Francisco Manoel do Nascimento

(pen name, Filinto Elísio). Born Dec. 21, 1734, in Lisbon; died Feb. 25, 1819, in Paris. Portuguese poet.

In 1754, Nascimento was ordained a priest. An exponent of patriotic revolutionary classicism, Nascimento combined a classicist theory of poetry with a national renaissance tradition, for example, in his On Portuguese Poetics (1816). In his poems in the collections The Poetry of Filinto Elísio (1797–1801) and Works (1817–19), Nascimento assailed the aristocracy, clericalism, and the Inquisition and expressed faith in progress and the triumph of reason.