Heteronym (literature)
Pessoa's three chief heteronyms are Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos; the latter two consider the former their master.
(My semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares, who in many ways resembles Álvaro de Campos, always appears when I'm sleepy or drowsy, so that my qualities of inhibition and rational thought are suspended; his prose is an endless reverie.
For each of his 'voices', Pessoa conceived a highly distinctive poetic idiom and technique, a complex biography, a context of literary influence and polemics and, most arrestingly of all, subtle interrelations and reciprocities of awareness.
Reis is a stoic Horatian, a pagan believer in fate, a player with classical myths less original than Caeiro, but more representative of modern symbolism.
Soares, the assistant bookkeeper and Campos, the naval engineer never met in the pen-and-paper drama of Pessoa's heteronyms, who were frequently pitted against one other, but the two writer-characters were spiritual brothers, even if their worldly occupations were at odds.
Pessoa was often unsure who was writing when he wrote, and it's curious that the very first item among the more than 25,000 pieces that make up his archives in the National Library of Lisbon bears the heading A. de C.
or B. de D. (or something else).This heteronym was created by Fernando Pessoa as an alter ego who inherited his role from Alexander Search and this one from Charles Robert Anon.
He worked in London (1915), Barrow on Furness and Newcastle (1922), but became unemployed, and returned to Lisbon in 1926, the year of the military putsch that installed dictatorship.
This fictional character was born in 1889 and died in 1915, at 26, almost the same age as Pessoa's best friend Mário de Sá-Carneiro, who killed himself in Paris in 1916 less than a month shy of his 26th birthday.
He wrote "Poemas Inconjuntos" (Disconnected Poems) and "O Guardador de Rebanhos" (The Keeper of Sheep), published by Fernando Pessoa in his "Art Journal" Athena in 1924–25.
In a famous letter to the literary critic Adolfo Casais Monteiro, dated January 13, 1935, Pessoa describes his "triumphal day", March 8, 1914, when Caeiro "appeared", making him write down all the poetry of "The Keeper of Sheep" at once.
