Francisco Manuel do Nascimento

Francisco Manuel do Nascimento (born December 23, 1734, Lisbon, Portugal—died February 25, 1819, Paris, France) was the last of the Portuguese Neoclassical poets, whose conversion late in life to Romanticism helped prepare the way for that movement’s triumph in his country.

Of humble birth and probably illegitimate, Nascimento was educated by Jesuits and ordained in 1754. In 1768 he became tutor to the daughters of the marquis of Alorna and fell in love with one of them, the “Maria” of his poems. Disapproving of the low-born poet’s affection for his daughter, the marquis may have been ultimately responsible for Nascimento’s being denounced to the Inquisition in June 1778. He succeeded in escaping to France and there, except for some four years spent in The Hague during the revolutionary Terror, he remained, living by translations and by taking private pupils.

The themes of Nascimento’s poetry—which is usually in blank verse, polished, robust, but often overladen with archaisms—range from denunciations of the tyranny of the aristocracy, the Inquisition, and the hierarchy to homely evocations of the joys of life in his native land and laments on the poverty and loneliness of exile. His demonstration of the flexibility and richness of the Portuguese language, his choice of themes, and his translations of such works as Christoph Wieland’s Oberon and the vicomte de Chateaubriand’s Les Martyrs influenced the Romantic writers.

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