I am not so inclined as Verissimo to accept at full value the statements of poets like Gonçalves Dias that they have never felt love. It is rather that they have never found it as they have visioned it. Indeed, this is just what Gonçalves Dias himself has written:
O amor que eu tanto amava de imo peito
Que nunca pude achar.
The love that so much I loved in my innermost heart,
And that never I could find.
The poet who wrote the lines that follow, with their refrain,
Isso é amor e desse amor se morre
This is love, the love of which one dies
must have been something more than the man gifted with divination that Verissimo would make of him. I would hazard the guess that Verissimo’s deductions are based on a certain personal passionlessness of the critic himself, whose writings reveal just such an idealizer of love as he would find in Gonçalves Dias.
Amor é vida; é ter constantemente