Although Pessoa made use of more than five dozen heteronyms in the course of his thirty-five years, the best known are Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, Álvaro de Campos, and Bernardo Soares. But it does take a little explaining.įernando Pessoa, in order to express various philosophical and poetic moods, constructed a series of what he termed “heteronyms.” The heteronym, although similar to the mask or persona, differs in that each one is equipped with a name, a personality, a biography, and a physical description, as well as a distinct writing style. Who are the four greatest Portuguese poets of the 20th century? A. Here is the only Portuguese literary joke I know: Q. The critic Harold Bloom referred to him in the book The Western Canon as the most representative poet of the twentieth century, along with Pablo Neruda. Álvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis also signed dozens of pages of prose. And each produced a large body of poetry. Not only were their styles different they thought differently, they had different religious and political views, different aesthetic sensibilities, different social temperaments. He dubbed them ‘heteronyms’ rather than pseudonyms, since they were not false names but “other names”, belonging to distinct literary personalities. In fact Pessoa wrote under dozens of names, but Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos were – their creator claimed – full-fledged individuals who wrote things that he himself would never or could never write. The statement is possible since Pessoa, whose name means ‘person’ in Portuguese, had three alter egos who wrote in styles completely different from his own. It is sometimes said that the four greatest Portuguese poets of modern times are Fernando Pessoa.

Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa was a poet and writer.

The book of disquiet penguin