If Anglo-American literature influenced what Pessoa wrote, the English language itself influenced how he wrote. English is more apt than the Romance languages to repeat words—for the sake of clarity, for syntactical straightforwardness, or for a rhetorical effect—and Pessoa followed this usage in Portuguese (in The Book of Disquiet, for instance). And whereas Pessoa’s English sonnets employ a convoluted syntax derived from his Elizabethan models, modern English seems to have inspired the directness of expression that characterizes the poetry attributed to Alberto Caeiro and Álvaro de Campos.

 

After Pessoa’s first wave of poetic creation in Portuguese, with about a dozen surviving poems dating from when he was thirteen and fourteen, he didn’t go back to writing poetry in his native tongue (except for an odd example here and there) until he was close to twenty, three years after returning to Lisbon. By 1911 he was writing perhaps as much poetry in Portuguese as in English, and a year later he published, in an Oporto-based magazine, two large articles on the state of recent Portuguese poetry from, respectively, a “sociological” and a “psychological” point of view. Fernando Pessoa was coming into his own. In 1913 he published his first piece of creative prose, a passage from The Book of Disquiet, which he would work on for the rest of his life, and in 1914 he published, in Portuguese, his first poems as an adult. That was the year when four of Portugal’s greatest twentieth-century poets were born: Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis, and Fernando Pessoa himself.

Alberto Caeiro, who emerged from Pessoa’s soul in the late winter of 1914, lived in the country, had no formal education, and said he wanted to see things as they are, without any philosophy:

 

What matters is to know how to see,
To know how to see without thinking,
To know how to see when seeing
And not think when seeing
Nor see when thinking.

 

Caeiro claimed to be “the only poet of Nature,” but his vision of nature was ideal, his appreciation of it abstract, and his poetry is almost pure philosophy. To talk about seeing things directly is tantamount to no longer seeing them directly. Caeiro was a moment of poetic nirvana, an impossibility embodied in weightless verses of rare, crystalline beauty. Pessoa called him the Master and reported—twenty years later—that Alberto Caeiro “appeared” in him on March 8, 1914, the “triumphal day” of his life, when he wrote all at once, “in a kind of ecstasy,” over thirty of the forty-nine poems that make up The Keeper of Sheep, Caeiro’s (and Pessoa’s) most sublime poetic work. From the manuscripts we know that this account is not quite true, but close to thirty poems were written over the course of two weeks in March of that year, and later poems written in Caeiro’s name rarely attain the astonishing clarity of that initial outpouring.

“Born” on April 16, 1889, Caeiro was in various ways a tribute to Pessoa’s best friend, the writer Mário de Sá-Carneiro (1890-1916). Caeiro is Carneiro (the Portuguese word for “sheep”) without the carne, or “flesh,” and Alberto Caeiro, by profession, was an idealized shepherd (“I’ve never kept sheep / But it’s as if I did,” he explains at the beginning of The Keeper of Sheep). His zodiac sign, naturally enough, was Aries, the ram. Sá-Carneiro committed suicide in 1916, a few weeks before his twenty-sixth birthday, and Alberto Caeiro, according to his “biography,” also died young, at age twenty-six, from tuberculosis. About one as about the other Pessoa wrote: “Those whom the gods love die young.”

Caeiro was initially conceived not just as “Nature’s poet” but as a multifaceted modernist, responsible for “intersectionist” poems inspired by cubism and for a planned series of “futurist odes.” But the intersectionist poems were ultimately assigned to Pessoa-himself, and the futurist ambitions were transferred to Álvaro de Campos, who came into being in early June of 1914, an offshoot of Alberto Caeiro. The organic relationship between the two is reflected in their similar-sounding names. Not only that, de campos means “from the fields”: Álvaro came from the fields where Alberto tended his imaginary or metaphorical sheep.

Campos, according to his script, was born in the Algarve in 1890, studied naval 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. Campos’s early poems, such as the “Triumphal Ode,” celebrated machines and the modern age with loud and sustained exuberance. His later poems are shorter and melancholy in tone, but the basic Campos creed remains:

 

To feel everything in every way,
To live everything from all sides,
To be the same thing in all ways possible at the same time,
To realize in oneself all humanity at all moments
In one scattered, extravagant, complete and aloof moment.

 

Álvaro de Campos was the most public heteronym, airing his views on political and literary matters in articles and interviews published (apparently with the help of Pessoa) in Lisbon-based magazines. He was fond of contradicting the opinions of his creator, whom he censured for being too rational-minded, with the “mania of believing that things can be proved,” and he also enjoyed meddling in Pessoa’s social life. He would occasionally turn up in lieu of Fernando at appointments, to the chagrin and ire of those who were not amused by such antics.

Ricardo Reis, the third in the trio of Pessoa’s full-fledged heteronyms, also emerged in June of 1914, probably a few days after Álvaro de Campos. A physician and classicist, whom Pessoa defined as a “Greek Horace writing in Portuguese,” Reis composed metered, nonrhyming odes about the vanity of life and the need to accept our fate:

 

Since we do nothing in this confused world
That lasts or that, lasting, is of any worth,
And even what’s useful for us we lose
So soon, with our own lives,
Let us prefer the pleasure of the moment
To an absurd concern with the future . . .

 

Ricardo Reis, according to his creator, 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 soon 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 Dr. Reis in Peru.

All three heteronyms were expressions of “sensationism,” one of the literary movements (like intersectionism, mentioned above) invented by Pessoa and taken up by his modernist writer friends. In a passage signed by Thomas Crosse—a fictional English critic and translator created a year or two after Caeiro, Reis, and Campos—Pessoa neatly differentiated among the three poets and the types of sensationism they represented: “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.”

The year 1914 also marked a turning point in the poetry of the “orthonym,” who signed himself Fernando Pessoa but who was not the same person as the flesh-and-blood Pessoa known to be living at this time with his Aunt Anica. Álvaro de Campos reports that Pessoa the orthonym (meaning “true name”), after meeting Caeiro in 1914 and hearing him recite The Keeper of Sheep, experienced a “spiritual shock” that resulted in his most original work to date.

Beyond all the self-fictionalization, there occurred in fact a profound transformation, or culmination, in Pessoa’s literary art.