Caeiro, Campos, and Reis were the most visible result of that transformation, for they represented something totally new, but heteronymy as such was no novelty. Besides the aforementioned heteronyms who wrote in English and French, several of the Portuguese journalists invented in Pessoa’s adolescence—Dr. Pancrácio and Gaudêncio Nabos—wrote outside the pages of the newspapers where their “careers” began, with Mr. Nabos remaining “active” until at least 1913. Vicente Guedes, the first heteronym to write extensively in Portuguese, was invented already in 1908. Heteronymy, in fact, goes all the way back to Pessoa’s infancy, when as a six-year-old he wrote letters to himself signed by a personage called the Chevalier de Pas.

 

Pessoa described his artistic enterprise as “a drama divided into people instead of into acts.” He created, in other words, a series of characters but no play for them to act in. What they played out, in a certain way, was the life that their shy, retiring creator chose not to live in the physical world. “I’ve created various personalities within,” he explained in a passage from The Book of Disquiet. “Each of my dreams, as soon as I start dreaming it, is immediately incarnated in another person, who is then the one dreaming it, and not I. To create, I’ve destroyed myself. . . . I’m the empty stage where various actors act out various plays.”

It is no wonder that Pessoa, who considered himself to be “essentially a dramatist,” admired Shakespeare and Milton (whose Paradise Lost is practically a verse drama) above all other writers. Pessoa published one short, ethereal play, O Marinheiro (The Mariner), which he termed a “static drama,” and he left a score of unfinished plays, in Portuguese and English, but only the “static” ones, where no action is expected, are of much interest. Like Robert Browning, a poet he much read and appreciated, Pessoa put his dramatic instincts to better use in his poetry. But he went further than the English poet, for his dramatis personae were more than poetic subjects; he made them into quasi-autonomous poets.

All of this becomes fascinating when we delve deeper into the heteronymic system, which includes an astrologer, a friar, a philosopher, various translators, diarists, a nobleman who commits suicide, and a hunchback girl dying of tuberculosis. Yet I still haven’t explained (if it’s possible to explain) what caused the explosion in 1914 that transformed Pessoa into a great writer. I have mentioned the vast range of literature and learning that the writer-in-progress absorbed as a schoolboy and as a young man, during and after his abbreviated university career, and to these ingredients one must add the French symbolists (Mallarmé, Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Maeterlinck, a Belgian writing in French), whom he read between 1909 and 1912. It was also in this period that Pessoa steeped himself in Portuguese poetry, from its earliest manifestations in thirteenth-century troubadour songs (some of which he translated into English) to contemporary work by Teixeira de Pascoaes (1877-1952) and other saudosista poets, who promulgated a nationalistic nostalgia as a spiritual value and a creative energy. But what finally seems to have ignited this complex mixture of linguistic and literary acquisitions, provoking a kind of alchemical reaction, was Walt Whitman, arguably the single greatest influence on Pessoa’s poetry and, more generally, on Pessoa the artist.

It is not, as several critics have supposed, that Pessoa was a “son” of the American poet. The Whitmanian influence is clearly discernible in the poetry of Alberto Caeiro and Álvaro de Campos, but neither heteronym is a mere derivative, for they could not have existed without numerous other inputs from Pessoa’s rich literary background. Whitman, though, seems to have acted as a key to open up Pessoa and the power of his own personality. Song of Myself is a song of the whole cosmos—the cosmos felt and substantiated in the self—and it was this audacity, this chutzpah, that galvanized Pessoa and his heteronymic cosmos, which otherwise might not have been more than a curious psychological phenomenon and stylistic exercise, without real literary consequence. Pessoa indicated as much in a two-part article, “Notes for a Non-Aristotelian Aesthetics,” signed by heteronym Álvaro de Campos and published in 1925. In it the naval engineer advocates an aesthetics based on inner, personal force—the force of personality—rather than on outward beauty and, concomitantly, an art based on sensibility rather than on intelligence. The article ends with the bold affirmation that “up until now . . . there have been only three genuine manifestations of non-Aristotelian art.