{"id":12482,"date":"2021-10-21T14:33:12","date_gmt":"2021-10-21T13:33:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cassandravoices.com\/?p=12482"},"modified":"2021-10-21T14:33:12","modified_gmt":"2021-10-21T13:33:12","slug":"the-zenith-of-pessoa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/2021\/10\/21\/the-zenith-of-pessoa\/","title":{"rendered":"The Zenith of Pessoa"},"content":{"rendered":"

In how many garrets and non-garrets of the world
\nAre self-convinced geniuses at this moment dreaming.<\/em><\/span>
\n\u00c1lvaro de Campos, \u2018The Tobacco Shop\u2019, 1928<\/span><\/p>\n

In the early days of the Internet \u2013 end of the 1990s for me \u2013 while a history student in UCD, a friend took a passionate interest in a volatile political situation beyond Ireland\u2019s shores. Although aroused by injustices perpetrated by both sides, the drama itself also seemed to be a source of entertainment. He participated, in a small way, by adopting email aliases that represented varying, even opposing, viewpoints.<\/p>\n

In a time before the arrival of a fully-fledged \u2018social\u2019 media, friends might call into his smoke-filled non-garret room to find him participating in online fora. There, we might encounter bursts of laughter and guffaws \u2013 to the bemusement of anyone lacking an intimate understanding of his predilection.<\/p>\n

These were not simply pseudonymous accounts. In creating and projecting characters that seemed to reflect his own uncertainties my friend had, unconsciously, adopted a version of a dramatic form of communication \u2013 the heteronym \u2013 invented, or at least fully realised, by the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935). This approach is of enduring interest given the extent to which multiple selves prevail in online communication, including in the common use of anonymous handles on Twitter that often depart from a primary, mild-mannered self, into a more transgressive, \u2018other\u2019 personality.<\/p>\n

A new, ground-breaking biography of Fernando Pessoa in English by Richard Zenith, Pessoa: An Experimental Life<\/em> (Allen Lane, London, 2021) brings into the mainstream \u2013 to the English-speaking world at least \u2013 a Portuguese poet, whose extraordinary capacity for invention, sensitivity to language, and, ultimately, attention to human liberation places him in the highest echelon of a discipline he recast in his own images.<\/p>\n

Moreover, unlike other Modernist writers of his generation, Pessoa is profoundly accessible. As Zenith puts it: \u2018We don\u2019t need to look up words, hunt down references, or read up on some period of history or current of philosophy to follow his poetic trains of thought and feeling. (p.324)\u2019 Indeed, Pessoa expressed reservation regarding the art of James Joyce, which he described in 1933 as \u2018a literature on the brink of dawn<\/em>\u2019 that was \u2018like that of Mallarm\u00e9\u2026 preoccupied with method.<\/em> (p.831)\u2019<\/p>\n

Pessoa was inspired by aspects of the Irish Literary Revival of the early twentieth century, and even drafted a complimentary letter to W.B. Yeats, whose esoteric tastes he shared. However, as Zenith puts it, lacking Yeats\u2019s \u2018grand ambitions and conviction, Fernando Pessoa was more like a jazzman of higher, occult truth, improvising on standard doctrines of the esoteric repertoire and introducing his own variations, without staying in any one place for long. (p.849)\u2019<\/p>\n

It is the combination of Fernando Pessoa\u2019s simplicity of expression and an apparently endless capacity for experimentation that make him such a valuable guide to our confused and uncertain time.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Lisbon, Portugal, 2019.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Heteronyms<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The poet is a feigner
\nWho\u2019s so good at his act
\nHe even feigned the pain
\nOf pain he feels in fact
\n<\/em>Fernando Pessoa-Himself, \u2018Autopsychography\u2019, 1931<\/p>\n

Distinguishing pseudonymous works from heteronymous works in 1928, Pessoa wrote that \u2018Pseudonymous works are by the author in his own person, except in the name he signs; heteronymous works are by the author outside his own person. They proceed from a full-fledged individual created by him, like the lines spoken by a character in a drama he might write. <\/em>(p.xviii)\u2019<\/p>\n

Pessoa wrote to a relatively small reading public in the early decades of the twentieth century \u2013 in 1910 up to 70% of Portuguese adults \u00a0were illiterate (when it was just 2 percent in England p.291) \u00a0and his work hardly reached Brazil or other parts of the Portuguese-speaking world. He completed just one book \u2013 a visionary work of poetry infused with Romantic nationalism called Mensagem <\/em>(Message) in 1934 \u2013 in his lifetime. Now Zenith\u2019s extensive autobiography, masterfully capturing the historical context, brings global attention to an author whose \u2018literary dispersion faithfully mirrors our ontological instability and the absence of intrinsic unity in the world we inhabit. (p.xxvi)\u2019<\/p>\n

From his earliest days, Pessoa produced a bewildering array of heteronyms \u2013 often as a form of play \u2013 amounting to well over seventy throughout his life. Some hardly assumed a life at all, including a personal favourite, the contradictory Friar Maurice: \u2018a mystic without God, a Christian without a creed.<\/em> (p.254)\u2019<\/p>\n

These became, according to Zenith, \u2018ingenious vehicles for producing literature,\u2019 and \u2018also paths to self-knowledge. (p.119)\u2019 The self-fragmentation seemed to come at a serious cost to Pessoa himself, however. Towards the end of his life he remarked: \u2018Today I have no personality: I have divided all my humanness among the various authors whom I\u2019ve served as literary executor.<\/em> (p.41)\u2019<\/p>\n

From the outset, Pessoa\u2019s poetry was identified with fingimento<\/em>, a difficult word to translate, which can mean a kind of \u2018feigning,\u2019 \u2018faking,\u2019 \u2018pretending \u2019 or forging (which has the double entendre<\/em> of making and counterfeiting). This extended into an apparent unwillingness, or perhaps inability, to ever consummate a love affair, including his courtship of the forlorn Of\u00e9lia Queiroz, his only girlfriend; or to act on apparent homosexual urges \u2013 \u2018the love that dare not speak its name\u2019 \u2013 that pepper his work.<\/p>\n

Throughout his life, according to Zenith there was \u2018no clear lines of demarcation between\u2019 the heteronyms, or \u2018between fiction and reality. (p.146)\u2019 Perhaps, unsurprisingly alcohol featured prominently \u2013 he died aged forty-seven after a life of excess \u2013 although contemporaries insist he always maintained an appearance of sobriety, perhaps his greatest pretence of all.<\/p>\n

According to Zenith, Pessoa was \u2018monosexual, androgynously so. The heteronyms can be seen as the fruit of his self-fertilization. (p.871)\u2019 Thus, \u2018daunted by the expectation of the world all around him\u2019, he \u2018preferred to inhabit the story of his heteronym. (p.192)\u2019<\/p>\n

Notably also: \u2018Pessoa\u2019s communicators, on at least a couple of occasions, gave him not merely poetic metaphors but actual poems. They were his impromptu muses, vivid manifestations from the spiritual realm where \u2013 he liked to think \u2013 his poetry and his heteronyms originated. (p.516)\u2019<\/p>\n

\"\"
Alentejo, Portugal, 2019.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Alberto Caeiro<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

I have no philosophy, I have senses \u2026
\nIf I speak of Nature it\u2019s not because I know what it is
\nBut because I love it, and for that very reason,
\nBecause those who love never know what they love
\nOr why they love, or what love is.
\n<\/em>Alberto Caeiro from The Keeper of Sheep<\/em>, 1914.<\/p>\n

In later years Pessoa revealed that Alberto Caeiro began life as a joke figure of \u2018a rather complicated bucolic poet<\/em>\u2019. He claimed he wrote \u2018thirty-some poems at one go, in a kind of ecstasy I\u2019m unable to describe. <\/em>(p.379)\u2019 But Pessoa \u2013 ever the feigner \u2013 was an unreliable witness. Zenith reveals that a thorough examination of his archive revealed \u2018a rather different literary genesis. (p.379)\u2019<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, the invention of Caeiro in 1914 brought a creative release for Pessoa; liberating him from what Zenith describes as the \u2018chrysalis formed by so much learning\u2019 which had, until that point, inhibited him from coming \u2018into his own as an astonishingly original poet\u2019. Albeit this was a status \u2018he would never have attained without the chrysalis. (p.159)\u2019 He certainly fully understood the forms and rules of poetry, before breaking them.<\/p>\n

Having spent ten years of his life, and schooling, in Durban, South Africa where he gained fluency in English, Pessoa had been vacillating between writing in Portuguese or English. Zenith maintains that Pessoa \u2018did not know how to intensely feel in English; his poetic diction in this language was, oddly enough, too \u201cpoetical\u201d (p.148)\u2019, although he did produce a chap book of verse that was reviewed favourably in the London Review of Books no less.<\/p>\n

One can imagine Pessoa in South Africa as a slightly effete adolescent surpassing his peers in academic learning, but whose accent always marked him as an outsider, a status which he unconsciously absorbed, and which generated a lifelong antipathy to the British Empire.<\/p>\n

Caeiro therefore represented a form of homecoming \u2013 a statement of \u2018Portugueseness\u2019 \u2013 for a cosmopolitan young man struggling to form an identity. In this sense, Pessoa may be likened to W.B. Yeats, who also spent many years of his development in a country, which he ultimately rejected for an Irish mistress in Cathleen Ni Houlihan.<\/p>\n

Caeiro, according to Zenith was also \u2018a reaction against Fernando Pessoa \u2013 against all learning and incessant intellectual wrangling (p.386)\u2019, thus the heteronym writes: \u2018I lie down on the grass<\/em> \/ And forget all I was taught.<\/em>\u2019<\/p>\n

\"\"
Lisbon, Portugal, 2019.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Ricardo Reis<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Let us also make our lives one day,
\nConsciously forgetting there\u2019s night, Lydia,
\nBefore and after
\nThe little we endure.
\n<\/em>Ricardo Reis, July, 1914<\/em><\/p>\n

Richard Zenith observes of Ricardo Reis \u2013 the second of Pessoa\u2019s three main heteronyms and fictional disciples of Alberto Caeiro \u2013 that he \u2018espoused a revival of Greek moral, social, and aesthetic ideals, and the introduction of a new paganism, adapted to the contemporary mentality. (p.404)\u2019<\/p>\n

In part, Reis represents Pessoa\u2019s view that \u2018Religion is an emotional need of mankind <\/em>(p.541)\u2019, but also \u2013 having rejected doctrinaire Christianity, along with monarchy, in his youth \u2013 the imaginative possibilities of undogmatic polytheism, alongside a lifelong dedication to astrology and the occult.<\/p>\n

Pessoa urged: \u2018Let\u2019s not leave out a single god! \u2026 Let\u2019s be everything, in every way possible, for there can be no truth where something is lacking.<\/em>\u2019 Thus, according to Zenith, over the course of his life Pessoa, \u2018groped like a blind man in maze of occult mysteries that, by definition, could never be fathomed. (p.541)\u2019<\/p>\n

The persona of Reis also represented a stoicism reconciled to the \u2018slings and arrows of outrageous fortune\u2019. Acceptance of fate, and the remote tragedies we encounter in news reports, is memorably conveyed in \u2018The Chess Players\u2019 (1916), where two protagonists play a game while around them a city is ransacked by an invading army. This is a kind of acceptance of events \u00a0we generally cannot control that we might do well to learn from Ricardo Reis.<\/p>\n

Notably, Ricardo Reis attained a literary afterlife in Portuguese Nobel laureate Jos\u00e9 Saramago\u2019s 1984 novel The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis<\/em><\/a><\/span>, in which the heteronym returns to Lisbon from Brazil in 1935 to meet his death alongside Fernando Pessoa. A film based on the book was released in 2020.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Lisbon, Portugal, 2019.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u00c1lvaro de Campos<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Faint vertigo of confused things in my soul!
\nShattered furies, tender feelings like spools of thread children play with,
\nAvalanche of imagination over the eyes of my senses,
\nTears, useless tears,
\nLight breezes of contradiction grazing my soul \u2026
\n<\/em>\u00c1lvaro<\/em>\u00a0de Campos \u2018Maritime Ode\u2019, 1915<\/p>\n

The last and most important of Pessoa\u2019s heteronyms, \u00c1lvaro Campos, was born, in Pessoa\u2019s imagination at least, on Friedrich Nietzsche\u2019s birthday. According to Zenith he represents \u2018the Dionysian impulse \u2013 the intoxicating affirmation of life, felt in all its pains and pleasures. (p.397)\u2019 In profound contrast to Pessoa, who regarded sex as dirty, Campos\u2019s motto was to \u2018To feel everything in every way possible.<\/em> (p.521)\u2019<\/p>\n

The open-minded de Campos could be the liberated person Pessoa would never become: \u2018Have fun with women if you like women<\/em>\u2019 he recommended, \u2018have fun in another way, if you prefer another way. It\u2019s all fine and good, since it pertains to the body of the one having fun \u2026 morality is the ignoble hypocrisy of envy\u201d for \u201cnot being loved.<\/em> (p.626)\u2019<\/p>\n

Yet the ghost of de Campos inhibited Pessoa, as \u2018he\u2019 attempted to get in the way of a relationship with the tragic Of\u00e9lia. \u2018Today I\u2019m not me, I\u2019m my friend \u00c1lvaro de Campos<\/em>, (p.589)\u2019 he would warn his only meaningful girlfriend.<\/p>\n

According to Zenith, \u00c1lvaro de Campos\u2019s appetites in Freudian terms personified Pessoa\u2019s id. Then perhaps the phlegmatic Ricardo Reis operated as ego, mediating the unrealistic id\u2019s relationship to the world. These figures emerge under the tutelage of their acknowledged master, the Zen-like Alberto Caeiro \u2013 who was according to de Campos, \u2018The Great Vaccine \u2013 the vaccine against the stupidity of the intelligent. <\/em>(p.388)\u2019<\/p>\n

Thus, Caeiro can may be seen the superego, the ethical touchstone of a tripartite personality built around his universal Portuguese personality; similar to that constructed around the universal Russian character in Dostoyevsky\u2019s Brother Karamazov<\/em> that seemed to have informed Freud\u2019s original understanding of these characteristics.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Lisbon, Portugal, 2019.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Book of Disquiet<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Dead we\u2019re born, dead we live, and already dead we enter death. Composed of cells living off their disintegration, we\u2019re made of death.
\nThe Book of Disquiet<\/em>, Bernardo Soares<\/p>\n

Fernando Pessoa described the main author of The Book of <\/em>Disquiet, Bernardo Soares, as a semi-heteronym, or \u2018mutilation<\/em> (p.721)\u2019 of his personality, and as such The Book of Disquiet <\/em>served as a semi-factual autobiography. Of course, nothing is ever as it seems with Pessoa, so the character of Soares is an unremarkable bookkeeper who endeavours to avoid contact with the bustling world around him, while Pessoa himself was a relatively sociable bachelor.<\/p>\n

Bernardo Soares he confided: \u2018always appears when I am sleepy or drowsy, such that my qualities of inhibition and logical reasoning are suspended; his prose is an endless reverie. <\/em>(p.870)\u2019<\/p>\n

In a sense, The Book of Disquiet <\/em>is a book of the night, if not of quite of dream time, then of solitary down time and retreat. According to Zenith the book, which took years for scholars to reassemble from often scrawled notes, \u2018never ceased being an experiment in how far a man can be psychologically and affectively self-sufficient, living only off his dreams and imagination. (p.364)\u2019<\/p>\n

It is a book of ideas and self-analysis. Thus, Soares reveals: \u2018We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It\u2019s our own concept \u2013 our own selves \u2013 that we love<\/em>,\u2019 and also, of self-reliance in solitude, where the intellect rises above material limitations.<\/p>\n

It displays a belief in the magical quality of words. At one point he remarks \u2013 triggered by Walter Pater\u2019s description of Mona Lisa\u2019s smile containing: \u2018the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the mysticism of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of Borgias\u2019 \u2013 \u2018How much more beautiful the Mona Lisa would be if we couldn\u2019t see it.<\/em> (p.670)\u2019<\/p>\n

In his imagination Soares\/Pessoa is \u2018the naked stage where various actors act out various plays.<\/em>\u2019 Thus, The Book of Disquiet<\/em>, according to Zenith \u2019magnificently illustrates the uncertainty principle that runs throughout his written universe. (p.xxiii)\u2019<\/p>\n

Also, in a time when we are urged to fulfil our potential, as a Capitalist economy demands constant self-improvement, the Book of Disquiet <\/em>reconciles us to anonymity and the inner life of the imagination that we may rely on in times of adversity.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Alentejo, Portugal, 2019.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Political Commentator<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The dazzling beauty of graft and corruption,
\nDelicious financial and diplomatic scandals,
\nPolitically motivated assaults on the streets,
\nAnd every now and then the comet of a regicide
\nLighting up with Awe and Fanfare the usual
\nClear skies of everyday Civilisation!
\n<\/em>\u00c1lvaro de Campos, \u2018Triumphal Ode\u2019, June, 1914,<\/p>\n

Hired as a columnist for the newspaper O Jornal<\/em> in 1925, Fernando Pessoa, writing as himself, proclaimed that \u2018only superficial people have deep convictions.<\/em>\u2019 insisting that a modern intellectual \u2018has the cerebral obligation to change opinion \u2026 several times in the same day.<\/em>\u2019 This person, presumably himself, might, for instance, be \u2018a republican in the morning, and a royalist at dusk.<\/em> (p p.450-51)\u2019<\/p>\n

Abiding by this injunction, Pessoa presented a dazzling array of viewpoints in the 1920s, having renounced Catholicism in his youth, and embraced republicanism prior to the Revolution of 1910. He also acquired a distaste for British imperialism while living in Durban, albeit not necessarily imperialism itself.<\/p>\n

Pessoa was a roving provocateur, who, according to Zenith, \u2018had a fondness for ardently defending a certain idea one day and then attacking it the next, with equally impassioned arguments. (p.340)\u2019 Confrontationally, he opined in Nietzschean terms that the \u2018plebeian class should be the instrument of the imperialists, the dominating class<\/em>,\u2019 and \u2018linked to them through a community of national mysticism, such that it is voluntarily their slave.<\/em> (p.453)\u2019 The feigner\u2019s tendency towards outlandish, objectionable views should be taken with a grain of salt, however, as the artist often played with literary tropes in political statements.<\/p>\n

This applies to a frankly disturbing 1916 pronouncement that \u2018Slavery is logical and legitimate; a Zulu or Landim<\/em> [an indigenous Mozambican] represents nothing useful to the world.<\/em> (p. p.533)\u2019 Importantly, however, according to Zenith, who devotes considerable attention to the theme of race he never \u2018publicly supported any racist ideology, (p.534)\u2019 and in the 1920s remarked that \u2018Mahatma Gandhi is the only truly great figure that exists in the world today<\/em>, (p.78)\u2019 while he was opposed to fascism from the beginning.<\/p>\n

Until the 1930s Pessoa\u2019s political views were in a chrysalis of caf\u00e9 talk, untested by real authoritarianism, including censorship and a nascent police state under the dictator Ant\u00f3nio Salazar.<\/p>\n

Moreover, Pessoa was expressing his views during the chaotic first Portuguese Republic (1910-26), which experienced a series of political convulsions generating forty-four ministries and nine presidents, with frequent political assassinations. As Zenith puts it: \u2018[t]he nation\u2019s political centre, rather than being caught in a tug-of-war between ideological extremes, was caving in on itself. p.220)\u2019<\/p>\n

Pessoa was disgusted by the chaos, and rejected \u2018the positivist project of certain republicans, who envisioned a science-based society of secular citizens illuminated by the twin virtues of order and progress. (p.424)\u2019 \u2018All radicalism fosters reaction<\/em>,\u2019 he warned, \u2018since the informing spirit is the same.<\/em> (p.312)\u2019 In response, he developed his own reactionary idea an aristocratic republic. Progress, he argued, \u2018could be achieved only through an aristocracy of superior individuals<\/em>\u2019 that, mercifully, have \u2018nothing to do with blue blood or inherited privilege. (p.412)\u2019<\/p>\n

In 1928 he published The Interregnum: Defense and Justification of Military Dictatorship in Portugal <\/em>where he argued that Portugal required a new political system but that this system had first to be discovered, and until then a military dictatorship was the best alternative. However, according to Zenith he \u2018set himself apart from those who favoured a long-term authoritarian solution. (p.700)\u2019<\/p>\n

Only when put to the test would he display his true qualities, dismissing narrow appeals to national identity \u2013 proclaiming (as Bernando Soares) \u2018My nation is the Portuguese language<\/em> (p.791)\u2019 \u2013 and defending individuals \u2018whom he regarded as the true creators and only deserving beneficiaries of civilization. (p.742)\u2019<\/p>\n

\"\"
Alentejo, Portugal, 2019.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Under Salazar<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Ah, what a pleasure
\nTo leave a task undone,
\nTo have a book to read
\nAnd not event crack it!
\nReading is a bore,
\nAnd studying isn\u2019t anything.
\n<\/em>Fernando Pessoa-Himself \u2018FREEDOM\u2019, 1935<\/p>\n

According to Zenith, Pessoa \u2018smelled a rat in Mussolini (p.640).\u2019 The Italian dictator had become a popular figure among the Portuguese intelligentsia of the period in search of a solution to the country\u2019s catastrophic instability.<\/p>\n

Zenith writes: \u2018Pessoa continually oscillated between a Promethean impulse to help humanity, to be involved in the world, and a contrary inclination to retreat and seek perfection in the artistic space of a poem. (p.217)\u2019 Confronting dictatorships across Europe in the 1930s he ceased feigning and honoured that Promethean impulse, at a significant cost to his career.<\/p>\n

Pessoa opined, in the heteronym of Thomas Crosse, that Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin and Salazar were all \u2018unbalanced characters<\/em>,\u2019 whose \u2018limited vision of reality<\/em>\u2019 might, he acknowledged, make them effective but they shared the same \u2018hatred of intelligence, because intelligence discusses.<\/em>\u2019 They were all, therefore, \u2018enemies of liberty<\/em>\u2019, which if \u2018not individual, is nothing<\/em>,\u2019 and saliently observed that, by nature, dictators \u2018are unhumorous, because a sense of humour preserves a man from that maniac confidence in himself by which he promotes himself dictator<\/em> (p.841).<\/em>\u2019<\/p>\n

The priest-like \u2013 another lifelong bachelor \u2013 Salazar may have been a less monstrous character than other dictators of that era, but his \u201cinterregnum\u201d would last almost fifty, stultifying years. A trained economist, who summarily banned gambling halls in Lisbon on taking power, before introducing austerity measures that appear suspiciously similar to those inflicted during our neoliberal era. A motto of \u2018faith, moral guidance, and the spirit of sacrifice <\/em>(p.705)\u2019 is also reminiscent of public health exhortations under lockdown.<\/p>\n

According to Zenith, Pessoa \u2018instinctively bristled when he was expected to be a willing and even joyous participant in a mass movement, whatever it was. (p.293)\u2019 Unsurprisingly, he reacted against propaganda projecting a \u2018myth of a peaceful, bucolic Portugal where peasants joyfully hoed corn, tended cattle, picked grapes and wove baskets, while singing traditional songs and dancing in their spare time. (p.892)\u2019<\/p>\n

As a writer he was also infuriated by Salazar\u2019s demand that literary works should observe \u2018certain limitations<\/em>,\u2019 and embrace \u2018certain guidelines<\/em>\u2019 defined by the New State\u2019s \u2018moral and patriotic principle<\/em>.\u2019 Salazar said that writers should be \u2018creators of civic and moral energies<\/em>\u2019 rather than \u2018nostalgic dreamers of despondency and decadence<\/em>. (p.880)\u2019 This remark seemed to have been aimed at Pessoa himself.<\/p>\n

In response, he caustically observed that the word Salazar was made up of sal<\/em> (salt) and azar<\/em> (bad luck), and that rain had long ago dissolved the sal<\/em>, leaving Portugal with nothing but azar <\/em>(p.883). He would also write a sarcastic poem wishing that for once the radio announcer would tell listeners \u2018what Salazar did not say <\/em>(p.891).<\/em>\u2019<\/p>\n

By the time of his death in 1935 Pessoa had come around \u2018full circle\u2019 according to Zenith \u2018returning to the high-minded and large-hearted ambitions of his youth (p.903)\u2019, arguing democratically that the nation is \u2018worth the sum of its individuals<\/em> (p.914).\u2019<\/p>\n

In response to Mussolini\u2019s invasion of Abyssinia in 1936, Pessoa would ask: \u2018what are we all in the world if not Abyssinians?<\/em>\u2019 Between us and them he saw a \u2018vast and broad human fraternity<\/em> (p.915)\u2019<\/p>\n

In response to the censorship of an article he wrote condemning Mussolini\u2019s invasion, as well as discrimination against openly gay poets such as Ant\u00f3nio Botto and the banning of the Freemasons and other secret societies, he took the dramatic decision to quit publishing in Portugal. In return for this he received an unwelcome visit from Salazar\u2019s secret police, although he was largely left to his own devices until his death aged just forty-seven.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Lisbon, Portugal, 2019.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In History<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

No, I don\u2019t want anything.
\nI already said I don\u2019t want anything<\/em><\/p>\n

Don\u2019t come to me with conclusions!
\nDeath is the only conclusion.<\/em><\/p>\n

Don\u2019t offer me aesthetics!
\nDon\u2019t talk to me of morals!
\nTake metaphysics away from here!
\nDon\u2019t try to sell me complete systems, don\u2019t bore me with breakthroughs
\nOf science (of science, my God, of science!)\u2013
\nOf science, of the arts, of modern civilization!<\/em>
\n\u00c1lvaro de Campos \u2018Lisbon Revisited\u2019 (1923)<\/p>\n

What to make of an artist such as Fernando Pessoa almost a century on from his death?<\/p>\n

First, huge credit goes to his biographer Richard Zenith, who has assiduously assembled the parts of an extraordinarily complex life. Readers may feel daunted by such a weighty tome, but this represents a bible for English speakers, at least, conjuring a literary titan, deserving our attention alongside Shakespeare, and few others, such is his contribution to world literature.<\/p>\n

Once suspects that Zenith himself must have struggled to maintain a coherent sense of self in the face of such a fecund imagination as Fernando Pessoa\u2019s.<\/p>\n

In the characters of the three heteronyms, the semi-heteronym and Pessoa as himself we find spiritual resources that may guide us \u2013 like Virgil in Dante\u2019s Divine Comedy<\/em> \u2013 through the labyrinth of an increasingly mediated age of increasing homogenisation and fake authenticity in the arts. And, like Virgil perhaps, he takes us to the gates of heaven, and no further.<\/p>\n

With Alberto Caeiro \u2013 the vaccine against the stupidity of the intelligent \u2013 <\/em>we may see nature in its glorious parts, at a remove from crippling intellectual conceits. Or we may dance with Ricardo Reis, maintaining order and composure in the face of chaos and deceit. That arch-sensualist, \u00c1lvaro de Campos, meanwhile, demands we appreciate all aspects of our journey through life, while taking aim at hypocrisy when required.<\/p>\n

Then Bernardo Soares should be appreciated for his self-sufficiency and celebration of the interior world of the mind. Lastly, Fernando Pessoa as himself represents a narrative arc, wherein a true love of humanity, and human wellbeing, eventually asserts itself in the face of tyranny.<\/p>\n

All these voices, and more, are what make Fernando Pessoa an essential poet for age.<\/p>\n

Poetry translated by Richard Zenith, Fernando Pessoa, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe, Penguin Classics, London, 2006.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

With thanks to Bartholomew Ryan<\/a><\/span> for editorial assistance.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Featured Image: Image of Ser Poeta<\/a><\/span> by Florbela Espanca in Lisbon, Portugal (2019).<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In how many garrets and non-garrets of the world Are self-convinced geniuses at this moment dreaming. \u00c1lvaro de Campos, \u2018The Tobacco Shop\u2019, 1928 In the early days of the Internet \u2013 end of the 1990s for me \u2013 while a history student in UCD, a friend took a passionate interest in a volatile political situation […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":12487,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[44,72,389,447,448,449,450,930,931,932,991,3249,3251,3252,3253,4079,4325,5026,5567,7104,7105,7106,7107,7108,7109,7110,7844,7845,8277,8922,8959,9324,9346,10251,10286,10287],"class_list":["post-12482","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-literature","tag-autopsychography","tag-triumphal-ode","tag-alberto-caeiro-the-keeper-of-sheep","tag-alvaro-de-campos","tag-alvaro-de-campos-lisbon-revisited","tag-alvaro-de-campos-maritime-ode","tag-alvaro-de-campos-the-most-important-of-pessoas-heteronyms","tag-bernardo-soares","tag-bernardo-soares-mutilation-of-pessoa-personality","tag-bernardo-soares-semi-heteronym","tag-biography-of-fernando-pessoa-in-english","tag-fernando-pessoa","tag-fernando-pessoa-heteronyms","tag-fernando-pessoa-himself","tag-fernando-pessoa-himself-freedom","tag-heteronyms","tag-images-of-lisbon","tag-jose-saramago","tag-literature","tag-pessoa","tag-pessoa-a-poet-for-our-time","tag-pessoa-and-joyce","tag-pessoa-and-lisbon","tag-pessoa-and-ofelia-queiroz","tag-pessoa-and-the-occult","tag-pessoa-an-experimental-life","tag-richard-zenith","tag-richardo-reis","tag-ser-poeta-by-florbela-espanca","tag-the","tag-the-book-of-disquiet","tag-the-vaccine-against-the-stupidity-of-the-intelligent","tag-the-year-of-the-death-of-ricardo-reis","tag-yeats-and-pessoa","tag-zenith","tag-zenith-pessoa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12482","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12482"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12482\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12482"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}