The first is in the astonishing poems of Walt Whitman; the second is in the even more astonishing poems of my master Caeiro; the third is in the two odes—the ‘Triumphal Ode’ and the ‘Maritime Ode’—that I published in Orpheu.”

 

Orpheu was a literary review founded in 1915 by Pessoa, his friend Mário de Sá-Carneiro, and other vanguard writers and artists. In its brief life—only two issues were published—it introduced modernism into Portugal. Several members of the group were in contact with the cubists and futurists in Paris, while Pessoa, through his readings, kept abreast of the latest literary currents in Britain, Spain, France, and elsewhere (he obtained copies, for instance, of Blast, a vorticist review where Ezra Pound published poems in 1914). Orpheu prompted reactions of outrage and ridicule in the press and the literary establishment, but the genius of Pessoa’s work was quietly recognized.

In 1917 Pessoa published, in the name of Álvaro de Campos, an inflammatory Ultimatum in the one and only issue of Portugal Futurista, which was immediately seized from the newsstands by the police. Portugal supported the Allies in the war, and while Pessoa-Campos’s ranting manifesto was not pro-German, it heaped as much abuse on the British, French, and other Allied leaders as on Wilhelm II and Bismarck. After lambasting the present age for its “incapacity to create anything great,” Campos’s manifesto calls for the “abolition of the dogma of personality” and affirms that “no artist should have just one personality,” since “the greatest artist will be the one who least defines himself and who writes in the most genres with the most contradictions and discrepancies.” The greatest artist, in other words, will have multiple personalities (“fifteen or twenty,” states the manifesto farther on), like Fernando Pessoa.

This was not the first time that Pessoa predicted, or promoted, his own artistic greatness. In the articles on Portuguese poetry that he published in 1912 he envisioned the imminent emergence of a “Great Poet” who would overshadow even Luís de Camões, universally regarded as Portugal’s premier poet. It is clear, in retrospect, that Pessoa was setting the stage for his own grand entrance (or entrances, thanks to the heteronyms). But personal greatness, in the form of literary immortality, was only part of his dream. In an addendum to those articles, likewise published in 1912, Pessoa also foresaw the dawning, in Portugal, of a “New Renaissance,” which would spread from the nation’s borders to the rest of Europe, as had the Italian Renaissance centuries earlier.

Pessoa would subsequently recast his vision of a Portuguese Renaissance in the doctrine of the Fifth Empire, a new take on an old prophecy, from the Book of Daniel, chapter 2. The prophet’s interpretation of a dream of Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, had traditionally been understood as a history of the Western world’s great military empires—Babylonian, Persian, Greek, and Roman, with the fifth sometimes being understood as the British Empire. Pessoa, adopting a “spiritual” or cultural point of view, understood the five empires to be those of Greece, Rome, the Christian West, post-Renaissance Europe, and—on the near horizon—Portugal. The idea was that Portugal, through its language and culture, and most especially through its literature, would dominate the rest of Europe. An “imperialism of poets,” specifies one of the passages Pessoa wrote on the subject.

Pessoa’s nationalism was as constructive as it was ardent. He had no illusions about Portugal’s relative backwardness vis-à-vis the rest of Europe, and his goal was to make it catch up. He took the British and French cultures as models to emulate, at least in certain respects, and the English-speaking world as the best outlet for promoting Portuguese culture abroad. Already in 1909 he had planned to publish, in a printing office founded with a small inheritance left by his paternal grandmother, a long list of classic and contemporary Portuguese works translated into English, as well as a collection of foreign classics, including Shakespeare’s complete works, in Portuguese. The Empresa Ibis, as the press was called, was also supposed to publish magazines, political treatises, and scientific works, and—last but not least—numerous works by Pessoa and his heteronyms, in English and in Portuguese.

Pessoa’s personal literary ambitions were, as he saw it, in perfect accord with his concern to make Portugal more cosmopolitan and to promote its culture abroad. His writings aimed, either directly or by example, to educate the Portuguese, to make them more European. For their sheer originality and quality (Pessoa was never modest), his writings would convince foreigners of the worth and cleverness of contemporary Portuguese literature. Pessoa, by promoting his own work, felt that he was promoting Portugal. This rationale was perhaps justified, in view of his considerable literary talents, but his entrepreneurial skills were wanting, and economic difficulties forced the Empresa Ibis to close its doors forthwith.

In 1919 Pessoa filled up a notebook with copious plans for an even more grandiose enterprise—tentatively called Cosmópolis, or Olisipo—whose mission would be to foster cultural and commercial exchange between Britain and Portugal. A conglomerate with offices in Lisbon and London, it would provide information for businessmen and travelers, translation and interpretation services, legal advice, publicity and public relations expertise, research and editorial assistance, and a host of other services. The Lisbon branch would also include a subsidiary company for promoting Portuguese products and encouraging new industries, a school offering courses in business training and cultural enrichment, and a publishing house that would publish not only books by contemporary authors but also literary classics in cheap editions, magazines, business directories, and guidebooks.

What finally emerged from all these plans, in 1921, was a small commercial agency and publishing house called Olisipo, which did little more than publish half a dozen books, including two chapbooks of Pessoa’s English poems, a re-edition of a poetry collection by the openly homosexual António Botto, and a booklet by the even more stridently homosexual Raul Leal, whose Sodoma Divinizada (Sodom Deified) did exactly what its title promised. Conservative Catholic students launched a campaign against the “literature of Sodom,” the two books were banned, and Pessoa counterattacked, through self-published handbills that mocked the students’ pretended morality and fervently defended his authors. This episode reveals another facet of Pessoa’s program to shake up and educate Portuguese society and, if possible, European civilization in general, since a book like Raul Leal’s would have caused public indignation through most of the continent. Though Pessoa tended to be conservative in his politics, his defense of an individual’s right to free expression—even in sexual matters—was far advanced for his time.

In 1924 Pessoa founded Athena, whose five issues demonstrated, in exemplary fashion, how his literary self-promotion dovetailed with his concern to elevate Portuguese culture. The magazine, beginning with its title and elegant graphic presentation, was an ideal illustration of the New Renaissance presaged by Pessoa twelve years earlier and a showcase for the Great Poet—Fernando Pessoa—who was supposed to spearhead Portugal’s cultural rebirth. It was in this exquisite publication—which included art reproductions, essays signed by Pessoa and by Álvaro de Campos, and translations by Pessoa of inscriptions from The Greek Anthology, poems of Edgar Allan Poe, and an excerpt from Walter Pater’s essay on da Vinci—that Ricardo Reis and Alberto Caeiro were first revealed to the public, with a large selection of poems by each.

 

The neo-Greek revival that these two heteronyms were meant to foreshadow—Reis with the atmosphere of antiquity and abundant references to the gods in his odes, Caeiro with the “absolute objectivity” of his clear, direct seeing—was undergirded by “neopaganism,” a philosophical and religious system embedded in their poetry and expounded on in theoretical texts signed by Reis and António Mora, a heteronym conceived as a “philosophical follower” of Caeiro.

To wonder if Pessoa believed in the pagan gods whose return he heralded and advocated for Portugal is like wondering if he “believed” in the heteronyms who embodied (especially Caeiro) or espoused (Reis and Mora) the neopagan cause. They and it were part of the same package, or rather, of the same dispersion, since what Pessoa did not believe in was unity.