Education
He began his studies in Brazil and finished at Coimbra, in Portugal, eventually becoming a professor of Latin and history at the College of Pedro II in Rio de Janeiro.
Antonio
He began his studies in Brazil and finished at Coimbra, in Portugal, eventually becoming a professor of Latin and history at the College of Pedro II in Rio de Janeiro.
He was a major exponent of the Brazilian Romanticism and of the literary tradition known as "Indianism".
Called "the Poet of the Indians," Goncalves Dias won a place in Brazilian letters with his poems exalting, in a somewhat idealized way, the aboriginal past of the land. In doing so, he opened the way for one of the most important trends in native Romanticism. In his unfinished poem Os Timbiras, and in Cancao do Tamoio, Maraba, and I-Juca-Pirama, there is a poetic voice with an unmistakable New World accent, both in its subject matter and in its feeling for tropical nature. This, however, was only one side of his talent; under the influence of Lamartine, Zorrilla, and Schiller, he composed excellent poetic dramas on European subjects. As a scholar he possessed a solid culture and erudition, which found expression in a Diccionario da lingua Tupy (1858: "Dictionary of the Tupi Language") and a number of other works on history and ethnology.
