VISÕES DANTESCAS DE LUÍS HENRIQUES NO CANCIONEIRO GERAL DE GARCIA DE RESENDE: A TROVA SEGUIDA DE CANTIGA

Abstract

With this article I intend to show an innovative modality of poetry from the 15th and 16th centuries, namely the compositions presented in Garcia de Resende’s Cancioneiro Geral, published in 1516. This modality would be the poems of mixed forms, whose characteristic is to use two or more poems in one; the form is born in the noble halls of the period and includes, for example, some trovas followed by a cantiga, a case that I study in this work. The author of the poem is Luís Henriques who, in verses of maior and minor art, discusses about some visions he would have had when in São João da Mina during the conquest of Africa. These visions are part of a new genre developed by palace poets at the time when Dante Alighieri was beginning to be worshiped in the Iberian Peninsula. In both poems, the record is of the suffering of the lyrical self that does not know how to define the reason for its pain and seeks answers by addressing three mythological entities – Tristeza, Congoxa and Esperança. Luís Henriques makes use of an erudite composition in larger verses and a popular one in real verses in a song that closes the poem.