Fernando Pessoa

• Born: June 13, 1888
• Birthplace: Lisbon, Portugal
• Died: November 30, 1935
• Place of death: Lisbon, Portugal

Other literary forms

In addition to his verse, Fernando Pessoa (PEHS-wah) published many critical essays and polemical tracts during the course of his career. Most of these were published in the many Portuguese journals with which he was associated, or as short-run pamphlets for particular occasions. He also accumulated a large body of nonliterary writing of a speculative, philosophical nature that was never intended to be published during his lifetime. Moreover, Pessoa was a prolific letter writer, and he left a large body of uncollected correspondence containing some of his clearest and most detailed commentary on his own work. The vast bulk of this material is now available in the following posthumous collections: Páginas de doutrina estética, 1946; Páginas de estética e de teoria e crítica literárias, 1966; Páginas íntimas e de auto-interpretação, 1966; Textos filosóficos, 1968; Cartas a Armando Côrtes-Rodrigues, 1945; and Cartas a João Gaspar Simões, 1957.

Achievements

Although very little of Fernando Pessoa’s work was collected and published in book form during his lifetime, his poetry—appearing mainly in small literary journals that he founded, supported, or helped to edit—has come to be considered an important expression of the modern sensibility. Pessoa is considered to be a major poet of the twentieth century—and, in the opinion of many of his countrymen, the greatest of all Portuguese poets since Luís de Camões.

This is evident in the increasing influence that his posthumously published work has had on the modern Portuguese tradition in poetry—in which he has come to be considered the seminal figure—and in his effect on the work of such prominent later poets as José Régio and João Gaspar Simões, and, finally, in the works of his many admirers among poets writing in Spanish, English, and many other languages.

Pessoa’s preoccupations—the introspective, philosophical nature of his poetry, the epistemological doubts that it expresses, and the anxiety-ridden existential atmosphere that pervades his work—are not provincial but universal in character, and they convey the central concerns found in the work of countless modern writers. Among the recurring themes of Pessoa’s work is a persistent concern with understanding the essential nature of the self and its difficulties when subjected to the contingencies of life. Like many other modern writers, Pessoa sought to discover through his writing the psychological truth about the artist’s identity: Who is the artist, and what is his or her role among all the fictional selves that inhabit the work? These two concerns are clearly expressed in the reflexive nature of Pessoa’s work, where the “I” is constantly turning back upon itself, asking: Who is speaking? and Who is speaking now?

Until 1942, when Pessoa’s work began to be published in collected form, his reputation was based mainly on his early poems in English. These were published under the pseudonym Alexander Search and were written mostly between 1903 and 1905, although not published in collected form until a decade later. Otherwise, there was the collection Message, the only volume of Pessoa’s Portuguese verse published before his death, assembled and submitted to a poetry contest sponsored by the Portuguese Secretariat of National Propaganda in 1934. Neither of these two volumes, however, is representative of the poet’s best work, for the verse written in English is imitative, while the poetry of Message is fervently nationalistic and hence deliberately provincial. The remainder of his work was known only to the small readerships of short-lived Portuguese literary journals such as A Águia, A Renascença, Orpheu, Centauro, Exílio, Portugal futurista, Contemporânea, Athena, and Presença, in which the majority of his published work—both poetry and prose—appeared between 1912 and 1928.

Biography

Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa was born in Lisbon, Portugal, on June 13, 1888. After the early death of his father, Joãoquim de Seabra Pessoa, in 1893, and the subsequent remarriage of his mother, Maria Madalena Pinheiro Nogueira, to Commandante João Miguel Rosa, the newly appointed Portuguese consul to Durban, South Africa, Pessoa and his mother left Portugal for South Africa in December of 1894. Here, Pessoa received his education in English. From 1894 until August of 1905, when he returned to Lisbon to attend the university there, Pessoa was developing the skills which were later to have such an important effect upon his career: his bilingual abilities in Portuguese and English and his interest in business and international commerce, which led to a lifelong career as a commercial translator in Lisbon. This position gave Pessoa the flexibility of movement and the leisure necessary to participate in his literary activities, which consisted of the founding and editing of numerous literary journals whose purpose, it became increasingly clear, was to further the development of an indigenous, innovative, modern Portuguese literature.

This developing literary nationalism is evident in the change from Pessoa’s early poetry, written in English between 1905 and 1909, to the appearance in that year of his first verse in Portuguese. That early work in Portuguese is clearly reflected in Message, much of which was written long before its publication in 1934. It was, however, with the development of his “heteronyms” (three distinct pseudonymous personalities, each with a different style), which first appeared in 1914 and were later widely employed in the many poems he published in small magazines, that the mature work that contributed to his growing international reputation came into being.

This fame, however, was late in coming. Pessoa rarely left Lisbon after his return from South Africa in 1905, and he never left Portugal again. When he died on November 30, 1935, in Lisbon—a victim of alcoholism at the age of forty-seven—he was virtually unknown outside his own country, and to those Portuguese readers who did know him, his greatest accomplishment was thought to be his allegorical collection of nationalistic poems, Message. Pessoa’s real fame, however, was to come later—through the work of his surrogate selves, of heteronyms (as later critics described them), when the posthumous publication of his complete works, beginning in 1942, revealed the large body of Pessoa’s work that had been published under the names Álvaro de Campos, Alberto Caeiro, and Ricardo Reis.

Analysis

During several decades of intense and sustained critical interest, initiated by Simões’s Vida e obra de Fernando Pessoa (1950; life and works of Fernando Pessoa), Fernando Pessoa’s status as a poet has been transformed from that of a literary oddity—combining an intense nationalistic provincialism with an affinity for the faddish avant-garde literary movements of the early twentieth century—into that of a major figure in modern European literature. His poetry is now seen by many critics to express—in both content and form—the deepest concerns of the modern age. Ronald W. Sousa, his “rediscoverer,” expresses this new perception of Pessoa’s work in The Rediscoverers:

Pessoa’s writing . . . while not “philosophical” in a strict sense, nonetheless not only treats in practical application the systematic intellectual problems of the day but also does so at a level of abstraction and in a mode of presentation that approach many of the formal properties of traditional philosophy.

This modernist sensibility is characterized by two strong emphases in Pessoa’s work: the assertion of the relative or subjective nature of the interior psychological world of the self, and the epistemological reduction of the external world of objects and persons to the status of concrete phenomenological data that exist in a wholly different order of reality from that of the reflecting mind. For this reason, Pessoa’s work has come, in recent years, to be associated with the work of two better-known writers: Jorge Luis Borges and Alain Robbe-Grillet.

In the stories and parables of Borges, such as “Borges y yo” (“Borges and I”), “Las ruinas circulares” (“The Circular Ruins”), and “De alguien a nadie” (“From Someone to No One”), one finds an intense questioning of the reality of the self which explores in a more self-conscious, didactic way the identical questions of existence that Pessoa considers in his “Passos da cruz” (“Stations of the Cross”). There, the narrator is the incarnate Christ, Jesus, who reveals his bewilderment in the course of a confusing series of events.

“Stations of the Cross”

“Stations of the Cross,” written under Pessoa’s own name, consists of a series of fourteen sonnets that retell the story of Christ’s Passion from the perspective of the suffering victim. In this work, Pessoa’s literary kinship with Robbe-Grillet is made evident, for, like the central characters of Robbe-Grillet’s New Novels (nouveaux romans)—Les Gommes (1953; The Erasers, 1964) and Le Voyeur (1955; The Voyeur, 1958)—the speaker of the “Stations of the Cross” sequence is plagued by a split in consciousness that finds him acting out a role in a drama of whose ultimate purpose he is not consciously aware. This epistemological dilemma is well illustrated in sonnet 6, where Jesus speculates on his role in history: “I come from afar and bear in my profile,/ If only in remote and misty form,/ The profile of another being.” The puzzled speaker, reflecting on the role into which he has been cast unaware (unlike the biblical account of Christ’s Passion, in which he is granted foreknowledge), concludes: “I am myself the loss I suffered.” Like Borges’s narrators, this speaker seems intended to be a figure representing modern humanity’s existential bewilderment.

Message

Also included in Pessoa’s orthonymic poetry (that part of his work published under his own name) are the fervently nationalistic poems of Message. These poems constitute the only collection of his poems in Portuguese published during his lifetime. Fortunately, the collection was put together shortly before his death, so that the volume contains work spanning nearly the entire period during which he wrote verse in Portuguese. It would be a mistake, however, to see this collection as representative of his work. For one thing, the collection is dominated by a tone of intense longing for the restoration of Portugal’s once-illustrious past. Furthermore, as Sousa has shown in his work on Pessoa, the volume has an elaborate, systematic, symbolic structure (not characteristic of Pessoa’s other work) which gives it the thematic unity of a sustained political allegory. Sometimes the nostalgia of Message is expressed as a generalized attitude, as in his reminiscence of an unidentified sea explorer in “Mar Português” (“Portuguese Sea”). At other times, Pessoa speaks through the personage of a historical figure such as the sixteenth century king of Portugal Dom Sebastian, who is elevated to the status of a legendary hero in the poem bearing his name: “Mad, yes, mad, because I sought a greatness/ Not in the gift of Fate./ I could not contain the certainty I felt.”

This concern with the relativity of the self goes beyond being merely a theme of much of Pessoa’s best poetry; it is also expressed in the very manner of its presentation. The writer now known as Pessoa wrote much of his mature work under the assumed identity of a series of three “heteronyms,” for each of which Pessoa created not only a biographical background but also a distinctive style.

Álvaro de Campos

The first of the three heteronyms that Pessoa adopted was Álvaro de Campos, whose writing was characterized by the use of long verse lines of uneven length, informal, colloquial diction, and the organic forms of free verse. This style is illustrated in the long, overlapping lines of a poem such as “Na noite terrível” (“In the Terror of the Night”), a poetic meditation on a common existential theme—the creation of oneself by one’s own actions. As in much of Pessoa’s work, the poem is pervaded by a tone of elegiac regret: “In the terror of the night—the stuff all nights are made of,/ . . . I remember what I did and could have done with life,/ . . . I’d be different now, and perhaps the universe itself/ Would be subtly induced to be different too.” This poem exhibits Campos’s tendency to mold entire lines—and at times entire poems—around subtle variations of key words. In the example above, this is done with the noun “night,” the verb “to do,” and the adjective “different,” where Pessoa carefully retains their grammatical functions consistently throughout the passage. Another characteristic of Campos’s style illustrated in the poem is the use of the paradoxes, oxymorons, and non sequiturs that has frequently led critics to compare his style to that of the French Surrealists.

“Tobacco-Shop”

The surreal quality of Campos’s work is best seen in “Tabacaria” (“Tobacco-Shop”), in which verbal irrationality is used to create a subtly ironic form of black humor reminiscent of the best poetry of Benjamin Péret, the master comedian of the French Surrealist movement. The speaker of this poem, self-characterized as a metaphysical “genius,” sits dreaming in a garret, out of which he observes a little tobacco shop far below in the street. He finally concludes that dreams and fantasies are humankind’s only certainty, though they can never have more than an accidental correspondence with the external world.

Alberto Caeiro

Pessoa’s second major Portuguese heteronym, Alberto Caeiro, which he employed from time to time between 1914 and 1920 (when he “killed him off” at the tragically young age of twenty-six), is predominantly a nature poet. As Caeiro himself says in a poem titled “If, After I Die”:

I am easy to describe.I lived like mad.I loved things without sentimentality.I never had a desire I could not fulfil, because I never went blind.. . . And by the way, I was the only Nature poet.

This epitaph illustrates well Caeiro’s simple, colloquial style, which has been described by many critics as essentially prosaic. In creating an informal style for Caeiro which imitates the structure and content of ordinary speech, Pessoa eschews traditional poetic devices such as elevated diction, figures of speech, meter, rhyme, and predictable stanzaic patterns, and employs rhetorical locutions that call attention to the poems as conversation.

“I’m a Shepherd” and “The Keeper of Flocks”

These qualities of Caeiro’s style are best illustrated in his most famous work, a series of forty-nine brief poems collectively titled “O guardador de rebanhos” (“The Keeper of Flocks”). There are also, however, other characteristic elements of Caeiro’s work. One of the most important of these is what critics have called the “antimetaphysical” nature of his thought. As Peter Rickard, one of Pessoa’s translators, puts it:

Fundamental to his worldview is the idea that in the world around us, all is surface: things are precisely what they seem, there is no hidden meaning anywhere.

This attitude of calm, naturalistic objectivity toward the world is prominent in poems such as “Sou um guardador de rebanhos” (“I’m a Shepherd”):

I’m a shepherd.My sheep are my thoughts.And my thoughts are all sensations.I think with my eyes and earsAnd with my hands and feetAnd with my nose and mouth.And so on a warm day,. . . I feel my whole body lying full-length in reality,I know the truth and I’m happy.

Some critics see in Caeiro’s thought a foreshadowing of existentialism’s assertion of the primacy of existence over essence—where humanity’s immediate physical experience in the world is valued above the rational productions of its reflecting consciousness.

Ricardo Reis

It was Pessoa’s third major Portuguese heteronym, Ricardo Reis, that served him longest. Works by Reis appeared from 1914, the first year of Pessoa’s adoption of the heteronyms, until 1935, the year of his death. Under this guise, Pessoa produced some skillful imitations of Latin poetry, writing a series of Horatian odes the style of which is characterized by archaic, formal diction and the use of free verse. Reis’s odes, like those of Horace, are governed by classical conventions that constrain not only the language of the poem but its theme as well. As Pessoa later said of Reis’s classicism in a letter to one of his friends: “He writes better than I do, but with a purism which I consider excessive.”

Equally important, however, is Reis’s attitude toward the world, for in many ways his resigned attitude of detachment from life is the psychological converse of Caeiro’s engagement with it. This important contrast in attitude is succinctly characterized by F. E. G. Quintanilha, one of Pessoa’s translators:

In opposition to Caeiro’s constant discovery of things . . . Reis assumes a stoic and epicurean attitude towards Existence. As he assumes that he can learn nothing more, he shuts himself up in his world and accepts life and destiny with resignation.

“The Roses of the Gardens of Adonis”

These attitudes and techniques are well illustrated in one of Reis’s best odes, “As rosas amo dos jardins do Adónis” (“The Roses of the Gardens of Adonis”), which illustrates a number of characteristic elements: The elevated poetic diction, the Latinate syntax, the perfect strophic form, the use of conventional symbolism drawn from mythology—even the name by which the beloved is addressed is a poetic convention. However, the imitative nature of this ode is not limited to its style, form, or content. The didactic conclusion that the speaker reaches at the end of the poem expresses the carpe diem (seize the day) theme common in classical poetry:

Like them, let us make of our lives one day—Voluntarily, Lydia, unknowingThat there is night before and afterThe little that we last.

As Pessoa himself suggested, this degree of imitative purity cannot help but strike the modern reader as “excessive,” however skillfully it might be accomplished.

Creating selves

Pessoa’s attempt to resolve the epistemological doubts that have plagued the artist in the modern age led him to consider the essential nature of the self, which constituted for him the core of the problem. He concluded that the self is multiple, that it contains many conflicting potentialities. To prove the truth of this proposition, he created the heteronyms, giving each of them a distinctive personality which was reflected in the work they wrote. To Campos, he gave a painful awareness of the reflexive nature of thought and language; he granted Caeiro an absolute, almost inhuman, objectivity; and he provided Reis with a stoic detachment. Each of these selves is thoroughly consistent within itself yet is challenged by the equal though quite different reality of the other two.

Perhaps Pessoa’s greatest challenge, however, is not to the reader but to the modern artist himself. To the question of the relation of the author to the fiction that he creates, Pessoa’s work provides a clear answer. The mere existence of the heteronyms suggests that the author himself is as much a fiction as the work he creates. To assume that a poem signed Fernando Pessoa is somehow more honest or authentic than one signed by a heteronym—who, after all, is just a name, not someone who really lived—would be to ignore the radical critique of thinking about literature and reality that his accomplishment clearly represents.

Bibliography

Klobucka, Anna M., and Mark Sabine, eds. Embodying Pessoa: Corporeality, Gender, Sexuality. Toronto, Ont.: University of Toronto Press, 2007. This collection of essays examines Pessoa’s heteronyms and the question of sexual identity in his works.

Monteiro, George. Fernando Pessoa and Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Literature. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000. The critic searches for the poet’s literary influences rooted in the English language. His European models and precursors included John Keats, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Lord Byron. Edgar Allan Poe was the most influential of his American models, along with Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman. The critic traces elements of influence in Pessoa’s work as he identifies the poet’s own legacy of influence.

Pessoa, Fernando. A Little Larger than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems. Edited and translated by Richard Zenith. New York: Penguin Books, 2006. This excellent translation of Pessoa’s work provides an idea of the scope of the works he wrote under his own and other names. The introduction contains background information and some analysis.

Sadlier, Darlene J. An Introduction to Fernando Pessoa: Modernism and the Paradoxes of Authorship. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998. This study focuses on the diminished value of authorship in twentieth century literature and the modernist pursuit of source. This vision is consistent with Pessoa’s personas, as his heteronyms relate their literary creation to source. This study also explores links between Pessoa’s heteronomous writings and his literary predecessors. The critic seeks to broaden an understanding of European modernism by demonstrating that Pessoa’s authorship was a mimetic textual performance.

Santos, Irene Ramalho. Atlantic Poets: Fernando Pessoa’s Turn in Anglo-American Modernism. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2003. Examines Pessoa as a modernist, comparing him with Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and other American poets.

Sousa, Ronald W. The Rediscoverers: Major Writers in the Portuguese Literature of National Regeneration. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1981. Addresses Pessoa in the context of Portuguese literature and the modern age. Bibliography.