This document provides a biography of Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. It details that he was born in Lisbon in 1888 and attended school in South Africa before returning to Portugal in 1905. It describes how he began publishing poetry, criticism, and creative works in the 1910s under various heteronyms or alter egos, including Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Álvaro de Campos. Pessoa was a prolific yet private writer who published just one book of Portuguese poems in his lifetime. He died in 1935 in Lisbon from cirrhosis of the liver. The document examines Pessoa's innovative use of heteronyms to express different personas and perspectives through his writing.

2. On June 13, 1888, Fernando António
Nogueira Pessôa was born in Lisbon,
Portugal.
He attended an English school in Durban,
South Africa.
In 1905, he returned to Portugal for good
In 1906,he began studying at the University
of Lisbon.

3. During the following years he stayed
with relatives, making his living by
translating, writing in avant-garde
reviews, and drafting business letters in
English and French.
He began publishing criticism in 1912,
creative prose in 1913, and poetry in 1914. This
was also the year when the alter egos he called
heteronyms—Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and
Álvaro de Campos—came into existence.

4. He published his first book of English
poems, Antinous in 1918, followed
bySonnets (1918) and English Poems (1921),
but released only a single book of
Portuguese poems, Mensagem, in 1933.
He died November 30, 1935, in
Lisbon from cirrhosis of the liver.
Pessoa avoided the literary world and most
social contact; it wasn’t until years after his
death that his work garnered a wide
readership.

5. Literary alter egos were popular among
early twentieth-century writers: Pound had
Mauberley, Rilke had Malte Laurids Brigge,
and Valery had Monsieur Teste.
Pessoa gave up his own life to confer
quasi-real substance on the poets he
designated at heteronyms, giving each a
personal biography, psychology, politics,
aesthetics, religion, and physique.

6. In 1914, he found the three main literary
personas, as he called them; Alberto Caeiro was
an ingenuous, unlettered, unemployed man of
the country. Ricardo Reis was a doctor and
classicist who wrote Horace-like odes. Álvaro
de Campos, a naval engineer, was a bisexual
dandy who studied in Glasgow, traveled to the
Orient, and lived outrageously in London.

7. In an English text, Pessoa wrote,
“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.”

8. In later years, Pessoa also gave birth to Bernardo
Soares, a “semiheteronym” who authored the
sprawling fictional diary known as The Book of
Disquietude; António Mora, a prolific philosopher
and sociologist; the Baron of Teive, an essayist;
Thomas Crosse, whose critical writings in English
promoted Portuguese literature in general and
Alberto Caeiro’s work in particular; I. I. Crosse,
Thomas’s brother and collaborator; Coelho Pacheco,
poet; Raphael Baldaya, astrologer; Maria José, a
nineteen-year-old hunchback consumptive who wrote
a desperate, unmailed love letter to a handsome
metalworker who passed under her window on his
way to work each day; and so on.

9. Although Pessoa also published some
works pseudonymically, he distinguished
this from the “heteronymic” project: “A
pseudonymic work is, except for the name
with which it is signed, the work of an
author writing as himself; a heteronymic
work is by an author writing outside his
own personality: it is the work of a
complete individuality made up by him, just
as the utterances of some character in a
drama would be.”

10. If, After I Die
By: Fernando Pessoa
If, after I die, they should want to write my biography,
There's nothing simpler.
I've just two dates - of my birth, and of my death.
In between the one thing and the other all the days are
mine.
I am easy to describe.
I lived like mad.
I loved things without any sentimentality.
I never had a desire I could not fulfil, because
I never went blind.

11. Even hearing was to me never more than an
accompaniment of seeing.
I understood that things are real and all different from
each other;
I understood it with the eyes, never with thinking.
To understand it with thinking would be to find them
all equal.
One day I felt sleepy like a child.
I closed my eyes and slept.
And by the way, I was only Nature poet.

12. Presented by:
Mary Ann Mission