Fernando Pessoa is the extreme example of what may be the essentially modern kind of poet: the objective introvert. None has more consistently tried to find his poems impersonal. He accepted the dividedness of a human self so completely that he did something unique: wrote poetry under four names - his own and three 'heteronyms'. Not pseudonyms: they are imagery poets with real poems in them. Fernando Pessoa was four poets in one: Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, Alvaro dos Campos and himself; each strongly distinct from the others.

Fernando Antonio Nogueira Pessoa was born in Lisbon, Portugal, on June 13, 1888. When he was scarcely five years old, his father died. His mother remarried a year and a half later to the Portugese consul in Durban, South Africa. Pessoa attended an English school in Durban, where he lived with his family until the age of seventeen. When he was thirteen he made a year-long visit to Portugal, returning there for good in 1905. He began studying at the University of Lisbon in 1906 but dropped out after only eight months. During the following years he stayed with relatives or in rented rooms, making his living by translating, writing in avant-garde reviews, and drafting business letters in English and French. He began publishing criticism in 1912, creative prose in 1913, and poetry in 1914. This was also the year when the alter egos he called heteronyms-Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Álvaro de Campos-came into existence. In 1915 he dropped the circumflex from his surname.

The majority of Pessoa’s poems, heteronymic or otherwise, appeared in literary journals and magazines. He published his first book of English poems, Antinous in 1918, followed by Sonnets (1918) and English Poems (1921), but released only a single book of Portuguese poems, Mensagem, in 1933. He died November 30, 1935, in Lisbon from cirrhosis of the liver. Pessoa avoided the literary world and most social contact; it wasn’t until years after his death that his work garnered a wide readership.

Literary alter egos were popular among early twentieth-century writers: Pound had Mauberley, Rilke had Malte Laurids Brigge, and Valéry had Monsieur Teste. But no one took their alter ego as far as Pessoa, who gave up his own life to confer quasi-real substance on the poets he designated at heteronyms, giving each a personal biography, psychology, politics, aesthetics, religion, and physique. Alberto Caeiro was an ingenuous, unlettered, unemployed man of the country. Ricardo Reis was a doctor and classicist who wrote Horace-like odes. Álvaro de Campos, a naval engineer, was a bisexual dandy who studied in Glasgow, traveled to the Orient, and lived outrageously in London.

In an English text, Pessoa wrote, “Caeiro has one discipline: things must be felt as they are. Ricardo Reis has another kind of discipline: things must be felt, not only as they are, but also so as to fall in with a certain ideal of classic measure and rule. In Álvaro de Campos things must simply be felt.” In later years, Pessoa also gave birth to Bernardo Soares, a “semiheteronym” who authored the sprawling fictional diary known as The Book of Disquietude; António Mora, a prolific philosopher and sociologist; the Baron of Teive, an essayist; Thomas Crosse, whose critical writings in English promoted Portuguese literature in general and Alberto Caeiro’s work in particular; I. I. Crosse, Thomas’s brother and collaborator; Coelho Pacheco, poet; Raphael Baldaya, astrologer; Maria José, a nineteen-year-old hunchback consumptive who wrote a desperate, unmailed love letter to a handsome metalworker who passed under her window on his way to work each day; and so on.

At least seventy-two names besides Fernando Pessoa were “responsible” for the thousands of texts that were actually written and the many more that he only planned. Although Pessoa also published some works pseudonymically, he distinguished this from the “heteronymic” project: “A pseudonymic work is, except for the name with which it is signed, the work of an author writing as himself; a heteronymic work is by an author writing outside his own personality: it is the work of a complete individuality made up by him, just as the utterances of some character in a drama would be.”

Selected Poetry
Antinous (1918)
Sonnets (1918)
English Poems (1921)
Mensagem (1933)
Poesias de Fernando Pessoa (1942)
Poesias de ?lvaro de Campos (1944)
Odes de Ricardo Reis (1946)
Poemas dram?ticos (1952)
Poemas in?ditas: 1919-1930 (1956)
O manuscrito de O Guardador de Rebanhos de Alberto Caeiro (1986) The Maunscript of The Keeper of Sheep by Alberto Caeiro
Fernando Pessoa & Co.: Selected Poems (1998) Ed. by Richard Zenith
Poems of Fernando Pessoa (1998)
Prose
Cartos de amor de Fernando Pessoa (1978)
Livro do dessassogego por Bernardo Soares (1982) The Book of Disquiet for Bernardo Soares
Always Astonished: Selected Prose (1988)

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