3 - The Poet as Hero: Pessoa and Carlyle

Summary

During his adolescence, Fernando Pessoa was an admiring reader of Thomas Carlyle. The Scottish writer was part of the young poet's school curriculum, and the book Sartor Resartus. Heroes Past and Present (1833–4) can be found in his personal library at the Casa Fernando Pessoa in Lisbon. This opus was very much on Pessoa's mind, for he made several references to it in his writings, quoting the same phrase by Carlyle, for example, in two different fragments of the Livro do Desassossego [Book of Disquiet].

In Fernando Pessoa na África do Sul [Fernando Pessoa in South Africa], Alexandrino E. Severino dedicates a chapter to the influence of Carlyle on Pessoa, specifically regarding the poet's role in the government of nations. What I propose to examine in this essay, more generally, is Carlyle's concept of the Poet as Hero, and Pessoa's different stances, as a man and as a poet, in relation to this concept.

The concept of the poet as a hero was introduced by the German romantics and taken to England by Thomas Carlyle. In his famous lectures ‘The Hero as Man of Letters’ and ‘The Poet as Hero’, both in 1840, Carlyle observed that divine or prophetic heroes belong to the remote past, being no longer cultivated in the modern world. And he proposed that writers should be considered the heroes of the new era.