Fernando Pessoa

Pessoa's early education was in Cape Town. He learnt and became fluent in English and developed a love for English poets such as Shakespeare and Milton. At seventeen he left for Portugal to continue his education st the university in Lisbon. A student strike though put an end to his studies and he got a job as a business correspondent.

Pessoa earned a living as a commercial translator. He also wrote reviews especially for Orpheu which was a forum for new aesthetic views.

Pessoa's first book Antinous appeared in 1918 and was followed by two other collection of poems, all written in English. In 1933 he published his first book in Portuguese, the prize-winning Mensagem, which at the time did not attract much attention.



 The poetical technique for which Pessoa has become especially noted is the use of heteronyms, or alternative literary personae. Much of his best work Pessoa attributed to his heteronyms, Campos, Reis, and Caeiro.

Álvaro Campos, an engineer, represents the ecstasy of experience; he writes in free verse.

Ricardo Reis is an epicurean doctor with a classical education; he writes in meters and stanzas.

Alberto Caeiro, a shepherd, is against all sentimentality, and writes in colloquial free verse.

Under his own name Pessoa wrote poems that are marked by their innovative language, although he used traditional stanza and metric patterns.

Each persona has a distinct philosophy of life. Pessoa even wrote literary discussions among them.

Pessoa was not fond of society and he avoided social life and the literary world, but his poetry started to gain a wider audience from the 1940s in Portugal and later Brazil. Several of his collections have been published posthumously and translated in Spanish, French, English, German, Swedish, Finnish, and other languages. Among the most important works are Poesias de Fernando Pessoa (1942), Poesias do Alvaro de Campos (1944), Poemas de

Alberto Caeiro (1946), and Odes de Ricardo Reis (1946).



Pessoa died on November 30, 1935 in Lisbon.