Pessoa’s Heteronyms

June 28, 2006 Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), describing his literary enterprise as “a drama divided into people instead of into acts”, split himself into dozens of dramatis personae, the “heteronyms”, who occupied the stage of his otherwise uneventful life. It was a process that began in Pessoa’s childhood, gathered steam in his adolescence with the invention of alter egos who wrote in English, and made literary history in 1914, with the creation of would-be shepherd Alberto Caeiro, Futurist naval engineer Álvaro de Campos, and classicist Ricardo Reis, three of the finest Portuguese poets of the twentieth century.

Caeiro, the first in the poetic trinity to emerge from Pessoa’s soul, was considered the Master of the other two and, indeed, of Pessoa himself. Born, according to his script, in 1887, and dead from tuberculosis already in 1915, Alberto Caeiro lived in the country but never kept sheep, claimed to have no philosophy, and aspired to see things as things, without any added thought. In fact his poetry is a continual philosophical discourse that defends materialism and questions language – a kind of update on Lucretius and a foretaste of Wittgenstein. Caeiro’s ambition – sensation without thought – is impossible in the linguistic domain, and each poem written in his name points ultimately to the blank space on the page, to silence. He was the Master, yes, even Pessoa’s Master: the unreal beginning and end of poetic utterance.

Álvaro de Campos was supposedly born in Portugal’s Algarve region in 1890, studied engineering in Glasgow, traveled to the Orient, lived for a few years in England, where he courted both young men and women, and finally returned to Portugal, settling down in Lisbon. A decadent and a dandy, Campos billed himself a ‘sensationist’ poet, and his long early poems – partly influenced by Walt Whitman – celebrated machines and the modern age with loud exuberance. This attitude gradually gave way to a nagging existential anguish that found expression in shorter poems colored by melancholy, but his motto was still and always “Feel everything in every way”. The largest and most playful of the heteronyms, he even meddled in Pessoa’s real-world life. In addition to taking public stands – in interviews or letters to the editor – against statements made by his progenitor in magazine articles, he would occasionally turn up in lieu of Pessoa at appointments, to the chagrin and ire of those friends who were not amused by such antics.

A physician and classicist, whom Pessoa defined as a “Greek Horace writing in Portuguese”, Ricardo Reis composed metered, non-rhyming odes about the vanity of life and the need to accept our fate. He was born in 1887 in Oporto, which became the focal point of the surviving monarchist forces after the founding of the Portuguese Republic, in 1910. In 1919 the monarchists took control of Oporto but were forthwith defeated, at which point Reis, a royalist sympathizer (his last name means ‘kings’), fled to Brazil, where he presumably lived out the rest of his days, though there is, among the thousands of papers left by Pessoa at his death, an address for a Dr. Reis in Peru.

There was considerable interaction among the heteronyms. Campos and Reis had nothing but praise for the poetry of the ‘master’, Alberto Caeiro, but they were less charitable about each other’s work, and quibbled about what made for good rhythm in poetry, with Campos taking a more intuitive approach. Caeiro, for his part, said that considerations of rhythm have to do with prose, not poetry, since poetry is really just the art of plain speech: “We speak in verse, yes, in natural verse – in verses without rhyme or set rhythm, just the pauses we make in our breathing and feeling.” So should we close our books of poetry and just talk to each other? Or even to ourselves? Hmm…

Pessoa created horoscopes for each of his heteronyms, which we've included as a bonus.