Fernando Pessoa was a Portuguese poet, writer, philosopher, translator and publisher. He also wrote under the heteronyms of Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, Alvaro de Campos, Alexander Search, Bernardo Soares, Baron de Teive and others. He was also a co-founder of Orpheu and Presenca literary journals.
Background
Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa was born on 13 June 1888, in Lisbon, Portugal. He was the son of Joaquim de Seabra Pessôa and Maria Magdalena Pinheiro Nogueira.
His father, who was a music critic, died when the future poet was five, and a year later his mother married the Portuguese consul to South Africa.
Education
Pessoa was educated at St. Joseph Convent School. He also attended University of Lisbon.
Career
In 1905, Pessoa returned to Portugal. He secured an office job as a commercial translator, an occupation in which he remained for the rest of his life. He did continue to write poetry, but it was not until 1912 that Pessoa began composing poems in Portuguese. Around that time he became associated with poets of the saudosismo movement, whose works expressed a longing for Portugal’s glorious past. By 1915, Pessoa was well-known as a modernist poet and critic in Lisbon, gaining renown as one of the founders of Orpheu and Presenca, highly influential literary journals. Most of Pessoa’s poetry published during his lifetime appeared in literary journals and remained uncollected; with the exception of his English poems, only one volume of verse, Mensagem (1934), appealed during his life. At the time of his death Pessoa’s work was not widely known outside of Portugal; consequently, his international reputation is almost entirely based on posthumously published works.
For a brief time he also edited his own journal, Athena, where many of his poems and essays were first published. He died in November 1935 in Lisbon, Portugal after long-suffering from alcoholism. At the time of his death, his work was not widely known outside of Portugal, as it was not collected or published in books until after his death. His reputation has grown posthumously through the publication of many collections of poetry and by a number of English translations which made his work available to a much wider audience than during his lifetime.
During his lifetime, he published several volumes of his English poems: 35 Sonnets (1918), Antinous (1918), English Poems (I, II and III) (1921). He also published one volume of Portuguese poems, Mensagem (1934), which is considered his greatest work. Mensagem is composed of a sequence of poems on the history of Portugal, and created controversy in that it is possible to interpret it as a "nationalist" work in which Pessoa apologizes for the authoritarian regime that had come to power in 1926. Since his death, numerous volumes of his poetry have been published, and his poetry has been translated into several languages. Among these posthumous editions are Poemas de F. P. (1942), Fernando Pessoa: Selected Poems (1974), and Poems of Fernando Pessoa (1987). The poems themselves are not his only successful poetic creations. Among the most remarkable of Pessoa's poetic achievements are those alter-egos, or "heteronyms," that he created to be the authors of much of his poetry. Distinct from pen-names, or "pseudonyms," these do not simply disguise the author, Pessoa argued, but replace the author, allowing the author to affect a completely different persona.
Politics
Pessoa was politically active and involved with the saudosismo movement and, by 1915 had produced a considerable body of work in Portuguese.
Personality
The history of twentieth-century literature, and modernist poetry in particular, would not be complete without Fernando Pessoa. Critics often speak of Pessoa in the same breath as such modernist legends as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Rainer Maria Rilke. Because of his invention and frequent use of "heteronyms" in his poetry however, Pessoa stands out as an idiosyncratic figure in twentieth-century letters. Critics have analyzed Pessoa's three most frequently used heteronyms and agree that each has a distinctive personality and distinguishing literary characteristics.
Quotes from others about the person
“When I think of what is most radical in the literature of the past hundred years, of what embodies most clearly the essential spirit of modernism, I think of five grey-suited gentlemen: Constantin Cavafy, Franz Kafka, T.S. Eliot, Fernando Pessoa, Jorge Luis Borges.” - Gabriel Josipovici