1 - ‘O Deus que Faltava’: Pessoa's Theory of Lyric Poetry

Summary

The rainbow …

… is … more convincing Than Philosophy.

Emily Dickinson

Wallace Stevens, a poet I have often brought into contact with Fernando Pessoa, says in one of his ‘Adagia’ that ‘poetry is a sense’. It seems to me that, more than a sense, poetry is an affair of the senses. Stevens himself would agree: ‘With my whole body I taste these peaches’, reads a line of ‘A Dish of Peaches in Russia’. For many modernist poets, the sensuous experience of everydayness tends to be far more important poetically than divinity or transcendence. Pessoa's poetry as a whole is witness to this conception, which is best grasped in his heteronym Alberto Caeiro, the poet who claims, ‘Eu nem sequer sou poeta: vejo’ [I am not even a poet: I see]. As in Stevens, the senses of sight and hearing are foremost in Caeiro, but as in Stevens also both are metonyms for the experiencing body. Unlike Stevens, however, Caeiro leaves the frightful wonder of everyday existing unquestioned. The anguished doubts are left to the orthonymous Pessoa (who confides to the world, ‘tenho-te horror porque te sinto ser’ [I abhor you because I feel you being]), Álvaro de Campos (who is ‘uma sensação sem pessoa correspondente’ [a sensation without a corresponding person]), the alleged semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares (who says, ‘dói-me a vida’ [life aches me]) and, in a stoically serene manner, to Ricardo Reis (who claims to be merely ‘o lugar / Onde se sente e pensa’ [the place / Where one feels and thinks]).