What Do Poets Want to Write?

This chapter explores the careers of sixteenth-century Portuguese poets as articulated by themselves and their contemporaries. It draws on scholarly work in the developing field of career criticism to consider moments when poets discussed what they had written and what they one day hoped to produce. For all that writers wrote a lot about what they had achieved or wanted to achieve, this chapter shows that their careers rarely proceeded in a purely linear fashion as was claimed for some ancient authors, such as Virgil. The chapter suggests that when we refuse the lure of hindsight or look beyond the ways that writers tried to iron out their own careers, we see that lots of anxiety attended moments of career reflexivity, that choices of genre were determined by a mixture of personal, economic, political, and social motivations and, moreover, that writers would foreground different motivations when writing in different contexts or addressing different individuals.