Fernando Pessoa and the Lyric: Disquietude, Rumination, Interruption, Inspiration, Constellation 9781666903133, 9781666903140, 1666903132

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Fernando Pessoa and the Lyric

Fernando Pessoa and the Lyric Disquietude, Rumination, Interruption, Inspiration, Constellation

Irene Ramalho-Santos

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2022 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ramalho-Santos, Irene, 1941- author. Title: Fernando Pessoa and the lyric : disquietude, rumination, interruption, inspiration, constellation / Irene Ramalho-Santos. Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Fernando Pessoa and the Lyric studies Pessoa’s poetic theory and practice, emphasizing Livro do desassossego and the heteronymic drama, and discovers new approaches to reading and appreciating the lyric. A number of Pessoan concepts are examined in relation to different poets, yielding unprecedented results in comparative studies of poetry”— Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2021053205 (print) | LCCN 2021053206 (ebook) | ISBN 9781666903133 (cloth) | ISBN 9781666903140 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Pessoa, Fernando, 1888-1935—Criticism and interpretation. | LCGFT: Literary criticism. Classification: LCC PQ9261.P417 Z8276 2022 (print) | LCC PQ9261.P417 (ebook) | DDC 869.1/41—dc23/eng/20211029 LC record available at https://lccn​.loc​.gov​/2021053205 LC ebook record available at https://lccn​.loc​.gov​/2021053206 ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

To BSS Who was there all the time

Contents

Acknowledgmentsix Introduction: The Truth of Fiction

1

1 The “Great Book,” Caeiro, and Pessoa’s Theory of Poetry

7

2 The Tail of the Lizard: Pessoan Disquietude and the Subject of Modernity

23

3 The Art of Rumination: Pessoa’s Heteronyms Revisited

39

4 Poetic Interruption: A Pessoan Concept for Reading the Lyric

53

5 “The God That Was Missing”: Poetry, Divinity, Everydayness

65

6 Modernist Muses That Matter: Inspiration Revisited in Pessoa and Stevens

85

7 The Truant Muse and the Poet’s Body

97

8 Orpheu et al.: Modernism, Women, and the War

113

9 The Accidental Poem: Hart Crane’s Theory of the Lyric

131

10 Being Blind. Being Nobody. Being a Poet: Emily Dickinson “Reads” Fernando Pessoa

143

Source of Texts

157

Bibliography 159 Index 171 About the Author

179 vii

Acknowledgments

For unfailing encouragement in the course of years, the names of the late Edwin Honig, Sacvan Bercovitch, George Monteiro, and Harold Bloom first come to mind. I am also indebted, for different reasons, to Ana Luísa Amaral, Nancy Armstrong, Adriana Bebiano, Ziva Ben-Porat, Susan Brown, Isabel Caldeira, Maria José Canelo, Graça Capinha, Steffen Dix, Page duBois, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Patricio Ferrari, Doris Friedensohn, Michael Hinds, Anna Klobucka, Paul Lauter, Mary Layoun, Helder Macedo, James McIntosh, Stephen Matterson, Paulo de Medeiros, Françoise Meltzer, João Paulo Moreira, Isabel Pedro, Jerónimo Pizarro, António Sousa Ribeiro, Hugh Ridley, Clara Riso, Mark Sabine, Próspero Saíz, Max Statkiewicz, and Monica Varese Andrade. To the anonymous reviewer, whose insightful suggestions helped me improve the manuscript, my heartfelt thanks as well. Pedro Abreu and Lassalete Simões, at CES, provided technical support when I most needed it. Last but not least, to Holly Buchanan, my editor at Lexington Books, I owe the challenge of putting this book together. “Adagia,” and “Two or Three Ideas” from OPUS POSTHUMOUS by Wallace Stevens, copyright © 1957 by Elsie Stevens and Holly Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. “Credences of Summer,” copyright © 1954 by Wallace Stevens and copyright renewed 1982 by Holly Stevens; “The Rock,” copyright © 1954 by Wallace Stevens; “A Dish of Peaches in Russia,” “Extracts From Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas,” “Certain Phenomena of Sound,” and “Paisant ix

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Acknowledgments

Chronicle” from THE COLLECTED POEMS OF WALLACE STEVENS by Wallace Stevens, copyright © 1954 by Wallace Stevens and copyright renewed 1982 by Holly Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet,” and “Imagination as Value” from THE NECESSARY ANGEL: ESSAYS ON REALITY AND THE IMAGINATION by Wallace Stevens, copyright © 1942, 1944, 1947, 1948, 1949, 1951 by Wallace Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. THE LETTERS OF EMILY DICKINSON, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, Associate Editor, Theodora Ward, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1958 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © renewed 1986 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1914, 1924, 1932, 1942 by Martha Dickinson Bianchi. Copyright © 1952 by Alfred Leete Hampson. Copyright © 1960 by Mary L. Hampson. Used by permission. All rights reserved. THE POEMS OF EMILY DICKINSON, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1951, 1955 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © renewed 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1914, 1918, 1919, 1924, 1929, 1930, 1932, 1935, 1937, 1942, by Martha Dickinson Bianchi. Copyright © 1952, 1957, 1958, 1963, 1965, by Mary L. Hampson. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Poetry by Ana Luísa Amaral used with permission. Escuro, Ana Luísa Amaral. Assírio & Alvim, 2014. © Ana Luísa Amaral e Assírio & Alvim — Grupo Porto Editora. “Dramatis Personae: enter Another Voice” By Ana Luisa Amaral, translated by Margaret Jull Costa, from WHAT’S IN A NAME, copyright ©1990, 1993, 1995, 1998, 2002, 2007, 2014, 2017, and 2019 by Ana Luísa Amaral. English translation copyright © 2019 by Margaret Jull Costa. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

Introduction The Truth of Fiction

O poeta é um fingidor Fernando Pessoa1

Every lyric poem contains in itself the theory of its own making. The Portuguese modernist poet Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) exemplifies this idea better than any other poet I know.2 In this book, I compare and contrast Pessoa with several other poets to illuminate five concepts derived from Pessoa’s poetry-making that help us to understand and enjoy lyric poetry anew; they are disquietude, rumination, interruption, inspiration, and constellation. While I am interested in connecting poets to one another, I avoid resorting to that major concept in comparative literature, “poetic influence.” Harold Bloom’s work in the 1970s, arguing that poets are not influenced by previous poets, they rather misread them, changed the concept of “influence” completely. There are no individual poets, says Bloom, there are only relations between poets (1973, 1975). This proves to be a liberating idea for lyric poets, who have always been reluctant to find themselves being influenced by others. Pessoa even invented his own precursor as one of his heteronyms, Alberto Caeiro, “author” of a number of poems Pessoa called “inconjunct”— that is to say, poems that are like stars out of conjunction in a constellation. I elaborate on this idea in the first and last chapters. Pessoa left many scattered notes on poetry and poets; on genius, wit, and talent; on posterity and immortality; and on fame, celebrity, and notoriety. Curiously enough, he often sounds like Bloom, if for nothing else because his pronouncements are usually arrogant and opinionated. In his fragmentary “Erastratus,” which he wrote in English but never put together as a proper essay to be published, he states: “Shakespeare is the example 1

2

Introduction

of great genius and great wit linked to insufficiency of talent”; “Milton (. . .) had no wit; he was in fact, a pedant (. . .); “Wordsworth (. . .) is the example of pure genius (. . .) when his genius deserts him, (he) falls beneath meanness and below dullness (. . .).” More interesting still is a remark on “plagiarism without plagiarism” that anticipates the Bloomian concept of belatedness. When the ephebe surpasses his precursor, Pessoa says, “the earlier man is nevertheless smaller. (It is the later man who is the earlier)” (1973: 170–171, 174). The fragment that most interest me here, however, is a brief note known as “Os graus da poesia lírica” [The degrees of lyric poetry] (Pessoa, 1973: 67–69). In articulation with Pessoa’s poetic practice, as well as in comparison and contrast with well-known theoretical stances of such modernist poets as Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, this note contributes considerably to any serious reflection on lyric poetry in Western modernity. However scanty, the note invites discussion of such notions as author and authority, the subject, depersonalization and the question of poetic making as faking, as well as Plato’s supposed condemnation of poets as liars. Pessoa’s “Autopsicografia” [Autopsychography], one the most famous and most and more variously translated of Pessoa’s poems, is at the center of this discussion. The first line of the poem reads: “O poeta é um fingidor.” In English, that crucial term—“fingidor”—has been rendered into many different words, all of them suggesting different shades of untruthfulness, distortion, falseness, or insincerity. The noun comes from the verb “fingir,” with the same etymology as “to feign” and “fiction” [Lat. fingere]. English translations range from “feigner,” “pretender,” “faker,” “fake,” “forger,” “inventor,” and even “liar” to verbal forms suggesting disguise, dissemblance, invention, or fabrication.3 I prefer “faker” because it resonates with “maker,” which I understand the poet to be, first of all: poietes. “A poet is a faker” is also the choice of poets Edwin Honig and Richard Zenith, as well as, more recently, Charles Bernstein.4 One of the translators renders the first line as “Poets are liars.” How not to think of Sir Philip Sidney’s “defence” against Plato’s banishment of the “honeyed muse” from the polis in the Republic? To Plato’s charge that poets should not be allowed in the ideal city because their seductive lies would endanger the commonwealth, Sidney’s memorable response was “that of all writers under the sunne, the Poet is the least lyer. (. . .) He nothing afirmeth, and therefore never lieth.” Poets do not lie, Sidney’s Aristotelian argument goes, because, unlike historians, for example, they do not strive “to tel you what is, or is not, but what should, or should not be.”5 In other words, poetry does not claim to tell you the truth; rather it makes you think about the truth and how to give it words—if that be possible at all. Wallace Stevens (“The Man on the Dump”): “Where was it one first heard of the truth? The the.” Hart Crane (“The Broken Tower”): “My

Introduction

3

word I poured. But was it cognate?” And Emily Dickinson: “Truth—so manifold!” All three poems—Stevens’s, Crane’s, and Dickinson’s—theorize their own writing. Which is precisely what Plato does, as Sidney was quick to note: “And truly even Plato who so ever well considereth, shall finde that in the body of his worke though the inside & strength were Philosophie, the skin as it were and beautie, depended most of Poetrie.”6 Pessoa’s self-analysis poem—“Autopsicografia”—as objective construction rather than subjective expression brilliantly questions romantic lyricism as a subjective flow of emotions and sincere self-expression.7 His five “degrees of lyric poetry” are actually five degrees, or levels, of depersonalization. They go from (1) Wordsworthian overflow of powerful feelings, (2) Wordsworthian emotion recollected in tranquility, (3) Keats’s poetic characterlessness, (4) Browning’s dramatic monologues and Shakespeare’s soliloquies, to (5) Pessoa’s heteronymic drama of the lyric. Without ever forgetting that the name of “Pessoa” means “person,” we observe that the fifth degree of poetry is the most extreme degree of depersonalization or, indeed, the most extreme level of de-subjectivation. The lyric poet allows himself to become dramatically other, or to impersonate another person objectively (the heteronyms), without yielding completely to the dramatic form proper and stopping being lyrical. It is as if, half a century later, Pessoa were determined to corroborate Nietzsche’s argument (in section 5 of Die Geburt der Tragödie [1872]) that lyric poetry is as “objective” as Hegel’s “modern aesthetics” demanded for art. One is reminded of Stevens’s statement that “while poems may very well occur, they had very much better be caused” (1966: 274).8 Lyric poetry writing and reading call for a kind of rigorous and detached surrender to language—rational and emotional, fabricated and spontaneous— that you find nowhere else. O poeta é um fingidor Finge tão completamente Que chega a fingir que é dor A dor que deveras sente.

The poet is a faker So well does he fake He even fakes as pain The pain he really feels.

E os que lêem o que escreve, Na dor lida sentem bem, Não as duas que ele teve, Mas só a que eles não têm.

And those reading him Feel in the pain they read Not the poet’s twofold pain But the pain they don’t feel.

E assim nas calhas de roda Gira, a entreter a razão, Esse comboio de corda Que se chama o coração.

And so on its tracks round It goes to entertain reason That clockwork train We know as the heart.

*

4

Introduction

In chapter 1, “The ‘Great Book,’ Caeiro, and Pessoa’s Theory of Poetry,” I propose a new reading of Pessoa’s Livro do desassossego [The Book of Disquietude] as the poet’s theory of his own practice. In chapter 2, “The Tail of the Lizard: Pessoan Disquietude and the Subject of Modernity,” I show how Pessoa’s poetry and poetics anticipate poststructuralist misgivings about the shifting concept of “the subject.” In chapter 3—“The Art of Rumination: Pessoa’s Heteronyms Revisited”—I argue that Pessoa’s heteronymic multiplicity uncannily portends, and undermines, Harold Bloom’s theory of poetic influence. Chapter 4—“Poetic Interruption: A Pessoan Concept for Reading the Lyric”—takes off from Adorno’s “rupture” (Bruch) in his “Rede über Lyrik und Gesellschaft” [1957, A Talk on Lyric Poetry and Society] and Blanchot’s “infinite conversation” (entretien infini) in his “L’interruption” [1969, The interruption] to offer poetry writing as a mode of interruption; the chapter concludes with an analysis of Ana Luísa Amaral’s interpellation of Pessoa’s Mensagem [1934; Message] in her Escuro [Darkness, 2014]. In chapter 5—“The God That Was Missing: Poetry, Divinity, Everydayness”—I look into the relationship such poets as Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens, and Pessoa have with the sacred as a way of understanding the poetic. Chapters six and seven—“Modernist Muses That Matter. Inspiration in Pessoa and Stevens” and “The Truant Muse and the Poet’s Body”—deal with inspiration, a concept that worker-like modernist poets thought they had successfully gotten rid of. In chapter 8—“Orpheu et al.: Modernism, Women, and the War”—I analyze Pessoa’s masculinist role in the founding of Orpheu and compare and contrast this Portuguese modernist little magazine with Poetry and Little Review, two American little magazines edited by feminist women. Chapter 9 looks into Crane’s building of The Bridge from the point of view of a Pessoa who in all likelihood never heard of it. Finally, chapter 10 is a transgressive piece of poetic hermeneutics. I imagine Emily Dickinson “reading” Fernando Pessoa. While Pessoa probably never read, or even heard of, Dickinson, I argue in this chapter that both poets are stars of one constellation. NOTES 1. “The poet is a faker.” Fernando Pessoa, “Autopsicografia” / “Autopsychography.” My translation. When not otherwise indicated, all translations are my own. 2. For a fine, new biography of this “enigmatic writer,” who probably “died a virgin,” see Zenith, 2021. 3. For a number of different English translations of “Autopsicografia,” including a Google one, all of them “recreations after” Pessoa, see https://disquiet​.com​/thirteen​ .html (visited January 10, 2019). 4. Charles Bernstein, “Autopsychografia” (after Fernando Pessoa), in The Edge of One of Many Circles (Homenagem a Irene Ramalho-Santos). Ed. Isabel Caldeira,

Introduction

5

Graça Capinha, and Jacinta Matos (Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra, 2017), 45. 5. Sir Philip Sidney; Defence of Poesie (Ponsonby, 1595). Converted to HTML by Risa S. Bear, March 1995. Converted to pdf by R. Cunningham, January 2009. Downloaded, January 2021. 6. On Plato’s supposed quarrel between philosophy and poetry, or between rigor (akribeia) and play (paidia), see Statkiewicz, 2009 (“A Polemical Introduction”: “[Plato’s playfully mimetic writing] should be understood as a dialogue/confrontation between poetry and philosophy rather than a condemnation of the former by the latter” [p. 8]). 7. Pessoa’s theory and practice anticipate contemporary poetics as analyzed by Gerald Bruns in his What Are Poets For?, where Charles Bernstein and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry are prominent (Bruns, 2012). Jerome McGann (1983) first analyzed the “romantic ideology” that tends to obfuscate readings of romantic poetry. 8. The full Stevens quote, from a letter to Ronald Later Latimer (January 8, 1935), reads like this: “Writing poetry is a conscious activity. While poems may very well occur, they had very much better be caused.”

Chapter 1

The “Great Book,” Caeiro, and Pessoa’s Theory of Poetry

. . . escrevo a prosa dos meus versos . . .1 In an earlier version of “The Art of Rumination. Pessoa’s Heteronyms Revisited” (see chapter 3 infra), I refer to Livro do desassossego [The Book of Disquietude] as Pessoa’s “book of ruminations.”2 It was my way of putting in writing what I had been suggesting for some time and wish to explore further in this chapter: that Livro do desassossego holds the theory of Pessoa’s poetic practice.3 Throughout those sprawling, fragmentary texts that Pessoa never put together as a book (which does not mean that a book does not exist),4 the Livro constructs a poetic subject that ends up not existing, whether silently hiding behind a poetics of absence or boisterously exploding into a poetics of excess—heteronymic multiplicity as the other side of not existing, or being nobody.5 It is proper to this absented poetic subject to say nothing, and that is precisely how he ends up saying everything of what is there to be said—about us and the world—in verse, in prose, and in the prose of his poems. Livro do desassossego is “o Grande Livro que diz que somos” [the Great Book that says we are], as Teresa Sobral Cunha first read the difficult manuscript recently re-deciphered by Jerónimo Pizarro.6 Here is how Pizarro reads the passage in question, a handwritten addition to a curious typescript on cleanliness and uncleanliness, to which I will return: “Partir da Rua dos Douradores para o Impossível . . . erguer-me da carteira para o Ignoto . . . Mas isto interseccionado com a Razão—o Grande Livro como dizem os franceses” [To depart from Rua dos Douradores for the Impossible . . . rise from my desk for the Unknown . . . but this intersected by Reason, the Great book, as the French say] (# 42; 76–77. Emphasis added). “Interseccionado” [intersected] cannot but bring to mind Pessoa’s major modernist -isms: “paulismo” [paulism]7 “sensacionismo” [sensationism], interseccionismo” [intersectionism], 7

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the third of which he once described as rather a “method” than a movement.8 Method or movement, the truth is that in 1914 Pessoa was planning an anthology of intersectionism (Antologia do Interseccionismo); at about the same time, while he and Sá-Carneiro were discussing the “intersection of literature and politics,” Pessoa drops the name of a new -ism that apparently never went beyond the privacy of Pessoa’s exchange with Sá-Carneiro, but which becomes very interesting in the context of this chapter: Caeirismo.9 Le grand livre of the French is le grand livre de comptabilité, the creditand-debit ledger of boss Vasques’s firm of business transactions with the world “first” “discovered” by the Portuguese. In other words, le grand livre of the French is, in good commercial Portuguese, o Razão, the book of accounts that it is the assistant bookkeeper Bernardo Soares’s responsibility to keep. It seems to me, therefore, that when Pessoa thought of the grand livre of the French and capitalized Razão (as Pizarro shows [Pessoa, 2014a: 278]), he forgot to replace “a” (“razão” [reason]) with “o” (“Razão” [ledger]). This is precisely what Richard Zenith does (explaining why) starting with his ninth edition of the Livro.10 Zenith is right, of course, that Pessoa wanted Bernardo Soares’s ledger to resonate with reason/reasoning, as well as, of course, with all the faculties of reason, not least the imagination. Or perhaps it would suffice to say, after Wallace Stevens, “true imagination,” convening “intelligence” and “memory,” as “the sum of our faculties” (1951: 61). After all, Bernardo Soares’s Book of Accounts lives on the same street (“Rua dos Douradores”) as the “casual, meditated book” that the poet goes on writing all along with the same “care and indifference” (Pessoa, 1998a: #13; 55).11 The interesting thing is that the “stupid book” of “random impressions” (#442; 390–391) and the ledger interrupt each other. One of the fragments (#409; 365–366) actually relates that, on a particular day, Bernardo Soares “suddenly” found himself alone in the office (“escritório”). He was enjoying his solitude, fully immersed in memory, daydreaming, imaginings, when this “amused solitude” was interrupted by the sudden arrival of one of the employees. “Normal life” restored, the assistant bookkeeper picked up the “forgotten pen” to resume his work on the ledger. The pen retrieved from its forgetfulness in reverie (“devaneio”)12 to resume ledger work is also the subject-less pen that materializes the poet’s “dream writing” in the textual space of the “casual, meditated book.” After all, the two books intersect in the “escritório,” literally, in Portuguese, the scene of writing (“escrita”).13 It is at the intersection of these two books that what I call the book of ruminations emerges, the great book that speaks us all as it speaks the world—and speaks the poet by theoretically grounding him, even if in absentia. Thus, even if a misreading, Teresa Sobral Cunha’s reading continues to make sense: at the intersection, the Great Book is the book that says we are (“o Grande Livro que diz que somos”).

The “Great Book,” Caeiro, and Pessoa’s Theory of Poetry

9

Paulo de Medeiros has argued forcefully that Livro do desassossego is “one of the most important attempts at theorizing the human condition in modernity.”14 O silêncio das sereias, a title Medeiros borrows from Franz Kafka (“Das Schweigen der Sirenen,” 1917 [The Silence of the Sirens]), shows that Livro do desassossego definitely puts Pessoa alongside many other modernist authors in the Western tradition, Kafka foremost among them, who anxiously question the very idea of modernity and the human condition as “modern.” We might even say that Pessoa’s Bernardo Soares / assistant bookkeeper, no less than Kafka’s Gregor Samsa / traveling-salesman-turned “ungeheures Ungeziefer” [monstrous vermin] in The Metamorphosis (1916), is a metaphor of the human condition in modernity (Kafka, 1986: 9). Medeiros also suggests that the poets’ questioning of modernity and the human condition in modernity is inextricably linked to how they envision their own relation to writing. This is not exclusive to modernity. Though modernist poets, like Wallace Stevens, for example, or Pessoa, excelled at it, metapoetry was not an invention of modernism. Two centuries earlier, Hölderlin wondered in the elegy “Brot und Wein” [Bread and Wine] “wozu Dichter in dürftiger Zeit?” [what are poets for in destitute times?]. We could even visit an even more distant time and remote place and invoke the fifteenth-century, pre-Columbian poet, Nezahualcoyotl, and give voice to the Nahuatl poet’s anxiety about the impossibility of speaking “true words” and so letting flowers, feathers, and stones say the unsayable.15 What is writing for?—the works of many of our modernist poets cry out, whether explicitly or implicitly, in a center-less time of abysmal unknowns, ambiguous progress, senseless wars, somber emptiness, major insignificances, unsettling alienation, bourgeois ambitions, formless individualities, oppressive inequalities, noisy unanimities, suffocating commonalities, hypocritical solidarities, and fake moralisms. Pessoa is no exception: he is also troubled by the purpose of writing. Livro do desassossego, Medeiros argues, “should be read as a large and uninterrupted inquiry into what it means to be a writer” (148). Eduardo Lourenço, the critic who has written compelling pages about The Book as an existential cri de coeur, has referred luminously to Livro do desassossego as “escrita como des-existência” [writing as the opposite, or the other side, of existence].16 I would like to push Lourenço’s and Medeiro’s insights a little further and suggest that, more than theorizing the human condition in modernity by inquiring about the impossible task of the writer, Livro do desassossego theorizes the poet—and the very act of poeming itself. It does so by absenting the poet from writing. How not to think of Pessoa’s fifth degree of poetry and the poet’s utter de-subjectification? Theoretically, the poet gives precedence to the poem by absenting himself.17 Once the poem is written and the work done, the writer is no longer there, and it even seems that the poet was never there at all: “Sou, em grande parte, a mesma prosa que escrevo” [I am, in

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large measure, the very prose I write] (#193; 200); “Tornei-me uma figura de livro” [I have become a figure in a book] (#192; 201); “Sou bocados de personagens de dramas meus” [I am bits of characters of my own plays] (p. 442);18 “Quero ser uma obra de arte” [I want to be a work of art] (#114; 139); “Sou uma figura de romance por escrever” [I am a character in an unwritten novel] (#262; 258); “ser a página de um livro” [to be the page of a book] (# 31; 66–68). The page of the book is the “pessoa própria” [the proper person/ Pessoa] into which the writer delights in losing himself and letting his notbeing-himself be cuddled by sensuous, siren-like words and vibrant images (#259; 254–255). Álvaro de Campos’s memorable characterization of Fernando Pessoa’s nonexistence has been repeated many times: “Fernando Pessoa (. . .) não existe, propriamente falando.” [Properly speaking, Fernando Pessoa does not exist].19 In an introduction for a projected edition of Livro do desassossego that circumstances prevented him from bringing to light, Jorge de Sena wrote some very illuminating pages on Fernando Pessoa’s “ciência de não-ser” [science of not-being].20 My emphasis, however, is different from his. Since I am particularly interested in understanding Pessoa in Livro do desassossego as the theorist of his poetic practice, I start out by paraphrasing Álvaro de Campos—theoretically speaking, the poet does not exist—and then go on to suggest that this phrase of mine sums up Pessoa’s theory of poetry. Pessoa’s oeuvre as a whole, with its mirror games of properly non-existing pessoas, already points in this direction, as Sena so brilliantly shows. I would like to argue further that, from the Livro’s viewpoint, the non-existing persons prefigure the theoretically non-existing poet, as if pushing the fifth degree of poetry to the utmost. While “pessoas-livros” [persons-books],21 the heteronyms make up the prosthetic poet that Soares keeps insisting does not exist—or is a makeshift nothing: “Sou postiço” [I’m fake], the writer declares in one of the sketches (#30; 65), this “aesthetics of artificiality” (as identified in #114; 138–139) promptly creating the aesthetically other-of-the-poet—the poem, writing, poetry itself. This is, I think, how Pessoa reads Rimbaud’s paradox in his famous voyant letter to Georges Izambard (May 15, 1871): “Je est un autre” [I is an other] (1966: 304–305). The poet’s radical other is poetry. As such, Pessoa’s poet is “foreign,” “passer-by,” “translated,” “intruder,” “guest,” “interval,” “betweenness.”22 That is to say, the poet (not the empirical human being—Fernando Pessoa—to whom all the credit must ultimately be given) is “nothing,” the nothing that Álvaro de Campos so beautifully materializes in “Tabacaria” [Tobacco Shop] by postulating, not poetic immortality (a topos widely sung in the western tradition), but poetic mortality: “[O Dono da Tabacaria] morrerá e eu morrerei. / Ele deixará a tabuleta, eu deixarei versos / A certa altura morrerá a tabuleta também, e também os versos.” [(The Owner of the Tobacco Shop)] will die and I will

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die. / He will leave the signboard, and I will leave poems. / After a while the signboard will also die, and also the poems.] The poet’s realization of his absolute not existing and rather being no one comes to the writer in Livro in a flash of lightening: “Cheguei hoje, de repente, a uma sensação absurda e justa. Reparei, num relâmpago íntimo, que não sou ninguém. Ninguém, absolutamente ninguém [I arrived today at an absurd yet precise sensation. I realized, in an inner flash, that I am no one. Absolutely no one] (#262; 257). The radical solitude of the poet’s being nothing comes across poignantly in a passage of Livro do desassossego depicting the pariah-like status of an utterly forlorn human being (#461; 406): Nunca tive alguém a quem pudesse chamar “Mestre.” Não morreu por mim nenhum Cristo. Nenhum Buda me indicou um caminho. No alto dos meus sonhos nenhum Apolo ou Atena me apareceu, para que me iluminasse a alma. [I have never had anyone I could call “Master.” No Christ died for me. No Buddha showed me the way. In my loftiest dreams, no Apollo or Athena ever appeared to enlighten my soul.]

We might even say that the fact that Bernardo Soares is not allowed to write poems—which does not mean that there is no poetry in Livro do desassossego—is one more piece of evidence that, theoretically speaking, “the poet” does not exist. Which is also the reason why Alberto Caeiro, the “Master,” must die, while giving the lie, as it were, to the assistant bookkeeper. Furthermore, Caeiro, doubly non-existing because he is already “dead,” continues to make poems appear.23 While all the major heteronyms make subtle or indirect appearances in Livro as non-existing poets, Ricardo Reis perhaps less so,24 Alberto Caeiro is actually explicitly invoked and reread, and a couple of lines from O guardador de rebanhos (VII) are quoted as providing an “inspiration” and a “liberation” (#46; 80):25 Releio passivamente, recebendo o que sinto como uma inspiração e um livramento, aquelas frases simples de Caeiro, na referência natural do que resulta do pequeno tamanho da sua aldeia. Dali, diz ele, porque é pequena, pode ver-se mais do mundo do que da cidade; e por isso a aldeia é maior que a cidade . . . “Porque sou do tamanho do que vejo E não do tamanho da minha altura.” Frases como estas, que parecem crescer sem vontade que as houvesse dito, limpam-me de toda a metafísica que espontaneamente acrescento à vida. Depois de as ler, chego à janela sobre a rua estreita, olho o grande céu e os muitos astros, e sou livre como um splendor alado cuja vibração me estremece no corpo todo.

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“Sou do tamanho do que vejo!” Cada vez que penso esta frase com toda a atenção dos meus nervos, ela me parece destinada a reconstruir consteladamente o universo. “Sou do tamanho do que vejo!” Que grande posse mental vai desde o poço das emoções profundas até às altas estrelas que se reflectem nele, e, assim, em certo modo, ali estão. E já agora, consciente de saber ver, olho a vasta metafísica objectiva dos céus todos com uma segurança que me dá vontade de morrer cantando. “Sou do tamanho do que vejo!” E o vago luar, inteiramente meu, começa a estragar de vago o azul meio-negro do horizonte. Tenho vontade de erguer os braços e gritar coisas de uma selvajaria ignorada, de dizer palavras aos mistérios altos, de afirmar uma nova personalidade larga aos grandes espaços da matéria vazia. Mas recolho-me e abrando. “Sou do tamanho do que vejo!” E a frase fica-me sendo a alma inteira, encosto a ela todas as emoções que sinto, e sobre mim, por dentro, como por sobre a cidade por fora, cai a paz indecifrável do luar duro que começa largo com o anoitecer. [I passively reread, welcoming what I feel as an inspiration and a liberation, those simple lines by Caeiro referring to what naturally results from the smallness of his village. From there, he says, because it is small, you can see more of the world than from the city, hence the village is larger than the city . . . “Because I am the size of what I see And not the size of my height.” Lines like these, which seem to crop up regardless of any will to say them, cleanse me of all the metaphysics I spontaneously add on to life. After reading them, I go to my window overlooking the narrow street, look at the sky and all the stars, and feel free in a winged splendor whose vibration makes my whole body shiver. “I am the size of what I see!” Each time I think of this phrase with the attention of all my nerves, it seems to me to be destined to reconstruct the universe constellatedly. “I am the size of what I see!” What mental power goes from the well of deep emotions to the high stars reflected on it and which, somehow, are there too. Actually, aware that I can see, I look at the vast objective metaphysics of all the skies with a certainty that makes me want to die singing. “I am the size of what I see!” And the vague moonlight, all my own, begins to spoil with vagueness the horizon’s half-black blue. I feel like raising my arms and shout things of unknown savagery, to speak words to the high mysteries, to assert a new and vast personality before the wide spaces of empty matter.

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But I collect myself and calm down. “I am the size of what I see!” And the phrase becomes my entire soul, I lean all the emotions I feel against it, and upon me, inside, as upon the city, outside, there falls the indecipherable peace of the harsh moonlight that begins to spread as the night falls.]

In this long quotation I would like to highlight two images: cleanness (“asseio”) and constellations. Cleanness, because the fragment clearly suggests that “Caeiro” cleanses the speaker in Livro “of all the metaphysics [he] spontaneously add[s] on to life.” This line of thinking will force me to go back to sketch # 42 (which begins: “Não compreendo senão como uma espécie de falta de asseio” [Only as a kind of lack of cleanness do I understand]), as well as to “o Razão,” and from there to Caeiro’s poems. Constellations, on the other hand, because, once again, Caeiro, like the starry sky, appears endowed with the astral power to preside over the whole universe; what sketch # 46 suggests Caeiro’s phrase (“I am the size of what I see”) is supposed to do, literally, is to reconstruct the universe constellatedly [“consteladamente”], the unusual adverb pointing to the importance of astral influence on life on earth. But it is not so much Pessoa’s well-known interest in astrology that concerns me here; it is rather his use of the astral image of constellations as self-sufficient, poetry-like forms (or vice versa). Besides “consteladamente” (in the manner of constellations or the way constellations work), Livro do desassossego has several instances of the use of the verb “constelar” [constellate], either in the specific sense of having to do with astrology, as in the phrase “constelado destino” [constellated destiny] (#389; 350); or simply referring to the starry night, as in “a grande noite vagamente constelada” [the vast, vaguely constellated night] (#50; 83); or just meaning adorning, decorating, as in “constelar de novas flores ou de novos astros os campos ou os céus” [constellating the fields or the skies with new flowers and new stars] (#27; 63). On a particularly striking fragment (#110; 136), the verb is used reflexively (“constelo-me” [I constellate myself]) with the result that the writer seems to disappear in astral infinity as if part of a constellation. I am tempted to see here Caeiro (as in #46; 80) reconstructing his own universe constellatedly. This line of thinking leads me once again to Caeiro’s poems, this time with a special reference to “Poemas inconjunctos” [Inconjunct Poems] and the theoretical implications of such an apparently strange title.26 But first, let me comment briefly on sketch # 42 and that apparent afterthought rashly scribbled at the end of the previously existing typescript. Or perhaps it was just a sudden thought Pessoa wanted to register for future use but had no other piece of paper where to jot it down at the time. Some readers have indeed assumed that those scanty three lines do not belong there. Leyla Perrone-Moisés, for example, does not include them in her edition of

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Livro do desassossego.27 I sympathize with this view. I myself had doubts once. On my old copy of Zenith’s first edition I, too, scribbled on the margin early on, “doesn’t seem to ‘belong’ here.” Although I have never erased it (as part of the history of my understanding of Livro do desassossego and Pessoa in general), my old perplexity is long gone. The desire manifested in those final, earnestly penciled words I would call immortal longings that yet do not let go of mortality; they are rather intersected, by way of the concrete reality of Vasques’s ledger, with the chaotic, unpleasant dirtiness so graphically described in the previous paragraphs. Animal images of filth, sliminess, danger, and death combine to picture the sorry human condition in modernity as existing in little less than a pigsty, however metaphorical. At the same time, though, the tropes on “lavar o destino” [washing destiny] and “mudar de estar” [changing being-there], though suggesting multiple ways of being, the heteronyms immediately coming to mind, point above all to the process of purification that Blanchot’s essay on the “right to death” [le droit à la mort] presents as a condition of writing.28 By articulating such images and concepts as cleanness (“asseio”) and uncleanness (“desasseio”), on the one hand, with, on the other, life, existence, destiny, powerlessness, (un)consciousness, nothingness, and death, the typed text of # 42 can easily be read as an excellent example of how Livro do desassossego theorizes the human condition in modernity. The brief handwritten passage added at the end, however, with its focus on the intersecting Great Book, sheds a new, metapoetical light on the writing previously reported: “escrevo nos vidros, no pó do necessário, o meu nome em letras grandes, assinatura quotidiana da minha escritura com a morte” [I write on the windowpanes, on the dust of necessity, my name in capital letters, daily signature on my compact with death]. The writer of these dark lines does not exist, does not live, and does not die, simply because he is “não-ele” [not-him]. The empty space of his (not) being-there is the all properly named the nothing. Such a non-being doesn’t even have the right to death. Or perhaps, as Blanchot would put it, it is “the work” that “is no longer capable of dying,” thus offering the writer “the mockery of immortality” (328; 340). The paradoxes of “mays” and “musts” and “power” at the close of Emily Dickinson’s “My Life had stood a Loaded Gun” (J754/Fr764) speak eloquently to the complex intersections of life and art with which Blanchot deals in this essay.29 The (modernist) scribbler of Livro do desassossego, by constructing his own nonexistence, offers a far more somber view of “the mockery of immortality”: “Quem vive como eu não morre: acaba, murcha, desvegeta-se” [Whoever lives like me does not die: he ends, withers, devegetates]. Blanchot’s essay is useful for reading Pessoa’s work as a whole. In fact, it sounds at times, implausibly, as if written with multiple Pessoa in mind (the writer as several people in one [303; 312], the poet becoming other [305;

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314], writing condemning the poet to a life that has nothing to do with real life [328; 340]). My understanding of Pessoa’s poetic theory, however, is not the Mallarméan one, so well-articulated by Blanchot, that the poet disappears by becoming his poem; my understanding of Pessoa’s theory of poetry, as I have been suggesting, is that the Pessoan poet is theoretically nonexistent. Caeiro, who makes the assistant bookkeeper want to die singing his line, “I am the size of what I see,” is cleansed of all metaphysics—that being perhaps why he returns “virginity” to Álvaro de Campos30—and becomes the nonpoet purified into absolute seeing: “Eu nem sequer sou poeta; vejo” [I am not even a poet; I see], says Caeiro-of-the-clear-gaze in a poem from “Poemas inconjunctos” (“A espantosa realidade das coisas” [The amazing reality of things]). I will turn to “Poemas inconjunctos” by and by, but first I wish to go over the condition of the poet in O guardador de rebanhos [The Keeper of Sheep].31 Poem I of O guardador de rebanhos traces what I just called the “condition” of the poet, that is to say, the condition of being a non-poet: he doesn’t even want to be a poet (“Ser poeta não é uma ambição minha” [Being a poet is not my ambition]) and he doesn’t really write poems, black on white (“Escrevo versos num papel que está no meu pensamento” [I write poems on a piece of paper in my mind]). All he wants is to be found in his non-poems as “qualquer coisa natural” [something natural]. Of course, there is a poet in O guardador de rebanhos—“Alberto Caeiro” (named in XXVI)—but it is a poet always on the verge of undoing himself; a poet intent on learning how to unlearn, on cleaning himself of learning, so as to be able merely to see; a poet eager to unwrap himself and be, not “Alberto Caeiro” (i.e., a poet), but a human animal produced by Nature (XXVI); a poet prone to falling sick (XV); a poet who actually only writes the prose of his verses (XXVIII) and lets poetry rather come forth like flowers (XXXVI). In many of the poems of O guardador de rebanhos, we can hear Pessoa’s denunciation of romantic sentimentalism as a way of being not a poet. A good example is precisely Poem XXVIII, just mentioned, where Caeiro debunks poets that commit the sin of pathetic fallacy by ascribing feelings to flowers, souls to stones, and ecstasies in the moonlight to rivers. Or Poem X, where only the keeper of sheep knows what the wind really says, not the passerby supposedly hearing memories and longings. Better still is Poem XXXII, about “um homem das cidades” [a city man], whose preaching of social justice leaves Caeiro wondering about rural sounds not being like the bells of little chapels summoning flowers and brooks to mass. “A minha poesia é natural como levantar-se o vento” [My poetry is as natural as the wind rising]. The last line of Caeiro’s Poem XIV sums up the theory of Pessoa’s poet-less poetry. Poiesis without poietes, as is clearer in Poem XXXVI, inveighing against poets that strain themselves in their

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making in order to be artists because they don’t know how to bloom. Eduardo Lourenço once said that Caeiro’s poetry hankers after a silence prior to the word. (1973: 43). Could this be what Pessoa was thinking of when he came up with “Caierism”? To be sure, “Caeiro” is not a nature poet, not even in the manner of Francis of Assisi. Although Saint Francis may have been an inspiration of sorts to the Pessoan personae, he “astonishes” Caeiro negatively in one of his “Inconjunct Poems” for loving things without even looking at them (“Leram-me hoje S. Francisco de Assis” [I was read Saint Francis today]).32 What I am suggesting is that “Caeiro” is not a “something” poet, or an “anything” poet. “Caeiro” is a poetry poet. This is how I understand the phrase that proclaims “Caeiro “o poeta do ovo de Colombo” [the poet of Columbus’s egg].33 His utterly original, deceivingly “easy” poems, like the line that so struck Bernardo Soares (“Sou do tamanho do que vejo” [I am the size of what I see]), “seem to crop up regardless of any will to say them.” No human making could have produced Caeiro’s poems. They are like constellations. Oftentimes, they offer themselves not in conjunction. That is what inconjunct means in astronomy:34 celestial bodies that, by reason of their positions, do not affect one another. They are not in conjunction. They may still be part of a constellation, but they are not in conjunction. So are Caeiro’s inconjunct poems. * Thanks to Ivo Castro, we know now that Pessoa put together O guardador de rebanhos as a cycle with extremely great care.35 The set of forty-nine poems survived as such, in spite of many gestures of revision on the individual poems, even after publication, and have come down to us in that form in all the editions, even if the various modern editors use different individual choices amongst Pessoa’s post-print variants.36 A beautiful constellation, I would call O guardador de rebanhos. In a letter to Gaspar Simões of February 25, 1933, commenting on his intention of publishing his Complete Poems, Pessoa also seemed to consider “O pastor amoroso” [The Shepherd in Love] as another cycle. “Poemas inconjunctos,” however, he had not yet collected (“não tenho reunidos”), nor was he sure when he could do it, since they required revisions that were not merely “verbal” but rather “psychological” as well.37 The rest of Caeiro’s work Pessoa considered mere “posthumous” fragments. Or so he had Ricardo Reis write in one of this heteronym’s many reflections on Caeiro (Pessoa, 1982a: 126). Reis goes on to say that, after “O pastor amoroso,” Caeiro’s sensibility and intelligence pale and his work is not the same. Once O guardador de rebanhos is written, Reis concludes, nothing seems to justify the (inconjunct) poems.

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It is true, as Reis argues, that the imaginary of the “Poemas inconjunctos” is largely the same as that of O guardador de rebanhos, though on a more somber note, or referring more darkly to death and dying. But the privileging of mere seeing is still there, as in the poem quoted earlier, where the poet claims not to be a poet and just to see (“A espantosa realidade das coisas” [The amazing reality of things]); or the poet’s insistence on the poetic necessity of always “seeing for the first time” (“Criança desconhecida e suja brincando à minha porta” [Unknown and dirty child playing at my door]); or the importance of “looking without opinion,” which is another way of “merely” seeing (“Entre o que vejo de um campo e o que vejo de outro campo” [Between what I see of a field and what I see of another field]). The topos of sickness also crops up in “Inconjunct Poems,” actually rather more insistently, as if confirming Reis’s opinion about Caeiro’s diminished powers after The Keeper of Sheep and “The Shepherd in Love”: “Estou doente. Meus pensamentos começam a estar confusos” [I am sick. My thoughts begin to be confused]; “Mas por que me interrogo, senão porque estou doente?” [But why do I question myself if not because I am sick?] in “Seja o que for que esteja no centro do mundo” [Whatever it is that is at the center of the world]; “Estive doente um momento” [I was sick for a while] in “Pétala dobrada para trás da rosa que outros dizem de veludo” [Back-folded petal of the rose others say is of velvet]. This last example can’t help but remind the reader of the poems in O guardador de rebanhos in which Caeiro is not a poet as opposed to those sentimental poets that ascribe meaning and feeling to things. And yet, the poet of “Poemas Inconjunctos” never makes himself totally absent, as we saw happen in O guardador de rebanhos. There is even a poem in which the poet fails to perform his theory of disappearing into only seeing. He speaks of things while (he confesses) he should merely see them, without thinking and regardless of time or space (“Vive, dizes, in the present” [Live, you say, in the present]). The poet of “Poemas inconjunctos” is never in a hurry because the sun and the moon are never in a hurry either (“Não tenho pressa: não a têm o sol e a lua” [I am in no hurry: nor are the sun and the moon]. For some reason, Pessoa never felt rushed either to go back to these poems—constellated with sun, moon, and stars as some of them are—to put them in conjunction and make a real constellation out of them. Ivo Castro says that we (devoted readers of Pessoa) are still a long way off from a standardized (“padronizada”) edition of “Poemas inconjunctos” (Pessoa, 2015b: 263). I wonder, would Pessoa really want one? Or could he ever accomplish such a “standardized” edition? Assuming their posthumous condition and the risk of fragmentariness, as Ricardo Reis suggests, Caeiro’s “Inconjunct Poems” are like deconstellated stars (Bernardo Soares would say), or stars out of conjunction (I say) or, Blanchot would say, they are stars

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of the disaster, intimating the limit of writing (“le limite de l’écriture”)—the fragment-poem in abeyance, or interrupted.38 After all, if the poet does not exist theoretically speaking, “all the poems are always written the following day” [todos os poemas são sempre escritos no dia seguinte]. By their readers.39

NOTES 1. I write the prose of my verse . . . (Pessoa, 1981: 153). My translation. When not otherwise indicated, all translations are my own. 2. I have often explained why I prefer disquietude to render desassossego. Zenith’s translation of Livro do desassossego was first published by Carcanet, Manchester, 1991, as The Book of Disquietude (a word Pessoa would have encountered in authors he knew well, such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Melville). For the carefully revised Penguin edition, London, 2001, the translator was regrettably persuaded to change the title to The Book of Disquiet, which represents a loss of meter, rhythm, and exacting meaning. I believe meter was also behind the choice of a nonexistent French word (intranquillité), rather than the well-established inquiétude, to be desassossego in the first translation of The Book: Le livre de l’intranquillité, trans. Françoise Laye (1988). After all, like disquiet, inquiétude does not quite “rhyme” with desassossego. . . . If Pessoa were to say desassossego in English, I suspect he would choose disquietude. 3. I have consulted all the editions of Livro do desassossego (Portuguese and English) in the bibliography, but here I quote mainly from Richard Zenith’s first edition of 1998, even though now and then I prefer a different variant from the one he chose. And even if I use my own translations, I am very grateful to Zenith for his translation of Livro do desassossego (Pessoa, 2003a). There is also a practical reason why I give here Zenith’s fragment number followed by page number. Englishspeaking readers with little or no Portuguese may find it convenient to have the numbers of fragments in Zenith’s edition and in his translation coincide. For Zenith’s revised edition and translation of The Book, see Pessoa, 2015. 4. For a thorough description of the disquieting nonexistence of Livro do desassossego, see Pizarro, 2016: 11–27. 5. José Gil first spoke of Livro do desassossego as Pessoa’s “laboratório poético” [poetic laboratory]. He reads The Book as the active locus of poetic experimentation but not of theoretical thinking. Pessoa theorizes “preferably in other places,” Gil adds, “journal articles, projects of prefaces, letters” (1986: 1–28 [13]). He is right, but my argument in this chapter is that The Book’s poetic experimentation implicitly weaves a (poet-less) theory of poetry. 6. Pessoa, 2008: 325. Teresa Sobral Cunha immediately identified in this passage the clear reference to the ledger: “o Razão.” See also Pessoa, 2013: 271. 7. Paulismo, from “paul” [quagmire], not to be confused with St Paul’s doctrines. 8. See Ramalho-Santos, 2003b: 162 and n. 25.

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9. Antologia do Interseccionismo is mentioned in a letter to Armando CôrtesRodrigues, October 4, 1914; Caeirismo (capitalized) in the draft of a letter to Sá-Carneiro (July 28, 1914?). See Pessoa, 2009: 348–353. 10. Cf. Pessoa, 2013: #42; 81, note on p. 517; Zenith thinks that it is difficult to distinguish “a” from “o” in the scribbled addition. He has also silently corrected some lapses since his first edition. 11. Pessoa, 1998a: #13; 55. References included in the text from now on. For “Rua dos Douradores” as the “home” of both “life” and “art,” see # 9; 53. 12. “Devaneio” throughout the Livro suggests poetic creativity. I wonder if, when he translated it as “reverie,” Zenith had also in mind Emily Dickinson’s “To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee. / And revery, / The revery alone will do / If bees are few” (J1755/Fr1779). Poetry is written in poetry. 13. See Derrida, 1972. Cf. “The ‘subject’ of writing does not exist if we mean by that some sovereign solitude of the author. The subject of writing is a system of relations between strata: of the Mystic Pad, of the psyche, of society, of the world. Within that scene the punctual simplicity of the classical subject is not to be found” (113). The phrase “dream writing” is Derrida’s (87). The pen is, of course, part of Freud’s “Mystic Pad.” 14. Medeiros, 2015: 157. Pages inserted in the text from now on. See also Medeiros, 2013. 15. Cf. Ramalho-Santos, 2012: 245–281. 16. See Lourenço, 2004: 103–109 [105]. Note how the critic’s thinking cleverly plays with existence-as-desistance. 17. I am speaking here of a male poet. But great women poets often choose to absent themselves as well. Emily Dickinson, for example, absents herself exceptionally well into “possibility” (J657/Fr466). 18. In his first edition, Zenith gave an alternative version in the MS. (“Sou uma personagem de dramas meus” [I am a character of my own plays]). Pizarro, on the other hand, prefers, as do I and a later Zenith does as well, “bocados de personagens” [bits of characters], more in tune with the fragment’s musings on the “pulverization of personality,” clearly pointing to the heteronymic explosion (Pessoa, 2013: 445, 2014a: 101). 19. In a text first published in Lopes, 1990: 2: 413. 20. Sena (1982, 2: 178–242 [181].). More relevant for my musings in these chapter are mostly (not always) the fragments of what Sena calls the last phase of Livro, that is to say, sketches dated roughly from 1929 onwards of a work definitely ascribed to Bernardo Soares. 21. For “pessoas-livros,” see Pessoa, 1966:101. 22. Estrangeiro: # 83; 112–113; # 86; 115; cf. Campos, “Lisbon Revisited (1926). Transeunte: # 208; 213–214; cf. Campos, “Lisbon Revisited (1926). Translato: # 31; 66–68; cf. Campos, “Cruzou por mim.” Intruso, Hóspede: # 429; 381–382. Intervalo: #204; 210–211. Entresou: #281; 271–272. 23. José Gil has written some very interesting pages on the philosophical meaning of “the death of Caeiro” (2013: 37–68). I am concerned here with its poetic meaning.

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24. But see the Reis-like mode in #236; 234–235 (“Não se subordinar a nada” [To submit to nothing]). 25. It is curious that Caeiro, the “Master” of them all, should appear as the most prominent heteronym in a Livro that calls masterhood into question, as we just saw. Without exploring it, Manuel Gusmão sensed the importance of Caeiro’s explicit presence in Livro do desassossego very early on. See Gusmão 1986: 25–27. 26. Perhaps because it seemed to suggest “poems not part of a set” [“conjunto”], Pessoan scholarship has long established this title as “Poemas inconjuntos,” even though “inconjunto” is not registered as a word in any dictionary. I suspect that Pessoa called these Caeiro poems “Poemas inconjunctos” because he did not see them as in conjunction with O guardador de rebanhos [The Keeper of Sheep] or “O pastor amoroso” [The Shepherd in Love]. In English, “inconjunct” means “celestial bodies lacking conjunction,” and that is probably how Pessoa wanted these poems to be read. Not as Assorted Poems, Miscellaneous Poems or Uncollected Poems, as translators and critics usually have it, and not as poems not part of a set (“conjunto”) but rather as poems lacking conjunction: Inconjunct Poems. These poems are out of shepherd orbit, so to speak, and yet they are somehow still part of the same constellation. 27. Cf. Pessoa, 1986b: 86–87. Curiously enough, however, Perrone-Moisés immediately follows the said fragment with another one that also mentions o Razão intersected with reverie. (“Tenho diante de mim as duas páginas grandes do livro pesado” [I have before me the two large pages of the heavy book] (Pessoa, 1998a: #5; 49). 28. Blanchot, 1949: 293–331 “[La littérature et le droit à la mort”]; Blanchot, 1995: 300–344. The essay “Literature and the Right to Death” was translated by Lydia Davis. Pages included in the text from now on (original followed by translation). 29. Here is the last quatrain of Dickinson’s well-known poem: “Though I than he—may longer live / He longer must—than I— / For I have but the power to kill, / Without—the power to die—.” 30. Campos’s response to Caeiro in his “Notas para a recordação do meu Mestre Caeiro” [Notes to remember my master Caeiro]: “o efeito em mim foi receber de repente, em todas as minhas sensações, uma virgindade que não tinha tido” [the effect on me was suddenly to receive, in all my sensations, a virginity I had not had before] (Pessoa: 1982a: 108). 31. Most poems are easily accessible in Arquivo Pessoa (http://arquivopessoa​ .net/). Editions used here: Pessoa, 1946, 1981: 135–183, 1994, 2015b, 2016. 32. Pessoa, 1994: 133, 2015b: 87, 2016: 70. 33. Maria Helena Nery Garcez offers a very interesting study of Caeiro as an extremely original nature poet. She shows that the originality of Caeiro’s poetry consists in its dealing skillfully with its own dependence on and independence from the Western tradition of nature poetry in its articulations with religiosity, both western and eastern. To her mind, the phrase “Caeiro é o poeta do ovo de Colombo” [Caeiro is the poet of Columbus’ egg] means that Caeiro is the poet of the obvious (Garcez, 1985: 140). 34. The term is no longer widely used in astronomy; it is now practically circumscribed to astrology. 35. Pessoa, 2015b: Castro’s introduction and p. 263–264.

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36. Jerónimo Pizarro and Patricio Ferrari, while keeping The Keeper of Sheep intact, signify their idea of the “complete poems” of Alberto Caeiro by giving sequential numbers to all the poems, the first poem of “O pastor amoroso” being number 50. Pessoa, 2016: 31–120. The editors come up with a total of 115 poems (conjunct or inconjunct?). 37. Pessoa, 1982b: 98. 38. Blanchot, 1980: 17, and passim; Blanchot, 1995b: 7 and passim. 39. Cf. Álvaro de Campos, “Insónia.” Pessoa, 1981: 308–310 [310].

Chapter 2

The Tail of the Lizard Pessoan Disquietude and the Subject of Modernity

Talvez tenhas existido apenas, como um lagarto a quem cortam o rabo E que é rabo para aquém do lagarto remexidamente.1 (Pessoa/Campos “Tabacaria”)

In 1991, a collection of essays was published in the United States by Routledge with the intriguing title Who Comes After the Subject? Edited by Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy, the book gathers together essays by French philosophers (known in the United States as “continental”) on what we might call the crisis of the post-Cartesian subject (Cadava, 1991). Some of the essays first appeared in the international review of philosophy Topoi (September 1988). A French edition of this issue of Topoi, with new contributions, appeared in 1989. Who Comes After the Subject? includes all the previously published essays and adds some that had never been translated or even published before. The authors’ challenge, as conceived of by Jean-Luc Nancy, who agreed to coordinate the project, was to respond to the question formulated in the title: Who Comes After the Subject? In his introduction, Nancy, invoking Hegel, explains that the integral “subject” as identified by Descartes’s famous Je pense donc je suis / Cogito ergo sum was already putting itself in question by the early nineteenth century (Hegel: the subject is that which is capable of maintaining within itself its own contradiction). From the late nineteenth century onwards, the thinking of such philosophers as Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Husserl, Heidegger, Bataille, and Wittgenstein contributed much to help the authors included in this book further to put the subject in question. Factors influencing these authors’ meditations on the crisis of the subject, Nancy suggests, are also findings in linguistics and the social sciences, the European experience of war, fascism, Stalinism, the camps, decolonization, new nations emerging. The question (“Who comes 23

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after the subject?”), Nancy insists, is actually multiple: it is a question about the individual but also about peoples, the State, history, geography; it also addresses work, men and women, myself, ourselves. The subject as manifested in the philosopher’s formulation of the question is the existentas-occupying-a-place, or put another way, “the one present there.” One of the authors concludes that after the subject comes the citizen (Etienne Balibar). Nancy himself argues that what comes after the subject is the community. Another philosopher offers “situation” or “place” as a reply (Badiou). Yet another submits that the question should address what, not who, the proper answer being death—or nothingness (Lacoue-Labarthe). All these concepts (“citizen,” “community,” “situation,” “nothingness”) will be useful in dealing with the Pessoan desassossego [disquietude] discussed next in the chapter. Fernando Pessoa is actually mentioned in two of the French philosophers’ responses to Nancy’s question and cannot but come vividly to mind in a third one. In “On a Finally Objectless Subject,” Alain Badiou observes that the subject “wore thin and fell into ruin between Nietzsche and Heidegger, as well as throughout the whole of what should be called “the age of the poets”— Hölderlin, Hopkins, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Trakl, Pessoa, Mandelstam, Celan.2 This is not the only time that Badiou invokes the Portuguese modernist poet to elucidate his own thinking. A few years later, in “Une tâche philosophique. Être contemporain de Pessoa” (Badiou, 1998: 61–89), arguing that more than Mallarmé’s Pessoa’s book is as multiple, contingent, and untotalizable as the universe, Badiou challenges fellow philosophers “to be contemporaries of Pessoa,” that is to say, “to think of him as a possible condition for philosophy.”3 In the wake of Nietzsche and Deleuze, and acknowledging José Gil’s Deleuzian approach to Pessoa’s work (Álvaro de Campos in particular), Badiou’s meditations on Pessoa here aim to contribute to a clarification of the poet’s relationship with Plato. If the task of modern philosophy, as famously defined by Nietzschean Deleuze, is to “overturn Plato,” Badiou’s conclusion that Pessoa’s modernity calls into question “the pertinence of the Platonism/ anti-Platonism opposition” already points to the complexities and contradictions involved in such an overturning.4 From Badiou’s earlier essay, included in Who Comes After the Subject? (“On a Finally Objectless Subject”), I draw his negative delimitation of the subject as situation, place, or chance (hasard). Before I go briefly to the two other essays in which Pessoa is mentioned or has echoes, let me offer Pessoa’s desassossego as, in Badiou’s rather Pessoan terms, the “interval that the poet has opened up for us, a veritable philosophy of the multiple, of the void, of the infinite. A philosophy that will affirmatively do justice to this world that the gods have for ever abandoned.”5 Intervalo, a word repeated more than forty times in the book, is a crucial concept in Livro do desassossego. Suffice it to suggest here, following Badiou’s thinking, that the intervalo that the poet opens up for us is precisely the

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inbet​weenn​ess-o​f-bei​ng-no​nbein​g-in-​multi​plici​ty (“Quantos sou? Quem é eu? O que é este intervalo que há entre mim e mim?” [How many am I? Who is I?, What is this interval that exists between me and me] #213; 218). Pessoa’s intervalo is the void of nothingness (“um intervalo entre nada e nada” [an interval between nothing and nothing] #225; 226) and the lure of infinitude (wind whistling “no intervalo do vento” [in the interval of the wind] #32; 68).6 In a word, intervalo, signifying presence and absence, in and out, at one and the same time, is the threshold of the Pessoan rift-enigma of disquietude in Livro do desassossego. How not to think of Heidegger’s “Die Sprache” [Language] and consider Pessoa’s intervalo in the context of the philosopher’s concepts of “threshold” (die Schwelle), “between” (das Zwischen), “dif-ference” (der Unter-schied), and “rift” (der Riβ)?7 Heidegger “discovered” that “language speaks” (die Sprache spricht) by researching where he knew language is most purely spoken—or “originating” (anfangend): the lyric poem (Rein Gesprochenen ist das Gedicht). Heidegger resorts to Georg Trakl’s “A Winter Evening” [Ein Winterabend] to show how the lyric poem speaks the world without really saying anything. The poem sounds loud and clear what the philosopher strains to think. No wonder philosophers often aspire to the condition of poets. For Heidegger himself, writing a few poems was part of his thinking experience (2001: 1–14). The images of dark coldness outside and bright warmth inside in Trakl’s “Ein Winterabend” acknowledge the threshold (die Schwelle) as the site of being: “bread and wine” (Brot und Wein). Pessoa’s Bernardo Soares also muses on thresholds. In one of the fragments, a desert threshold (limiar deserto) and an “abstract threshold” (limiar abstracto) (#290; 278–279) bespeak the inbetweenness of being, nonbeing, and thinking. However, as I have already suggested, intervalo is really the threshold of Pessoa’s Bernardo Soares. That crucial word, intervalo, carries different meanings in different sketches of Livro do desassossego, but they all speak the fragility of inbetweenness. Whether it be a proper interval, like the intermission of a show, or a space between beings, feelings, or things, an unfathomable twilight zone, as it were, intervalo is implicitly and explicitly disquieting: “Entresou” [between-I-am], the poet says (#281; 271), and the image of human existence in modernity suddenly appears as the I’s total vulnerability-in-incomprehensibility. Even when the interval explicitly refers to a show’s intermission, the futility and artificiality of what happens (or does not happen) in the interval is what provokes the poet’s disquietude about human existence in general and his own existence in particular: “Somos qualquer coisa que se passa no intervalo de um espectáculo; por vezes, por certas portas, entrevemos o que talvez não seja senão cenário. Todo o mundo é confuso, como vozes na noite” [We are something that happens in the interval of a show; at times, through certain

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doors, we have glimpses of what is perhaps no more than scenery. The whole world is confused, like voices in the night] (#63; 96–97). Intervalo is what is supposed to be temporary, possibly a welcome interruption, some respite or relief, quieting down the subject (as, almost, in “Sossego, quase, do cansaço do desassossego” [I almost quiet down from the fatigue of disquietude] #243; 240). But it ends up crystallized in the terrifying emptiness of an eternity. In another sketch, projected as triviality and meaninglessness, human existence is mere “crochet of things,” an “interval” (#12; 54). There are several sketches bearing the titles, “Intervalo” and “Intervalo Doloroso” (Painful Interval), the latter title expressing in fact a redundancy: the interval cannot but be painful. That is why, in “Saudação a Walt Whitman” [Salutation to Walt Whitman], a euphoric Pessoa/Campos cries out, “não quero intervalos no mundo” (I want no intervals in the world).8 Ultimately, being the interval is what disquiets, and the interval is that which provokes disquietude. To acknowledge, as the poet does, “Sou o intervalo entre o que sou e o que não sou” [I am the interval between what I am and what I am not] (#204; 210) means fully to assume desassossego, a word which the reader half expects to find next. And, indeed, it makes its appearance a line below. The very book in Livro do desassossego, be it the assistant bookkeeper’s book of accounts or the poet’s casual book of disconnected scribblings (#12, #13; 54, 55), is like an interval in its being a groan between half-light and half-darkness (“este livro é um gemido” [“Intervalo Doloroso” #412; 369]). Disquietude and interval, or betweenness, are explicitly linked as well in sketch #478; 416, where the narrator speaks of his “disquietude between margins” (desassossego entre margens). It comes as no surprise that mystery haunts disquietude. Given that the sensation is one of the subject’s ways of manifesting itself (or being its own being), the most complex of sensations, because it both pains and comforts, is the “disquietude of mystery” (desassossego do mistério, “Milímetros,” p. 451). As I have argued elsewhere, Pessoa’s book of fragments—or of disquietude—is the modernist crowning of the poetic and theoretical adventure initiated by the first Romantics, particularly as regards the Athenäum Romantics’ “incomprehensibility” and conception of the lyric as an endless becoming (werden) pure subjectlessness.9 One is almost tempted to speak of a sixth degree of poetry. Pessoa’s desassossego best characterizes modernity’s loss of grounds for meaning in its rigorous problematization of the subject and acute consciousness of the opacity of language—language only speaks. Taken together with Pessoa’s total oeuvre, Livro do desassossego anticipates not only Heidegger’s “Die Sprache” but also both Nancy’s question and the various philosophers’ replies it garnered, and to which I now return. Pessoa features in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s “The Response of Ulysses” (Cadava, 1991: 198–205). By invoking Ulysses’s response to Polyphemus’s question, “Who are you?,” and by translating the meaning of “no one” into

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Pessoa’s name, which in his native French, “personne” [person], means both “anyone” and “no one,” Lacoue-Labarthe addresses the problem of the subject as a problem of existence and identity, that which Heidegger calls “Jemeinigkeit” (always-being-my-own-being).10 Setting aside Kant’s transcendental subject, Lacoue-Labarthe suggests that what, not who, comes after the subject is nothing, or death, death and nothingness being the limit of existence and identity. In the fragility of existence, he argues, lies the essence of lyricism. Even if Pessoa’s name is not mentioned again, it is clear that the Portuguese modernist poet’s heteronymic fragmentation and negativity (that is to say, his disquietude) are behind Lacoue-Labarthe’s reflections. As existence (Dasein) grounds essence (Wesen), the heteronyms-as-existents (what Pessoa called his pessoas-livros [persons-books]) are the precarious grounding of Pessoan being.11 “Fernando Pessoa” is no transcendental subject, but rather one more heteronym—merely one more existent. “Fernando Pessoa [. . .] não existe, propriamente falando” [Fernando Pessoa (. . .) does not exist, properly speaking]. This erasure of the poet occurs in “Notas para a recordação do meu mestre Caeiro” [Notes to remember my master Caeiro] by Álvaro de Campos, who, properly speaking, does not exist either.12 Only the places/books claimed by the heteronyms do exist. Before I turn to the poet’s performance and subtler theorization of the question of the subject in his own work, I would like to take up a short essay by Maurice Blanchot in the same collection, entitled simply “Who?” (Cadava, 1991: 58–60). Trying to answer Nancy’s question (“Who Comes After the Subject?”), Blanchot imagines a dialogue between a student and an examiner. The dialogue does not go much further than a reflection on the grammatical/ syntactical meaning of the phrase. For example: why “who” and not “what”; why “comes” and not “came” or “will come”; “after,” how?, as in time? or as in causality?; “the” as indicating specificity? But unlike all the other authors in this collection, Blanchot seems to leave the “subject” unquestioned. Even if, as the author puts it, “‘who comes’ never comes,” Blanchot’s “subject” is here the Cartesian “thinking thing,” apparently before it started to wane, and merely on the verge of putting itself in question. This self-questioning is precisely what Blanchot stages at the closure of his brief meditation—and he does so in a Pessoan way, as we shall see. Admitting that he has actually been trying to avoid the very question posed by Nancy, Blanchot invokes a title by the French philosopher, Claude Morali, which cannot but make Pessoan scholars prick up their years: Qui est moi aujourd’hui? Morali’s title refers to children playing in the garden and exclaiming, in jest and naive wonder at identity, alterity, and impersonation: “Who is me today?” The mise en abyme of Pessoa’s infinitely fragmented subject in the poem about a little boy playing with an oxcart cannot but come to mind (1981: 385):

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Brincava a criança Com um carro de bois. Sentiu-se brincando E disse, eu sou dois!

The child was playing With an oxcart. He felt himself playing And said, I am two!

Há um a brincar E há outro a saber, Um vê-me a brincar E outro vê-me a ver.

There is one playing And there is another knowing, One sees me playing The other sees me seeing.

Estou por trás de mim Mas se volto a cabeça Não era o que eu qu’ria A volta só é essa . . .

I’m behind myself But if I turn my head It’s not what I wanted The turn stops there . . .

O outro menino Não tem pés nem mãos Nem é pequenino Não tem mãe ou irmãos.

The other little boy Has neither feet nor hands Nor is he a little one He has no mother or siblings.

E havia comigo Por trás de onde eu estou, Mas se volto a cabeça Já não sei o que sou.

And he was with me Behind where I am, But if I turn my head I no longer know what I am.

E o tal que eu cá tenho E sente comigo, Nem pai nem padrinho, Nem corpo ou amigo,

And the one I have here And feels with me, Neither father nor godfather, Neither body nor friend,

Tem alma cá dentro ‘Stá a ver-me sem ver, E o carro de bois Começa a parecer.

Has a soul inside Sees me without seeing, And the oxcart Begins to appear.

This is a poem signed by Pessoa-himself, as is the much anthologized and far better known, “Autopsicografia,” both poems speaking eloquently to the complex interplay of the different heteronyms (the so-called semiheteronym Bernardo Soares included; see, in this context, #155; 170: “E há muito sentimento sincero, muita emoção legítima que tiro de não estar sentindo” [And there is much sincere feeling, much legitimate emotion that I get from not feeling]). In the rest of this chapter I try to show how Pessoa anticipates (and renders problematical) the philosophers’ understanding of the subject of modernity in their various responses to Nancy’s question. As Rimbaud once put it, poetry is always en avant (letter to Paul Demeny, May 15, 1871). *

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CITIZEN, SITUATION, COMMUNITY, NOTHING/DEATH Citizen The citizen is Balibar’s reply in “Citizen Subject”: “After the subject comes the citizen. The citizen (defined by his rights and duties) is that nonsubject who comes after the subject, and whose constitution and recognition put an end (in principle) to the subjection of the subject” (Cadava, 1991: 38–39; emphasis in original). Pessoa’s radical modernist poetics is a comment on, and at the same time calls into question, the clear trajectory from subject-ed (subjectus, subditus) to republican citizen in Etienne Balibar’s “Citizen Subject.” Is the citizen, asks Balibar, the citizen as defined by liberty, equality, fraternity, the constitutive element of the State? His answer is yes and no. The citizen can be simultaneously considered as the constitutive element of the State and as the actor of a revolution. The actor, Balibar specifies, “of a permanent revolution: precisely the revolution in which the principle of equality, once it has been made the basis or the pretext of the institution of an inequality or a political ‘excess of power,’ contradicts every difference” (Cadava, 1991: 54; emphasis in original). The pitfalls and conflicts traced by Balibar in his analysis of the course of European thinking from the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789) to the end of the twentieth century can be observed in Pessoa’s work as a whole. The poet’s desire to create a State inside himself both underlines and undermines the notion of the active “citizen subject” as formulated by Balibar. In a passage of Livro do desassossego, Pessoa/Soares begins by expressing the impossible desire to create a State inside himself, a State with a political system, parties, and revolutions, in order to embody in his own “the-peopleI” [esse povo eu] the sovereign citizenry of such an imaginary State (#157; 172). The impossibility is further complicated, of course, by the fact that the “I,” here, is “no one,” that is to say, no person [Pessoa], precedence having been given to the imagined person of Bernardo Soares. The “I”’s sacrilegious desire to be “all,” to be “them” and “not them,” calls into question such ideas of authority and totalization as the State, the people, or even God. More interestingly still, in another passage, echoing Balibar metaleptically, Pessoa/Soares proclaims citizenship as passive resistance to the State: “Não me submeto ao estado nem aos homens; resisto inertemente [. . .]. Nunca me apoquentou o estado” (#120; 142) [I submit myself neither to the State or to men; I resist inertly (. . .). The State never bothered me]. In another sketch, the unexpected, sympathetic gesture of a waiter in the modest restaurant where the equally modest assistant bookkeeper usually eats his meals inspires Pessoa/Soares to muse on community, class, and status, and the “subtleties”

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of “fraternity.” “A fraternidade tem subtilezas,” he states; and then goes on to submit that between an American millionaire and the socialist leader of a village there is no difference of quality but simply of quantity (#24; 61). If fraternity has its subtleties, so does freedom: “A liberdade é a possibilidade do isolamento [. . .]. Se te é impossível viver só, nasceste escravo” [Freedom is the possibility of isolation (. . .). If you find it impossible to live alone, you were born a slave] (#283; 272–273). In yet another sketch, Pessoa/Soares suspends the distinction between human beings and trees and claims to abhor social reformers (#161; 175–176). Pessoa/Campos’s “Cruzou por mim, veio ter comigo, numa rua da Baixa” [He passed me, approached me downtown] cannot but come to mind.13 In this poem, the poet’s lucidity about the difficult articulation of humanity, society, and sociability grasps the complexities of social existing and structuring far better than the philosopher’s rigor. Ironically feeling sorry for himself for (willingly) failing to abide by social rules, “poor Álvaro de Campos” (who in another poem adamantly refuses to be “taxable”) closes the poem with an expletive that reinforces the lucidity of his social marginality: “Merda! Sou lúcido.” In poem XXXII of O guardador de rebanhos, Pessoa/Caeiro’s disgust at the “man from the cities” (citizen?) who preaches social solidarity is another of Pessoa’s footnotes on the problematization of the republican, egalitarian society emerging from the French Revolution and critically surveyed by Balibar himself as well: “Todo o mal do mundo vem de nos importarmos uns com os outros, / quer para fazer bem, quer para fazer mal” [All the evil in the world comes from concerning ourselves with other people, / Whether to do good or to do evil].14 A poem from Poemas inconjunctos, in explicit dialogue with the one just quoted, reads like another scathing gloss on the hazards of class struggle and social justice: “Ontem o pregador de verdades dele / Falou outra vez comigo [. . .] / Falou de tudo quanto pudesse fazê-lo zangar-se” [Yesterday the preacher of the truths he holds / spoke with me again (. . .) He spoke of everything that might make him angry].15 Situation In “On a Finally Objectless Subject,” Alain Badiou insists that “the subject,” as that which, in classical philosophy, grounds being, knowledge, and truth, is not obsolete. What comes after the subject, therefore, cannot but be the subject, albeit now redefined as the concrete, finite event, or situation, including what we usually call the subject matter; in a word, the concrete place of existence itself. Badiou rejects the abstract nature of previous metaphysical conceptions of the subject. In Badiou’s thought, truth is not an abstract concept; a truth never preexists the event, it is always post-eventual, its process is fidelity to the event. In this frame of thought, individual human

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consciousness does have a relatively diminished role; what counts now is the “event,” the “situation,” the “[pluri-subjectivized] procedure,” “names” and “naming”—and noncoincidental truth; hence the logic of Badiou’s use of the future anterior: a truth, always already, will have been, that is to say, it will never be in the abstract or the infinite. The subject, or rather, subjectivization, is the advent of a twofold event: for example, St. Paul / Church; Lenin / the Party; Cantor / serial theory; Schoenberg / atonality; lovers / singular love. But if rather than twofold we think multifold, the obvious addition to the series is: Pessoa / heteronyms. Badiou’s statement that a “subject is that which uses names to make hypotheses about truth” seems to have been written with Pessoa in mind. What I am suggesting is that Badiou takes pains to explain here something that is marvellously presented by the poet Fernando Pessoa in many different ways: there is no subject, rather a situation, an event, a subjectivized procedure, names and naming, and noncoincidental truth. A change in space, time, or situation—and “I” am no longer “I.” Or, on the contrary, my “I” may be suddenly restored to its proper “I.” The latter case is masterfully reenacted in Pessoa/Campos’s “Tabacaria,” a poem of total desubjectivization (“Não sou nada [. . .] tenho em mim todos os sonhos [. . .]. Falhei em tudo” [I am nothing (. . .) I have in me all the dreams (. . .). I have failed in everything]) which ends up resubjectivizing the “I.” The poem resorts to several devices (let me call them “places”) to situate and ground the subject: the little girl eating chocolates; the invocation of the muse; the tail of the lizard that lends me my title; the signboard of the tobacco shop; the writing (“calligraphy”) of the poem itself. But the poet’s utter feeling of nonbeing is only and barely overcome at the very end, when the tobacco shop, the owner of the tobacco shop, and the patron that goes into the tobacco shop, Esteves-without-metaphysics, are put in place. No longer “nothing” and now without “dreams,” grasping the situation, the subject is finally the poet himself, no doubt risking failure, as a true poet: “E vou tencionar escrever estes versos em que digo o contrário” [And I will intend to write these lines in which I say the opposite]. I am tempted to suggest that Alain Badiou would conceive of Pessoa’s oeuvre as whole as “making a hole in knowledge” (cf. Cadava, 1991: 25). In sketch # 279 of Livro do desassossego, a change in the situation sparks a crisis in the subject. When the office boy leaves the office to return to his home town, assistant bookkeeper, Bernardo Soares, is in a state of shock. The line, “O moço do escritório foi-se embora” [the office boy has gone away], its content already expressed in a different form twice before, is repeated four times, emphatically closing the four last paragraphs of this five-paragraph sketch. The office boy is gone and the office is no longer the same for Soares. The assistant bookkeeper himself is no longer the same. A vital, substantial part of his very being went with the office boy: “Fui hoje diminuído” [I was

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diminished today]. Only with great effort can Soares resume his work as bookkeeper in the office. Interestingly enough, his work, bookkeeping, is literally “writing” (escrita), the office being, also literally, the “place, or scene, of writing” (escritório). As I show in chapter 3, “The Art of Rumination,” Soares’s bookkeeping ledger and his “disconnected” “literature” are inextricably tied together (see sketches #12; 54 and #13; 55). A change in the office situation is also a change in the escritório, that is to say, a change in the escrita itself. In the end, the sketch (#279; 270) leaves its readers uncannily in the presence of a self-conscious, Portuguese Bartleby, picturing himself in what can be seen as corresponding to the dead letters office: “amanhã [. . .] eu também serei quem aqui já não está, copiador antigo que vai ser arrumado no armário por baixo do vão da escada” [tomorrow (. . .) I will also be the person who is no longer here, old scrivener about to be stowed away in the closet under the stairs]. Community Commenting on the fact that he did not write a response to his question himself, Jean-Luc Nancy concludes his introduction to Who Comes After the Subject? by highlighting the commonality of presence. “The coming into presence is plural,” he says, “in each case ‘ours’ as much as ‘mine.’ This community without the essence of community, without a common being, is the ontological condition of existence as presence-to . . . the plural liberates (or shares) the singular, the singular liberates (or shares) the plural, in a community without subject (. . .). Who thinks, if not the community?” (Cadava, 1991; 8; emphasis in original). By the time he agreed to produce this book, Nancy had already published La communauté désoeuvrée (1986 [The Unworking Community]). This earlier book is an attack on the totalizing implications of one of the most important concepts of the Western tradition, namely the idea of community. Nancy focuses mainly on Bataille to reflect on mid-twentieth-century European intellectuals’ nostalgia for a lost community, as well as on their fascination with either the mystical totalization of Christian communion (best expressed in National Socialism) or communism/Stalinism. He then goes on to critique both the suspension of difference and erasure of an outside, as in Christianity, and an undifferentiated, egalitarian, producing society, threatening totalitarianism, as in communism. The community he proposes is “unworking” (désoeuvrée), precisely because it “cannot arise from the domain of work (oeuvre). One does not produce it, one experiences or one is constituted by it as the experience of finitude.”16 Nancy does conceive of being as community, but community as defined by “ecstasy,” that is to say, by the capacity to be beside itself, not ab-solute, hence stating the impossibility of complete immanence: being is ever being-with, fragmentary,

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and sharing (partage). Because it has the capacity to interrupt itself, experience ecstasy, and exist outside itself, literature best inscribes community as sharing (Nancy, 1991: 72).17 Community is what takes place through others. It is the space of the I’s that are not egos, but rather others (Nancy, 1991: 6, 15). Could Nancy be thinking of Pessoa here? Perhaps not.18 But when he writes that “there is no singular being without another singular being,” that only “a being-in-common makes possible a being-separated,” that community is not communion, rather communication-as-sharing in the compearance (comparution) of finite others, this reader cannot but think of the complex community dynamics of the self-interruptive heteronyms of Fernando Pessoa.19 The major heteronyms—Caeiro, Campos, Reis, Soares, Pessoa-himself—compear (com-paraît) as poetry by sharing and inscribing community. Community as sharing but also as unworking, that is to say, as having nothing to do with production or completion, and everything to do with “interruption, fragmentation, suspension” (Nancy: 1991: 31). Or imperfection and ruin. Given its praise of incompletion, imperfection, ruin, uselessness, and the absurd, and given its utter contempt for productivity and utility, sketch #330 of Livro do desassossego again sounds like a metaleptic commentary, this time on Nancy’s communauté désoeuvrée: “[P]or que escrevo eu este livro? Porque o reconheço imperfeito. Calado seria a perfeição; escrito, imperfeiçoa-se. E, sobretudo, porque defendo a inutilidade, o absurdo” [Why do I write this book? Because I recognize it as imperfect. Silent, it would be perfection; written, it imperfects itself. And, above all, because I defend uselessness, the absurd]. The same could be said of sketches # 311, 312, 313 (293, 294), which, by parodically demystifying the Christian concept of “thy neighbor so-called” (o chamado semelhante), seem to make fun of the semireligious overtones of Nancy’s discussion of “le semblable,” alterity, and community (1986: 81–85; 1991: 32–34). The heteronyms are livros (books) that are pessoas (persons). They interrupt themselves and one another, as Nancy says literature must do if it is to inscribe community. Above all, the heteronyms (Pessoa’s drama em gente) are the perfect dramatization of lyric poetry as (self-)interruption, an example of lyric remaining lyric while threatening to become drama, Pessoa’s fifth degree of lyric poetry.20 A brilliant example is the best-known fragment of “Saudação a Walt Whitman,” signed by Álvaro de Campos.21 The extended apostrophic address to the American poet—himself grounded in the interruptiveness of his many “I’s,” “Me’s,” “Me myselves,” as well as all their opposites—is interrupted two-thirds of the way by a somewhat surprising call, written in English in the original: “He calls Walt.” If the salutation poem is written by Álvaro de Campos, who is this person (pessoa) interloping here to explain what is happening? It cannot but be Fernando Pessoa (the other

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one of the major heteronyms who knows English). Moreover, the interruptive meta-explanation cannot but convene the community of the heteronyms which cannot fail to compear. The interruption is followed by one final ecstatic outburst of poetic naming which translates Walt Whitman into the very Pessoan idea of poetry: multiple, many-voiced, paradoxical, interloping, inter-relational, self-interrupting. Ultimately, ungraspable communication. “Saudação a Walt Whitman” is a hymn to the interpenetration of the singular and the plural, a hymn to the mystery of identity and difference. It is the chant of an “I” that is really “others.” Within the community of heteronyms, Álvaro is and is not Walt. Failing in this problematical identification, the poetic self is condemned to the anxiety and pain of not recognizing himself, as in “Mestre, meu mestre querido,” also signed by Álvaro de Campos. More than a tribute to the sublime poetic being embodied in Alberto Caeiro (the poet who is not even “a poet” because he knows how to see), “Mestre, meu mestre querido” is an elegy for Álvaro de Campos, the tortured “decadent poet” who has grasped the “terrifying science of seeing” from Caeiro but not the master’s “serenity.”22 To complete the community of heteronyms here, suffice it to mention Pessoa/Reis’s “Vem sentar-te comigo, Lídia, à beira do rio” [Come sit by my side, Lidia, by the river] and Pessoa-himself’s Fausto. In the former, amid the placidity of quietude (sossegadamente), disquietude having been previously relativized (sem desassossegos grandes), ignorance of death is the sad privilege of paganism (pagãos inocentes da decadência [pagans innocent of decadence]; pagã triste e com flores no regaço [a pagan, sad and with flowers on her lap]). In Fausto, which rather than a “subjective tragedy,” as Pessoa called it, is best described as a tragedy of subjectivity; knowledge is terrifying because it is no less than dread of nothingness and death (cf. Ramalho-Santos, 2003b: 256–259). Death/Nothing Who comes after the subject? No one, Lacoue-Labarthe is tempted to reply, thinking of Fernando Pessoa. Who comes after the subject? Personne? Pessoa-ninguém? Or ninguém-as-Pessoa? Looking at a corpse, in sketch #40, Pessoa/Soares understands death as a “departure,” the disappearance of a subject from the dead interval that is life, leaving behind his garment finally discarded as useless.23 In sketch #42, the poet’s contract with death grants him the nothingness of his own disappearance. And in a gesture that evokes several heteronymic poems, including Fernando Pessoa’s “O que eu fui o que é?” [What I was, what is it?], Ricardo Reis’s “Nada fica de nada. Nada somos” [Nothing remains of nothing. We are nothing], and Álvaro de Campos’s “Começo a conhecer-me. Não existo” [I begin to know myself. I do not exist] (#262; 257–258), the I’s nonexistence after itself, so to speak, is powerfully

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narrated.24 The subject is here a perfect nothing, a nothingness that yields itself up to its own narrative of itself. In a gesture reminiscent of the disquieting interval that is presence and absence at the same time, the subject is nothing, but a nothing that is a center, and a center that is in turn surrounded by nothing. The incomprehensibility of it all is registered in the poet’s absurd and proper sensation: “Cheguei hoje, de repente, a uma sensação absurda e justa. Reparei [. . .] que não sou ninguém. Ninguém, absolutamente ninguém [. . .]. Roubaram-me o poder ser antes que o mundo fosse [. . .] reencarnei sem mim [. . .]. Sou uma figura de romance por escrever [. . .] sou o nada [. . .] o centro de tudo com o nada à roda.” [Today, I suddenly reached an absurd and proper sensation. I noticed (. . .) that I am no one. No one, absolutely no one (. . .). They robbed me of the power to be before the world ever was (. . .). I reincarnated without me (. . .) I am a character in a novel yet to be written (. . .) I am nothingness (. . .). The center of everything with nothingness on every side]. No heteronym better speaks the language of the “nothing” that the subject of modernity is than Álvaro de Campos. Any of the poems already quoted would do, but let me linger a little on the two “Lisbon Revisited” poems before I return to “Tabacaria” for my conclusion. I suggested earlier that “Lisbon Revisited (1923)” calls into question Balibar’s notion of the citizen subject. It also renders problematical Nancy’s notion of community: “Ah, que maçada quererem que eu seja da companhia!” [Oh, what a bore that they want me to be of the company!]. To the extent that “Lisbon,” the place, being the same and other than itself, fails to hold the lyric “I” in both poems, both “Lisbon Revisited” (1923) and “Lisbon Revisited” (1926), can be read as metaleptic commentaries on Badiou’s conception of the modern subject as a place or situation. Who comes after the subject? Pessoa/Campos’s response is, the placeless foreigner: “Estrangeiro aqui como em toda a parte” [Foreigner here as everywhere else] (1981: 294). Ask the question again and you will wonder about Lacoue-Labarthe’s reply. The ever foreign subject is less than nothing and less than death. It is a splintered fragment, a brittle shard, a resilient remnant—just like the wriggling tail of the lizard in “Tabacaria.” The tail of the lizard is, thus, an apt metaphor for the Pessoan tale of the fragmented/fragmentary subject of modernity, which European (“continental”) philosophers would discuss at the end of the twentieth century. Part of the tale that my lizard’s tail tells is that poetry happens first and theory lags behind. Theory is always posterous. NOTES 1. “Perhaps you merely existed, like a lizard whose tail they cut off / And is a tail on this side of the lizard, wrigglingly” (Pessoa, 1981: 296–300 [299]). My translation.

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When not otherwise indicated, translations are my own. For three (very different) translations of “Tabacaria,” see Pessoa, 1986a: 86–90 [89], 1987b, 1998b: 173–179. 2. Cadava, 1991: 24–32. French: “D’un sujet enfin sans objet.” Cahiers Confrontation, 20 (1989), 13–22. Alain Badiou elaborates on what he means by “the age of the poets” in “L’âge des poètes” (in Rancière, 1992: 21–38). In the very first sentence of this particular essay, Badiou explains that he first introduced the idea of an “age of the poets” in his Manifeste pour la philosophie (1989). However, the same title (“L’âge des poètes”) presides over two different, though complementary, texts. In the one included in Manifeste, Badiou mentions Pessoa’s “pluralized subject” and quotes Pessoa/Campos’s “O binómio de Newton é tão belo como a Vénus de Milo” [Newton’s binomial is as beautiful as the Venus de Milo] in Jonathan Griffin’s translation (1982). In the text included in La politique des poètes, Badiou quotes poems from O guardador de rebanhos [The Keeper of Sheep] (“Há metafísica bastante em não pensar em nada” [There is enough metaphysics in thinking about nothing]; “Acho tão natural que não se pense” [I think it so natural not to think]; “Deste modo ou daquele modo” [This way or that way]). 3. English: Badiou, 2005b: 36–45. More recently Badiou (2005a) resorts to Pessoa once again to explain, or perhaps understand, through Álvaro de Campos, the “cruelties” of our time. English: Badiou, 2007. 4. On the philosophical need to overturn, or not, Platonism, see Statkiewicz, 2009. 5. Who Comes After the Subject, 45. Emphasis added. 6. All quotations from Richard Zenith’s first edition of Livro do desassossego (Pessoa, 1998a). Translations mine. Sketches are identified by the number ascribed to them by Zenith to facilitate access of readers with little or no Portuguese; failing that, sketch title and page number. For the most recent and complete English translation of Livro do desassossego, by Margaret Jull Costa, see Pessoa, 2017. 7. Heidegger, 1985: 9–30; translations are Albert Hofstadter’s in Heidegger, 2001: 185–208. 8. Pessoa never allowed Campos to complete his projected “Saudação a Walt Whitman” (see Pessoa, 2014b: 106–124). For a translation of the better known fragment of the salutation poem, see Pessoa, 1986a: 81–89. 9. Cf. Ramalho-Santos, 2003b: 259. 10. It is tempting to surmise that Pessoa/personne may be somehow behind Roger Laporte’s Lettre à personne, avant-propos de Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe; postface de Maurice Blanchot ([France]: Plon, 1989). It is also fair and relevant to remember that in 1974 Leyla Perrone-Moisés’s influential ‘Pessoa personne?’ was published in Tel Quel (vol. 60: pp. 86–104). See also Perrone-Moisés, 1990. 11. For “pessoas-livros,” see Pessoa, 1966: 101. 12. Pessoa, 1997: 75. For a translation of these Notas, see Pessoa, 2001: 38–50. 13. For a translation of this poem, see Pessoa, 1986a: 101–102. In “Lisbon Revisited 1923,” Álvaro de Campos indignantly resists conventional, societal mores: “Queriam-me casado, fútil, quotidiano e tributável?” [You wanted me married, futile, quotidian, and taxable?]. Poem also translated in full in Pessoa, 1986a: 79. 14. Pessoa, 1981: 154–155. For a translation of O guardador de rebanhos, see Pessoa, 1985.

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15. For a translation of “Ontem o pregador de verdades dele,” see Pessoa, 1998b: 83. 16. I quote from The Inoperative Community (Nancy, 1991: 31). 17. Cf. Nancy, 1982 (Le partage des voix). 18. But see Nancy’s Les muses, where poem XXXIX from O guardador de rebanhos and “Ontem o pregador de verdades dele” from Poemas inconjunctos are quoted (Nancy 2001: 57–58). 19. Nancy’s terms, com-paraître and com-parution, have the juridical implication (to appear before a tribunal) well captured by Peter Connor’s compear and compearance (1991: xxxvii, 28, 29). 20. Speaking of his heteronyms in a biobibliographical note he wrote for presença (November 1928), Pessoa says: “It is a drama in people, rather than in acts” [É um drama em gente, em vez de em actos]. In Páginas íntimas e de auto-interpretação, the idea is expressed slightly differently: “dramas in souls, rather than in acts and action” [em vez de dramas em actos e acção, dramas em almas] (Pessoa, 1966: 102). 21. “Saudação a Walt Whitman” was never completed (see Pessoa, 2014b: 106–124). I refer to the best known and most quoted fragment of Pessoa/Campos’s hymn to Whitman as reproduced by the first Ática edition of 1944 (See Pessoa, 1981: 270–275). 22. English versions of both “Saudação a Walt Whitman” and “Mestre, meu mestre querido” in Pessoa, 1986a: 78, 92–93. 23. Cf. “Marcha Fúnebre”: “A vida é [. . .] um intervalo, [. . .] intervalo morto entre a Morte e a Morte.” [Life is (. . .) an interval, (. . .) a dead interval between Death and Death] (Pessoa, 1998a: 445). 24. Translations of Reis’s “Nada fica de nada. Nada somos” and Campos’s “Começo a conhecer-me. Não existo” in Pessoa, 1986a: 124, 100.

Chapter 3

The Art of Rumination Pessoa’s Heteronyms Revisited

In memoriam Harold Bloom Releio lúcido, demoradamente, trecho a trecho, tudo quanto tenho escrito. Livro do desassossego1

Friedrich Schlegel once said that a critic is a ruminating reader and should have more than one stomach (“Ein Kritiker ist ein Leser, der widerkäut. Er sollte also mehr als einen Magen haben” [Schlegel, 1967: 149]). In his preface to Zur Genealogie der Moral, Nietzsche pushes the potentially pejorative sense of Schlegel’s metaphor to a sarcastic extreme, by literally translating readerly competence into bovine rumination, and thus suggesting that in order to be a competent literary critic in modernity (evidently, like himself) one should be a cow (1980: V, 255–256). Without wishing to cancel out the facetiously ironical implications of the expression, I resort to the concept of rumination in this chapter to reflect once again on the processes of poetry writing, focusing mainly on the Portuguese modernist poet Fernando Pessoa. As is implicit in Nietzsche’s work and as this chapter will take for granted, rumination is one of the many faces of memory and is related to repetition. Kierkegaard conceived of knowledge as both recollection and repetition, and many poets have been fascinated by repetition in its many forms. In “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” (III​.​ix), Wallace Stevens defines the poet as “he that of repetition is most master” (1997: 350). Gertrude Stein, in turn, took justifying this definition to maddening extremes. The result, she might argue, is poetry as what Heidegger calls unconcealedness [Unverborgenheit], the presencing of the thing. In her famous repetition of the word “rose,” for 39

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example—“Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose”—the rose, asserts Stein defiantly, “is red for the first time in English poetry for a hundred years” (1947: IV). But within the Anglo-American tradition, most important for Pessoa’s conception of himself as a poet is Walt Whitman, whose “I” is often not the “Me Myself” of its many repetitions. The truth of the matter is that poets are essentially readers and frequently readers of themselves.2 António Ramos Rosa (2002: 233–234), who is both one of the best contemporary Portuguese lyric poets and a fine critic of poetry, once explicitly stated that he conceived of himself as basically a reader: “como ensaísta, sou essencialmente um leitor de poesia e, como poeta, sou ainda um leitor de poesia” [as an essayist, I am essentially a reader and, as a poet, what I really am is still a reader of poetry]. In this brief note inspired by his reading of a younger poet’s work, Ramos Rosa goes on to explain that while his poetry originates as his own creation, it is also the happy confluence of the poets that make the originality of such creation possible. Although, as we see, in Ramos Rosa’s case the poet is romantically eager to claim his own originality of invention, often by rereading mainly himself, his poems present themselves theoretically as the clearest instance of intertextuality, at the same time that poetic creativity appears as the rewriting that results from the poet’s art of readerly rumination. To my mind, the best illustration of the poet as sublime ruminator is heteronymic Pessoa, whose name means “person” and who writes poetry by rereading and rewriting himself-in-his-many-other-selves/persons over and over again. In this my insistence on poetry as rereading and rewriting, I suggest Bloom’s notion of “misreading” be taken into account as well (1975). There are no individual poems or poets, said Harold Bloom (1973), as he was giving shape to his theory of poetic influence. There are only relations between poems and relations between poets. Poetry manifests itself, according to Bloom, as an agonic reading-and-writing process involving the powerful minds of precursors and ephebes. Thus spoke Bloom long before he knew hardly anything about Pessoa, the poet who divided his poetic self into many selves-with-different-names-books, and even invented his own precursor in “master Caeiro,” as if to oblige Bloom and properly ground such a conception of poetry. I concur with Bloom that poets are essentially the most eager and earnest of readers of poetry. I would go even further and say that rumination is their most accomplished art. In this chapter, I propose to revisit Pessoa as a striking example of the art of rumination in Western modernism. What, indeed, are the heteronyms if not the poet’s rumination on the poet’s name and naming? By inventing the heteronyms, Pessoa allows himself to rewrite the poet endlessly. By “the poet” I mean here, as Pessoa himself does when he speaks of the heteronyms as persons-books (pessoas-livros), “the poem,” “poetry,” “the poetic,” as well as the subject that voices poetry’s poeming itself. As they bring the poetic to presence, the Pessoan heteronyms—Alberto

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Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, Álvaro de Campos, and orthonymous Pessoa—become the most perfect embodiment of this conception of poetry. To be sure, the famous, seemingly inexhaustible trunk of Pessoa’s unpublished papers has yielded many “other names” in recent years. However, I would be wary of calling any of the others “heteronyms.” Pessoa’s many other names—for example, among the better known, António Mora, the Aristotelian theoretician; Vicente Guedes, the interrupted precursor of Bernardo Soares; Barão de Teive, the aristocrat of stoic musings on education—are precisely just that, other names; they are not people-books; they do not presume to make the poetic appear.3 Only poetic unconcealedness grounds the Pessoan proper heteronyms, generally known as the “major heteronyms.” As the right performance of the heteronymic drama-in-persons (drama em gente), Caeiro, Reis, Campos, and Pessoa-himself flesh out the poet’s art of rumination as his poetic practice. What I would like to suggest as well is that the “semi-heteronym” Bernardo Soares in Livro do desassossego (The Book of Disquietude) is the practicing theoretician of Pessoa’s heteronymic poeming.4 Livro do desassossego, an obsessive reading-and-writing process, is perhaps best described as Pessoa’s “Book of Ruminations.” In the fragment that lends me my epigraph (I reread, lucidly, slowly, fragment by fragment, all that I have written), the writer, would-be “poeta da [sua] prosa” [poet of (his) prose], muses on the mystery of writing and rewriting as absolute purposelessness or “magia falsa” ([false magic] Pessoa, 1998a: #169, 181–182).5 In another fragment, in which the association between poetry and bookkeeping is clear (I shall come back to this), the writer confesses to “rereading” his “book of incoherent impressions” [Releio (. . .) o meu livro de impressões sem nexo] only to discover his own self to be “an absence of balance” [Sou uma ausência de saldo de mim mesmo] (1998a: #442, 390). My allusion to the abovementioned “theory” does not imply “theorizing” ex post facto, hence my characterization of Pessoa/Soares as a “practising theoretician.” Nor do I mean theory in its etymological sense of seeing what there is. I mean theory in Heidegger’s sensuous sense of what is called thinking, a bringing to presence by grasping (1954).6 Thinking, like cabinet-making, says Heidegger, means handiwork. Thinking is nothing if it does not grasp, like hands, what it does. Thinking, therefore, is conceived by Heidegger as thinking back to the previously thought—or as grasping by memory. Here we find ourselves already in the realm of poetry. For memory, as the mother of the Muses, does not mean thinking back to anything whatsoever already thought: “Memory is the gathering of thought upon what everywhere demands to be thought about first of all” (Heidegger, 1992: 376). Heidegger finds himself confirmed in his own thinking by the writing of poets. As so often in Heidegger’s work, here too it becomes clear that Hölderlin grasped it first. Hölderlin’s hymn to “Mnemosyne” helps Heidegger to realize that memory

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grounds poetry by its grasping of the poetic process that in turn confirms it, in its happening (Ereignis): “Lang ist / die Zeit, es ereignet sich aber / Das Wahre” (1951: II, i, 195–196; II, ii, 816–830) [Long is time, / but the True / happens]. Beissner’s edition of Hölderlin’s poetry includes three closely related versions of “Mnemosyne.” What Heidegger in his essay calls a “draft” of the poem is the opening of Beissner’s second version (from which I have just quoted), the first three lines in particular: “Ein Zeichen sind wir, deutungslos / Schmerzlos sind wir und haben fast / Die Sprache in der Fremde verloren” [We are an unreadable sign, / without pain and have nearly lost / our language in a foreign country]. In Heidegger, thinking-as-memory equals “Dichten” (what I call “poeming”), the poet’s coping with the difficulty of remembering back beyond time’s oblivion, language retrieved from utter foreignness. “Memory,” says Heidegger after Hölderlin’s “Mnemosyne,” “Mother of the Muses—the thinking back to what is to be thought [zu-Denkende]—is the source and ground of poeming [der Quellgrund des Dichtens].” Poetry writing cannot but be, paradoxically, the origin that goes on repeating itself, an endless repetition of Pessoa’s self-interrupting recollection—or, precisely, rumination. Pessoa’s heteronyms are the most daring modernist performance of poetic rumination, even as Livro do desassossego is, to a large extent, Pessoa’s reflective enframing of the whole process—rumination of rumination, as it were. We may actually end up concluding that Bernardo Soares, the semi-heteronym that is forever thinking the act of poeming, is more of a real heteronym than all the “other names.” By now, the breadth and depth of Pessoa’s reading of the poetic tradition, from the ancients to the moderns, including both major and minor poets, have been fairly well established in Pessoan scholarship. In this chapter, however, I am not so much interested in hearing in Pessoa echoes of Homer, Horace, Shakespeare, or Whitman, to mention only a few of his most obvious poetic references, as in observing a few examples of the poet’s rumination on his own writing. The clearest and least interesting of examples are, of course, the prose remarks that each one of the heteronyms writes about the others. Campos, Reis, and orthonymous Pessoa comment frequently on one another and on Caeiro, who does not “read” (or “write” for that matter), but whose implicit comments on the others can be heard in the others’ comments on his poetry. In my conception, rumination concerns the repetitive and selfinterruptive rewriting of the heteronyms themselves as poetry. As if to make problematical the “derivation” that Robert Duncan, that most omnivorous of readers, was much later provocatively to identify as the essence of the poetic, Pessoa claims imaginative self-containedness while incessantly reading and rereading his other pessoas. “Os antigos invocavam as Musas” [The ancients invoked the Muses], wrote Pessoa/Campos in the year that Pessoa died; “Nós invocamo-nos a nós mesmos” [We invoke ourselves] (1981: 330).

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The modernist poet’s invocation, however, is pointless, for, even granted that the Muses appeared in antiquity when invoked, which remains in doubt, the modernist poet “knows” that “we do not appear” (Não sei se as Musas apareciam, / Seria sem dúvida conforme o invocado e a invocação. / Mas sei que nós não aparecemos (Pessoa, 1981: 330) [I do not know if the Muses appeared, / It would no doubt depend on the invoked and the invocation. / But I do know that we do not appear]. Even to invoke himself, the poet has to project himself, or his selves, into the vague form of his face’s reflection at the bottom of the deep well he himself is. Robbed of the Muses, the poet has no choice but to reinvent himself out of the bottomless well of his own being. The heteronyms are the embodiment of Pessoa’s reinvention of the poetic for a modernity without a muse (no longer a sick muse, as in Baudelaire, but a totally absent muse). No wonder the different heteronyms repeat themselves, often quite explicitly, as they read and reread one another, and as the poet grasps what appears as he goes on writing and rewriting it. No wonder, too, that each heteronymic poet repeats himself constantly. Although dates point to a certain chronology, theoretically it is irrelevant to decide which poem came first and initiated the conversation. The fabric of Pessoa’s text suggests rather the promiscuity of his poeming. “Os antigos invocavam as musas” (1935) may be read as the poet’s rereading of “Tabacaria” (1928) [Tabacco Shop], a poem that includes an explicit yet desperately futile invocation of the ancient muse as female principle of reassuring yet non-existing presence: “Tu, que consolas, que não existes por isso consolas” (Pessoa, 1981: 296–300) [O you who comfort, who do not exist and thus comfort], only to end up underscoring the poet’s aloneness and foreignness in a world made occasionally meaningful by the sheer banality of objects and common people. In fact, “Tabacaria,” chronologically the earlier and a far more complex poem, seems to require the poet’s problematization of the muse as carried out in “The Ancients Invoked the Muses” for its own efficacy as ultimately an alien, useless poem: “Essência musical dos meus versos inúteis, / Quem me dera encontrar-te como coisa que eu fizesse” (Pessoa, 1981: 296–300) [O musical essence of my useless poems / I wish I could encounter you as something made by myself]. This ignorance of being (as of poeming), or foreignness, is echoed in turn in Reis’s “Lídia, ignoramos. Somos estrangeiros / Onde quer que estejamos. // Lídia ignoramos. Somos estrangeiros / Onde quer que moremos. Tudo é alheio / Nem fala língua nossa” (Pessoa, 1981: 222) [Lydia, we ignore. We are foreigners / wherever we are // Lydia, we ignore. We are foreigners wherever we live. All is alien / Nor speaks our language]. Another striking instance of Pessoan rumination occurs when the banal mediocrity of being human is conveyed by the same expression—“cadáver adiado que procria” [postponed corpse that breeds]—in one of the odes of Ricardo Reis, “Nada fica de Nada” (1981: 223) [‘Nothing comes of nothing’]

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and in the fifth of the “Quinas” [Shields] of Mensagem [Message], “D. Sebastião, Rei de Portugal” (Pessoa, 1981: 9–10) [King Sebastian]. The dates we have for the two poems indicate that Reis’s ode was composed in September 1932, “King Sebastian” in February of the following year. It would seem that the poet’s rumination on the theme of the earlier poem originated the later poem. The nihilism and quiet acceptance of finitude and human meaninglessness in Reis’s ode is translated into defiant despair in Mensagem, as madness is made synonymous with genius. But it may not be so simple. The two poems repeat and interrupt each other, and the uncanny dialogue they engage in transcends both of them. The Shakespearean echoes of Reis’s ode—Lear’s “nothing comes of nothing,” Macbeth’s “tale told by an idiot,” and even Hamlet’s graveyard mortal musings—cast a darker shadow over Sebastian’s fateful tragedy of squandered greatness. By the same token, the exceptionalism of genius that pushes nonconformity to destructive madness lends a kind of tranquil dignity to the banality of mediocre living echoed in the ode. The last part of Mensagem (1981: 18–23) resonates with these themes and motifs, as King Sebastian—whether explicitly invoked or not—becomes the symbol of a longing that is as much a recollection of the past as an image of the future-as-repetition. In “O quinto império” (The Fifth Empire), the poem that ostensibly sings the glories of the future both in individual and national terms, the sad domesticity of anonymous humanity cannot but bring forth the mythmaking truth (however unsayable) of Sebastian’s death—the death of nation and imagination both (Quem vem viver a verdade / Que morreu D. Sebastião?) [Who could live the truth / That King Sebastian has died?].7 The Sebastic “Symbols,” “Prophecies,” and “Times” of the third part of Mensagem are prepared for by the two last poems of the middle part, “A última nau” [The last ship] and “Prece” [Prayer] (1981: 16–17). In “Prece,” the poet, whose singing renders problematical both the nation and modern consciousness, cries out for the breath of inspiration (the ancient muse?), made improbable by the desperation of his own belated singing. In “A última nau,” the heavy time of tragedy promises to bring back the perfection of “Empire,” but the Empire’s “hour” remains paradoxically a future without a present as it prolongs itself on to the foggy end in the fifth “Time” (“Nevoeiro” [Fog]), whose last line—“É a hora!” [This is the hour]—is the last line of Mensagem and structurally intimates its very absence. The closing “hour” of Mensagem does not vindicate the possibleness of being that the nation and consciousness long for in the fifth of the “Times” (“Tormenta” [Storm]). Rather than triumphantly affirming the poder ser [the will to be] of “Tormenta,” the closing hour of Mensagem in “Nevoeiro” [Fog] undermines the subject’s (and the nation’s) desire, power, and will (“O desejar poder querer” [Desiring to be able to want]), and inexorably underscores the oppressiveness that haunts an increasingly sadder Portugal (Portugal a entristecer)

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under the nihilistic “fog” of its “today” (Ó Portugal, hoje és nevoeiro) [Oh Portugal, today you are fog]. Mensagem is not just Pessoa’s Portuguese antiepic, as Eduardo Lourenço (1983) first brilliantly stated; Mensagem is, above all, the synthesis of the heteronymic song as a self-interrupted, intertranslatable whole, that is to say, the modern lyric poet’s half-hopeful, half-hopeless cry for the vanishing possibility of singing at all in modern times. The lingering, oxymoronic hope beyond the ominous nothingness of the song is what Pessoa’s inter-heteronymic ruminative exchanges are all about. The closure of Reis’s ode reads like this: “Somos contos contando contos, nada” (Pessoa, 1981: 223) [We are tales telling tales, nothing]. The three opening lines of Álvaro de Campos’s “Tabacaria” are well known: “Não sou nada. / Nunca serei nada. / Não posso querer ser nada” (Pessoa, 1981: 296–300) [I am nothing. / I will always be nothing. / I can’t wish to be anything]. The fourth line is often ignored: “À parte isso, tenho em mim todos os sonhos do mundo” [Aside from that, I have all the dreams of the world inside me]. To my mind, Campos’s “dreams” are part of his rereading of Alberto Caeiro. Campos’s explicit address to Caeiro’s poetry is, of course, “Mestre, meu mestre querido” (Pessoa, 1981: 303–304) [Master, my dear master], Campos’s elegy for the “death” of Caeiro as master, guide, and inspiration. Although Pessoa probably never read Hölderlin, they are stars of one constellation. “Mestre, meu mestre querido” has uncannily affinities with Hölderlin’s “Der Einzige” [The only one]. Both poems recall the forever evasive, yet inescapable, truth of poetry. “Mein Meister und Herr!,” cries out Hölderlin, “O du, mein Lehrer! / Was bist du ferne / Geblieben?” (1994: 468–469) [My Master and Lord! / O you, my teacher! / Why did you keep away?]. Curiously enough, Bernardo Soares, the so-called semi-heteronym, can’t even remember the authority of priority and first origin (“Nunca tive alguém a quem pudesse chamar ‘Mestre’” [Pessoa, 1998a: 406] [I never had anyone I could call “Master”]. “Mestre, meu mestre querido” contrasts vividly Campos’s anguished reasoning about the purpose of poetry and the ultimate meaning of being in a world seen as “subjectivized,” on the one hand, with the thoughtless, sensuous serenity of Caeiro’s clear vision, mere existing and objective poeming, on the other. “Tabacaria” suggests a far more complex exchange between Campos and Caeiro. Being “nothing,” not even “a poet,” is what Caeiro’s poetry proclaims throughout, but Caeiro’s “nothingness” implies happy ignorance (the mode of being that Pessoa-himself envies hopelessly in “Ela canta, pobre ceifeira” [She sings, poor reaper], of which more later). This is completely different from Campos’s metaphysical pain and dejected consciousness of his own incomprehension of “o mistério das coisas por baixo das pedras e dos seres” [the mystery of things underneath (i.e., beyond) the stones and beings]. Campos’s obsession with meaning and dread before “the mystery”

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of the world responds to Caeiro’s placid acceptance of “things” having existence but no signification. But in the synchronicity of the intertranslatable heteronymic fabric, it may well appear the other way around: Caeiro’s bout of sickness halfway through the shepherd sequence, which gave origin to four Caeiro-denying songs-with-metaphysical-longings, responds to Campos’s realization in “Tabacaria” “that metaphysics is the consequence of being indisposed” [de que a metafísica é uma consequência de estar mal disposto]. Another interesting case of heteronymic rumination is the problem of poetic transitivity, in the case in point, the issue of social relevance in poetry. In poem XXXII of O guardador de rebanhos [The Keeper of Sheep] (“Ontem à tarde um homem das cidades” [Pessoa, 1981: 154–155] [Yesterday a city man]) the poet opposes the “city man”’s socialist feelings of inequality and injustice to the material opacity of his own utterly disengaged poetic stance, whether what is in question is class struggle or poetic convention. The poet cannot be expected to be a “friend of the people” (the superciliousness of the Portuguese expression, “o amigo de gente,” is quite audible), nor, by the same token, can he be expected to sanction the sentimentality of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century poetry, which often relied heavily on pathetic fallacies like those wittily parodied in this poem. “Caeiro” signifies what some poets and critics would call “objective” lyric poetry, or even “pure poetry,” that is to say, poetry that desires to be free from history (from space and time), and so free as well from the burden of the subject’s authentic selfexpression, moral compassion, and purposeful commitment (Warren, 1989 [1942]: 3–29). Caeiro’s poet, perfectly coincident with a dazzlingly innocent transparency of vision, portends a superior kind of imagination: deconceptualized, intellectually detached, radically independent, and endowed with the capacity to look and see without thinking, like Stevens’s wished-for “ignorant eye” in Notes toward a supreme fiction. This seemingly unproblematic anti-humanistic bent of Caeiro’s is, however, subject to correction not only in Caeiro’s bout of sickness but also in Campos’s tormented rumination in “A passagem das horas” (1981: 275–288) [The passing of the hours]. Here, the poet cries out for the “humanity” and “fraternity” that ground life, only to acknowledge the poet’s incapacity to comply (Só humanitariamente é que se pode viver [. . .]. Não sei sentir, não sei ser humano, conviver) [You can only live humanitarianly (. . .). I don’t know how to feel, I don’t know how to be human, how to coexist]. In another Campos poem (“Cruzou por mim, veio ter comigo, numa rua da Baixa” [1981: 347–348], [He passed me, approached me downtown]) the poet’s much-quoted profane lucidity (“Merda! sou lúcido” [Shit! I’m lucid] is the poem’s closure) presents him as an asocial being, while proffering a severe statement about the contradictions of being human and living in society. On the other hand, Caeiro’s contented tranquility reads like a sweetly

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contemptuous comment on the incapacity of the “sensationist poet” to reconcile “banal” humanity, which includes solidary compassion for the oppressed, with the pain of his ever-expanding, all-including, bottomless consciousness.8 As the Campos poem explicitly addressed to Caeiro clearly shows, Caeiro, the poet’s unselfconscious poeming, is one of the reasons why Campos’s imagination aches (“Dói-me a imaginação não sei como, mas é ela que dói” [My imagination hurts, I don’t know how but it hurts] Pessoa, 1981: 287). Ricardo Reis’s “Vivem em nós inúmeros” (Pessoa, 1981: 225) [“Numberless live in us”] presents a fine reading of what I would call the heteronymic inbetween, crisscrossing intertranslatability of Pessoa’s poeming: Vivem em nós inúmeros; Se penso ou sinto, ignoro Quem é que pensa ou sente. Sou somente o lugar Onde se sente ou pensa. Tenho mais almas que uma. Há mais eus do que eu mesmo. Existo todavia Indiferente a todos. Faço-os calar: eu falo. Os impulsos cruzados Do que sinto ou não sinto Disputam em quem sou. Ignoro-os. Nada ditam A quem me sei: eu ‘screvo. [Numberless live in us; If I think or feel, I don’t know Who thinks or feels. I am only the place Where one feels or thinks. More souls than one have I. There are more I’s than myself. I do exist nonetheless Regardless of them all. I shut them up: I speak. The double-crossed impulses Of what I feel

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Fight for what I am. I ignore them. They command nothing To whom I know myself to be: I write.]

Pessoa’s poetry thus appears in the interval of the heteronyms’ grasping of one another’s reading and writing. The “interval” [intervalo], a frequently repeated word in Livro do desassossego, is the uncanny time/space between nothing and nothing [um intervalo entre nada e nada] (Pessoa, 1998: #225, 226). “Sou o intervalo entre o que sou e o que não sou” (#204; 210) [I am the interval between what I am and what I am not], says Bernardo Soares who elsewhere wonders, perplexed, “O que é este intervalo que há entre mim e mim?” (218; #213) [What is this interval between me and myself?]. Pessoa’s poetics of interruption and interstices best expresses itself as entreser (‘in-between-being) (1998a: #281, 271). Thus, Livro do desassossego appears as the proper locus of the endless rumination of Pessoa’s creative process. Rather than a semi-heteronym, “Soares,” while fleshing out the modest assistant bookkeeper, is actually the theory of heteronymic poeming as pure intertranslatability. According to Bernando Soares, the poet is “transported” [translato] in the proper sense of transferred from one place to the other (Pessoa, 1998a: #266, 262). While Campos’s use of the same term in “Cruzou-se comigo” [He passed me] is oxymoronic, comically exposes the most contradictory of the heteronyms, and borders on metaphor (“Sou vadio e pedinte a valer, isto é, no sentido translato” [I am really a vagrant and a beggar, that is to say, in a transferred sense]), Bernardo Soares grasps the meaning of the heteronyms in the notion of interchangeable self-othering. Pessoa’s word for the phenomenon of being other [outro] while being the same [eu], masterly sung in “Autopsicografia” (1981: 98–99), is outridade (1998a: #266, 262). This I that-is-the-other, we learn with the so-called semiheteronym, is the poetic itself as the written text: “Sou, em grande parte, a mesma prosa que escrevo. Desenrolo-me em períodos e parágrafos, faço-me pontuações” (Pessoa, 1998a: #193, 200) [I am, to a large extent, the selfsame prose I write. I unroll myself in periods and paragraphs, I turn myself into punctuation marks]. The fragmentary, ever-in-progress Livro do desassossego is, of course, the book that is not a book; it is rather, in Blanchot’s terms, the work (or writing) that is the absence of the book. But it does have a very concrete book in it: “O Razão” [the ledger], the big, heavy book of credit-and-debit entries [assentos, lançamentos] that it is Soares’s responsibility to keep at the office. Soares’s words at the beginning of one of the fragments—“Tenho diante de mim as duas páginas grandes do livro pesado” (Pessoa, 1998a: #5, 49) [I have before me the two large pages of the heavy book]—point to the world of the office where Soares’s bookkeeping is witness to the company’s business, that is to

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say, the commerce that includes, besides the exchange of capital and goods, the old Portuguese colonial adventure of sea voyaging and circumnavigation. A glance at the white page in front of him puts assistant bookkeeper Soares’s memory to work and opens up a dream world of unwritten past glories of discoveries and imperial domination, inextricably linking sossego (the ledger as the quietude of ordinary life) and desassossego (the disquietude brought about by memory, imagination, and longing, best expressed in Campos’s great odes). And thus, writing (a escrita) goes on in the office, the place that in Portuguese is conveniently named o escritório—the site and scene of writing (escrita). The book-as-ledger signals sossego [quietude], the opposite of (albeit including) desassossego [disquietude]. Sossego, from sessio, from sedeo “to sit [down],” means, etymologically, what a ledger or book of records is: o livro dos assentos as the book of timely ordered registers that quietly proves the sine qua non of our existence: “O Razão” is “o Grande Livro que diz que fomos” (Pessoa, 1998a: #42, 77) [the Great Book that says we existed].9 In another of the fragments (Pessoa, 1998a: #129, 150), a turn of the ledger’s pages confirms the mundane relief of mere untranscendental existing. Throughout Livro do desassossego, however, it is not easy to distinguish the sossego of bookkeeping in the firm’s office from the desassossego of poetry writing. Poetry writing, also signified by the term devaneio [daydreaming], is what Livro do desassossego is all about: “O devaneio, em que naturalmente se perde quem não pensa, perco-me eu nele por escrito, pois sei sonhar em prosa” (Pessoa, 1998a: #155, 170) [Daydreaming, in which those who do not think lose themselves naturally, is my way of losing myself in writing, for I know how to dream in prose]. I emphasize the words naturalmente/naturally, por escrito/in writing, and prosa/prose to call attention to the ruminative preoccupation of Soares’s writing with writing itself. In another fragment, the writer confesses: “Escrevo a minha literatura como escrevo os meus lançamentos—com cuidado e indiferença” (Pessoa, 1998a: #13, 55) [I write my literature as I write the ledger entries—with care and indifference]. Working and daydreaming—the book of assentos and the absent book, or book to come, or writing-as-the-poetic—are often brought together. This particular fragment ends up dreading shutting the ledger (o livro) and closing down the office (o escritório) because that would mean cancelling out the dream as well, hence, literally, precluding writing: “sofro que ao fechar do escritório se me feche o sonho também; que no gesto da mão com que cerro o livro encubra o passado irreparável” (Pessoa, 1998a: #33, 69–70) [it pains me that as the office is closed down my dream is also closed; that as I move my hand to shut the ledger I may conceal the irretrievable past]. Sossego and desassossego are always interrupting each other, perhaps as on a Riemann surface, the well-known image of self-interrupted time/space, used by Blanchot in

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his essay on interruption (“L’interruption”) (1969: 106–116) and curiously invoked by Pessoa/Campos as well many years earlier in “Apontamentos para uma estética não-aristotélica” (1982a: 240) [Notes toward a non-Aristotelian aesthetic]. As I have been long suggesting, Livro do desassossego contains the theory and practice of modern (or Pessoan) lyricality (cf. Ramalho-Santos, 2003b: 257ff). “Casual and meditated” that it is (Pessoa, 1998a: #13, 55), Livro do desassossego is an integral part of Pessoa’s conception of the poetic as heteronymy—that is to say, a self-interruptive and ruminative construct forever on the verge of surpassing Pessoa’s fifth degree of poetry. Although sometimes Soares claims to hate reading and to read willingly only what he already knows, there are several references to reading and writing in Livro do desassossego. A couple of particularly striking examples concern the poet’s discovery of earlier pieces written by himself, but which he now fails to recognize as his own. Time is heavy, memory seems to escape him, rereading makes him forget what should be remembered, and the poet is at a loss to figure out who he is in the “interval” that separates his different selves. The poet’s perception of misrecognition turns writing into an endless process of rereading and rewriting, forever on the verge of reaching meaning, but never quite getting there. Orthonymous Pessoa’s poem about the child watching himself play immediately comes to mind: “Brincava a criança / Com um carro de bois. / Sentiu-se brincando / E disse, eu sou dois” (1981: 385) [The child was playing / With an ox cart. / He felt himself playing / And said, I am two]. The heteronyms are a constant presence in Livro do desassossego, whether the allusion be implicit or explicit. An oblique allusion (or could it be an anticipation?) occurs as well in another fragment that ruminates on the impossibility of happiness. There is no happiness without knowledge, writes Soares, but knowledge of happiness is unhappy. To know is to kill, but not to know is not to exist, concludes Soares (Pessoa, 1998a: #406, 364). Could there be a better commentary on the paradoxes of orthonymous Pessoa’s ‘Ela canta, pobre ceifeira’?10 Another fragment (1998a: #236, 235), urging us to live “willingly ignoring” all the predicaments of life, clearly ruminates on Reis’s stoic stance. Another still, rejecting the grandeur of culture and embracing the simplicity of nature as the mark of wisdom, sounds like a combined commentary on (or preparation for) the poems of Caeiro and Reis both (Pessoa, 1998a: #73, 104). But there is also an explicit, lengthy remark on rereading Caeiro (#46, 80) that exemplifies Pessoa’s conception of poetry as self-rumination. A phrase from O guardador de rebanhos VII—“sou do tamanho do que vejo” (Pessoa, 1981: 142) [I am the size of what I see]—is made to perform a variety of Pessoan stances, from Caeiro’s natural serenity to Reis’s constructed indifference, and including Campos’s metaphysical

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doubts and orthonymous Pessoa’s ambivalence toward knowledge. The most interesting reference to the heteronyms in Livro do desassossego, however, is the allusion, in what is perhaps its most quoted passage of The Book, to the written page as a “pessoa própria” [proper person] (Pessoa, 1998a: #259, 254–255). Punning on the poet’s proper name and pointing to what Jacinto do Prado Coelho (1985) called “diversity and unity” in Fernando Pessoa, writing-as-proper-person implies as well Caeiro, Reis, and Campos as non-Pessoas. There is no end to Pessoa’s poetic rumination. As Pessoa/Campos memorably says in “Insónia” (1981: 308–310): “O poema é sempre escrito no dia seguinte” [The poem is always written the following day]. The intertranslatable exchanges among Pessoa’s heteronyms (including Bernardo Soares) conspire with memory and forgetfulness to allow for the journey back beyond what has been thought and make the poetic appear as graspable once again. Hölderlin’s “Mnemosyne” comes to mind one more time: “Lang ist / Die Zeit, es ereignet sich aber / Das Wahre” [Long is time, / but the True / happens]. NOTES 1. I reread lucidly, slowly, fragment by fragment, all that I have written (Pessoa, 1998a: 181; #169). My translation. When not otherwise indicated, all translations are my own. Translations of Livro do Desassossego as The Book of Disquiet are listed in the bibliography. 2. For a different use of an idea that is by no means new, see Duarte, 1993. João Ferreira Duarte draws on Jauss, Barthes, and Foucault to sketch a theory of selfcanonization as self-reading. 3. Of the lesser known “other names,” Maria José, the helpless hunchback, hopelessly in love with a metalworker who is not aware of her at all, comes closest to the heteronymic concept. Her letter to the unreachable, unwitting object of her passion contributes to a finer understanding of what I call the poet’s illness in lyric poetry, but I am not concerned here with the sickly aspects of Pessoa’s art of rumination. See “Carta da corcunda para o serralheiro” (Lopes 1990, II: 256–258). For an English translation, see “Letter from a Hunchback Girl to a Metalworker” (Pessoa, 2001: 314–318) 4. I used all the editions of Livro do desassossego mentioned in the bibliography. My references, however, are to Zenith’s edition of 1998, Zenith’s number for the sketch followed by page. 5. The relevant passage reads in full thus: “Com que vigor da alma sozinha fiz página sobre página reclusa, vivendo sílaba a sílaba a magia falsa, não do que escrevia, mas do que supunha que escrevia! Com que encantamento de bruxedo irónico me julguei poeta da minha prosa, no momento alado em que ela me nascia, mais rápida que os movimentos da pena, como um desforço falaz aos insultos da vida! E afinal, hoje, relendo, vejo rebentar meus bonecos, sair-lhes a palha pelos rasgos,

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despejarem-se sem ter sido” (Pessoa, 1998a: #169, 182) [With what vigour of a solitary soul have I composed page after reclusive page, living syllable by syllable the false magic, not of what I wrote but of what I thought I wrote! With what enthralment of ironic spell have I deemed myself the poet of my prose, in the winged moment when it appeared to me, faster than the movements of my pen, like fallacious redress for the insults of life! And in the end, today, as I reread, I see my dolls burst, straw coming out of their torn parts, emptying themselves out without ever having been]. 6. See also Heidegger (1992). For the Heideggerian articulation of thinking (Denken) and poeming (Dichten), I am indebted to Pereira (1998). 7. For a reading of Mensagem as the quintessential modernist poem about poetry, see Ramalho-Santos, 1995; and Ramalho-Santos, 2003b, especially chapters 1 and 3. For a provocative reading of Mensagem as a failed postcolonial poem, see Silvestre, 2002. 8. In several fragments of Livro do desassossego, “humanity” appears as the kind of mediocrity (often designated as “tedium”) against which the poetic arrogantly fights constantly. Bernardo Soares is often irritated by “a felicidade de todos estes homens que não sabem que são infelizes” [the happiness of all these people who do not know they are unhappy], or suffocated by ordinary life, or nauseated by his socalled fellow-creatures (o chamado semelhante) (Pessoa 1998: #312, #313, 293, 294). 9. But see chapter 2 for the import of this hard-to-read handwritten addition to sketch # 42 (Pessoa, 1998a: 77). 10. An earlier version of the “ceifeira” poem may have actually been destined for Livro do desassossego. See Saraiva, 2002 and Sena, 1982: II.

Chapter 4

Poetic Interruption A Pessoan Concept for Reading the Lyric

trabalhos que se fazem de ruptura—como um poema Manoel de Barros, Livro de pré-coisas1

Lyric poets in the Western tradition often claim that only poetry is free. They often complain that what is commonly called “interruption” constantly threatens the freedom of their creative imagination. Such formulations suggest a conception of poetry implying a suspension of time and history as limits. Poetry, or the poetical, as unbounded license, so to speak. When they complain about being interrupted, poets usually mean either that a certain poem never got written or that it turned out to be lesser than its original conception. In other words, interruption is detrimental to the poetical. A classic example of this stance is Fernando Pessoa’s “O Homem de Porlock” (The Man from Porlock [1934]) on Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” Pessoa speaks here of an “unexpected intruder” (read “interrupter”), someone who, “no one visiting us,” arrives “from within” and thus hinders the full realization of the poetical. I submit, however, that, without this kind of Pessoan “interruption,” the poem would never come to be. This is how I understand the rupture invoked by Adorno to define lyric poetry, a tension between the pure, uninterrupted lyric cry and the irrecusable demands of the community. Writes Adorno in his address on the lyric and society (“Rede über Lyrik und Gesellschaft,”1957 [Adorno, 1981: 53–54]): What we mean by lyric poetry, however (before we broaden the concept historically or turn it critically toward the sphere of individualism), the “purer” it claims to be, has a moment of rupture (Bruch). The “I” that makes itself heard in the lyric is an “I” that defines itself and speaks in opposition to the collective, to objectivity; its expression refers to nature, but it is not immediately at one 53

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with nature. It is as if it had lost nature and attempted to restore it by giving it a soul—by diving into the “I” itself. Humanization alone can bring back to nature the rights that man’s domination took away. Even lyrical compositions with no trace of the conventional and concrete being, no trace of crude materiality—the major works of our language—owe their dignity precisely to the force with which the “I,” waiving alienation, projects onto them the image of nature. The pure subjectivity of such compositions, what in them appears uninterrupted [bruchlos] and harmonious, bears witness to its opposite, to the suffering of an existence alien to the subject, even as it bears witness to the love for such an existence—indeed, their harmoniousness is nothing but the mutual accord of this suffering and this love. Even [Goethe’s] “Warte nur, balde / ruhest du auch” [Just wait / soon you too shall rest] is marked by a gesture of consolation: its unfathomable beauty cannot be separated from what it keeps silent—the image of a world that withholds peace.

Perhaps, then, Maurice Blanchot is right when he urges us to conceive of human living as a “conversation,” something that by definition is social and open to constant interruption—his apt formulation is l’entretien infini (1969: 106–112). In “L’interruption,” Blanchot reflects on the vicissitudes of a conversation between two interlocutors, a conversation that keeps being interrupted by silencings and waitings, and is ever threatened by the danger of a prolonged interruption that may turn into a deep, totalitarian silence itself. Blanchot’s purpose is to suggest that conversation and interruption are the concepts that better signify human doing and being—or poiesis. For the work to be at all, poiesis—that is to say, human life as a thing ever in the making—depends on interruption, silencing, de-working or worklessness (désoeuvrement), and waiting (attente).2 If for a moment we relate Blanchot’s thinking to Adorno’s, we cannot but realize that, when poets speak of interruption, what they really have in mind is what we might call “the political”—social-being or life-in-community. Just think of Rilke’s longing, in his “First Duino Elegy,” for “the uninterrupted message” [die ununterbrochene Nachricht] that makes itself heard out of God’s “silence” (Stille) as the “breath” [das Wehende] of poetry. And yet, even for the poet, it would be “strange” [seltsam] “the earth no longer to inhabit” [die Erde nicht mehr zu bewohnen]. Strange, indeed, no longer to share the social meaning of learning how to be human-as-political. Indeed, being human is not intelligible without the social notion of interruption. Just like the infinite conversation of human existing creates itself between saying and silencing, waiting and saying anew, so lyric poetry is a making irrupting out of the mutually interruptive tension between the poetical and the political. By the political-that-interrupts I mean the naturalized structure of Western society as it shapes and conditions people’s lives, and as they are made to

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perceive and experience it, rather than the capacity to intervene in and change it for the better. The latter would be “political” in Adrienne Rich’s utopian/ poetical sense of “the impulse to create” the “humanly possible,” and would hardly be interruptive of what may be meant by “the poetical” (1993: 23–25). Naturalized structure of society, I say, because it is perceived not as a human construct, or indeed as creative at all, but as a necessity. It is this Ananké that poets claim impinges on them, interrupting their vision of the possibility of human making. It seems to me, on the contrary, that, by bringing the political to break in upon the poet’s unifying imagination (in the quoted essay, Adorno speaks of “alienation”), interruption is actually what accounts for the poetical. Interruption I see, then, paradoxically (to be sure, after the poets themselves), both as a hindrance and as an urging forward, that is to say, a breaking in upon the political facts of life, even as the political facts of life go on interrupting the poet’s vision, thus allowing for its actual poeming. In other words, the poetical needs the interruption of the political to keep “intact” the power of language.3 Following Adorno, Fredric Jameson adds that the poem paradoxically realizes, as if for the first time, what it actually rejects (1981: 82). Rather than being a hindrance to creativity, interruption is, therefore, a crucial part of the poetic process. It signals the frontier, the margin, the threshold, or the limit desiring, or “waiting for,” transgression. Actual trespassing would turn the act of interruption into the utter limit of death, thus precluding poetry itself. Why else would Emily Dickinson speak of the death of Nathaniel Hawthorne as Hawthorne’s interruption?4 Poetry—to the extent that it is an experience of limits just short of trespassing—is thus made present by the mark of interruption. The locus classicus of interruption in the Anglo-American literary tradition is “Kubla Khan,” the poem Coleridge claims to have left unfinished because of a certain Mr. Taylor, the man from Porlock whose knock on the door interrupted the poet’s writing. In an earlier study of Pessoa’s broodings on the “interruption” of “Kubla Khan” in “O Homem de Porlock” [The Man from Porlock] I analyze the facts surrounding the composition of the poem and Coleridge’s version of the genesis of the “fragment” in order to argue that interruption must be seen as a very important part of Coleridge’s conception of poetry as well (1934; Ramalho-Santos, 1983).5 The point I would like to make now is that the poem itself, in its fragmentary structure, gives body to the theoretical notion of interruption that grounds it ex post facto, as it were. The poem’s fragmentary structure is ironic; it tells about power and intimates powerlessness, that is to say, the romantic motif of the impossibility of writing the poem (if, like Kublai Kahn, I had the power to order creation, the poet “says,” I could write the poem, but I don’t). As Marjorie Levinson aptly puts it, “[i]n the hypostatized dome, Coleridge offers a spatial representation of the negatively capable poem” (1986: 107). By making absent the “dome,”

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a synecdoche that rhymes tellingly with “poem,” the poet goes back to the radical origin of creation (to before the emperor’s imagining of the palace, so to speak), thus allowing for the total presence of the poem as against the absented dome (Ramalho-Santos, 1983: 17). Though “Kubla Kahn” is graphically arranged in three parts, it is usually read as a two-part structure with a “gap” after line 36: in the first part, the poem tells about the kahn’s fabulous palace (the fact that the palace is actually absent from the poem is also, in my view, very important for our understanding of Coleridge’s poetic theory and practice); in the second part, it tells us about poetic inspiration and possession. But I would like to argue that the poem interrupts itself at least two more times. “Kubla Khan” begins with history (or perhaps we should say, with politics) and sets out to tell a story (“In Xanadu did Kubla Kahn / A stately pleasure-dome decree”). The nine following lines seem to perform the appropriate task of locating the palace in a beautiful foreign land that calls for compelling description: forests and rivers, fertile grounds, gardens with perfumed trees, sun and shade, caverns and the sea. But just as the last line of the first part closes with an evocation of “sunny spots of greenery,” the story is literally interrupted by a “but” and a “deep romantic chasm.” So is the poem. A crack in the earth’s surface is so awesome and haunting that it diverts attention from the main topic of the narrative and invites mythmaking. But a chasm is also figuratively speaking a rupture in continuity. And this is where the story of Kublai’s palace explodes into the very language and idea of poetry: first, the origin as a mighty fountain bursting forcefully; then the myriad scattering fragments; and then the sacred river imposing the apparent order of imaginative form as it runs through. Order is certainly there, until the end of this second part, except that the image of Kublai and the idea of empire have meanwhile introduced the fact of war and the ephemerality of political power (the dome projected now as a mere floating shadow). And so we come to the most important interruption in the poem. It is a triple interruption. First, the subject’s irruption in the poet’s vision of the Abyssinian maid, her song and Mount Abora; second, the subject’s limits in the poet’s understanding of his inadequate poetic powers; and finally, the definition of the poet as sacredly mad, or, indeed, divinely broken down—or disrupted. It’s tempting to think of deconstruction. However, deconstruction is a convenient label for a kind of literary theory and criticism that aims to do with poetry what the best poetry in the Western tradition has been doing with language and with itself for centuries. This much may be partly implied by A. Lynn Magnusson when she speaks about the “habit of interruption” in The Tempest. “Essays in the recent volume Deconstruction and Criticism,” she says, “‘disfigure’ the texts of poems and of critical commentaries in just the way that Antonio and Sebastian disfigure Gonzalo’s speeches” in The

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Tempest, II, 1 (Magnusson, 1986: 52–65). Rather than regretting deconstruction’s disfigurings of texts, however, I see no other way of dealing with poetic language than to acknowledge its capacity (so exemplary dramatized in “Kubla Khan” and in Shakespeare’s plays) to go on imposing self-reflective interruptions upon itself. No poem is worthy of the name if it does not include, however unobtrusively, the anxiety about the gaps between the saying, the said, and the unsaid. This has nothing to do with ineffability, the misleading notion that there are things that cannot be said. After all, if things cannot be said, they are no-things. Nor has it anything to do with silence—as Alberto Pimenta puts it with great eloquence, silence in poetry is but a metaphor for the impossible absence of language, which is reenacted as priority in most modern and contemporary lyric poetry (2003). But it has everything to do with the power of language to unsay what it says in the very act of saying it. As it says the emperor’s “dome” (a saying, incidentally, which the synedoche promptly turns into an absenting), “Kubla Kahn” also unsays it by saying itself in its stead, thus becoming, in Paul de Man’s suggestive phrasing in “Criticism in Crisis” (1967), “the presence of a nothingness.” As the said and the unsaid are the same (Coleridge’s rhyming does make “dome” and “poem” coincide), they are also made radically discontinuous by the poem’s self-reflective, interruptive “disfigurings” in its radical saying of itself (cf. de Man, 1983: 18).6 For the past 200 years “Kubla Khan” has kept its stronghold on the imaginations of poets. According to Coleridge himself, Lord Byron was the first poet to be fascinated by it, and then many more. Fernando Pessoa, Jorge Luis Borges, Stevie Smith, Louis Macneice, Theodore Weiss, Amy Clampitt (to name but a few from different countries and cultures) have been inspired or even haunted by it.7 Could it be that the poem speaks of the theory and practice of poetry in a particularly cogent way? This is precisely part of what I am arguing here: that, as Pessoa best saw it in his “O Homem de Porlock,” Colerige’s “Kubla Khan,” in its subtle anacoluthon-like structure, which is further underscored by the poem’s history, embodies a conception of lyric poetry as interruption that we find reenacted in the practice of many poets across ages and cultures. “O Homem de Porlock” is just Pessoa’s theorization of a poetic practice that is his own but also that of the strongest lyric poets in the tradition.8 Beyond Pessoa’s mournful lament for Coleridge’s “Kubla Kahn” as, merely, almost a poem (esse quase poema), we must conclude that, for the Portuguese poet, poetry originates in the poet’s un-self-conscious dream at the precise moment that the dream is interrupted so as to become a “thing.”9 If we pay close attention to Pessoa’s wording, we will come to the conclusion that the kind of interruptive self-awareness he talks about has strange affinities with poetic language and with the materialized poem itself as a written thing:

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All of us, although awake when we compose, create while in a dream. And even though nobody visits us, “the Man from Porlock” comes to us, from within, the unexpected intruder. All that we truly think or feel, all that we truly are, experiences (when we express it, even when it be only to ourselves) the fatal interruption of that visitor we also are, that external person which each of us carries within himself, more real in life than we ourselves are:—the sum total of what we have learned, of what we judge to be ourselves, and of what we desire to be.

What could this “fatal interruption” be, the “unexpected intruder” that thus steps in between “the beginning and the ending of a poem wholly finished, which however we do not allow ourselves to have written”? The poem itself, of course, the poem actually composed, or, in Pessoa’s own romantic phrasing for it here, “fragments of what is that we know not of.” If this is so, then Pessoa’s heteronymic romance becomes much easier to understand: Pessoa’s waking dream is the illusion of identity as it is self-reflectively interrupted by his fiction of the heteronyms as writing. It is all related in Pessoa’s account of the genesis of the heteronyms in his letter to Casais Monteiro. On the magical day of March 1914, Alberto Caeiro suddenly “happens” in Pessoa (just like a “visitor,” an “unexpected intruder” or “fatal interruption”), immediately followed by Ricardo Reis, Álvaro de Campos, and Pessoa-Himself—to speak only of the major heteronyms. These “pessoas livros” [persons books]—and let’s not forget that Fernando’s surname means “person”—are the most daring dramatization of interruption as a poetic strategy—or as (re)writing.10 What is interesting is that the interruptive fiction of the heteronymic romance feeds on forms of interruption itself. The Pessoan “persons” are not only foils to each other—they interrupt one another and are downright adversarial, they live different kinds of life, they argue, they disagree on poetry and poetics and fight with each other on all sorts of aesthetic and even political and ethical matters—and they are even ascribed different horoscopes! More interesting still is that their different kinds of writing—bucolic Caeiro, futurist/decadent Campos, classical Reis, nationalist/existential Pessoa-Himself—signify a pluri-conversation with plenty of ongoing interruptions. Together, in their mutual interruptiveness, the Pessoan heteronyms bear witness to the fact that poetry is written in poetry. Such is the fifth degree of lyric poetry. What is Pessoa’s Mensagem (Message [1934]) if not an elegiac interruption of Os Lusíadas [The Lusiads, 1572], the celebratory Portuguese national epic by Luís de Camões?11 More than that, as a poem-made-of-poems, Mensagem, just like Crane’s “epic of the modern consciousness,” The Bridge (1932), is lyric interrupted by epic and epic interrupted by lyric. Lyric poetry is not just written in poetry; it is written in poetry as interruption—entretien infini. Ana Luísa Amaral’s poem-made-of-poems, Escuro (Darkness, 2014), bears brilliant witness to this conception. Escuro interrupts Mensagem even

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as Mensagem interrupts Os Lusíadas. Or rather, in Escuro, the voice of Mensagem—elegiac, though still celebratory of the nation’s imperial history—is replaced by the saddest condemnatory tone, a voice more mournful for being constantly remindful of joy. Or light, the other side of darkness, in Escuro often signified by “lume,” a marvelous Portuguese word of many nuances—from perilous fire to light and lumination, bright domesticity and sociability, cozy hearth, and brilliancy of life. In the poet’s imagination, “lume” even gets linked to “memories” in the inaugural poem of the volume: “Das mais puras memórias: ou de lumes,” translated by Margaret Jull Costa as “About the Purest Memories: or about Light” (Amaral, 2014: 13–15, 2019: 123–124). The subtle variations of meaning suggested by the plural— “lumes”—disappear, but then translation calls for a kind of interruption as well. To translate a poem is not to produce the same poem in a different language; it is rather to produce a different poem in a different language. Consider the last poem in the volume, “O drama em gente: A outra fala” [literally, The Drama in People: The Other Speech], where the mysteries of “lume” also have a role to play. The title points to Pessoa’s heteronymic creativity, a drama in people, he once explained, rather than a drama in acts.12 I quote the poem here, in Portuguese and in Margaret Jull Costa’s beautiful translation, which brilliantly highlights Pessoa’s heteronymous dramatic performance (Amaral, 2014: 67, 2019: 70): O drama em gente: a outra fala O lume que as rodeia, A estas vozes, não foi feito de sol, embora dele herdasse um rasto de paisagem, nem se moldou em luz, que a noite lhe foi sempre o estado puro O lume que as sustenta, a estas vozes, é mais de dentro, e eu não o sei dizer Pressinto-o só, e há fases, como em lua, em que o sinto a chegar: ondas de mim, tempo herdado em camadas de espessuras diferentes Mas sempre deste tempo é o lume que as prende, a estas vozes, e ao prendê-las as solta sobre o tempo—

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Dramatis Personnae: enter Another Voice The fire that surrounds those voices was not made of sun, although the sun may have lent it something of its landscape, nor was it moulded in light, because night was always its purest state The fire that sustains those voices comes more from within, and I have no words for that fire I merely sense its presence, and there are moon-like phases when I feel it approach: those inner waves, time bequeathed in layers of varying thicknesses But it belongs always to this time, the fire that binds those voices, and in binding releases them into time—

It is as if the twenty-first-century Portuguese poet Ana Luísa Amaral were claiming to be one more interruptive heteronym (a outra fala / the other voice) to speak what was left unspoken: the silenced voices of the Portuguese history of power, discovery, expansion, conquest, colonialism, and ruthless empire, which Mensagem’s interruption of Lusíadas, however mournful for its awareness of finitude, is all about. Voices that come to the poet’s memory steeped in ambivalent “lume,” a fire within that seems utterly reluctant to release those voices into the world, the heavy time of the muffling narrative voice of the imperial nation evidently speaking too loudly. I have been speaking of Escuro as a poem-made-of-poems. Let me look at it now as a privileged conversation with poets or artists. Pessoa is everywhere, but Blake comes first. The cover of Escuro reproduces the frontispiece of Jerusalem (1804–1820). Los, Blake’s personification of the poetic imagination, carrying a sun-like lantern, is about to go into Albion’s dark bosom. Darkness about to give way to light, as suggested by the epigraph taken from America, a Prophecy (1793): “The morning comes, the night decays, the watchmen leave their stations.” Of this passage wrote David Erdman that “it is part of Blake’s poetic paraphrase of the Declaration of Independence” (1977: 10). I agree. But what are we to make of the parenthetic passage at the end of the “Preludium” (Plate 4) when the poet, “ashamed of his own song,”

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is determined to smash his harp and silence himself? Here is the intriguing passage: [The stern Bard ceas’d, asham’d of his own song; enrag’d he swung His harp aloft sounding, then dash’d its shining frame against A ruin’d pillar in glitt’ring fragments; silent he turn’d away, And wander’d down the vales of Kent in sick and drear lamentings.]

Some Blake critics (e.g., Erdman and Damon) have suggested that this passage (the last one to be added to the poem) has autobiographical implications, pointing to the poet’s increasing pessimism regarding the later course of revolutions. Through Amaral’s anti-colonial, anti-imperial, and feminist imagination in Escuro, it is easier to understand Blake’s poetic “shame.” The bard is prophetically embarrassed by the exhilarating vision of emancipation and liberty, symbolized by the American Revolution, that he is about to chant. When, just a few years later, he illustrated the Narrative of a Five Year’s Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796), by Captain John Gabriel Stedman, Blake was quick to subvert the message of white supremacy underlying it. He must have been aware early on of the less noble reasons to declare independence, as recently spelled out by historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker in The Many-Headed Hydra (2000). The triumphant discourse of nation building hankering after empire, into which Blake’s revolutionary America was about to turn, is called into question by Amaral’s interruption, in Escuro, of the official narrative of the Portuguese imperial history.13 Light and darkness preside over Amaral’s entire book. The first poem, “Das mais puras memórias: ou de lumes” [About the Purest Memories: or about Light], sets the tone: the contrast between the luminous joy of being innocent—meaning: not knowing—and the ominous reality of experience— meaning: knowing of darkness. How not to think of the Songs of Innocence and Experience which, we have known for a long time now, Blake wrote at the same time? The second poem—“Entre mitos: ou parábola” [Between Myths: or Parabola]14—tells of the other side of the first European “discoveries” of rich and attractive lands, and the havoc the conquests created among unsuspecting and creative peoples. That the poet chooses to underscore an assault on the “banks of the Nile” bears witness to her keen awareness of the long-lasting consequences of Western expansion and colonization. The current conflicts in Africa and the Middle East to which she subtly alludes are far less than local, as unending crowds of desperate refugees go on testifying. After acknowledging, in “Génese” [Genesis], the blind, octopus-like greed at the root of the maritime enterprise, the poem goes on to sing of other voices [“Outras vozes” (Amaral, 2014: 25–26)], the voices of the anonymous sailors

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who actually accomplish it all but are not supposed to be heard, or even seen. Here is the poem’s last dazzling, heart-rending closure (translation is mine): Serão eles a dar firmeza ao suporte da vela, um barco novo habitado de peixes brilhantes como estrelas Não eleger nem mar, nem horizonte. E embarcar sem mapa até ao fim do escuro [They keep steady spars and sails, a new ship inhabited by fish shining like stars They choose neither sea nor horizon. And embark without a map to the end of darkness]

This poem, singing of all the industrious and brave seafaring men that made the daring voyages possible, though ever longing for peace and domesticity, is Escuro’s interpellation of Mensagem’s “A última nau” [The Last Ship]. The imperial last ship, carrying only the phantasmatic King Sebastian that was supposed to salvage the nation, never comes back, after all. “O sonho” [The Dream] converses with Mensagem’s “D. Dinis.” Contrary to traditional lore, Amaral’s poem dares to reimagine King Dinis under the benevolent influence of his pious and charitable wife, Queen Isabel, later canonized as a saint. Poet and planter of the trees that would later be used to build the caravels, Dinis falls asleep (like Coleridge) and dreams of seafaring and enchanting discoveries without warfare and without Others. Little does he know that his beautiful “Dream” will be interrupted soon enough by the graceful vessels’ “thirst for conquest” [sede de conquista]. The following poems go on dialoguing with Mensagem (often revisiting Os Lusíadas as well) to reinvent history by rewriting poetry. Readers are forced to think otherwise of such canonical figures as D. João o Primeiro [King John the First], D. Philippa de Lencastre [Queen Philippa of Lancaster], and O Infante [Henry the Navigator]. I shall conclude by looking briefly into Amaral’s reinvention of Philippa of Lancaster, the well-educated daughter of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, who became queen of Portugal in 1387 by marrying King John I. The wedding sealed the Treaty of Windsor between Portugal and England (1386 to this day), but what catches the imagination of all three poets is the queen’s

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mothering of the distinguished sons for whom Camões coined the phrase Ínclita Geração [Illustrious Generation]. First Camões and then Pessoa stress the crucial role of such gifted progeny in helping to found and further expand the Portuguese empire. Philippa gets praised simply because, in giving birth to them, she made the empire possible. Pessoa’s poem, remarkable in its exquisite, concise (masculinist) eulogy—culminating in “Humano ventre do Império / Madrinha de Portugal” [Human womb of Empire / Godmother of Portugal”]—is interrupted by Amaral’s “A cerimónia” [The Ceremony] (Amaral, 2014: 41–44, 2018: 130–131). Unceremoniously interrupted indeed is Pessoa’s poem, for in Escuro Philippa is granted a voice and a proper, thoughtful, even prophetic identity: as an English princess, as a Portuguese queen, and as an expert educator of her illustrious sons—though uncannily regretful of what they came to be and signify. The West’s predatory history from the fifteenth century onwards is aptly synthesized in the poem’s last two lines—“Por que outra noite trocaram / o meu escuro?” [With what new night did they replace / my darkness?]. The voice is Pilippa’s, comparing the dark side of the history of both her countries, England and Portugal, in their role as remorseless empire builders. But it is also the poet’s own voice. By choosing to thus entitle the central part of Escuro, Ana Luísa Amaral (2014: 19) reenacts poetry as interruption—of history and of poetry itself.

NOTES 1. “Works that are made of ruptures—like a poem” (Barros, 1990: 228; my translation; unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own). 2. Derrida, writing after Blanchot (in both senses of the word “after”), also wonders if interruption doesn’t always resemble, “the mark of a borderly edge, the mark of a threshold never to be trespassed” [la marqued’une bordure frontalière, d’un seuil a ne pas dépasser] (Derrida, 1993: 17, 1994: 315). Interestingly enough, the sociologist and cultural critic, Stuart Hall, speaks of theory as interruption: “Again and again, the so-called unfolding of cultural studies was interrupted by a break, by real ruptures, by exterior forces; the interruption, as it were, of new ideas, which decentered what looked like the accumulating practice of the work. There’s another metaphor for theoretical work: theoretical work as interruption” (Hall, 1992: 277–294 [282]). 3. The concept of “intact” [intacto] I borrow from António Ramos Rosa. See, in particular, O livro da ignorância (The Book of Ignorance, 1988). Cf. Adrienne Rich: “poetry is . . . a concentration of the power of language” (“power” in italics in the original; emphasis on “concentration” is my own (1979: 248). 4. In a letter to Susan Gilbert Dickinson (Dickinson, 1986: 432, #292). 5. A reprint of Pessoa’s “O Homem de Porlock” is now available in Pessoa, 2020a.

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6. In a recent reading of this essay of de Man’s, Ian Saunders (1985) identifies a “trope of interruption” in the critic’s non-referential theory of poetry, so as to compare and contrast it with F. R. Leavis’s formalist-ethical criticism. Theoretical work as interruption, as in Stuart Hall. 7. See also Weiss (1982). 8. See Ramalho-Santos, 2003b: 222–256. 9. Remember Coleridge’s description of his composition of the “fragment”: “all the images rose up before him as things.” 10. Cf. Pessoa’s letter to Casais Monteiro of January 13, 1935 (Pessoa, 1982a: 93–99). 11. For the lyrical overtones already interrupting The Lusiads itself, see Macedo, 1983. 12. See http://multipessoa​.net​/labirinto​/obra​-publica​/25. Accessed January 2, 2021. 13. I follow here a fine bilingual edition of Mensagem (Pessoa, 2020). 14. For Margaret Jull Costa’s fine translation, see Amaral, 2018: 148–149.

Chapter 5

“The God That Was Missing” Poetry, Divinity, Everydayness

If you have poetry, you have religion If you don’t have poetry, then have religion Paraphrasing Johann Wolfgang von Goethe1

As the 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass nears its conclusion, Walt Whitman solemnly announces what is to be, according to the poet, a major feature of the new nation his poem sets out to sing: “There will soon be no more priests. Their work is done” (1973: 729).2 “America,” the author’s argument goes, is giving rise to a “new breed of poets” whose function it will be to sing a new sense of “divinity”: the kind of divinity which, seemingly paradoxically, resides in the everydayness of common people and of all beings and things. The proclamation at the end comes as no surprise. The whole conception and structure of the preface, celebrating from the very beginning the “unrhymed poetry” shaping the ample and generous commonality of the United States as “the greatest poem,” grounds the poet’s concluding statement. As poets become the only priests, poetry gathers the only belief and takes the place of religion. Or, indeed, religions. The word “religion” occurs only once in the preface and precisely in the plural. In a diverse “nation teeming with nations,” the idea of God may easily become divisive, as in fact it continues to be to this day. “[A]rgue not concerning God,” the preface’s creed of love wisely recommends (Whitman, 1973: 717). Section 43 of “Song of Myself” expresses respect for religiosity, if not for any particular institutionalized religion, as well as compassion for and solidarity with the comfortless doubters and unbelievers. But the idea of God as a transcendent being and superpower is quickly dismissed in section 48, in which the word “God” is repeated eleven times exactly to this effect. (“And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one’s self is.”) The relevance of the idea of God as a sublime 65

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unknowable lies in disclosing the wonder of the world as its opposite: the insignificant (“a bean in its pod”), the ordinary (a “trade or employment”), the common (any “object”), the everyday (“the faces of men and women”). Heidegger would agree that in “Song of Myself” Whitman creates the work that sets up a world that worlds, but he would have to reconsider his notion of worlding to include as well the poet’s wonder at stones, plants, and animals.3 Plato said that wonder (thaumazein) was at the origin of philosophy (philosophein), but the evolution of Western thought from Aristotle onwards tells a different story. Wonder resonates with something pre- and post-philosophical that accounts for the poetic.4 The bard of America, commensurate with the nation’s people, and his poem, one with the nation, thus chant a totally new song. Not a song of hierarchies and reverence for transcendent or supernatural powers controlling human destiny, but a celebration of the capacity of simple, ordinary, flesh and blood human beings to create their own destiny in the wondrous ordinariness of their daily lives. In section 24 of “Song of Myself,” the poet “Walt Whitman” standing for America—the ample geography of the nation and the immense variety of its peoples—declares himself divine and holymaking: “Divine am I inside and out, and make holy whatever I touch or am touch’d from.” Even if the right soil for the prophesized changes is the United States, the bard of America is sure (unsurprisingly, given the arrogance of his American stance vis-à-vis the tradition) that the rest of the world will respond in a kind of reversal of the conventionally perceived course of intellect and imagination.5 It is not a question of rejecting the tradition but rather of doing violence to it. An aging and ailing ancestor must be forcefully replaced by a “stalwart and wellshaped heir.” The preface’s first paragraph is as clear about the genealogy of Leaves of Grass as it is about the inevitability of its emancipatory gesture:6 America does not repel the past or what it produced under its forms or amid other politics or the idea of castes or the old religions . . . accepts the lessons with calmness . . . is not so impatient as has been supposed that the slough still sticks to opinions and manners and literature while the life which served its requirements has passed into the new life of the new forms . . . perceives that the corpse is slowly borne from the eating and sleeping rooms of the house . . . perceives that it waits a little while in the door . . . that it was fittest for its days . . . that its action has descended to the stalwart and wellshaped heir who approaches . . . and that he shall be fittest for his days. (Whitman, 1973: 711)

Leaves of Grass places itself ostensibly inside the Western tradition, which nonetheless it radically subverts. At the beginning of “Birds of Passage” (“Song of the Universal”), the poet inverts the conventional call of inspiration

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by having the Muse address him, rather than the other way around: “Come said the Muse, / Sing me a song no poet has yet chanted, / Sing me the universal” (Whitman, 1973: 226). After all, as we learn in section 20 of “Song of Myself,” he alone—the American poet, “gross” and “mystical,” “solid and sound”—knows immortality and “the amplitude of time.” The Muse, traditionally the conveyer of poetic power, from the deity to the poet, no longer has her old role to play, for now the poet occupies the very place in which the divine abides. In “Song of Exposition,” a poem that explicitly reiterates the American poet’s Western lineage (“We do not blame thee elder World, nor really separate ourselves from thee”), the traditional Muse, urged by the poet to migrate from ancient Greece and other strongholds of the Western tradition, becomes an “illustrious émigré” in the New World, where, “install’d amid the kitchen ware!” (Whitman, 1973: 198), she ends up being confused with the everydayness of America itself as the only source of inspiration. All the poet needs to do to compose his poem is hear America singing its modern song of plain, down-to-earth, quotidian, commonplace reality. “I Hear America Singing” appeared in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass (12–13), the only edition that included a poem, or a cluster of fragments, entitled “Debris”; in one of the fragments, the poet promises to go out into the world to “preach” birds’ eggs, fruit, and pebbles (Whitman, 1973: 607).7 In 1891, the poet was still singing the “commonplace”: the common day and night, earth and waters, and the work and trades of the nation (Whitman, 1973: 553–554). Thus, the long, sprawling catalogues of “Song of Myself”—as in section 33 in particular, spanning time and space and making the poet’s visionary description one with the nation’s nature, culture, and people—are entirely justified. As the poet claims in section 25, his tongue encompasses worlds, but he himself is absolutely not encompassable. The way the poet presents himself throughout “Song of Myself” makes him sound very much like the idea of God. I do not mean his Christ-like assumption of humanity, generous and steadfast throughout except for an anguished moment in section 38 (“Enough! Enough! Enough!”); I mean, rather, his larger claim to knowledge (section 20), perfection (section 44), incomprehensibility (sections 46, 51), and totality (section 51). While a century earlier in the Old World Hölderlin lamented the withdrawal of the gods from the earth as a major loss for the imagination and grounded his poeming on his lament, Whitman’s creativity in the new world thrives happily on that absence. How the American poet manages to succeed while, seemingly untroubled, keeping himself in the tradition that equates poetry with divinity and the sacred implies the daring gesture of putting the poet in the place of the gods and rendering divine the everydayness of an increasingly skeptical age. At the close of section 45, in wording that swerves significantly from that of the first edition, the poet boasts of his certain “rendezvous” with

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the “great Camerado” (in 1855, the rendezvous was “our rendezvous”).8 No doubt, in his “Salutation to Walt Whitman,” Pessoa’s heteronym Álvaro de Campos has this passage in mind when he writes: “Wherever you are now (I don’t know where it is but it is God).”9 More interesting still is Pessoa’s equally heteronymic Alberto Caeiro’s reinvention, after Whitman as I argue, of poetry and the poet as “the god that was missing” in Poem VIII of O guardador de rebanhos (Pessoa, 1981: 143–146).10 But before I deal with Pessoa and the Caeiro poem that grounds my chapter, let me go over two other American poets who also reinvent poetry in comparison and contrast with conventional notions of religion and belief: Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens. Stevens was well aware of Whitman’s godlike ambitions for his poetry. The beginning of “Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery” (Stevens, 1997: 121), depicting Walt Whitman as a sun god, singing himself and chanting finite and infinite worlds, is a rewrite of section 25 of “Song of Myself.” I will come back to this. * Emily Dickinson claimed never to have read Whitman. Perhaps. She did tell Higginson in her second letter to him that she “never read [Whitman’s] Book—but was told that he was disgraceful—” (Dickinson, 1986: 404 [L261]). Nonetheless, her conception of the poet is, in many ways, so close to Whitman’s that it would not be farfetched to hear Whitman’s “dazzling and tremendous” sun-like power reverberate in Dickinson’s famous assessment of poetry as the greatest value, comprehending the whole—or encompassing worlds—and, though wholly earthbound, or precisely for that reason, by far superseding “the Heaven of God” (J569/Fr533): I reckon—when I count at all— First—Poets—Then the Sun— Then Summer—Then the Heaven of God— And then—the List is done— But, looking back—the First so seems To Comprehend the Whole— The Others look a needless Show— So I write—Poets—All— Their Summer—lasts a solid Year— They can afford a Sun The East—would deem extravagant—

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And if the Further Heaven— Be Beautiful as they prepare For Those who worship them— It is too difficult a Grace— To justify the Dream—

Dickinson’s poets dwell in the amazing light (think “wonder”) of such an extravagant sun that the “Further Heaven,” reduced to a “Dream” not worthy of any effort, is easily dismissed as the not so good place to which religion urges believers to aspire. Heaven, we learn in another poem, is “excellent,” but only “[w]hen Earth cannot be had—” (J623/Fr689). Poetry is a simple affair of the earth (or of the “weather,” as Stevens also calls the earth), and no less because the earth has mysterious ways: four simple trees on a solitary acre challenge the poet’s capacity to know (J742/Fr778); birds are the poet’s criterion for tune (J285/Fr256); the poet’s song is fuller and longer than birds’ song (J250/Fr270); the “amazing sense” the poet “distills” comes but from “ordinary Meanings” or indeed from human “Poverty” (J448/Fr446), another favorite concept of Stevens’s. Although haunted by the unknowable, as in “I saw no Way—The Heavens were stitched—” (J378/Fr633), Dickinson’s poet is anchored in the trivial gestures of everydayness, as in “I tie my Hat—I crease my Shawl—” (J443/Fr522). In this last poem, the implicit reference to her womanhood underscores the ironic use she often makes of the topos of modesty and triviality, as in “I was the slightest in the House—” (J486/Fr473) or “They shut me up in Prose—” (J613/Fr445). Like Whitman, Dickinson deeply understood the pain of disbelief and was probably even more affected by the evolving skepticism of the age than Whitman. Not that she herself was a true believer. Of religion in her family she tells Higginson: “They are religious—except me—and address an Eclipse every morning—whom they call their ‘Father’” (Dickinson, 1986: 404 [L261]). But she acknowledges that the time when faith was in place and the paths of salvation were well known is gone forever, and she recognizes how agonizing that loss may be: Those—dying then, Knew where they went— They went to God’s Right Hand— That Hand is amputated now And God cannot be found— The abdication of Belief Makes the Behavior small—

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Better an ignis fatuus Than no illume at all—(J1551/Fr1581)

Loss of belief in the solid tenets of religion entails the unbearable darkness of the unknown, and that is when the will-o’-the-wisp may be helpful. The ignis fatuus is welcomed in the poem, not as the misleading hope that is only temporarily reassuring but as the “vital Light” of “Lamps” lit by poets (J883/Fr930). Jack-o’-lantern, thus, not as illusion but rather illumination, the Coleridgean willing suspension of disbelief, later translated by Stevens into a believable fiction, the fiction in which one believes willingly, knowing it to be a fiction.11 Repeating my paraphrase of Goethe in my epigraph, if you have poetry, you have religion; if you do not have poetry, then you have religion. James McIntosh calls Dickinson’s kind of believing, borrowing a phrase by Dickinson herself, “nimble believing.”12 I prefer to call it creative, or poetic, believing, a believing that is already a making—or poiesis. No wonder such believing easily dispenses with god-the-creator: To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee One clover and a bee, And revery. The revery alone will do, If bees are few. (J1755/Fr1779)

No wonder God appears in Dickinson’s poetry as “jealous” of human creativity (“God is indeed a jealous God— / He cannot bear to see / That we had rather not with Him / But with each other play” [J1719/fr1752]). Poetry is the making that Dickinson most reveres, as her use of religious and biblical figures, imagery and wording suggests.13 Poetry’s privilege is “awful” (J505/ Fr348) because it totally depends on the poet’s capacity to abide by the power of language. Long before deconstruction, Dickinson understood the ancientness and mystery of language. She knew that we do not speak the language, rather the language speaks us. The poet searches philology for finer wording, but the words may well surprise her with unsuspected revelations (J1126/ Fr1243). When she first wrote to Higginson, what Dickinson wanted to find out was if her poems “breathed” (1986: 403 [L260]). To bring the word into life as an independent, corporeal entity is the poet’s ambition—Pessoa’s more than fifth degree, so to speak. In many of her poems, Dickinson is fully aware of the poet’s efforts to make word and thing coincide, or to make the word “cognate,” as Hart Crane would say.14 Or to make the word “cohesive,” as in “A Word made Flesh is seldom” (J1651/Fr1715), a poem that strikes me as particularly heretical. This, of course, is nothing unusual in Dickinson, but perhaps nowhere else does she put poetry so unequivocally above religion

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and theology, by rendering immortal the word “consented” by language and philology, as opposed to the divine “condescension” of the “Word made Flesh.” The Bible held no secrets for Dickinson, as so many scholars have witnessed, but her dictionary may have been far more important to her. When she lists “her” books in her second letter to Higginson, she mentions Keats, the Brownings, Ruskin, Sir Thomas Browne, and the Book of Revelation. A few sentences down, after speaking of the friends she had lost to death, Dickinson adds: “and for several years, my Lexicon—was my only companion.” The several uses she makes of the word “lexicon” (or “philology,” for that matter) in her poetry cannot but lead readers to the conclusion that her sole companion for several years was not only language and the dictionary but also and mainly her own poetry.15 In “Many a phrase has the English language—” (J276/Fr333), the poet claims the privilege of sole, proper hearer of “Saxon.” It is her wonderment before language and her confidence in her command and rigorous questioning of language—her poetic faculty—that allows Dickinson to substitute the poet (“a warbling Teller”) for theologians; Orpheus, the Ur-poet, for the writers of the Bible (J1545/Fr1577). * Stevens was as careful a reader of Dickinson as of Whitman. As I said earlier, the opening stanza of the fragmentary “Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery” (Stevens, 1997: 121–128) depicting Walt Whitman as a sun god, singing himself and chanting finite and infinite worlds, is a rewrite of section 25 of “Song of Myself.” After the beautiful invocation of the sun-Whitman-muse in the first fragment, the forty-eight fragments that follow read like stylized Whitman catalogue lines, certainly not adding to a romantic, visionary description of the nation, as in Leaves of Grass, but to a modernist, universalist impression of nature, art, and ordinary human existence. “Sunday Morning” (Stevens, 1997: 53–56), on the other hand, sounds like a gloss on several Dickinson poems, such as “‘Heaven’ Has Different Signs—to Me—” (J575/Fr544) and “To Be Alive—Is Power—” (J677/ Fr876). The poet’s eloquent utterance in “Sunday Morning” on behalf of common terrestrial existence—all the more beautiful and precious for its sensuous evanescence—silences the woman’s anxious longings for a paradise of permanence and transcendence. This is not to say that the question of the unknowable, if not transcendence, does not often occur in Stevens, as it does in Dickinson. What is God, after all, Dickinson’s troubled question seems to be in “To be alive—is Power—,” if “omnipotence” resides in “finitude”? Stevens, likewise, debunks paradise by miswriting Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” in “Sunday Morning” VI, already pointing to “Credences of Summer”

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a few years later (“This is the barrenness/Of the fertile thing that can attain no more” [Stevens, 1997: 323]). Furthermore, in a gesture that immediately brings to mind Pessoa/Caeiro’s “god that was missing,” Stevens goes on to conclude his poem with “a chant of paradise” addressing what “a god might be, / Naked among [men]” (VII), while singing the common, physical, and graspable naturalness of deer, quail, sweet berries, and pigeons (VIII). The dialectical tension in “Sunday Morning” between the woman’s fear for finitude and trembling desire for life-after-life, and the poet’s all too persuasive plea for this-life-as-final, is a constant in Stevens’s poetry, as many scholars have noted.16 As late as 1951, in a lecture delivered at Mount Holyoke College entitled “Two or Three Ideas,” Stevens elaborates on the role of poetry and the poet in a time of disbelief (1997: 839–850). He begins (his first idea) by arguing for the specificity of poetry—its ontology, or ownness, its “umbilical” coincidence with itself, which curiously enough he names “style.”17 Then (his second idea), he reflects on the ancient gods as “creations of the imagination” with their own self-coinciding specificity, which he also, consistently enough, names “style.” Finally (his third idea), he addresses the real topic of his lecture: in an age of disbelief (150 years before, Hölderlin had said: “in dürftiger Zeit”), the role of the poets, who cannot but share the disbelief of the time, is to disclose reality-as-it-is.18 Stevens’s phrase is “the revelation of reality,” which he repeats more than once, italicizing one of them: “There is inherent in the words the revelation of reality a suggestion that there is a reality of or within or beneath the surface of reality.” Stevens’s poet, therefore, unlike Whitman’s (but not unlike Dickinson’s), does not claim to take the place of priests preaching a profane kind of divinity, let alone gods long withdrawn from the earth. In a time of disbelief, the poet’s call is to grasp “the indifferent experience of life” as “the unique experience” (Stevens, 1997: 848) and properly unconceal it. “The most provocative of all realities,” Stevens goes on to say, “is that reality of which we never lose sight but never see solely as it is” (emphasis added). Poetry here is no longer understood as a making but as a making appear. Or, as paradoxically put in a poem of the 1940s, making “the visible a little hard / To see.” Not impossible to see, note, but a little hard to see (“The Creations of Sound” [275]). Difficult, says Pessoa/Caeiro, is to be ownmost (próprio), that is to say, to-be-according-to-being, and see nothing but the visible.19 Heidegger’s truth, aletheia-as-unconcealment (Unverborgenheit), cannot help but come to mind.20 That Stevens’s “indifferent experience” is the “unique experience” later identified as an “item of ecstasy” reserved for a “loftier” time points to the tension between the here and the beyond which I have described earlier, and which I would now rephrase as a tension between nativeness and foreignness (1997: 848). Writing about John Crowe Ransom in 1948, Stevens (1997:

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819–821) eloquently reveals the poet he himself is in his poems: he demands that reality-as-lived-experience “surrender” to him, as canto XXVIII of “The Man with the Blue Guitar” claims it does (“I am a native in this world” [Stevens, 1997: 147]), and he exiles himself from reality to make a “legend” of it, as most clearly in “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction”: “We live a place/ That is not our own” and “blazoned days” (I.iv); “the gibberish of the vulgate” and “the poet’s gibberish” (II​.​ix); “reason” and “later reason” (III.i,iv). As “Sunday Morning” begins to show, the sun that presides over Stevens’s poetry is simultaneously reality-as-it-is (in this poem, for example, juxtaposed with fruit, bird, earth) and a quasi-mythical entity that calls for devotion. The latter, however, is not because the sun intimates respect for divinity or the sacred (note that the “devotion” is “boisterous”), rather because the sun is the symbol of the mystery (“difficulty” is Stevens’s word) of mere existence—the there-is. Why is there being-there rather than nothing?—is Leibnitz’s question famously repeated by Heidegger which Stevens also asks in as early a poem as “The Snow Man” (1921). Revealing the “truth” of existence is Stevens’s aim throughout his career as a poet, a project that can be properly described as nonaesthetic. “I think,” writes Stevens in “Two or Three Ideas,” “that the main characteristic of the poetry of the future or the near future will be an absence of the poetic” (1997: 849). The complex first canto of “It Must Be Abstract” in “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction,” while insisting that the sun must be seen in its idea, states peremptorily that the “idea” of the sun is “inconceivable.” The canto’s gesture thus wrenches poetry from traditional conceptualizations of the poetic (“Phoebus is dead”) and denounces any metaphorical “project” for the sun. It is not just that the sun “must bear no name”; the sun must likewise have no project. There have always been projects for the sun, there may still be a project for the sun, the poem does allow. But Stevens’s own sun must simply be “in the difficulty of what it is to be” (1997: 329–330)—ostensibly shunning “evading metaphor.” I have just quoted from “Add This to Rhetoric” (Stevens, 1997: 182), but “Credences of Summer” II is even more eloquent: Postpone the anatomy of summer, as The physical pine, the metaphysical pine. Let’s see the very thing and nothing else. Let’s see it with the hottest fire of sight. Burn everything not part of it to ash. Trace the gold sun about the whitened sky Without evasion by a single metaphor. Look at it in its essential barrenness And say this, this is the center that I seek.

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Fix it in an eternal foliage And fill the foliage with arrested peace, Joy of such permanence, right ignorance Of change still possible. Exile desire For what is not. This is the barrenness Of the fertile thing that can attain no more. (Stevens, 1997: 323)

The very language to which Stevens resorts here and elsewhere indicates how difficult it is to accomplish the poet’s non-project. “How does one stand (. . .) how does one feel?,” the poet asks in a poem of Ideas of Order (“The American Sublime” [Stevens, 1997: 106]). These may be appropriate questions, but not because one desires more than a diminished American sublime; rather because the sublime is not diminished enough. “One grows used to the weather,” the poem goes on, but not used enough, it seems: the sublime keeps coming “down to the spirit.” The really appropriate questions are the two final ones about the sustainability of everyday existence: “What wine does one drink? / What bread does one eat?”21 Its biblical resonances notwithstanding, these lines point to the gastronomic aspect of Stevens’s sensuous non-project: the physical palpability of lived experience best depicted in food and drink imagery.22 Many of Stevens’s poems give their readers the impression that the poet, when he was not busy revealing reality by putting a pineapple together, for example, was tasting it with relish and washing it down with wine—“Slice the mango, Naaman, and dress it // With white wine, sugar and lime juice. Then bring it, / After we have drunk the Moselle, to the thickest shade // Of the garden” (“Certain Phenomena of Sound” [Stevens, 1997: 256]).23 The coffee and oranges of the first stanza of “Sunday Morning” and the fancy meal in “Notes towards a Supreme Fiction” III.v—lobster Bombay with mango chutney accompanied by the Meursault Burgundy—are frequently quoted. Rather than a mere “sense,” poetry is an affair of the senses.24 “With my whole body I taste these peaches, / I touch them and smell them.” “A Dish of Peaches in Russia” begins, thus, by convening three of the five senses (Stevens, 1997: 206). In the rest of the poem, sight is explicitly verbalized (“I see them” appears in the fourth line) as well as vividly suggested by the color imagery, while hearing is merely implied in the mention of guitar and bell sounds. Sensuous grasp of everyday experience becomes the secularizing gesture that justifies poetry in a belated, profane time. In “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon” (Stevens, 1997: 51), in spite of the poem’s mythical mode and hierophantic tone, what comes across most vividly is its sensuous insistence on the physicality of the image. The subject descending, walking, and feeling; the oblique mention of bodily fluids; and the strong presence of the senses: seeing, hearing, the suggestion of touch in the implications of “ointment,” and

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even taste in the promised tea of the title. In a much later poem, “The Course of a Particular” (Stevens, 1997: 460), the subject “holds off.” But his grasp on a diminished reality of mere “leaves” and “the cry” of leaves is granted him by the sense of hearing. A far cry from “divine attention,” “heroes,” or “fantasia,” poetry coincides with reality, the there-is captured “in the final finding of the ear.” * That poetry is an affair of the senses stands out clearly in Pessoa’s work as well, but is best grasped in Pessoa’s heteronym Alberto Caeiro, the poet who claims, “I am not even a poet: I see.”25 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.26 There is nothing in Caeiro comparable to the “never-ending meditation” of the “eye’s plain version” throughout “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” (Stevens, 1997: 397–417), even if the ordinariness of experience is what concerns both poets. No poem of Caeiro speaks the sensuousness of being-there more simply and more eloquently than Poem IX of O guardador de rebanhos (Pessoa, 1981: 146–147): Sou um guardador de rebanhos. O rebanho é os meus pensamentos E os meus pensamentos são todos sensações. Penso com os olhos e com os ouvidos E com as mãos e os pés E com o nariz e a boca. Pensar uma flor é vê-la e cheirá-la E comer um fruto é saber-lhe o sentido. Por isso quando num dia de calor Me sinto triste de gozá-lo tanto, E me deito ao comprido na erva, E fecho os olhos quentes, Sinto todo o meu corpo deitado na realidade, Sei a verdade e sou feliz. [I’m a keeper of sheep. The sheep are my thoughts And my thoughts are all sensations.

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I think with my eyes and ears And with my hands and feet And with my nose and mouth. To think a flower is to see it and smell it And to eat a fruit is to know its meaning. So, on a hot day When I sadden at so enjoying it, And stretch full-length on the grass, And close my hot eyes, I feel my whole body lying in reality, I know the truth and I’m happy.]27

The untranslatable uncanniness of language is here crucial. Sense-as-thesenses grounds the poem, from the pastoral fiction of rustic hardships to truth finally grasped as reality coinciding with the body. The keeper of sheep is not really a shepherd. He does not keep the sheep, and that on two accounts: because there are no sheep, since the sheep are his thoughts, and because the thoughts do go astray and are lost by being sensations. The thinker (i.e., the philosopher) gives way to the poet (as at the very end of the previous poem about the Child Jesus, to which I will turn in a moment). Only the poet thinks with the body he physically senses. The poet thinks with his eyes and ears, with his hands and feet, with his nose and mouth (remember Stevens: “With my whole body I taste these peaches”). That the two isolated lines dividing the poem in two parts lead to a logical conclusion of sorts (“Por isso” / “So”) only shows how difficult, if not impossible, is the poet’s task of merely looking and seeing. Or looking and seeing “without opinion,” as Caeiro puts it in one of his “Inconjunct Poems” (Pessoa, 1981: 165). If to think a flower is sensuously to see it and smell it, how can eating a fruit be simply to know its meaning? “E comer um fruto é saber-lhe o sentido” [And to eat a fruit is to know its meaning]. “Saber” means “to know,” “knowing,” “knowledge.” “Sentido” does mean “meaning.” But it also means, among other things, “sense” and “felt” or “that which is felt, or sensed.” Thus, “E comer um fruto é saber-lhe o sentido” is far more sensuous than “And to eat a fruit is to know its meaning.” Honig and Brown’s “mistranslation” (“And to eat a fruit is to taste its meaning”) is actually much closer to the sense meaning of the original. In “And to eat a fruit is to taste its meaning,” the translators cleverly took into account the sense of “sentido” and played with the near homophony of “saber” (knowing) and “sabor” (taste). They considered, no doubt, the anaphoric alliteration of “sinto” (I feel) and “sei” (I know), again binding knowledge to the senses in the last two lines of the poem. All along,

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they may also have had in mind the opening of Poem XXI: “Se eu pudesse trincar a terra toda / E sentir-lhe um paladar” (“If I could bite the whole earth / And feel a flavor in it”). The truth, aletheia, is an affair of the senses, and only poetry, before or after philosophy, unconceals it.28 Poetry is not philosophy. Right at the beginning of “Song of Myself,” Whitman puts not only creeds but also schools “in abeyance” (1973: 29). Dickinson, who states in an early poem that the rainbow is more convincing than philosophy (J97/Fr76), demonstrates it brilliantly in “Of Death I try to think like this—” (J1558/Fr1588), where the thinking attempt is translated into the imagery of pure poetry; Stevens compares poetry and philosophy in several of his essays, explicitly in “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet” (1997: 666–685), to come to the same conclusion; Pessoa/Caeiro is the living experience of this negation. As the Portuguese philosopher Eduardo Lourenço, one of Pessoa’s finest readers, argues, philosophy made no sense to Pessoa, if by philosophy is meant a rational discourse to render intelligible reality and the world in which we live and of which we are supposed to be part. As witnessed by Caeiro, metaphysics is a sickness of the mind, as Christianity is a sickness of the soul. Lourenço then reads Poem VIII of The Keeper of Sheep, in which the Child Jesus escapes from heaven to live eternally on earth with the poet, as an account of the death of Christianity and the return of the pagan ethos, never completely eradicated by Christianity.29 More recently, the French philosopher Judith Balso, in the wake of Lourenço’s many exegeses of Pessoa’s work, though without mentioning him, has suggested that Poem VIII deals with the question of poetic mediation. The role of the Child Jesus is compared to that of the goddess that shows the truth (aletheia) to the youth in the first fragment of Parmenides, therefore functioning as a kind of muse.30 But, as I show at length elsewhere, the modernist Pessoa knows only too well that the muse is no longer available outside his own body, outside his own senses.31 What Poem VIII does is to make the Child Jesus, “the god that was missing,” perfectly coincident with the poet, and both with poetry-as-everydayness. In Poem VIII Caeiro tells a sacrilegious story, but a story which, the poet claims at the end, may well be closer to the truth (mais verdadeira) than what philosophers think and religions teach.32 Once at noon at the end of spring, the story begins, a dream came to Caeiro “like a photograph”: he saw Jesus Christ come down to earth turned once more into a child. Disgusted with the stupidity, falseness, vulgarity, and crassness of Roman Catholicism, Jesus stole three miracles from the chest of miracles and escaped from heaven on a sunbeam to live an ordinary life on earth as an eternal child. With the first miracle, he made it impossible for anybody to know he had escaped. With the second, he created himself eternally human and a child. With the third, he left a Christ forever nailed to the cross that hangs in the sky serving as

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a model for others. So, leaving religion untouched for gullible believers, an impish, playful Child Jesus, who misbehaves by taunting animals and playing tricks on people, becomes the poet’s companion and mentor and teaches him everything the poet needs to know—how to see: “He taught me to look at things.” Once tired of speaking ill of God, the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, the human Child Jesus, so human he is “divine,” falls asleep in Caeiro’s arms. Caeiro is sure then that the little urchin is “the god that was missing.” Missing, but certainly not in the vast cohort of pagan deities, for he is still the true Child Jesus (o Menino Jesus verdadeiro). More than an account of the return of the pagan ethos, as Lourenço has it, Poem VIII displays a theory of modern lyric poetry. The middle section of this longest of all of Caeiro’s poems weaves an intricate narrative about a “divine” that is “human,” a “human” that is “natural,” a “missing god” that is the poet’s “quotidian life as a poet,” and a poet that never stops being a poet because his senses were awakened by the child. The child and the poet and “all that exists” are always together, wondering at their own being in the world and making poetry appear: A Criança Nova que habita onde vivo Dá-me uma mão a mim E a outra a tudo que existe E assim vamos os três pelo caminho que houver, Saltando e cantando e rindo E gozando o nosso segredo comum Que é o de saber por toda a parte Que não há mistério no mundo E que tudo vale a pena. [The New Child who dwells where I live Gives me one hand And the other to all that exists And so we take, the three of us, whatever path is there, Skipping and singing and laughing And enjoying our common secret Which is knowing everywhere That there is no mystery in the world And that everything is worthwhile.]

Let me conclude by suggesting that the god that was missing is wonder itself (thaumazein). Not wonder about the divine, the extraordinary or the exceptional, but rather wonder about the profane, the ordinary, or the commonplace—in “everything.” It is “the essential wonder / A child feels if, at

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birth, / He could notice he’s really been born.” And thus I conclude with Poem II of O guardador de rebanhos, a poem that justifies and is justified by Poem VIII and the Eternal Child: O meu olhar é nítido como um girassol. Tenho o costume de andar pelas estradas Olhando para a direita e para a esquerda, E de vez em quando olhando para trás . . . E o que vejo a cada momento É aquilo que nunca antes eu tinha visto, E eu sei dar por isso muito bem . . . Sei ter o pasmo essencial Que tem uma criança se, ao nascer, Reparasse que nascera deveras . . . Sinto-me nascido a cada momento Para a eterna novidade do Mundo . . . Creio no Mundo como num malmequer, Porque o vejo. Mas não penso nele Porque pensar é não compreender . . . O Mundo não se fez para pensarmos nele (Pensar é estar doente dos olhos) Mas olharmos para ele e estarmos de acordo . . . Eu não tenho filosofia: tenho sentidos . . . Se falo na Natureza não é porque saiba o que ela é, Mas porque a amo, e amo-a por isso, Porque quem ama nunca sabe o que ama, Nem sabe por que ama, nem o que é amar . . . Amar é a eterna inocência, E a única inocência é não pensar . . . [My gaze is clear like a sunflower. I take to roaming the roads Looking to my right and to my left, And now and then looking back . . . And what I see all the time Is something I had never seen before, And I am very good at realizing that . . . I know how to have the same essential wonder That a child has if, at birth, He could notice he’d really been born . . .

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I feel I’m being born every moment Into the eternal newness of the world . . . I believe in the world as in a daisy Because I see it. But I don’t think about it Because thinking is not understanding . . . The world was not made for us to think about (Thinking is a sickness of the eyes) But for us to look at it and agree . . . I have no philosophy: I have senses . . . If I speak of Nature it’s not because I know what it is, But because I love it, and that’s why I love it, For whoever loves never knows what they love Nor why they love, nor what loving is . . . Loving is eternal innocence, And the only innocence is not to think.]

What could the “innocence” of “not to think” be but the desubjectivized poeming of Pessoa’s fifth degree of lyric poetry? * “[T]he great poems of heaven and hell have been written and the great poem of the earth remains to be written” (Stevens, 1997: 730). Stevens’s muchquoted statement appears in “Imagination as Value,” first published in 1949 and one of the seven essays included in The Necessary Angel (1951). As in the other six essays, in “Imagination as Value” Stevens also reflects on the essence of poetry and the role of the poet in his time. “I suppose,” Stevens goes on to say, “it [the poem of the earth] is that poem that will constitute the true prize of the spirit and that until it is written many lesser things will be so regarded, including conquests that are not unimaginable.” Since the world, according to Stevens, may well be lost to the poet but not to the imagination, and since the “momentous scale” of the imagination is no longer “the scale of poetry,” one such lesser thing and not unimaginable conquest may well be politics. Stevens refers explicitly to communism, the “grubby faith” that “promises a practicable earthly paradise.” The Cold War rhetoric can be heard in Stevens’s wording, but the major point he wants to make is that poetry is no more politics than it is philosophy or religion (international politics “is not the measure of humanity”; “poetry does not address itself

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to beliefs” [Stevens, 1997: 730, 731]). “The imagination that is satisfied by politics, whatever the nature of politics,” Stevens goes on to say, “has not the same value as the imagination that seeks to satisfy, say, the universal mind, which, in the case of a poet, would be the imagination that tries to penetrate to basic images, basic emotions, and so to compose a fundamental poetry even older than the ancient world” (1997: 732). By “basic” I understand the preconceptual, sensuous experience of reality that grounds poetry’s “intrinsic value,” a value that is not the “value of knowledge” or “faith,” but simply the value of the imagination, albeit imagination conceived of as “the ignorance of the mind” (Stevens, 1997: 734, 736). In Poem XXIV of The Keeper of Sheep, Caeiro calls for “a learning of how to unlearn” [uma aprendizagem de desaprender], as if anticipating the poet-as-ignorant-man in Stevens’s “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction” (1997: 329). In one of his “Inconjunct Poems,” the poet’s unlearning project (i.e., non-project) sounds even more radical: “Vivemos antes de filosofar, existimos antes de o sabermos” [We live before philosophizing, we exist before we know it] (Pessoa, 1981: 174).33 Stevens was unaware of it, but in 1949 the great poem of the earth had already been written. Caeiro’s areligious and apolitical, nonaesthetic and apoetical insistence on the senses, ordinariness and everydayness in the “prose of [his] poems” is Pessoa’s great poem of the earth, older in its wondrous novelty than the ancient world.34 But it would not have been possible without Whitman’s chants of the body and the commonplace in Leaves of Grass, and it would have been impossible without the child’s wonder about the grass in section 6 of “Song of Myself.”35 NOTES 1. Here is the full quote from Goethe’s Zahme Xenien IX: “Wer Wissenschaft und Kunst besitzt, / Hat auch Religion; / Wer jene beiden nicht besitzt, / Der habe Religion.” 2. Stevens may have had Whitman in mind when he wrote, in his joco-serious “Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas” III, “The lean cats of the arches of the churches, / That’s the old world. In the new, all men are priests” (Stevens, 1997: 229). 3. Cf. “The Origin of the Work of Art” (Heidegger, 1993: 143–212 [169–170]). See also Jean-Luc Nancy’s discussion of Heidegger’s “Die Kunst und der Raum” in The Muses (1996: 19). For everydayness as the site of wonder (thaumazein), see Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism” (1993: 217–265). 4. Cf. Ziarek, 2001, esp. chapter 6. 5. In “Old Chants” (Whitman, 1973: 547), the poet acknowledges that the “chieftest debt” of the “New World” may well be to “old poems,” but only because the “old chants” were already “preluding America.”

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6. For a much later, thoughtful reflection on Leaves of Grass, and American poetry in general, and the Western tradition, see Whitman’s “A Backward Glance o’er Travel’d Roads” (1888) (1973: 559–574). 7. On the place of “Debris” in Leaves of Grass, as well as on the importance of the concept for Whitman, see Price, 2008: 59–80. 8. My emphasis. Comparison between the first and the final version shows that Whitman’s boldness as far as substituting himself for God is concerned increased with time. The first version, however, by not separating the singular poet from the commonality of the plural people, is far more eloquent as regards rendering everydayness divine. Here are the two versions of the passage: See ever so far . . . there is limitless space outside of that, Count ever so much . . . there is limitless time around that. Our rendezvous is fitly appointed . . . God will be there and wait till we come. (1855) See ever so far, there is limitless space outside of that, Count ever so much, there is limitless time around that. The rendezvous is appointed, it is certain, The Lord will be there and wait till I come on perfect terms, The great Camerado, the lover true for whom I pine will be there. (1881)

9. “Lá onde estás agora (não sei onde é mas é Deus)” (Pessoa, 2014: 107). Pessoa never allowed Campos to complete his ode to Whitman. For an English translation of the relevant fragment, see Pessoa, 1986a: 72–78 [73]. 10. For a bilingual edition of O guardador de rebanhos, see Pessoa, 1985. 11. Stevens, 1997: 903: “The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly” (“Adagia”). Cf. “So, say that the final belief/ Must be in a fiction.” “Asides on the Oboe” (226). Samuel Taylor Coleridge speaks of the “willing suspension of disbelief” as “poetic faith” in chapter XIV of Biographia Literaria. 12. McIntosh, 2000. See especially the first chapter (Introduction), where McIntosh elaborates on the meaning of Dickinson’s phrase in the draft of a letter to Judge Lord: “On subjects on which we know nothing (. . .) we both believe, and disbelieve a hundred times an Hour, which keeps Believing nimble” (1986: 728 [L750]). 13. Even though he argues a different point, McIntosh’s reasoning supports my reading. 14. See “The Broken Tower” (Crane, 2006: 106). 15. Cf. poems J246/Fr264; J728/Fr754; J1342/Fr1277 (lexicon); J1126/Fr1243; J1651/Fr1715; J1342/Fr1277 (philology). 16. David Jarraway (1993) sums up this issue very well by focusing on the relations between poetry and belief. 17. “Style” as self-coincidence: “The style of a poem and the poem itself are one” (Stevens, 1997: 839). See also what Stevens says about “detached” poetry, “poetry that tries to exist or is intended to exist separately from the poem, that is to say in a style that is not identical with the poem. (. . .) By detached, I mean the unsuccessful, the ineffective, the arbitrary, the literary, the non-umbilical (. . .)” (1997: 846).

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18. Stevens’s preoccupation is not the same as Hölderlin’s, of course, but he knew there was an affinity between them. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Stevens acquired German editions of Hölderlin’s poetry and asked his bookseller to find him a copy of Heidegger’s work on Hölderlin. How much he learned, however, is impossible to tell. Cf. Lindsay Waters’s introduction to Paul de Man, Critical writings, 1953–1978. Ed. Lindsay Waters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989) lix. For Hölderlin’s question about poets in a destitute time (or, in Stevens’s terms, in a time of poverty), see “Brot und Wein” [Bread and Wine] 7 (1998: 318–329 [326/327]). 19. “Que difícil ser próprio e não ver senão o visível!” Poem XXVI of O guardador de rebanhos/ The Keeper of Sheep. 20. See Heidegger’s “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking” (1993: 431–449). Cf. “Aletheia,” Heidegger’s reflections on Heraclitus’s fragment 16 in Vorträge und Aufsätze (1954: 257–282). 21. I take off here from a completely different reading of this poem. See Longenbach, 1991: 43–44. 22. Edward Ragg (2006: 183–209) has some very important things to say about this topic in a learned and perceptive essay on Stevens and Shakespeare. 23. See also “Someone Puts a Pineapple Together” (Stevens, 1997: 693–697). 24. “Weather is a sense of nature. Poetry is a sense,” reads one of Stevens’s “Adagia” (Stevens, 1997: 902). 25. “Eu nem sequer sou poeta: vejo.” “A espantosa realidade das coisas” (The amazing reality of things). From “Poemas inconjunctos” (Inconjunct Poems) (Pessoa, 1981: 169). For a study of the bodily senses as muse, see, in this volume, “The Truant Muse and the Poet’s Body” and “Modernist Muses That Matter: Inspiration Revisited in Pessoa and Stevens.” 26. The anguished questioning is left to Pessoa-himself (the orthonymous Pessoa), Álvaro de Campos, the alleged semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares, and, in stoically serene manner, to Ricardo Reis. 27. Translations are mine, but see Pessoa, 1985 for a bilingual edition of The Keeper of Sheep/O guardador de rebanhos. 28. For a discussion of Caeiro’s “sense” in the context of Pessoa’s conception of “sensationism” and “non-Aristotelian aesthetics” (the latter proposed by Álvaro de Campos), see Ramalho-Santos, 2003b: chapter four, especially pp. 128–132. 29. See, in particular, “Poesia e filosofia em Pessoa” (Lourenço, 2004: 53–70 [55]). 30. Judith Balso (2006: 64–66). Balso must also have Heidegger’s essay on Parmenides in mind. See Heidegger, 1982. 31. See “The Truant Muse and the Poet’s Body” and “Modernist Muses that Matter” infra. 32. In a very interesting note on the importance of heteronymy for a better understanding of lyric poetry and its essential dramaticity (remember the fifth degree of lyric poetry), Pessoa, in propria persona, distances himself from the poet. He says that he was alarmed and disgusted at writing “blasphemy” into Poem VIII (escrevi com sobressalto e repugnância), but, he adds, not to let Caeiro write the way he

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writes would be like denying Shakespeare the right to create Lady Macbeth (. . .). See Pessoa, 1966: 108. 33. “Seja o que for que esteja no centro do mundo” [Whatever is at the center of the world]. Pessoa’s understanding of Caeiro’s poetic radicalism can be seen in the brief span of life he allows this heteronym. In the much-quoted letter on the genesis of the heteronyms, Pessoa tells Casais Monteiro that the “uneducated” Caeiro “was born” in 1889 and “died” in 1915 (1982a: 93–100 [97]). For a complete translation of Pessoa’s letter to Casais Monteiro (January 13, 1935), see Pessoa, 2001: 251–260. 34. In Poem XXVIII of O guardador de rebanhos, Caeiro says, “I write the prose of my poems / And I am happy” (escrevo a prosa dos meus versos / E fico contente). In Poem XXXII, Caeiro distances his poetic self placidly from “the city man,” “the friend of the people.” 35. Cf. Pessoa’s own wonderment at the “phenomenon” named Caeiro in relation to Whitman: “Caeiro, like Whitman, leaves us perplexed. We are thrown off our critical attitude by so extraordinary a phenomenon. We have never seen anything like it. Even after Whitman, Caeiro is strange and appallingly new. Even in our age, when we believe nothing can astonish us nor shout novelty at us, Caeiro does astonish and does breathe absolute novelty. To be able to do this in an age like ours is the definite and final proof of his genius” (Pessoa, 1966: 337; in English in the original).

Chapter 6

Modernist Muses That Matter Inspiration Revisited in Pessoa and Stevens

. . . the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses . . . —Plato, Ion Rasgar-me todo, abrir-me completamente, tornar-me passento . . . —Pessoa, “Ode triunfal” The body quickened and the mind in root . . . —Stevens, “The Rock”

The concept of inspiration, fallen into disrepute in modernist theories of creativity, seems to be coming back. In 1997, Timothy Clark, explicitly following the lead of Maurice Blanchot’s chapter on inspiration in The Space of Literature (L’espace littéraire, 1955), published a whole book entitled The Theory of Inspiration. In this book, Clark, like Blanchot, takes up the muse as well. To discuss inspiration and deal with the question of the muse, including the invocation, is to rethink the being and very foundation of poetry. At about the same time, Jean-Luc Nancy wrote a book entitled Les muses (1994, 2001) that is a kind of counter-Hegelian reflection on art and poetry. Asking anew Heidegger’s question in The Origin of the Work of Art (Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, 1956) “What is art?” (Was is die Kunst?), Nancy takes the plurality of the muses to constitute a proper model for interrogating the plurality of art. Why nine muses, rather than just one? Why so many forms of art, rather than just one? The myth of the nine muses, with their various specializations, helps Nancy to formulate the question that gives the opening essay of his book its title— “Why Are There Several Arts and Not Just One?” (Porquoi y a-t-il plusieurs 85

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arts, et non pas une seule?). The plurality of the worlds is his simple answer, elaborated on in many ways in the course of the book. In this articulation of the plurality of the arts with the plurality of the worlds, however, the problem that really concerns Nancy in Les muses is still the Heideggerian one of how to understand the being and origin of art. Heidegger, conceiving of art as the composing (dichten) of itself as unconcealedness (Unverborgenheit), or the truth (aletheia), insists that all art is in essence (wesentlich) poetry (Dichtung). For Nancy, too, poetry is the most important of the arts because, in its very saying, in its being a saying, it constantly formulates and questions the mystery of its own being, thus fully engaging the senses, while aspiring to transcend them. Art interrupts thought through the senses, and poetry, because language is its medium, is a particularly critical witness to the complexity of such a process. After all, the traditional muse is no more than a figure to explain the inexplicable: What is the being, or essence (Wesen), of poetry? What grounds its power? In modernity, when mimesis and the technicity of rational composition by and large take precedence, the figure of the inspirational muse appears necessarily less credible as a way of asking the most profound and demanding questions about poetic power. Hegel stated this in a different way when he said, not disapprovingly, that art, which he claimed modernity does not need anyway, is a thing of the past (ein Vergangenes) and no longer yields full satisfaction (volle Befriedigung). Full satisfaction comes now rather from knowledge (Wissenschaft) (Hegel, 1967: 30–31, 1979: 11). Are we to conclude that “full satisfaction” comes, therefore, from criticism of poetry? A literary critic, rather than a poet myself, I beg to disagree. Whenever mimesis and the excellence of the poet’s craft are emphasized in conceptions of poetry, the muse must go on a diet and make herself scarce. This happened in antiquity as well, whenever techné took precedence over poesis. Right at the beginning of the Aetia, Callimachus (c. 310 BC–c. 240 BC) was happy to receive the following piece of advice from Apollo: “Poet, feed the sacrificial victim to be as fat as possible but, my friend, keep the Muse slender” (1958: 7). I would like to insist, however, that the concept of inspiration and the figure of the muse, as what founds the poem, are indispensable for our understanding of lyric poetry in modernity as well. In this chapter, I appropriate Judith Butler’s famous title (Bodies That Matter) to signify that the modern poet’s muse is often indistinguishable from the poet’s own body. The poet’s body is the poem’s grounding. Poetry speaks sense by letting the senses speak. The figure of the transcending muse was the ancient prerogative of the male poet in the tradition. Women poets are a different story and I deal with it elsewhere (Ramalho, 2006: 179–201). Invoking the muse was supposed to grant the poet poetic power. But in the nineteenth century something happens.

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Walking along the streets of the modernized city in the age of capital, the poet finds the muse sick and is derisively dismayed that she has to sell herself to survive. Here is the opening line of Baudelaire’s “La muse malade”: “Ma pauvre muse, hélas! qu’as tu donc ce matin?” (My poor muse, alas! what is the matter with you this morning?).1 Of course, if you read Baudelaire’s entire sonnet carefully, you will realize that there is nothing wrong with the “muse.” It is the poet who feels the weight of time and history, the impingements of Christianity, and the demands of capitalism, market economy, and consumer society. In Baudelaire, modernity itself becomes the muse and, for better or worse, provides the music. A century later, things get worse. Stevens speaks of a “bad time” in which a “muse of misery” must be apostrophized (1997: 367–368); and Pessoa realizes that the muse is not there at all, cannot even be addressed, and the word (or song) seems totally out of reach.2 Abandoned by the truant muse, the male modernist poet is thus forced to rethink the old notion of inspiration all over again. What I would like to suggest is that, like women poets ever since Sappho, men poets in modernity have no choice but to turn to their own physical and mortal bodies to ground their poetry writing.3 The Stevens poem just alluded to—“In a Bad Time”—sets a scene in which the poet as “beggar,” facing “poverty and nothing more,” reprimands the muse, “sordid Melpomene,” for no longer doing her job at all. Not surprisingly, it is up to the contemporary American poet to formulate the implicitly paradoxical predicament. In “In Time Keep the Muse Thin,” writes próspero saíz: “The mating of Mnemosyne with Zeus, resulting in the birth of the nine muses is out of memory [of the computer?]. The muses no longer call upon the poets with the gift of the poetic word.” saíz goes on joco-seriously to rethink the poetic in our time—memory being no longer Mnemosyne-mother-of-themuses—by concerning himself with his own body: his “circulatory system,” his “sympathetic nervous system,” the capacity of his heart to produce the “atrial natriuretic factor,” and the “electromagnetic signals” of the “breathturning” of his heart. In the passage from which I am quoting, saíz takes Paul Celan’s “Atemwende” [breathturn] as the quintessentially poetic gesture and literally traces its anatomy in the organic functionings of his own biological body. For the American poet in the twenty-first century, only the caesura of the heartbeat “gathers” poetry. No wonder, then, that the “modern” muse of the contemporary American poet is uncannily corporeal: “I am your muse of flesh and blood.”4 Unlike the contemporary American poet, however, neither Pessoa nor Stevens was ever totally comfortable with his body. Stevens—large, conspicuous, opulent, and American at the outset of the modern empire—is a virile poet of noble sounds, yet excessively bulky, bulging, and too vastly accumulating, and never quite sure of being a native in his own world.

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Relishing, like Kierkegaard, Friedrich Schlegel’s dictum—“Nur Gesundheit ist liebenswürdig” (Health alone is lovable [Stevens, 1951:17])—Stevens toys with the idea of transcendent inspiration but firmly embraces mortality as the ultimate foundation. “Death is the mother of beauty” (Stevens, 1997: 55), he proclaims in “Sunday Morning,” and in “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” he states: “In the flesh [beauty] is immortal” (Stevens, 1997: 74). At the same time, in a number of poems, Stevens goes on insisting on health and good food—and the senses. In “Montrachet-Le-Jardin,” “the naked man” is the “hero” (one of Stevens’s names for poet); actually, he is the “tallest hero and plus gaudiest vir” (Stevens, 1997: 235–237 [236]).5 “With my whole body I taste these peaches” (1997: 206), Stevens writes in “A Dish of Peaches in Russia,” and of these peaches, which further down he tells us sensuously are “red,” have “soft” “skin,” and are full of “juice” and “colors,” he goes on to say: “I touch them and smell them. . . . I absorb them. . . . I see them as a lover sees.” Moreover, when in Stevens we encounter the “major man”—another one of his names for the modern poet—he may be seated in a café, as in “Paisant Chronicle,” and “There may be a dish of country cheese / And a pineapple on the table” (1997: 294). Or, more luxuriously still, as in “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction,” he may be found eating “lobster Bombay with mango / Chutney” washed down with “Meursault” (Stevens, 1997: 347). Pessoa, on the other hand—slight, ill-disposed, obscure, and Portuguese to boot at the dead-end of the old seaborne empire—is often overwhelmed by sickness. He does not seem to need any food at all and is not particularly fussy about wine, for the end of wine is “vomiting” (Pessoa, 1981: 355). In any case, both poets came to realize, albeit with different kinds and degrees of reluctance, that all they could have to ground their poetry writing was their own physical and mortal bodies. Here is the Portuguese modernist poet’s lament for the inadequate replacement of the absent muse by his diminished, sickly body (Pessoa, 1981: 330): Os Antigos invocavam as Musas. Nós invocamo-nos a nós mesmos. Não sei se as Musas apareciam— Seria sem dúvida conforme o invocado e a invocação.— Mas sei que nós não aparecemos. Quantas vezes me tenho debruçado Sobre o poço que me suponho E balido “Ah!” para ouvir um eco, E não tenho ouvido mais que o visto— O vago alvor escuro com que a água resplandece Lá na inutilidade do fundo . . .

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Nenhum eco para mim . . . Só vagamente uma cara, Que deve ser a minha, por não poder ser de outro. É uma coisa quase invisível, Excepto como luminosamente vejo Lá no fundo . . . No silêncio e na luz falsa do fundo . . . Que Musa! . . . [The Ancients invoked the Muses. We invoke ourselves. I don’t know if the Muses appeared— It would no doubt depend on the invoked and the invocation.— But I know we do not appear. How often have I leant over Into the well that I suppose myself to be And bleated “Ah!” to hear an echo, And have heard nothing more than the seen— The vague dark dawn that is the water’s sheen Down there in the uselessness of the depth . . . No echo for me . . . Only a face vaguely, Which must be mine since it can’t be anybody else’s. It’s an almost invisible thing, Except as I luminously see Down there in the depth . . . In the silence and false light of the depth . . . What a Muse!]

What I have just quoted is a poem signed by Fernando Pessoa’s heteronym, Álvaro de Campos. It is not just that the vagabond muse has been gone a long time. What happens is that poetry has no grounding any more. Forced to invoke himself, the modern poet is unable to respond to the call. The narcissistic gesture of self-invocation mixes up the myths to signify the poet’s lonely silence. Left but with the barely visible reflection of his own face at the bottom of the deep well that is his own being, the poet is like a bodiless Narcissus that dares not embrace his own image and is therefore denied even the echo of a voice. The reflected face that he believes to be his own, apparently “because it can’t be anybody else’s,” is really not his proper face, but rather a heteronymic face, and the reflection of a heteronymic face, at that. What a (non)muse indeed! Thus left alone with bottomless inspiration, the modernist poet has no choice but to grapple its corporeality. A sick body is Campos’s usual way of

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poeming (dichten). In a poem that reads like an ironic account of his poetic career at the end of his life, Campos claims finally to have understood himself by sensing his stomach. The “truth” is unconcealed in his feeling it with his bowels (Arre, encontrei uma solução, e foi preciso o estômago! / Encontrei uma verdade, senti-a com os intestinos! [Darn, I found a solution, and I had to use my stomach! / I found one truth, felt it with my intestines!]) (Pessoa, 1981: 345). The very existence of “Álvaro de Campos,” the heteronymic person that is not Pessoa-himself, is, of course, already a problematization of poetry (Dichtung). It points to the “crisis” that is Clark’s concern in The Theory of Inspiration, whose subtitle is Composition as a Crisis of Subjectivity in Romantic and Post-Romantic Writing.6 But Campos’s poeming pushes it further. In Campos’s poetry, Pessoa recreates the muse and restores inspiration by indulging in his highly (homo)sexualized, masochist, masturbatory body, a body that a would-be straight Pessoa, in a very macho, deeply prejudiced Portugal at the beginning of the twentieth century, could not but sense as profoundly sick. In “Ode triunfal” [Triumphal Ode], Pessoa’s body-as-muse is powerfully expressed by an extraordinary, untranslatable metaphor: passento (1981: 240–245).7 The use Pessoa makes of this unusual word—passento—in Campos’s ode requires all the meanings associated with the verb passar [to pass], both transitive and intransitive (passing, letting pass, suffering, enduring, disappearing, dying). As the ambiguities of the triumphal chant get under way—the feverish poet torn between the elating force and the crippling pain of the machines—a timely cry for inspiration is put in place. What muse could bring the poet the words capable of expressing all the contradictions of modernity, which of course include all the contradictions of antiquity and of all time? How can the poet express the promiscuity of time and space and their intersections and passages? There may be no answer to these questions. All we have is the poet’s sensuously hyperbolic desire, suggesting that the answer must lie in the promiscuous organicity of his own homoerotic body. Aroused by his own astonishment at the complex accomplishments of modernity, the poet is inspired by his physical, corporeal incapacity to voice them: Ah, poder exprimir-me todo como um motor se exprime! Ser completo como uma máquina! Poder ir na vida triunfante como um automóvel último-modelo! Poder ao menos penetrar-me fisicamente de tudo isto, Rasgar-me todo, abrir-me completamente, tornar-me passento A todos os perfumes de óleos e carvões Desta flora estupenda, negra, artificial e insaciável! (240) [Oh to be able to express my whole being as an engine expresses itself!

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To be complete like a machine! To go triumphantly through life like the latest model car! To be able at least to penetrate myself physically with all this, Rip myself wide open, and become passento Of all the perfumes of the oils and hot coals Of this stupendous, artificial and insatiable black flora!]

There is no such passento body in Stevens. The closest you may get in Stevens to Pessoa/Campos’s unhealthy imaginings is the sick man who, in the poem of the same title, chooses the good speech “out of himself, out of everything within him” (Stevens, 1997: 455).8 But I would like to suggest that the body as “susceptible being” is for the American poet, too, the proper site of inspiration. I have just alluded to “A Discovery of Thought,” a late poem of Stevens’s that locates itself “At the antipodes of poetry” (Stevens, 1997: 459). Here, images of birth, infancy, and generation abound to stress the “Surviving being born, the event of life” at the end of the poem. The “first word spoken,” the poem states, is “the susceptible being arrived,” and the “susceptible” is identified with what Heidegger called unconcealedness (“disclosure,” is Stevens’s word), that is to say, with the truth of poetry: The first word would be of the susceptible being arrived, The immaculate disclosure of the secret no more obscured.

In “The Rock,” another late poem in which an aging Stevens reminisces about poetic creativity by articulating nature, the senses, and the imagination, a striking corporeal image makes its appearance halfway through. The leaves, the poem says, are more than leaves that cover the barren rock. They bud the whitest eye, the pallidest sprout, New senses in the engenderings of sense, The desire to be at the end of distances, The body quickened and the mind in root. (446)

In the last two lines of this passage (“The desire to be at the end of distances, / The body quickened and the mind in root”), we hear how the poet’s desire, engendered by the leaves, not only includes the aliveness of the body but also calls for the animality of a mind in root. Strikingly enough, “in root,” like the snout of a hog in search of food, syntactically parallels “in love” in the next line (“[The leaves] bloom as a man loves, as he lives in love”). “Root,” as an erotic image of sound, masculine materiality (“penis”),

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provides Stevens with one more epithet for the poet: “root-man” as “superman” (Stevens, 1997: 236).9 No wonder, then, that Stevens’s poet is more often than not a “massive body and long legs, stretched out,” a “giant ever changing” (1997: 380), a “naked man” (1997: 220), a “hero” (1997: 244– 250), a “central man,” a “human globe,” a “man of glass,” whose “naked” “transparence” (1997: 226–227) binds him firmly to the stark reality of the earth-as-human-dwelling. In an earlier essay, “The Woman in the Poem: Wallace Stevens, Ramon Fernandez and Adrienne Rich,” I discuss Stevens’s deconstruction of the muse myth in “To the One of Fictive Music” and “The Idea of Order at Key West” (Ramalho-Santos, 1988). In the first of these two poems, the poet engages in deconstruction by playing with, or amusing himself with, the very word “muse” and making of the myth a mortal affair of human generation. Often, in Stevens’s poetry, the name of the sister and, particularly, the name of the mother are invoked as “the purpose” of the poem (1997: 356). In “The Idea of Order at Key West,” the traditional invocation of the woman’s voice as the source of poetry-making gives way to philosophical musings on the nature and function of poetry. That Ramon Fernandez, the regular critic of La nouvelle revue française, is made to play the dumb part as an irrelevant interlocutor, may well signify that the meaning of poetry lies in the poetic itself, and not in the “old descriptions of the world” that so much tire Stevens’s “latest freed man” (1997: 187). A fine counterpart to these two muse poems is “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon” (Stevens, 1997: 51): Not less because in purple I descended The western day through what you called The loneliest air, not less was I myself. What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard? What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears? What was the sea whose tide swept through me there? Out of my mind the golden ointment rained, And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard. I was myself the compass of that sea: I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw Or heard or felt came not but from myself; And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

Harold Bloom’s uplifted and uplifting reading of the poem, in which Hoon, Whitman, and “the girl at Key West” are, according to the critic, brought together to signify the essence of poetry, is well known (1977: 63–67). But

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let me highlight in the poem the body that matters, that is to say, the poem’s sensuous insistence on the physicality of the image (even without mention of the slangish connotation of hoon-hooligan). The subject descending, walking, and feeling; the oblique mention of bodily fluids; and the question about the senses: seeing, hearing, the suggestion of touch in the implications of “ointment,” and even taste in the promised tea of the title—the body is, to my mind, where the poet finds himself “more truly and more strange.” Stevens’s lifelong engagement with the complex articulation between reality and the imagination comes down to this: that poetry is nothing if it is not “the real.” When, in “Metaphor as Degeneration,” the poet denies that metaphor is degeneration and insists that “being / Includes death and the imagination,” he cannot but have the promise and mortality of the human body in mind: the man “in black space” counters the man “white as marble” (Stevens, 1997: 381). “The body is the great poem,” Stevens writes in one of his “Adagia” (1997: 908). In “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet” (the essay in which Stevens compares poetry with philosophy to conclude that poetry is not philosophy), the poet takes up the question of the muse once again in terms that are not unexpectedly generational and patriarchal, alluding to “son” and “father” and the male sex of centuries (section 5 begins with the much-quoted sentence: “The centuries have a way of being male”). The muse, the (female) muse is dismissively defined as “a kind of sister of the Minotaur,” “somehow more than human” and “half-beast” as well (Stevens, 1997: 675). A few pages down, the beast-like, “mystic muse” is discarded altogether. Interestingly enough, as he recreates the self-sufficient poet, it is as if Stevens-the-thinker were quoting Stevens-the-poet by setting off from the rest of the text and highlighting with italics the following statement about the senses replacing the muse, presumably authored by his poetic self: No longer do I believe that there is a mystic muse, sister of the Minotaur. This is another of the monsters I had for nurse, whom I have wasted. I am myself a part of what is real, and it is my own speech and the strength of it, this only, that I hear or ever shall. (1997: 680)

The poet’s reasoning on the foundation of poetic creativity thus requires “a return to fact,” “sense,” and “sensibility,” leads to the realization that “poetry is only reality,” and reaches the conclusion that “fact” is what constitutes “poetic truth” (one is reminded here of “The eye’s plain version” [Stevens, 1997: 397] at the beginning of “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven”). Fact-as-imagination (or the muse-less embodied poet) is what modern poetry is all about. The imagination is nothing but the real, for the world of fact is the equivalent of the world of the imagination: “Real and unreal are

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two in one” (Stevens, 1997: 414), he says in “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven.” After all, reality and the imagination, Stevens insists in “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet,” “look” alike. The body grounds the real (“fact”) and the unreal (“the imagination”) at one and the same time (Stevens, 1997: 681). And so the poet repeats his own sense of himself as poetic foundation: “I am myself a part of what is real and it is my own speech and the strength of it, this only, that I hear or ever shall” (Stevens, 1997: 682; repeated with variation further down). The essay’s last couple of pages insist on “sensibility” and “feeling” to stress the young poet’s virility, an idea that, far from being merely theoretical (or, as Stevens puts it, far from being “lost . . . in the folds of the garments of the ghost or ghosts of Aristotle”), underwrites the physicality of the “masculine nature” of “genius” (Stevens, 1997: 684–685). I have written elsewhere about the unsurprising masculinism of Stevens’s “supreme fiction” (Ramalho-Santos, 2003b: 212–213). Here, I just want to point out that, in himself, in his own body, the poet still remains inscrutable to himself. He may have discarded the “mystic” muse, but precisely for that very reason he needs to address the female other, or, we might say paraphrasing Karen Swann (and Stevens, for that matter), the male poet needs to “harass the muse” in order to justify his own autonomous manly being (1988: 91–92).10 “Inexplicable sister of the Minotaur,” Stevens apostrophizes as he substitutes himself for the muse in his conclusion, “hear me and recognize me as part of the unreal” (1997: 685). In Canto X of “It Must Give Pleasure” in Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, the poet goes even further, invoking the “more than natural” figure to put her finally in the “difference” of her place and thus establish his (that is to say, poetry’s) own grounding. Whether familiar or aberrant, seductive or overworked, the woman brings the corporeal sensuousness (“Fat girl, terrestrial”; “my green, my fluent mundo”) that confirms the undisputed mastery of the male (heterosexual) poet, whose fiction, the supreme fiction, “results from feeling” (Stevens, 1997: 351). I agree with early Gerald Bruns that Stevens often sounds as if he were finally making true the idealist coincidence of poetry and reality as propounded by the German romantics (e.g., Novalis’s assertion that “poetry is absolutely and genuinely real” [Die Poesie ist das echt absolut Reelle, Fr. 1853]) (1974: 209). But I would bring in as well Stevens’s “fascination” with the senses, as Charles Altieri calls it, to understand rather that, in Stevens, the real is the ultimate, absolute poem. The poem’s ambition is to be reality, to take the place of a mountain and breathe its oxygen. In “The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain,” in a truly Whitmanian manner, Stevens’s poet and poem are one with their own material locality. The poet’s “breath” (what used to be called inspiration) somehow achieves completion as a mountain that is the poet’s own body. It is tempting to surmise that Stevens may have had New Haven’s Sleeping Giant in mind. More important than that, however,

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is to account for poetry-making (poietiké) as coinciding with the human act of existing. Heidegger’s conception of poetry as building, dwelling, thinking (bauen wohnen denken) is in order here. Acting, or sensuously grasping (greifen), is what poeming (dichten) is all about.11 Philosophy may worry about distinguishing the “real” from the “unreal,” but poetry delights in the disquieting confusion of “is” and “as.” For the poet, we learn in “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” “made up” minds are fatal (Stevens, 1997: 403). Poetry provides no answers. Poetry questions and interpellates. Poetry extemporizes. That the poet’s extemporizing in “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” relies heavily on the senses (particularly, but not exclusively, on sight) is easy to demonstrate. What is perhaps not so visible is the extent to which the poem’s imagery calls for the reader’s sensuous engagement as well: How else could the “little reds” be truly “realized”? (Stevens, 1997: 416). Poetry requires three bodies: the poet’s, the poem’s, and the reader’s. As Pessoa once memorably said through Campos’s body, “the poem is always written the following day” (1981: 310). NOTES 1. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own. 2. For a fuller treatment of this problem in Pessoa’s work, see “The Truant Muse and the Poet’s Body” infra. 3. On women poets and inspiration, see Ramalho, 2006. 4. próspero saíz, “The Modern Muse.” A striking, unpublished poem. I thank the poet for letting me use it here. 5. For a fine, thorough reading of this difficult, “gastronomic” poem, see Edward Ragg, 2010: 143–165. 6. Pessoa is unfortunately not one of the poets studied by Timothy Clark. 7. See also Richard Zenith’s translation of this ode in Literary Imagination (Pessoa, 2000). 8. I deal with sickness as a metaphor for poetry in Pessoa and Stevens in “A doença do poeta” (Ramalho-Santos, 1987). 9. The Oxford English Dictionary registers “root” as a slang term for “penis,” first example from 1846. Stevens could not but have this meaning in mind as well. We know he was an assiduous visitor of the OED, often sending a junior employee of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company to the library to check words for him. 10. Cf. the “harassing master” in “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” (Stevens, 1997: 486). 11. For the Heidegger references, which suggest to me a reading of Stevens’s “hands” and “touch” somewhat different from Carolyn Masel’s in “Stevens and the Language of Touch,” see “Building Dwelling Thinking” and “What Calls for Thinking” in Basic Writings, 343–91. Cf. Vorträge und Aufsätze, 129–162.

Chapter 7

The Truant Muse and the Poet’s Body

Encontrei uma verdade, senti-a com os intestinos! Álvaro de Campos Something unknowable is traversing my vagus nerve. próspero saíz

The origin of the muses is lost in antiquity. They have always been more than one and are said to be the daughters of a female Titan, Mnemosyne (Memory), and Zeus. Traditionally, the muses signify the power of creativity but they do not have the power themselves. They are merely the vessels to convey the power. The names by which we came to know the nine muses and the competences of each one of them seem to have been established in ancient Rome. Their nine specialities are somehow all related to music or language: Calliope (epic poetry), Clio (history), Erato (lyric poetry), Euterpe (music), Melpomene (tragedy), Polymnia (sacred poetry), Terpsichore (dance), Thalia (comedy), and Urania (astronomy). In the tradition, the muses ended up being mainly associated with poetry. When there is mention of invocation of the muses, it is usually poetry that is in question. Poets invoke “the muses” or, more frequently, “the muse” for “inspiration.” It comes as no surprise that the muse, or the muses, should often become a metonym for poetry itself. When the young William Blake surmises in his Poetical Sketches (1783) that “the muses” “wander fair” or “rove” in far-off distances “forsaking Poetry,” what the reader understands is that poetry writing at the end of the eighteenth century had become repetitively sterile and lost its power to surprise: “The sound is forc’d, the notes are few” (Blake, 408–409). The question of the muses and their invocation is therefore really a question about the meaning and the very foundation of poetry. 97

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Jean-Luc Nancy has written a whole book explaining why the muses are more than one. Nancy’s question concerns the plurality of the arts, and I shall not deal with this problem here. But from Nancy’s dialogue with and elaboration on Hegelian aesthetics, I would like to take three ideas. First, art has no beginning or end; hence, there is no question of “origin.” Second, the arts have to do with the senses in that they separate “the sense” (both feeling and meaning) from common sense or signification. This concept of separation [séparation, dégagement] should be articulated with the concept of interruption, to which Nancy resorts here and that I have been using in my work as well (Ramalho-Santos, 2003b, chap. 7 and passim). Third, of all the arts, poetry, because language is its medium, is the one in which this “separation” can best be observed. The “proper” of poetry, writes Nancy, invoking Paul Celan and Fernando Pessoa, is the “outside” [dehors]. Poetry, insists Nancy, “names the outside” (1994: 57, 1996: 30–31). The passage from Celan’s Meridian quoted by Nancy indeed stresses the “outside” of art, its open-endedness, its being without resolution, without beginning or end.1 The Pessoa poem, on the other hand, is number XXXIX of Alberto Caeiro’s O guardador de rebanhos [The Keeper of Sheep], the one that asks about “the mystery of things” and ends up proclaiming that their mystery (their “hidden sense”) is that there is no mystery, no “hidden sense at all.” What there is is “existence” and “sense,” and nothing else (Pessoa, 1981: 157).2 Nancy, who seems to have written passages of his book on “the muses” with Armand Guibert’s Pessoa/Caeiro very much in mind, might have wished to invoke poem number V as well, with its debunking of “metaphysics” and propounding “loving” without “thinking”; or poem number XXVIII, the one about the “mystic poets” that are “sick philosophers” because they speak about the “feelings” of “things,” whereas “things” like flowers, stones, and rivers have no feelings, they merely exist. “Feelings,” in Portuguese, is “sentimentos,” from “sentir” [to feel] and related to “sentidos,” the senses. “Sentidos” without “sentimentos” is like sense without signification. Thus, the poem summons up “sense” without “signification.” It reveals what we might call, after Caeiro, “the outsidedness” of nature. Or rather of “things,” since “Nature doesn’t exist,” only trees, flowers, rivers, and stones “exist.” Unlike the “mystic poets,” or the “false poets” mentioned in another poem (XXVIII), Caeiro’s poet simply writes the prose of his verses and is happy, for he is “the outside.”3 It is not “the center” but the “space outside” that is the only “reality,” as the poet says in one of his “Poemas inconjunctos” [Inconjunct Poems], and the outside [o exterior] is what we are “essentially” (Pessoa, 1981: 174–176). What I would like to suggest by way of Nancy and of the poets themselves is that poetry distances itself by interrupting thought and by speaking the sense in the senses (or the body).4 Here is Pessoa/Caeiro on “The Wondrous Reality of Things,” one of the “Inconjunct poems”: “Eu nem sequer sou poeta; vejo”

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[I’m not even a poet; I see] (Pessoa, 1981: 169). Meanwhile Bernardo Soares, the practicing theoretician of Pessoa’s heteronymic poeming, states: “Ver é estar distante. . . . Analisar é ser estrangeiro” [To see is to be distant. . . . To analyse is to be foreign] (Pessoa, 1998a: 113, 2001a: 80).5 Poetry makes the radically other appear. Poetry is by distancing itself and consenting to the utter otherness of death, of existence. To exist is to die, an apparent paradox that poets formulate in many different ways. “Eternity” is the “Term,” says Emily Dickinson, and Mallarmé once heard “death triumph[ing]” in the poet’s “strange voice,” while Pessoa-as-Bernardo Soares proclaims: “Viver é ser outro” [To live is to be other] and “Somos morte” [We are death]. The Caeiro poem that best illustrates Nancy’s thinking on the uncanny disengagedness of poetry, especially in “Le vestige de l’art” [The Vestige of Art], is number XLIII of O guardador de rebanhos:6 Antes o vôo da ave que passa e não deixa rasto, Que a passagem do animal, que fica lembrado no chão. A ave passa e esquece, e assim deve ser. O animal, onde já não está e por isso de nada serve, Mostra que já esteve, o que não serve para nada. A recordação é uma traição à Natureza, O que foi não é nada, e lembrar é não ver. Passa, ave, passa, e ensina-me a passar! [Rather the flight of the bird that passes and leaves no trace, Than the passing of the animal, that is remembered on the ground. The bird passes and forgets, and this is as it should be. The animal, where it no longer is and is therefore of no use, Shows it was there, which is totally without use. Remembrance is a betrayal of Nature. What was is nothing, and remembering is not-seeing. Pass by, bird, pass by, and teach me to pass by!]

The poetic is always on the verge of not-being, like existence/death, best expressed by the bird’s traceless flight in Caeiro, or by the passing of the stage coach in another Caeiro poem. In the latter, number XLII of O guardador de rebanhos, poetry, that is to say, human making (or, as the poem puts it, “human action”) is absolutely traceless: “Nada tiramos e nada pomos; passamos e esquecemos” [We take nothing, we add nothing; we pass by and forget]. Ultimately, the poem, says Celan in the passage already quoted, “does not exist.” In the following non-existing poem by próspero saíz (a fine reader of Celan), the mutually “missing” senses (“the eye missing the hand”)

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are the only way of capturing the “rhythm” of being—“soft vanishing flow” or “flowing stillness”:7 red sand trickling down one grain at a time the eye missing the hand the eye missing the earth a soft vanishing flow the brain a rhythm a flowing stillness

Poets have access to (or “sense”) the radical, inhuman otherness that grounds the poetic by speaking the foreignness of language. Rimbaud, the poet who aimed to become a seer by a “long, immense and reasoned [raisonné] derangement of all the senses,” was probably the first to speak his “other” in literal terms: “Je est un autre.”8 Pessoa spoke himself into many other selves, but the closest to an absolute “other” among his heteronyms is Caeiro. “Closest,” I say, because the “othering” process makes Caeiro “sick,” the poet has trouble taking a bite of the earth and tasting it, or seeing only the visible, and, like Stevens, he embraces imperfection. To “sense,” that is to say, to “see” the “things” in “things,” or “the outside,” is a course in unlearning. If poem XXIV states it very clearly—poetry requires a learning of how to unlearn [uma aprendizagem de desaprender]—poem XLVI provides the course syllabus for writing poetry as if it were something that just happened to the poet, like the sun shining on him “from the outside” [de fora]. The difficulty of the process is patent in the wording of the poem: poetry writing as the random and nondeliberate nature of what “chances to occur” [conforme calha], and the near impossibility of making word and idea coincide, or of sensing sense. The learning process consists in undressing oneself, unpacking one’s true emotions, unwrapping one’s self, and finally finding oneself, not one’s self, but “a human animal that Nature produced” [um animal humano que a Natureza produziu]. In this poem we find out that poetry demands much more than Pessoa’s othering process, beyond the fifth degree of lyric poetry, as it were. We discover that what Pessoa called outrar-se and outridade has no end.9 We learn that the poet who at last finds himself “the Discoverer of Nature,” “the Argonaut of true sensation,” he that brings “the Universe to the Universe,” is not even Caeiro. A “human animal,” Caeiro as non-Caeiro is no poet that can be known at all. As he senses, he is the universe coinciding with his own body: “Sentir a vida correr por mim como um rio por seu leito” [To

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sense life flowing through me like a river along its bed]. Having thus located himself on the very ground of the poetic, Pessoa’s Caeiro embodies poetry itself. He (his “body”) happens, or chances, as poetry. What use would Caeiro have for a muse? His body (he is a “mystic in the body”) and his senses (“Vi como um danado” [I saw like a doomed one]) transport him to the strange distance of poetic language.10 No wonder Álvaro de Campos is jealous of his much admired “master.” Like Hölderlin’s “Der Einzige” [The Only One], Campos’s poem “Mestre, meu mestre querido” hankers desperately after the distant and foreign, yet inescapable being of poetry (Pessoa, 1981: 303–304; Hölderlin, 1998: 218–223). “My Master and my Lord!,” cries out Hölderlin, “O you, my teacher! / Why did you stay / Away?” [Mein Meister und Herr! / O du, mein Lehrer! / Was bist du ferne / Geblieben?]. Left without an answer, the poet is compelled to return to his sole self and his own frailty: “And yet I know, it is my / Own fault” [Ich weiß es aber, eigene Schuld / Ists!]. The song has come too much from his heart, and there is a wide gap between his desire and his accomplishment (“Much though I wish to, never / Do I strike the right measure” [Nie treff ich, wie ich wünsche, / Die Maas]). The poet’s “fault” is strange, however, for it is the consequence of the absence of the gods. After the gods disappeared from the earth, the poet, earlier struck by divine love, remains hopelessly “worldly.” The last two lines of the poem sum up the poetic paradox with a force that the English version lacks: “Die Dichter müssen auch / Die geistigen weltlich seyn” [The poets, the spiritual ones, must also be worldly]. No matter that Pessoa probably never read Hölderlin: Campos’s “Mestre, meu mestre querido” reads like a belated, uncanny commentary on “Der Einzige.” “Ergo as mãos para ti, que estás tão longe, tão longe de mim!” [I lift up my hands to you, so far away, so far from me!] is how Campos conjures up Hölderlin’s cry about the aspired-to uniqueness of poetry’s experience. It is as if Hölderlin’s poet had to be more than one poet to speak the poetic in a more destitute time. Caeiro harbors in himself the longing for the ancient gods even as he offers protection from such dangerous longing; Campos can’t understand but longs for and dreads the longing itself. The word “refúgio” in the line “Refúgio das saudades de todos os deuses antigos” (translated by Honig and Brown as “Refuge from the nostalgia for all the old gods” [Pessoa, 1986: 92]) is ambiguous, for it points to Caeiro both as refuge from inordinate desire (the desire, that is, to come as close as possible to the divine) and as the very site of desire. In Campos, the absence of the gods is not perceived as the absence of a presence but rather as absolute absence: Caeiro “died” in 1915. And yet, rather than an elegy for the death of Caeiro, “Mestre, meu mestre querido” is actually a hymn addressed to the “master,” authorizing the disciple-poet’s “life,” “origin,” and “inspiration.”11 If an elegy at all, it is an elegy for Campos himself, the poet who has a glimpse of the total disengagedness of the poetic (in the objectivity, or

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“thingness,” of Caeiro’s non-poems) only to end up trapped in the “subjectivized world.” Campos’s observations in his “Notas para a recordação do meu mestre Caeiro” [Notes toward remembering my master Caeiro] testify to his inability to grasp Caeiro’s tranquil sense of objective reality—what Campos calls here Caeiro’s “direct concept of things” [conceito directo das coisas]. Because he cannot really grasp them, Campos is tormented by the presentness of reality, the immediacy of space, and the inexorability of time. That is why he is so frustrated by his conversation with Caeiro about “the infinite” that is not “there,” or the yellow flower that is just a “yellow flower” and yet never the same (Pessoa, 1981: 180–183).12 Campos’s ode to Caeiro asks all the important questions about lyric poetry: questions about the subject and the object, the human and the inhuman, nature and language, life and death. It is a poem about the foundation of poetry, the ever-elusive origin that some of us still call “inspiration.”13 “Mestre, meu mestre querido” is really a muse poem, albeit without a traditional muse. The truth is that the muse is no longer available. As Campos intuits it with a certain degree of resentment, Caeiro needs no intermediary messenger to access poetic power because he embodies poetic power itself. We might say, to borrow Hölderlin’s beautiful formulation in “Brot und Wein” [Bread and Wine], that Caeiro is the very site where the poetic appears—like flowers: “Seguro como um sol fazendo o seu dia involuntariamente, / Natural como um dia mostrando tudo” [Sure as a sun making its day involuntarily, / natural as a day showing everything]. Campos, on the contrary, is torn between Caeiro’s dreadful knowledge of the senses [a pavorosa ciência de ver] and the senselessness of the quotidian normality that makes up common human destiny. He, more indeed than any other heteronym, could use the intermediation of the muse, that old prerogative of the male poet in the tradition. But once Baudelaire found the muse sick and even derisively stated that she had to sell herself to survive, the modernist poet could hardly bring her back.14 Abandoned by the truant muse, the male modernist poet was forced to turn to his own mortal body to ground his poetry writing. To deal with the body is never easy for Pessoa; the effort often makes him sick, even though sickness is where he most finds himself. Sickness, in Pessoa, is ever linked with what Eduardo Lourenço has called the poet’s “sexual panic,” or, I would say rather, his homosexual panic, the concern that his “feminine” (i.e., “passive”) side might eventually take over his “masculine” (i.e., “active”) “whole” being. If the ostensibly heterosexual Ricardo Reis seems to avoid the problem by merely letting himself listlessly feel his own passing through life and poetry, Campos, in his “Notes toward remembering my master Caeiro,” points to the discomfort of the organic (physiological) genesis of Pessoa’s poetry by invoking the first encounter between Reis and Caeiro. When he met Caeiro, Reis “found out he was organically a poet.” As

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he thus became a poet in his body, Campos argues, Reis “stopped being a woman and became a man, or stopped being a man and became a woman.” “Naked man” or “sensation of [himself],” in “the complexity of his simplicity” Caeiro embodies the Ur-poem, the primordiality of the poetic itself. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that Caeiro’s bout of illness ends up justifying his “separate” being by showing the “opposite” [o contrário] of what he is.15 Álvaro de Campos and Bernardo Soares are the most afflicted, the latter, once again, the practicing theorizer of the self-interruptive, creative body: “Dói-me a cabeça hoje, e é talvez do estômago que me dói. Mas a dor, uma vez sugerida do estômago, vai interromper as meditações que tenho por detrás de ter cérebro” [I have a headache today, and it comes perhaps from my stomach. But the pain, once suggested by the stomach, is going to interrupt the meditations I have behind my having a brain] (Pessoa, 1998a: 309). Álvaro de Campos is, however, the most interesting case. He is sick even before he becomes Álvaro de Campos. In “Opiário,” an “old” poem of Campos’s written before he met Caeiro and actually became Campos, the poet, beleaguered by fever and weakness, individual and national despondency, general indisposition and opium dependency, is at best convalescent. If “Opiário” already has “Álvaro in the bud,” as Pessoa explained to Casais Monteiro, no wonder “Álvaro” has so much trouble with his body.16 The only way for him to “sense,” and thus make the poem appear, may well be to fall sick. Of course, the poet’s ailing body is no match for the traditional muse, but at least it doesn’t play truant. “Os Antigos invocavam as musas” [The Ancients invoked the muses] is Álvaro de Campos’s lament for the inadequate replacement of the absent muse by the poet’s diminished body.17 It is not just that the vagabond muse has been gone a long time. What happens is that poetry has no grounding any longer. Forced to invoke himself, the modern poet is unable to respond to the call. The narcissistic gesture of self-invocation mixes up the myths to signify the poet’s lonely silence. Left but with the barely visible reflection of his own face at the bottom of the deep well that is his own being, the poet is like a bodiless Narcissus that dares not embrace his own image and is therefore denied even the echo of a voice. The reflected face that he believes to be his own “because it can’t be anybody else’s” is really not his proper face but rather a heteronymic face, and the reflection of a heteronymic face, at that. The muse’s nonexistence is even more powerfully dramatized in “Tabacaria” [Tobacco Shop], an earlier poem (1928) that reads like a metaleptic commentary on “Os Antigos invocavam as Musas” (1935). Halfway through, “Tabacaria” (Pessoa, 1981: 296–300) is interrupted by a strange parenthetical invocation that nonetheless leaves the poet literally empty-hearted: “Meu coração é um balde despejado” [My heart is a bucket that’s been emptied]. The invocation is addressed to an indeterminate, evanescent giver of comfort that “doesn’t exist” and “therefore” does

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give comfort, a feminine principle as the ancient muse would have to be, but not the muse herself as conveyer of poetic power, rather the eroticized idea of woman-as-inspiration in the predominantly male literary history, from antiquity (“deusa grega” [Greek goddess], “patrícia romana” [patrician Roman matron]) through the Middle Ages and modernity (“princesa de trovadores” [princess of the troubadours], “marquesa do século XVIII” [eighteenth-century marchioness], “cocote célebre” [famous cocotte]) to the contemporaneity of the poet’s own creative destitution: “não sei quê moderno—não concebo bem o quê . . . invoco / A mim mesmo e não encontro nada” [some modern something—I can’t quite imagine what . . . I invoke / Myself and find nothing]. The unexpected parenthesis, which seems at first meant to bring some relief from the entire poem’s oppressive nothingness, concludes with the utter foreignness of things. The poet “sees,” apparently like Caeiro (“Vejo . . . / Vejo . . . / Vejo . . .”), that everything is “foreign,” as if consciousness of himself in his obsession with signification earlier in the poem (“Que sei eu do que serei, eu que não sei o que sou?” [What do I know of what I’ll be, I who don’t know what I am?]) could not but prevent him from “sensing.” The poet ends up merely feeling like the cut-off tail of the lizard he imagines himself to be. A previous parenthesis, the one with the little girl eating chocolates, points to the metaphysical nature of Campos’s predicament: even though he knows that “there is no more metaphysics than eating chocolates,” he himself cannot eat chocolates at all. We could say, however, that the poem concludes almost totally under the aegis of Caeiro, after its despondent speculative mode is interrupted by the “plausible reality” of the tobacconist’s “without ideal or hope” across the street. The poet lights a cigarette, “savors” it [saboreio] and remains determined to smoke it for as long as Fate permits. The speculative that threatens to return in the brief parenthesis about happiness is not allowed to prevail. The comfort of the nonexistent muse lies in the poet’s “sense” (or Caeiro). More often, however, Campos’s mode does not allow for Caeiro’s unselfconscious sensuousness. A sick body is Campos’s usual way of sensing and making present. In “Ora até que enfim . . ., perfeitamente” [At long last . . ., perfectly], a poem that reads like an ironic account of his poetic career at the end of his life (which is neither “end nor life”), Campos claims finally to have understood himself (Pessoa, 1981: 344–345). The explanation (or “solution”) is the “exactitude” of madness in his head or, more graphically still, the “nausea,” as of a hangover, that “tickles” his throat and makes him vomit. To find the “solution” he uses his stomach, the “truth” he feels with his bowels: “Arre, encontrei uma solução, e foi preciso o estômago! / Encontrei uma verdade, senti-a com os intestinos!” [Darn, I’ve found a solution, and it took my stomach to find it! / I found a truth, I felt it with my bowels!] The very existence of “Álvaro de Campos” is, of course, already a problematization of the

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poetic, but Campos’s poem pushes it further. As the poet dismissively recalls the different kinds of poetry he has written, nausea overwhelms him and he is on the verge of vomiting. Poetry presents itself as beyond signification: Poesia transcendental, já a fiz também! Grandes raptos líricos, também já por cá passaram! A organização de poemas relativos à vastidão de cada assunto resolvido [em vários— Também não é novidade. Tenho vontade de vomitar, e de me vomitar a mim . . . [Transcendental poetry, I’ve done that too! Grand lyrical raptures, those have been here before as well! Organizing poems on the vastness of each matter resolved   [in several— Not new either. I want to vomit, and I want to vomit myself . . .]

Nowhere is Campos’s body made more obstreperously present than in “Ode marítima” [Maritime Ode] (Pessoa, 1981: 248–269).18 This long ode to the sea (Pessoa’s longest poem, with more than 900 lines) is a subversive, indeed accusatory celebration of the sea and the Portuguese Discoveries, and hence a denunciation as well of all seafaring as expansion, conquest, possession, domination, and destruction. But this theme is no more than the modern poem’s excuse to let itself be written as one of the greatest lyric poems of modernity. Quite early on, the poem includes an invocation in the traditional mode, explicitly asking for poetic inspiration (“Fornecei-me metáforas, imagens, literatura” [Supply me with metaphors, images, literature]). The passionate apostrophe is, however, addressed to no muse figure, rather to the sea itself and all things related to the sea and sea voyaging. What the poet asks for is to be completely possessed by the sea. He wants his body and all his contradictory sensations turned into the ships, keels, masts, sails, and nets he already feels physically as part of himself. The civilized engineer, modern and educated abroad, yearns for the sea—the triumphs and obscenities of the sea’s history, geography, and peoples—to take over his body. His body is here highly sexualized in a very complex, homoerotic manner. It is the body of the brave mariner and that of the plundering pirate at one and the same time, the body of the penetrating conqueror and the body of the ravaged land, the body of the rapist and the woman’s raped body. It is a body transported by the wild shatteredness of being a sensation-inflicting and, most of all, a sensation-suffering body. Long before Judith Butler (1993) problematized “the subject” by questioning the “heterosexual imperative” and rethinking

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sex, gender, and sexuality, the heteronymic modernist poet was already doing it. In “Ode marítima,” Pessoa’s Campos’s body eloquently interpellates the culture about bodies that matter: theory is always posterous. As if in answer to the poet’s apostrophic plea early in the poem, he becomes disturbingly indistinguishable from the heroic, delirious, bestial body of water that made possible imperial voyages, adventures, discoveries, and violences of all kinds across the centuries, and is still raging and roaring, encompassed in the poet’s body: Todo o meu sangue raiva por asas! Todo o meu corpo atira-se para a frente! (. . .) E a minha carne é uma onda dando de encontro a rochedos!

[All my blood rages for wings! My whole body throws itself forwards! . . . And my flesh is a wave breaking against the rocks!]

The sexual and power relation implied in the idea of possession is masterly crafted into the pathological, sado-masochist, and intersexual mode of the poem-as-poem. As he is possessed by the sea and his body is ravished by the actions of the sea, the victimized poet’s body becomes female, and so it becomes, like a muse, the ancient vessel of inspiration. The poem erupts from the poet’s passive, woman-like, and self-abused body. What I am suggesting is that “Ode marítima,” as one of the most highly self-conscious poems of modernity, gives powerful voice to the problem of the modern lyric. The poet’s desire for the sea in himself is ultimately his desire for “the Absolute Distance” [a Distância Absoluta] and “[the] Pure Far-away” [O Puro Longe] that ground the poetic. “Nada perdeu a poesia” [Poetry has lost nothing], exclaims the poet wishfully as he nears the end of his chant: modern poetry is still possible, not in spite of, but because of the “fly-wheel” [o volante] and the “crane” [o guindaste], the two modern images that structure the ode throughout. Once his orgasmatic delirium of frenetic piracy gives way to the silence of caesura (“Parte-se em mim qualquer coisa” [Something breaks inside me]), the poet once again hears the lyric’s “vast, most ancient of cries” [o vasto grito antiquíssimo]. And at the end, the Far-away [o Longe] is the movingly anguished silence of the seemingly bodiless poet. Caeiro’s “de fora” and Celan’s “draussen” come back to mind. In “Ode triunfal” [Triumphal Ode], Pessoa’s body-as-muse is even more powerfully expressed by an extraordinary, untranslatable metaphor: passento.19 As the ambiguities of the triumphal chant get under way—the feverish

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poet torn between the elating force and the crippling pain of the machines—a timely cry for inspiration is put in place. What muse could bring the poet the words capable of expressing all the contradictions of modernity, which of course include all the contradictions of antiquity and of all times? How can the poet express the promiscuity of time and space and their intersections and passages? There may be no answer to these questions. All we have is the poet’s sensuously hyperbolic desire, suggesting that the answer must lie in the promiscuous organicity of his own body. Pessoa/Campos anticipates here a much later poet, who joco-seriously rethinks the poetic in our time by concerning himself with his “circulatory system,” his “sympathetic nervous system,” the capacity of his heart to produce the “atrial natriuretic factor,” and the “electromagnetic signals” of the “breath-turning” of his heart. In the passage from which I am quoting, próspero saíz takes Celan’s “Atemwende” [breathturn] as the quintessentially poetic and traces its literal anatomy in the organic functionings of his own body.20 Almost a century earlier, Pessoa/Campos’s concern was similar. Aroused by his own astonishment at the complex accomplishments of modernity, which he obsessively compares with the timelessness and amplitude of Nature, Literature, and Philosophy, the poet is inspired by his physical, corporeal incapacity to voice them: Ah, poder exprimir-me todo como um motor se exprime! Ser completo como uma máquina! Poder ir na vida triunfante como um automóvel último-modelo! Poder ao menos penetrar-me fisicamente de tudo isto, Rasgar-me todo, abrir-me completamente, tornar-me passento A todos os perfumes de óleos e carvões Desta flora estupenda, negra, artificial e insaciável! [Oh to be able to express my whole being as an engine expresses itself! To be complete like a machine! To go triumphantly through life like the latest model car! To be able at least to penetrate myself physically by all this, Rip myself wide open, and become passento Of all the perfumes of the oils and hot coals Of this stupendous, artificial and insatiable black flora!]

I left the original passento in my translation above. Zenith’s brilliant choice—“pervious”—doesn’t entirely work, but I doubt anyone could come up with a better suggestion. Elsewhere, I comment at some length on the possible origin and uses of this relatively uncommon Portuguese word. Suffice it to say here that the use Pessoa makes of passento in Campos’s ode requires

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all the meanings associated with “passar” [to pass], both as a transitive and intransitive verb (passing, letting pass, suffering, enduring, disappearing, dying). One of the problems with “pervious” (both “that can be penetrated” and “having the quality of penetrating”) is that it loses the sound meaning of “passar,” a verb that is conjugated five times twenty-four lines below (“Tudo o que passa, tudo o que passa e nunca passa! . . . pederastas que passam” [All that passes, all that passes and never passes! . . . pederasts that pass by]).21 More importantly still, the word had already made its appearance in the previous strophe as “o passado” [the past], where time is problematized, and the idea conveyed is that modernity is all reality, and all reality—incessant, timeless passage: “Canto, e canto o presente, e também o passado e o futuro, / Porque o presente é todo o passado e todo o futuro” [I sing, I sing the present, and the past and the future too, / Because the present is all the past and all the future]. The apparently paradoxical concept is again repeated in one of the last sections of the poem, in which time is the promiscuity of all dynamic passages imaged in the Bacchic “Moment.” Everything passes, the strophe insists, seemingly incongruously, everything but the passing “Moment.” The obvious conclusion is that this “Moment” is the strident poem, one with the Orpheus-like poet’s naked and sensing body (passento): Tudo isto apaga tudo, salvo o Momento, O Momento de tronco nu e quente como um fogueiro, O Momento estridente ruidoso e mecânico, O Momento dinâmico passagem de todas as bacantes Do fero e do bronze e da bebedeira dos metais. [All that erases everything save for the Moment, The Moment with a bare, hot chest like a stoker, The strident, noisy, mechanical Moment, The dynamic Moment passage of all the bacchantes Of the iron and the bronze and the drunkenness of the metals.]

“Passable,” as one of the OED definitions of “pervious,” is of course out of the question to translate passento, for the poem does not allow at all for the pejorative connotations of something that is passable (as in the Portuguese passável) because it is not good enough. But the poetic subject is indeed “pass-able” in the literal sense that he passes, even as he is the thoroughfare of all that passes. The context of passento suggests the poet’s bodily desire to pass and be passed through by time-as-concrete-reality, and thus become the perfect multiple passageways of modernity and hence adequate voice of timeless lyric. The poet’s body and excited senses are, like the intermediary muse in antiquity, the appropriate vessel of poetry. In Campos’s ode

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to Whitman (“Saudação a Walt Whitman”/Salutation to Walt Whitman), Pessoa expresses this concept better than anywhere else. As the “rutting of the passages” [cio das passagens], Walt, with whom Campos identifies (“Tu sabes que eu sou Tu” [You know I am You]) and who thus emerges as the paradigmatic modern poet for Pessoa, is celebrated as the “forever modern and eternal singer of concrete absolutes” (Ó sempre moderno e eterno, cantor dos concretos absolutos).22 In “A passagem das horas” [“The Passing of the Hours”], the “sensationist” poet indulges in a long, complex, and highly sexualized gloss on a line that is repeated twice in the poem: “Sentir tudo de todas as maneiras” [To feel, i.e., to sense (like Rimbaud) everything in every way] (Pessoa, 1981: 275, 288).23 The length and complexity of the gloss denounce the poem’s difficulty in expressing itself. The wealth of experience imagined in the physicality of the poet’s body requires sexual metaphors. The poet-that-is-everything has sex (all kinds of sex) with everything. As so often in Campos, “intersexuality,” rather than intertextuality, best describes the rich cross-dialogue between all the contradictions of life and poetry that characterizes Pessoa’s strongest writing.24 His poeming is completely physical and corporeal, and his soul hurts like a burnt hand. As the poem reaches its conclusion, time [horas] is still passing through the poet’s body, and vice versa. The poet’s frenetic sensing is not a bit abated; he is still craving to endure the pain of being more, becoming more, devouring more of the world. In a word, the poet is passento, and so is his poem. In the end, the poet’s passento body manages to recapture the truant muse for itself. After such a major feat, how could Pessoa’s imagination not bodily ache in the person of Álvaro de Campos?25

NOTES 1. Nancy invokes Celan’s Der Meridian as quoted by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe in La poésie comme expérience. In her translation of “The Meridian,” Rosmarie Waldrop fails to keep the concept of the “outside” (draussen) that poetry is, according to Celan, and which brings Celan and Pessoa/Caeiro together in Nancy’s thinking. In the 1950s, we recall, Celan translated some Pessoa poems, including two by Alberto Caeiro, with the help of Edouard Roditi. See Celan’s Gesammelte Werke V, 562–593. 2. Nancy, quoting from Guibert’s translation, omits the first stanza. I quote the entire poem here, providing my own translation (when not otherwise indicated, translations are my own; for a bilingual edition, with translations by Edwin Honig and Susan M. Brown, see Pessoa, 1985). O mistério das coisas, onde está ele? Onde está ele que não aparece Pelo menos a mostrar-nos que é mistério?

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Porque o único sentido oculto das coisas É elas não terem sentido oculto nenhum, É mais estranho que todas as estranhezas E do que os sonhos de todos os poetas E os pensamentos de todos os filósofos, Que as coisas sejam realmente o que parecem ser E não haja nada que compreender. Sim, eis o que os meus sentidos aprenderam sozinhos:— As coisas não têm significação; têm existência. As coisas são o único sentido oculto das coisas. [The mystery of things, where is it? Where is it that it doesn’t appear At least to show that it is a mystery? What does the river know of this and what the tree? And I, being no more than they, what do I know? Whenever I look at things and think of what men think of them, I laugh like a brook resounding freshly on a rock. Because the only hidden sense of things Is that they have no hidden sense at all, It is stranger than all strangenesses And than the dreams of all the poets And the thinking of all the philosophers, That things are really what they seem to be And that there’s nothing to understand. Yes, this is what my senses learned all by themselves:— Things have no meaning; they have existence. Things are the only hidden meaning of things.]

3. See also poems V and XLVII. 4. My thinking here is indebted to Lacoue-Labarthe’s reflections, in “The Caesura of the Speculative,” on Hölderlin’s reinvention of the caesura in his “Anmerkungen an Oedipus.” 5. For the definition of Bernardo Soares as the practicing theoretician of Pessoa’s heteronymic poeming, see “The Great Book” and “The Art of Rumination” supra. 6. See Nancy, 1994: 97, 1996: 55; Dickinson, J615; Fr453; Mallarmé, “Le tombeau d’Edgar Poe” (p. 70). 7. saíz, 2002: 17. 8. See Rimbaud’s letter to Paul Demeny, May 15, 1871 (Rimbaud, 1972: 249– 252 [251]; original emphasis). 9. Pessoa coined these words for “becoming other” in Livro do desassossego (Pessoa, 1998a: 156, 262).

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10. See poems XXX, XLVIII and XLIX of O guardador de rebanhos and “Se, depois de eu morrer, quiserem escrever a minha biografia” from “Poemas inconjunctos” (Pessoa, 1981: 154, 161, 171). 11. Curiously enough, Bernardo Soares cannot even remember the authority of inspiring priority (“Nunca tive alguém a quem pudesse chamar ‘Mestre’ [I never had anyone I could call ‘Master’”]). Pessoa, 1998a: 406). 12. A longer version to be found in Lopes, 1990, 411ss. For an English translation, see Pessoa, 2001: 38–50. 13. This so-called old-fashioned concept—inspiration—has meanwhile been reinvented. See Clark, 1997. 14. Baulelaire, “La muse malade” and “La muse vénal” (pp. 14–15). 15. See poem XV of O guardador de rebanhos/The Keeper of Sheep. 16. Pessoa, 1981: 236–239. For Pessoa’s letter to Casais Monteiro on the genesis of the heteronyms, see Pessoa, 1982a: 93–99; a complete translation to be found in Pessoa, 2001b: 251–260. 17. “Os Antigos invocavam as musas” [The Ancients invoked the muses] is quoted in full in the previous chapter. 18. For specific quotes, see 252, 253, 254, 263, 267, 269. A full translation of the ode in Pessoa, 1986: 44–71. 19. Pessoa, 1981: 240–245. A translation by Richard Zenith in Literary Imagination 2.2 (2000), 239–248. 20. I quote here from the conclusion of “In Time, Keep the Muse Thin.” And also from Celan’s Der Meridian and Atemwende [Breathturn] (Celan, 1983: II, 11–107). 21. Zenith, poet as well as translator, manages to keep only four of the five Portuguese repetitions of the verb. The last one (“pederasts that pass by”) he translates as “sauntering homosexuals.” A few other instances of “passings” that couldn’t be honored in English: “Notícias passez-à-la caisse, grandes crimes— / Duas colunas deles passando para a segunda página!” (translated as “Sensationalist news, crime stories— / Two columns and continued on the next page!”); and a crucial one, almost at the end: “O Momento dinâmico passagem de todas as bacantes,” translated as “The dynamic Moment of all the bacchantes.” 22. Pessoa’s ode to Whitman was never completed. I quote from the fragment in Pessoa, 1981: 270–275. A translation of this same fragment can be found in Pessoa, 1986: 72–78. 23. For Zenith’s translation of “A passagem das horas,” see Pessoa, 1998b: 146–168. 24. Cf. Chapter 5 of Ramalho-Santos, 2003b. 25. “Dói-me a imaginação não sei como, mas é ela que dói,” cries out Álvaro de Campos midway through “A passagem das horas” [My imagination hurts, I don’t know how, but it hurts] (Pessoa, 1981: 287).

Chapter 8

Orpheu et al. Modernism, Women, and the War

It is frequently repeated in the relevant scholarship that Western literary and artistic modernism started in little magazines.1 The useful online Modernist Journals Project (Brown University/Tulsa University), dealing so far only with American and British magazines, uses as its epigraph the much-quoted phrase: “Modernism began in the magazines.”2 With two issues published in 1915 and a third one stopped that same year in the galley proofs for lack of funding, the Portuguese little magazine Orpheu inaugurated modernism in Portugal pretty much at the same time as all the other major little magazines in Europe and the United States. This is interesting, given the proverbial belatedness of Portuguese accomplishments, and no less interesting the fact that, like everywhere else, Orpheu was followed, in Portugal as well, by a number of other little magazines. Not always so original and provocative, to be sure, but with some of the same innovative collaborators, Fernando Pessoa foremost: Exílio (1916), Centauro (1916), Portugal Futurista (1917), Contemporânea (1915–1926), and Athena (1924–1925). Not to mention Presença (1927–1940), the journal that has been said to have inaugurated the Portuguese second modernism (or is it the anti-modernist modernism?).3 Just by way of example, in England John Middleton Murray’s Rhythm: Art Music Literature Quarterly, later The Blue Review, was published between 1911 and 1913; The Egoist ran between 1914 and 1916, preceded by The Free Woman (1911–1912) and The New Free Woman (1913); the only two issues of Wyndham Lewis’s Blast: Review of the Great English Vortex came out in 1914 and 1915, Blast 1 immediately before the Great War began, Blast 2, the “War Number,” a year later. The vorticists said that the war killed Blast—as indeed it killed Blast’s Gaudrier-Brzeska. The vortex in the title does not let us forget the great facilitator of Western literary modernism, the American cosmopolitan poet and opinion arbiter and taste-maker, Ezra 113

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Pound, who had meanwhile invented the name for vorticism. Readers of the “vertiginous” 1917 Ultimatum by Pessoa/Campos cannot help but immediately think of the iconoclasm of Blast. Unlike Blast, however, Ultimatum does not blast Marinetti. In the United States, Alfred Stieglitz’s Camera Work ran between 1903 and 1917; his 291, between 1915 and 1916; the last issue of Alfred Kreymborg’s Glebe, first published in September 1913, appeared in November 1914; it was followed by Kreymborg’s very influential Others: A Magazine of the New Verse, running between 1915 and 1919. Poetry: A Magazine of Verse started in Chicago in 1912; The Little Review appeared first in Chicago as well, in 1914, and was published until 1929 in such varied places as San Francisco, New York City, and Paris. So, Orpheu, appearing in 1915, was not too Portuguesely late, after all. Some of these international and often transcontinental little magazines, on both sides of the Atlantic, were founded and edited by women. This is the case of Poetry. A Magazine of Verse, founded in Chicago in 1912 by Harriet Monroe, who edited it for many years, having another woman, Alice Corbin Henderson, as coeditor. Unlike most little magazines of the modernist avant-garde, Poetry was not at all short-lived and is still running today. Also, American and a two-women venture was The Little Review, started in 1914 by Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap joining her in 1916, as coeditor and as a companion and lover; the last issue of the journal came out in 1929. In England, there was The Egoist. An Individualist Review, running between 1913 and 1919 under the editorship of two other women: Dora Marsden and Harriet Shaw Weaver. The suffragette Dora Marsden had been responsible for the more politically engaged The Free Woman (1911–1912) and The New Free Woman (1913). The American poets Marianne Moore (The Dial, 2nd series, 1920–1929) and H.D. and the latter’s lover, Maecenas, and life companion, Annie Winifred Ellerman, better known as Bryher, a writer herself (Close Up, 1927–1933), were also instrumental as little magazine editors in bringing out exciting new poetry and art, often systematically neglected by established, profit-minded (male) publishers. The most interesting case is, of course, that of James Joyce, whose Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was first serialized in The Egoist (1914–1915) and then published in book form by the Egoist Press (1916), which was first set up by Dora Marsden and Harriet Weaver precisely for that purpose. Joyce’s writing of Ulysses was also subsidized by Harriet Weaver and first serialized in the United States in Margaret Anderson’s The Little Review. The consequences of the daring gesture of Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap are well known: in 1921 the US Post Office refused to distribute The Little Review on charges of Ulysses’s “obscenity.” Since no mainstream publisher would touch the book, another lesbian, Sylvia Beach, had it published by her Shakespeare & Co. in Paris in 1922. However, it is possible that the serialization of Ulysses was just the

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excuse for the American authorities to fold an American inconvenient, subversive, anarchist journal, run by two lesbians. The role of women editors and publishers during the first decades of modernism elicited an interesting remark by their contemporary, the American poet and publisher, Robert McAlmon: “It is some kind of commentary on the period,” wrote McAlmon in his autobiography, “that Joyce’s work and acclaim should have been fostered mainly by high-minded ladies, rather than by men. Ezra first brought him to Miss Weaver’s attention, but it was she who then supported him.” And McAlmon concludes: “The Little Review [meaning Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap], Sylvia Beach, and Harriet Weaver brought Joyce into print” (McAlmon, 1938: 74). Later I will come back to the implications of McAlmon’s reference to Pound and the contrast he poses between “high-minded ladies” and “men,”4 but first I want to point out that these intelligent, gifted, and committed women were performing all these important tasks in the art world at the onset of modernism at a time when they had not yet conquered or had barely conquered, the right to vote. Katherine Mansfield, who collaborated with Middleton Murray in Rhythm and The Blue Review, was the exception; in New Zealand, where she came from, the 1893 Electoral Act, for reasons I will not go into here, had granted all women the right to vote.5 What I am suggesting is that the fate of modernism, including the literary fortune of some of the most innovative authors of the period (most of them male) was largely and ironically in the hands of disenfranchised women. Women of means, intelligence, and some kind of power in the literary and artistic world, to be sure, but politically disenfranchised nonetheless. Just remember that Bryher had to contract a fake marriage with Robert McAlmon in 1921 to be allowed to take possession of her large, inherited fortune. With very rare exceptions, women’s position in society required the “protection” of a father or a husband. The women editors I have mentioned (some of them also poets) had fine minds, artistic sensibility, and great intellectual curiosity, were well educated and very knowledgeable about literature and the arts, as well as being dedicated readers of poetry, and independent enough to cultivate a taste of their own. Even if all of them were not always very vocal publicly about such political issues, they were feminists, and thus always running the risk of being defined as “high minded” by “men,” especially when the latter’s work was questioned by them according to editorial criteria. In a literary world dominated by men, these women editors did not hesitate to discuss aesthetic issues from their own point of view in order to challenge poets, such as Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Hart Crane, often by asking for clarification and revisions and even by rejecting poems. I have here Harriet Monroe and Alice Corbin Henderson and their Poetry particularly in mind. Even though the general perception today is

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still that the most original and exciting work of Poetry was due mainly to the influence of Pound, who was the magazine’s foreign correspondent between 1912 and 1917, the two women editors did not allow themselves to be cajoled by him and knew very well how to hold their ground.6 An important objective of theirs was to understand and educate America poetically, and thus to address a wide range of readers, by balancing the novelties of international experimentation with free verse, symbolism, imagism, cubism, and Dadaism, on the one hand, and more traditional, regional, ethnic, and sentimental poetic production, on the other. To Pound’s dismay and impatience, Poetry took a long time to publish “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” When Eliot’s poem finally came out in the June 1915 number, it made a striking splash at the end of the issue, preceded as it was by a series of well-wrought poems expressing conventional feelings of longing or idealized regret. The issue included a tribute to Rupert Brooke by Harriet Monroe and several mournful poems dedicated to the English poet, who had died months before. On the other hand, Alice Corbin Henderson, the sharper and less conventional of the two coeditors, did not hesitate to ridicule what she found were the excesses of faddish experimentation, exaggerated insistence on novelty, and poetic self-indulgence. When Others, an Anthology of New Verse came out in 1916, edited by Alfred Kreymborg, Henderson made fun of its claim to be “a new school of poetry” (emphasis added). Her hilarious remarks are worth quoting: “Replacing the outworn conventions of the I-am-bic school, we have now the I-am-it school of poetry.” And she adds a comic parenthetical “(NOTE: Les I-am-its are not to be confused with Les I’m-a-gists, who are already outclassed and démodé.)”7 After a series of quotes of poems overladen with the poetic “I,” Henderson concludes, “We regret to say the printer announces that there are no more I’s in the font.”8 What I find interesting about this story is that this “high-minded lady” did not let herself be intimidated by such well-established “men” as Maxwell Bodenheim and William Carlos Williams, who immediately provided outraged protests on behalf of Kreymborg. Whether we think she was being fair or unfair, Henderson never stopped considering Kreymborg’s anthology “sheer bosh.”9 The two women editors of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse played a very important role in consolidating Anglo-American modernism, but the politically radical editorship of The Little Review presents a much more interesting case for my purposes here. Margaret Anderson’s “Announcement” in the first issue of the journal (March 1914: 1–2) is clearly written by a woman who wants it to be perceived as having been written by a woman, and a woman who is fully aware of the place she has no choice but construct for herself in a male-dominated society. It anticipates much of the independent and daring, antiauthoritarian, anti-patriarchal, and anarchist stance that would be the hallmark of the journal. It is not just that the author of the “Announcement”

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does not hesitate to proclaim hers and the journal’s feminism “ardent,”10 as if foreseeing Wyndham Lewis’s condescending, disparaging, and sexist advice to suffragettes in the first issue of Blast, published a mere two months later: 11 TO SUFFRAGETTES. A WORD OF ADVICE. IN DESTRUCTION, AS IN OTHER THINGS stick to what you understand. WE MAKE YOU A PRESENT OF OUR VOTES, ONLY LEAVE WORKS OF ART ALONE. YOU MIGHT SOME DAY DESTROYA GOOD PICTURE BY ACCIDENT THEN !— MAlS SOYEZ BONNES FILLES! NOUS VOUS AIMONS! WE ADMIRE YOUR ENERGY. YOU AND ARTISTS ARE THE ONLY THINGS (YOU DON’T MIND BEING CALLED THINGS?) LEFT IN ENGLAND WITH A LITTLE LIFE IN THEM IF YOU DESTROY A GREAT WORK OF ART YOU are destroying a greater soul than if you annihilated a whole district of London. LEAVE ART ALONE, BRAVE COMRADES!

While Blast advises feminists to take their hands off art lest a great work be destroyed, The Little Review believes that “revolution is art” and thus presents the anarcho-feminist Emma Goldman as an artist: “A great artist, working in her own material as a Michael Angelo worked in his.”12 Anderson explicitly rejects any kind of “tolerant,” “paternal” recommendations concerning herself as a human being and her job as an editor. She is fully aware that her conception of art in its relation to life, the way she sees art as part of life and life as part of art, that is to say, the way she projects the experience of art as indistinguishable from the experience of life will provoke some eyebrow raising among colleagues and friends, whom she clearly envisions as male, authoritarian, patronizing, and hierarchical, and not at all sympathetic to what may be perceived as a gross confusion between the artistic and the personal. For Margaret Anderson, as for the artist Jane Heap who joined the journal in 1916, the artistic is personal, the personal is artistic. We are still too far from the 1960s’ “the personal is political,” but the spirit is already there. Unlike Jane Marek and other feminist scholars, I think that what concerned these women editors was less sexual difference

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than hierarchization of difference.13 As we shall see, the opposite was true of the Portuguese Orpheu group. For the first Portuguese modernists, sexual difference was a major issue, whether delicately interwoven in some poems or violently erupting in others. The subtle cross-dialogues between the two editors of The Little Review throughout the whole journal enhance the original conception of the journal as a constructive “conversation” among editors and critics, artists and poets, readers and the public in general. The most striking example is the so-called “blank” issue. Anderson had promised not to compromise (the journal’s motto was “Making No Compromise with the Public Taste”), and yet, by the time issue n. 5 of vol. 3 came out, she regrets that she has not kept her promise and vouches to let the next issue of the journal come out with only submitted material considered by her to be of aesthetic value. “If there is only one beautiful thing for the September number it shall go in and the other pages will be left blank” (2). And so they were.14 Evidently, no creative writing submissions were deemed worthy of publication, and the “one beautiful thing” was Jane Heap’s ironically amusing sketches of the daily life of the editor, Margaret Anderson, which deliberately confuse art and life: she practices piano eighteen hours a day and takes her Mason and Hamlin to bed with her; gathers her own firewood in a horse wagon; gobbles huge amounts of fudge for breakfast; is determined to convert “the sheriff” to anarchism and vers libre; indulges in “swimming” by sprinkling herself with a garden hose; has her picture taken astride a superb horse but actually rides a decrepit animal; and gets bored listening to anarchist Emma Goldman’s lectures. The reference, in Jane Heap’s cartoon, to Emma Goldman’s activism, side by side with the comic disclosure of Anderson’s intention to subvert social authority poetically, is an oblique commentary on The Little Review’s political engagement. Both Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap were openly critical of conventional society and its hypocritical laws; they supported women’s suffrage, birth control, workers’ unions and struggles, and called for open, public debate on sexuality and sexual relations with a view to changing current social mores through a better understanding of difference. The March 1915 issue of the journal carried “two points of view” regarding a lecture delivered in Chicago by Edith Ellis, Havellock Ellis’s wife, on “Sex and Eugenics.” The first point of view is an enthusiastic response, by a certain Mary Adams Stearns, to “Mrs. Ellis’s Gift to Chicago” on the little-discussed topic of sexuality (12–15); the second one is Anderson’s scathing critique of “Mrs. Ellis’s Failure” even to mention homosexuality in her talk (16–19). Since Ellis’s lesbianism and her open marriage were common knowledge, in Anderson’s angry remarks we can hear her disappointment at a lost opportunity to challenge the established social mores formally and eloquently about

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what is normal or abnormal sexuality, what may be considered private or public, and what is or is not acceptable in society, and why. Thus, side by side with original poems, art, and literary criticism, The Little Review carried fierce social criticism, often penned by Margaret Anderson. The already mentioned “blank number” dedicates a lot of space to “The San Francisco Bomb Case” (16–17). The “case” concerned a bomb that exploded during the San Francisco Preparedness Day Parade on July 22, 1916, killing ten people and wounding forty. Five innocent people were indicted just because they were union leaders, organized workers, and strike organizers that big businesses wanted out of the way. A thorough explanation of the crass and tragic mishandling of justice, including an appeal for financial support to arrange for proper defense, appears on p. 29 (“Facts about the Preparedness Bomb”), and one suspects that Jane Heap, who had just started working for the journal, had a hand in it. Anderson’s outrage at the condemnation of two of the indicted appears on p. 17–19; she also vents fierce indignation at what she felt were the incompetent efforts of her friend Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, as well as of other anarchists, organized workers, and labor unions, to find good lawyers for the convicted. The Preparedness Parade was meant to prepare the United States’ entrance in the war. The organized workers did not want to have anything to do with it because they knew that war abroad would mean utter misery for the majority of the people directly affected by it and great profit for big business in the United States. For no other reason was the Chamber of Commerce behind the organization of the Parade. As Anderson writes in “Armageddon” in the September 1914 issue (1.6, 3–4), with sharp lucidity that would be more than welcome today, “as long as devastation and horror do not exist on his own piece of land, Uncle Sam doesn’t care—while he can harvest his wheat and sell it at a good high price to starving people.” But she does have a prophetic word of warning for Uncle Sam’s illusions of exceptionalism: “As long as we cultivate the ideal of patriotism, as long as we put economic value above spiritual and human value, as long as in our borders there exist dogmatic religions, as long as we consider desirable the private ownership and exploitation of property for private profit—whether by nations or by individuals—we maintain those elements of civilization which have led Europe to the present crisis.” The journal’s pacifist concern runs through all the issues for the duration of the war. The United States entered the war on April 6, 1917. The April 1917 issue carried a piece by Margaret Anderson: a blank page entitled “WAR,” having at the bottom the following, bracketed comment “[We will probably be suppressed by this].”15 However, and as has been often pointed out, WWI ended up being a liberating experience for some European women. In England, for example, by replacing the men that had volunteered and later been conscripted to the

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war, women got proper jobs for the first time in their lives and experienced the sense of freedom the new condition brought them. They were competent and efficient performing “male” work, were proud of themselves, and felt like citizens, even though they could not yet vote. We might say that the war contributed to women entering politics before winning the suffrage. The situation cannot be compared to the realm of modernist little magazines, where women, likewise disenfranchised, had nonetheless played important roles from the very beginning. But when the English poet Richard Aldington, assistant editor of The Egoist, went to the trenches in 1916, the American poet H. D., his wife, who had already been doing some editorial work for the journal rather informally for some time, replaced him. Curiously enough, however, what happened officially was that her name was simply added to that of her husband, both identified as assistant editors from then on, although Aldington was fighting in the war, was eventually wounded and unable to do any editorial work. Finally, in 1917, the name of T. S. Eliot appeared as their replacement. * I now turn to a modernist little magazine apparently with no women, no war, and no explicit involvement in politics: the Portuguese Orpheu, whose goal was to revolutionize poetic discourse by celebrating poets and excoriating lepidoptera. Lepidóptero (lepidopter) was Pessoa’s and Sá-Carneiro’s derogatory term for a weak poet, one who, not possessing proper light, one presumes, could not help but gravitate, like a moth, toward an alien light.16 Some poems may weave wars of old into their fantasy creations of refined sensibilities, as in Angelo de Lima’s depiction of Semiramis’s death (“[SemiRami] Morreu na Guerra em um País Distante” [She died in the War in a faraway country]), but the Great War is totally absent from the pages of the journal.17 On the other hand, for reasons that can be understood but I will not discuss at length in this chapter, no woman had anything to do with the conception and creation, let alone founding, planning, and editorship of Orpheu. More than that, there is no woman poet contributing to it.18 Of course, women are all over the pages of the three Orpheus, but they do not represent real, empirical women; they are rather totally “paper women,” female figures conventionally, if not stereotypically, invented by the pen of Orpheu poets— strange, exquisite woman figures who have no historical counterpart and no plausible existence outside the male poets’ gendered imaginations.19 The Horatian “Lídias,” “Neeras,” and “Cloes” of Ricardo Reis, himself a “paper poet” of sorts, fall beautifully into this category—with a vengeance, since they are doubly “mulheres de papel.” Significantly enough, José Saramago

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would much later translate—in paper, of course—Pessoa’s paper Lídias in Ricardo Reis’s odes into a historicized Lídia-of-flesh-and-blood in O ano da morte de Ricardo Reis (1984). The mismarried women in Livro do desassossego [The Book of Disquietude] constitute an interesting case of paper women. According to the provocative male writer, mismarried are all married and some single women. Their mysterious portrait emerges from the imagined, sexist pen of whatever imagined persona Pessoa was playing with at the time, perhaps Vicente Guedes, since the texts captioned “Conselhos às mal-casadas” date from c. 1915 (the year Orpheu came out). Teresa Sobral Cunha places them in what she calls the “first” (Vicente Guedes) Livro do desassossego (Pessoa, 2008: 147–149).20 The contours of these “inferior” women are traced by the condescending, “altruistic” advice of the self-assumed “superior” male. Women are inferior presumably because they are mismarried, which seems to mean that they are incompetent to deal with their supposed hypersexuality, and so in great need of the advice provided in these sketches. Pessoa displays in these fragments, no matter how tongue-in-cheek, the age-old, Western, masculinist ideology that the feminist philosopher Genevieve Lloyd would thoroughly expound many years later: male is reason (i.e., bodiless intellect); female is body (i.e., pure sex or sheer physical sensation).21 “A mulher é essencialmente sexual” [the woman is essentially sexual], Pessoa’s surrogate author proclaims and goes on to state that while “a inferioridade feminina precisa de macho” [female inferiority needs a male], “o homem superior não tem necessidade de nenhuma mulher” [the superior man needs no woman]. However, how superior and “macho” this self-appointed, would-be concerned educator of “inferior” women is, remains highly ambiguous. In a sketch roughly of the same period (Jerónimo Pizarro dates it tentatively “1916?”), entitled “Declaração de diferença” [Declaration of difference], a troubled male voice reflects on the possible permeability of sexual difference and the dangers, for men, of “feminization,” male action running the risk of being thwarted “by female rut” [por um cio feminino] (198–200). Pessoa’s well-known note on his “sexual problem” (“by temperament feminine with a masculine intelligence . . . ‘a mild sexual inversion’ that ‘stops in the mind’ but he fears might eventually ‘go down into [his] body’”) cannot but come to mind.22 Sexual and gender inequality was abysmal in early twentieth-century Portugal, but prominent Portuguese women were also already fighting for suffrage, and things were changing, however slowly. The Orpheu people (os de Orpheu) could not but have been aware of such a formidable woman as the distinguished physician, Adelaide Cabete (1867–1935), who in 1914 founded the Conselho Nacional das Mulheres Portuguesas [National Council of Portuguese Women]. Now, if women could be “like men,” men might well be “like women”—a disturbing thought. Safer to imagine idealized, paper women.

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In the little magazine, even when no imaginary woman is made poetically present, as they are in Sá-Carneiro’s “A inegualável” [The Peerless] (“Ai, como eu te queria toda de violetas / E flébil de setim” [Oh, I wish you were all made of violets and plaintive satin]) or in Alfredo Pedro Guisado’s “Adormecida” (“E tu adormecida há tanto tempo, em pranto” [And you so long asleep, in tears]) (Orpheu 1) or in Ângelo de Lima’s exotic and mythic female impersonations (“Sou a Grande Rainha Neitha-Kri” [I am the Great Queen Neitha-Kri]) or in “Violante de Cysneiros” and “her” poems (modestly inscribed to some of “her” male colleagues) (Orpheu 2), the fluid feminine imagery subtly interweaving the poetic discourse throughout, and made easier by the grammatical gender difference of the Portuguese language, speaks loudly of the uneasiness of early twentieth-century Portuguese male poets in a changing world where women were still supposed to be revered and desired (albeit at a distance), but whose mysterious, perhaps powerful, otherness was increasingly feared and, therefore, apotropaically spurned through idealization. The fabrication of a woman poet in Armando Côrtes-Rodrigues’s impersonation of “Violante de Cysneiros” (at Pessoa’s suggestion, we recall) cannot but be read in this way as well.23 A “generation” that claimed to be “superior” for being free of “sentimental complications” and even free of a “woman’s voice,” as Sá-Carneiro boasted in a letter to Pessoa, needs the proverbial frailty of woman to assert its own virility. No wonder the first Orpheu, after lingering on the exquisite post-symbolist gestures and imagery of the embellished, languid femininity of poems by Sá-Carneiro, Ronald de Carvalho, Alfredo Coelho Guisado, and Armando Côrtes-Rodrigues, not excluding Pessoa’s “O marinheiro” or Almada’s “Frizos,” closes with the post-discoveries ennui of the Portuguese masculine subject of “Opiário” [Opiarium] by Álvaro de Campos “in the bud,” immediately followed by the provocatively feisty and would-be very male “Ode triunfal,” by the full-fledged Campos.24 Actually, the subject of the magnificent “Triumphal Ode” swings sharply between a man “roaring” and a woman “possessed.” In Orpheu 2, the dialogue between tradition and innovation is more balanced, as Mário de Sá-Carneiro’s “Manucure” and Álvaro de Campos’s “Ode marítima” contrast sharply with the plaintive tones of hankering after unattainable beauty in poems by Ângelo de Lima, Eduardo Guimarães, Raul Leal, and Luís de Montalvor. The experimental intersectionism of Pessoa’s “Chuva oblíqua” underscores the utter poeticity of the Orpheu agenda.25 The third Orpheu was left incomplete, but its structure remains basically the same: the geography of Sá-Carneiro’s poems of symbolist inspiration is shattered by Almada’s “Scena do ódio” [The Scene of Hatred], a poema that compels me to correct my previous statement that there is no Great War in Orpheu. The war, mirrored in the violence and destructiveness of Almada’s poetics, is raging outside, but the Orpheu poets’ vocation is poiesis, as

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Almada’s outrageous poem parenthetically has it: “(Ha tanta coisa que fazer, Meu Deus! / e esta gente distrahida em guerras! [So much to be done, My God! / and these people distracted by wars!]).”26 And what is that “so much” waiting to be done, according to the poet? What is to be done is making poetry accomplish the utter destruction of the bourgeois and literary status quo, as when Álvaro de Campos refuses to be “casado, fútil, quotidiano e tributável” [married, futile, quotidian, and taxable] in “Lisbon Revisited (1923)” or when, in Ultimatum, he declares Western civilization to be totally and obscenely bankrupt.27 As in many other moments of lyric poetry’s selfdefinition, the main goal of the Portuguese modernist avant-garde was to disclose poetry as the radically and sublimely other.28 The Great War would soon strike the Orpheu people, nonetheless. If in the third Orpheu the havoc that the war was actually wreaking all over Europe seemed to be a mere metaphor for the aesthetic changes the Portuguese modernist avant-gardes were engaged in, in Portugal Futurista (1917) the stance changed. In his provocative “Ultimatum futurista às gerações portuguesas do século XX” [Futurist Ultimatum to the Portuguese Generations of the Twentieth Century], clearly inspired by Marinetti, Almada Negreiros unashamedly and rather euphorically celebrates the Great War as “the great experience” heralding “civilization” in Europe. One of its noble tasks has to do with the formation of females worthy of the nation’s males. The advice to mismarried women in Livro do desassossego cannot but come back to mind. Almada’s war as a “great experience” was also supposed to educate “a mulher portugueza na sua verdadeira missão de fêmea para fazer homens” [the Portuguese woman in her true female mission of making men]. Pessoa, in turn, in Álvaro de Campos’s Ultimatum, angrily sends an eviction note to all the “Mandarins” who had been destroying Europe for quite some time. The Great War was the peak of European failure: “Falencia geral de tudo por causa de todos / Falencia geral de todos por causa de tudo / (. . .) Falencia de tudo por causa de todos / Falencia de todos por causa de tudo” [General failure of everything because of all! / General failure of all because of everything / (. . .) Failure of everything because of all / Failure of all because of everything]. No wonder Pessoa/Campos loudly shouted MERDA to shake Europe from the war that was interrupting it. For he knew then, as we know now, that, sadly, “ninguém combate pela Liberdade ou pelo Direito! Todos combatem por medo dos outros!” [nobody fights for Freedom or Justice! They all fight out of fear of the others!]29 Regardless of other stances of Pessoa and his other heteronyms on the Great War, including the poet’s alleged sympathy for Germany, Ultimatum by Álvaro de Campos is clearly a pacifist document. As is his “Ode marcial” [Martial Ode], whose lyrical subject, like a repentant Wandering Jew (Ashavero), assumes the guilt and remorse of a ruthless soldier for the insane

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devastation and suffering provoked by all his senseless wars (Pessoa, 1981: 350). Even Alberto Caeiro anathematizes the war as a philosophical error in “A guerra, que aflige com os seus esquadrões o Mundo” (1917), from “Poemas inconjunctos” [Inconjunct Poems] (Pessoa, 1981: 176): “A guerra, que aflige com os seus esquadrões o Mundo, / É o tipo perfeito do erro da filosofia” [The war afflicting the world with its squadrons / Is the perfect example of philosophy’s mistake]. Almost ten years later, the wreckages of war were still haunting orthonymous Pessoa: in 1926, the little review Contemporânea published “O menino de sua mãe.” The poem has, of course, echoes of “Le dormeur du val” and, just like Rimbaud’s, by contrasting the serenity of things with the brutality of needlessly untimely death, it is a powerful and moving denunciation of the violence and cruelty of war (Pessao, 1981: 80).30 O menino de sua mãe No plaino abandonado Que a morna brisa aquece, De balas traspassado —Duas, de lado a lado—, Jaz morto, e arrefece. Raia-lhe a farda o sangue. De braços estendidos, Alvo, louro, exangue, Fita com olhar langue E cego os céus perdidos. Tão jovem! que jovem era! (Agora que idade tem?) Filho único, a mãe lhe dera Um nome e o mantivera: «O menino da sua mãe». Caiu-lhe da algibeira A cigarreira breve. Dera-lha a mãe. Está inteira E boa a cigarreira. Ele é que já não serve. De outra algibeira, alada Ponta a roçar o solo,

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A brancura embainhada De um lenço . . . Deu-lho a criada Velha que o trouxe ao colo. Lá longe, em casa, há a prece: «Que volte cedo, e bem!» (Malhas que o Império tece!) Jaz morto, e apodrece, O menino da sua mãe. [His mother’s little boy On the forsaken plain warmed by breeze, pierced by bullets —two, side by side— He lies dead and grows cold. Blood brightens his uniform. Arms outstreched Pale, fair, bloodless, he stares languidly and blind at the lost skies. So young! How young he was! (How old is he now?) An only son, his mother gave him a name and he kept it: “His mother’s little boy.” His small cigarette case fell from his pocket. His mother’s gift. Whole and good the cigarette case. It is he who’s no longer of any use. From another pocket, winged tip brushing the earth, the hemmed whiteness of a handkerchief . . . A gift from the old maid who’d cuddled him on her lap.

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Far away, at home, the prayer: “May he come back soon and well!” (Meshes woven by the Empire!) Lying dead and rotting his mother’s little boy.]

The sad, tragic waste displayed in “O menino de sua mãe” gains in being juxtaposed with the trampled boy’s buried toy train in “Ode Marcial.” Orpheu, the little magazine, was apparently untouched by the Great War, but the Orpheu people were not. Pessoa, in particular, in more than one persona—as António Sousa Ribeiro has explained—was clearly affected by what he called “the German war.”31 Indeed, there are also numerous references to war throughout Livro do desassossego, though none of them apparently pointing explicitly to the Great War. Actually, the term “war” is almost always used as a metaphor in The Book. For example, in a very late sketch, dated by the author January 17, 1932, the reader learns that “[t]oda a vida é guerra, e a batalha é, pois, a síntese da vida” [All life is war, and the battle is, therefore, the synthesis of life”] (Pessoa, 2008: 518). Or when The Book’s aestheticist writer, in a sketch of the Orpheu period, condemns the “impudor” [immodesty] of energetic action and productive effort, of which war is the perfect example (Pessoa, 2008: 252–253). The same aestheticist ethos (or is it a pacifist ethos? or both?) presides over another sketch of the same period, already cited: “não nos interessam as grandes convulsões, como a Guerra e as crises dos países” [we have no interest in great turmoils, like (the) War and crises affecting countries] (Pessoa, 2008: 198). I am tempted to leave “the War,” displace the “great” from modifying “turmoils” and make it modify capitalized “War” instead, and surmise that the Great War, raging outside, is what is nurturing the poet’s imagining. With the ravagings of WWI in mind, the poet submits that war, whatever the particular actual war may be, will only yield devastation or obscene victories: “Toda a vitória é uma grosseria” [Victory is always gross] (Pessoa, 2008: 122). To conclude: there is a different ethos in Livro do desassossego other than the political feistiness of Margaret Anderson’s Little Review. The 1932 sketch quoted earlier is clearly a text by Bernardo Soares, the assistant bookkeeper who actually keeps two books at one and the same time: the ledger, or book of accounts, of Vasques’s firm, on the one hand, and his own creative writing, on the other. The latter, also identified in another sketch of the same period as its author’s “book of senseless impressions” (Pessoa, 2008: 380), I consider extremely important for our understanding of the theory of Pessoa’s poetic practice. I call it Pessoa’s “book of ruminations.”32 Although, as The Book claims, the two books live on the same street, they

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have very different concerns: while the ledger registers the ruthless victories of war-like commerce, the “meditated book” (Pessoa, 2008: 432) wonders about the role of feeling and art in a merciless world demanding victory and success, no matter how obscene the action needed to accomplish them. The episode that inspires the assistant bookkeeper’s meditation is the business exchange conducted by “patrão Vasques” that led a man to ruin. And what can art do?, the implicit question lurks. Nothing, it seems: “A arte serve de fuga para a sensibilidade que a acção teve de esquecer. A arte é a Gata Borralheira, que ficou em casa porque teve que ser” [Art works as escape for the feeling action had to ignore. Art is the Cinderella that stayed home because she had to] (Pessoa, 2008: 518). No doubt the devastations of war had a remarkable impact on Pessoa’s imaginary. It helped him—theoretically, poetically—to distinguish acting and feeling, life and art, then to confuse them to a certain extent, but never to fuse them. Perhaps the two books do not live on the same street, after all. Or perhaps only occasionally. It would be interesting to know how the Portuguese modernist poet would respond to Margaret Henderson’s and Jane Heap’s modernist experiments with art in articulation with explicit, serious (and dangerous) personal/ political commitments.

NOTES 1. When not otherwise stated, all translations are my own. 2. See Scholes and Wulfman, 2010, and Brooker and Thacker, 2009–2013. 3. Cf. Lourenço, 1974: 165–194. [“Presença ou a contra-revolução do modernismo português?” (1960; 1961)]. 4. Feminist critics have abundantly criticized the masculinist bias of modernist discourses on modernism. See, for example, Scott, 1990: Introduction. 5. For dates of full female suffrage all over the world, see Daley and Nolan, 1994: 349–352. For the long fight of American women for the suffrage, see Lepore, 2019: 328. 6. Cf. Marek, 1995. For an excellent review article about Women Editing Modernism, see Canelo, 1997a: 201–205. 7. The temptation here is to bring in Álvaro de Campos’s Ultimatum: “Passae, frouxos que tendes a necessidade de serdes os istas de qualquer ismo!” [Pass by, you milksops who need to be ists of one or another ism!]. Pessoa, 1982a: 509–520 [512]); Pessoa, 2001: 72–87 [76]. 8. Poetry: A Magazine of Verse 8 (2) 103–105. Strangely enough (or typically enough?), Alice Corbin Henderson’s name is not given credit on the review’s cover and her critical notes are simply signed “ACH.” 9. In a letter to Monroe. Apud Marek, 40. Actually, the anthology includes a fine, imagist poem by Wallace Stevens (“Six Significant Landscapes”) which uses the “I”

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only in the third of its six stanzas, the one Henderson, of course, chooses as one of her examples of I-am-itism. 10. When The Little Review first came out, the suffragist movement in the United States was at its peak. For an interesting reflection on the often neglected relationship between feminist print culture and the development of “canonical” modernism, see Chapman, 2014. 11. Blast 1 (July 1914) 151. 12. The Little Review, 3.5 (August 1916) 1. 13. Cf. Marek, 193–202; Scott, Introduction. I am closer to Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s notion of negotiation [of difference] in her Writing beyond the Ending. See DuPlessis, 1985: 43. 14. Confronted with a similar situation of lack of publishable material, Pessoa had a proto-Álvaro de Campos produce “Opiário” for the first Orpheu. See below, note 24. 15. On the social, political, and industrial climate in the United States right before it entered the Great War, see Zinn, 2003: 359–376. 16. Sá-Carneiro, 1978: I, 148 ff (June 15, 1914). In his 1965 “evocation” of Orpheu, Almada Negreiros identifies leptidópteros, implying mimicry, as one of Orpheu’s pejorative terms. The others were literatura (literature) and bota-deelástico (stick-in-the-mud). See Almada Negreiros, 1965: 23–30. Almada attributes the choice of the term (leptidópteros) to Sá-Carneiro. 17. Angelo de Lima, “Ninive,” Orpheu 2, p.15. It is true that Portugal joined the war effort only in March 1916; but the United States did so even later, in April 1917, the same year that Portuguese troops were sent to Europe to fight. However, Portugal had been fighting the Germans in Africa since 1914. For Pessoa’s genuine concern with the Great War, see Ribeiro, 2017: 9–22. 18. Maria José Canelo addresses this issue very perceptively in her MA thesis. See Canelo 1997b: 11–12. 19. I borrow the expression “paper women” from Ribeiro, 1996. Particularly important to me is Ribeiro’s analysis of José de Alencar’s ahistorical images of women in his novels. 20. Pages included in the chapter from now on. For dates of sketches, I follow Jerónimo Pizarro in his monumental, two-volume, critical edition. See Pessoa, 2010. 21. See Lloyd, 1984. 22. See Pessoa, 1966: 27–28. 23. On the “woman’s place” that Violante de Cysneiros occupies in Portuguese modernism, see Klobucka, 1990: 103–114. Cf. Canelo, 1997b: 139–144. 24. In the famous letter to Casais Monteiro on the genesis of the heteronyms (January 13, 1935), Fernando Pessoa explains that since the issue of the first Orpheu was too short, he came up with an older poem by Álvaro de Campos, “Opiário,” revealing the Engineer-poet “em botão” [in the bud]. Pessoa, 1982a: 93–99 [97]). “Opiário” is Pessoa’s jocoserious invention. 25. For some discussion of the aestheticization of sex in modernism, see RamalhoSantos 2003b (chapter 5, “Intersexualities and the Modernist Ode. The Sea Poems of Pessoa and Crane”). For the “superior generation” and the absence of a “woman’s

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voice” (“boca de mulher”) among the poets-of-the-Orpheu-to-be, see Sá-Carneiro’s letter to Pessoa of December 2, 1912. Sá-Carneiro, 1978: I, 33 ff. 26. Years later, right in the middle of the Second World War, an American poet would sanction Orpheus’ seeming obliviousness of the real war outside by insisting that the “soldier is poor without the poet’s lines” (Cf. the closure of Wallace Stevens’s “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction” [1942]. Stevens, 1997: 351–352). After all, it seems, in our culture, there is no poetry without war, for war among humans is always already all over the place. 27. Pessoa, 1981: 290–291; Pessoa, 1982a: 509–520 [513]). 28. But see Ribeiro, “Modernist Temporalities,” for the impact history, war, and violence also had on the poetic endeavors of the Portuguese modernists. 29. Pessoa, 1982a: 513; Pessoa, 2001: 78. For Almada’s quote, see Portugal Futurista. Edição facsimilada (Lisboa: Contexto) 38. For a reading of Pessoa/ Campos’s Ultimatum as the total erasure of culture and civilization for a radically new beginning of poiesis, see Ramalho-Santos, 2003b: 132–136. 30. For an excellent account of Pessoa’s complex and contradictory attitudes toward the Great War, see Monteiro, 2000 (chapter 10: “Webs of Empire. Caroline Norton, Rimbaud, and Others). 31. See Ribeiro, 2005, 2017. 32. Cf. “The Art of Rumination” supra.

Chapter 9

The Accidental Poem Hart Crane’s Theory of the Lyric

A poet will accidentally define his time Crane, “General Aims and Theories” formo, pouco a pouco, o meu livro casual e meditado Pessoa/Soares, Livro do desassossego1

“The poem is always written the following day,” Fernando Pessoa-as-Álvaro de Campos once said memorably (1981: 310). That the statement appears in one of his poems (“Insónia”) only adds to its poetic truth. It is there to state clearly that, just like the poem itself, it does not exist until it is read. Reading makes the poem real by becoming part of its very construction. Each poem is the history of the way it goes on being read, and hence rewritten, across time. A poem’s existence depends on the critical history of its readings, including the reading or readings of the author himself or herself. Emily Dickinson said it very well in one of her short, seemingly unassuming poems, when she wrote that, contrary to the opinion of “some,” a “word,” rather than falling “dead” “when it is said,” begins to live “that day” (J1212/Fr278). I formulate the idea sketched earlier as the hermeneutical construction of the poem. My approach is grounded on the theory and practice of the poets I have been reading all my life, and any one of them would provide ample illustration, but none so magnificently as Hart Crane. In Crane’s case, and particularly in the case of The Bridge (1930), the issue becomes far more complex and interesting because the poem is made up of many different and to a certain extent self-interruptive poems. Rather like Pessoa’s Mensagem (1934) [Message].2 The Bridge is made up of eight numbered sections and fifteen individual poems of varying length, touching on a variety of topics. And yet, The Bridge is still “a poem.” Crane’s work, significantly, announced 131

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itself as The Bridge, A Poem—an appellation that is quite different from the title of his first book: White Buildings, Poems by Hart Crane (1926). The Bridge is “A Poem,” not a collection of poems. Both the history of the book’s composition and the history of its readings, however, render problematical the very idea of the poetry book as an organically unified and, as it were, inevitable whole. In other words, given the self-interruptive structure of many individual poems, The Bridge is no more a poem in the book than it is a poem on the page. This is not to say that The Bridge is a mere series of poems. The Bridge-as-poetry-book is a poem-made-of-poems in history—its and their own history, the history of its poet’s American imagination, and the history of its readers in the world. Furthermore, The Bridge is explicitly a poem about the American nation as a complex modern state, and it is a Whitmanian poem about its own proper singer. Although the desire to give form to the variety and contradictions of human experience in the modern world, in the manner of Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) or Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), albeit in a more hopeful note, lies at its genesis, The Bridge only begins to take shape when Crane begins to feel “directly connected with Whitman” (Crane, 2006: 327). This last quote comes from Crane’s letter to Gorham Munson of March 2, 1923, in which the poet boldly envisions himself as “a suitable Pindar for the dawn of the machine age” (328; Crane’s italics). Even if he could not have been aware at the time of all the implications of his project, it is little wonder that the enterprise appeared to Crane, from the very beginning, as “too impossible an ambition” (2006: 322). The hermeneutical construction of The Bridge (Crane, 2006: 31–74) began long before it was put together as a book. The idea of the poem-as-poetrybook began to germinate in the poet’s mind during the composition of “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen” (1922, 1923, 1924; Crane, 2006: 19–23), the poem-made-of-poems that aimed to “bridge” (Crane’s phrase) tradition and modernity, beauty and technology, knowledge and art. “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen” is the poem of Crane’s poetic maturity. In spite of (or because of) the many disappointments caused by the poem’s first publications, the poet himself was fully aware of what he had accomplished and was thereby emboldened to start “ruminating” on a greater project.3 To be sure, the original conception of The Bridge was merely that of a “new longish poem” to be added to and improve the collection that Crane was then hoping to get published soon. The title appears for the first time in a letter to Munson of February 6, 1923 (Crane, 2006: 314). Crane’s letters of the first few months of 1923, with many identical phrasings addressed to different correspondents, bear witness to the poet’s obsession with the project and its theme. By the time White Buildings came out in 1926, the “longish” poem “on a synthesis of America and its structural identity” had turned into a “long poem” made up of parts, aiming “to enunciate a new cultural synthesis of values in terms

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of our America.”4 The “last part of The Bridge” was sent to Waldo Frank in a letter dated January 18, 1926 (Crane, 2006: 430). Crane’s statement that this “last part” (“Atlantis”) was, “oddly enough,” the first one to emerge has been frequently repeated. What is often neglected is that as early as February 12, 1923, Crane had sent Allen Tate an earlier version of the first stanza of “Van Winkle,” calling it “the first verse of The Bridge” (Crane, 2006: 320). The first two lines appear unchanged as the opening of the second of the five lyrics that comprise “Powhatan’s Daughter.” In this second section of the book, the ample geography of America, embodied in Pocahontas as American history and myth, is bridged from coast to coast by the progress of modern transportation: “Macadam, gun-grey as the tunny’s belt, / Leaps from Far Rockaway to Golden Gate” (Crane, 2006: 39). The bridge image repeats itself in many forms and with many symbolic resonances in the structure of the book as a whole. Crane saw the “very idea of a bridge” both as “a communication” and as “an act of faith.”5 Writing the poem evidently encompassed for the poet both the difficult, slow construction of passages between disparate worlds of experience, ancient and modern, and the discovery of the visionary dreams of which they were the expression. It is ironic that Crane should express the desire to be allowed to write his poem uninterruptedly (namely, by getting enough support from his Maecenas and thus avoiding the drudgery work “at the office”), whereas poetry writing, as he himself conceived of it, is grounded on poetic interruption—a making that constantly questions itself. The idea is perhaps first clearly expressed at the very beginning of “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen,” where “the mind” is “divided,” and reality, or “the day,” envisioned as “stacked partitions” (Crane, 2006: 19). In “General Aims and Theories,” the unpublished essay that Crane is said to have written to help Eugene O’Neill prepare his promised (and never delivered) introduction to White Buildings, Crane speaks of the composition of the poem as “a kind of grafting process.” Although he will not be “interested in repeating” it, he adds, the “process” is “consistent with subsequent theories of [his] on the relation of tradition to the contemporary creating imagination” (Crane, 2006: 160). To bridge tradition and modernity, beauty and technology, knowledge and art implies the mutually interruptive and fragmentary dynamics of all these and many other concepts. In what follows I will try to show that the history of the composition of The Bridge helps us to understand that Crane’s theory of poetry is grounded on the romantic idea of the fragment which longs for wholeness that is never achieved. Crane’s first book of poetry could also teach us a thing or two about the hermeneutical construction of the poetry book: the poems that were included and those that were not; the circumstances of the previous publication of individual poems; the order in which the poems appear in the book; what was on

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the poet’s mind and what were his expectations as he was preparing the book for publication; how the new project affected its composition; how it was received by the critics; what promises it seemed to offer regarding the poet’s subsequent career. In retrospect, after the publication of The Bridge and its reception, after the poet’s suicide at sea in 1932, and after assessment of the poems he left unpublished (both those written before and after the publication of The Bridge), White Buildings is readily construed as anticipating (if not prophesying) the poet’s major concerns in The Bridge. To my mind, White Buildings is no less a poem about America than The Bridge (see RamalhoSantos, 1999: 94–114). The Bridge is, however, a far more interesting case than White Buildings because it was conceived of from the start as a unified poetry book. The architectural metaphor already present in the title of the first book (buildings) is recreated in the dynamic concept of the bridge as movement, passage, voyage, experience, communication, gesture, prayer, song—the bridge, therefore, as incessant, architectural bridging. The actual daring conception and painful construction of Roebling’s suspended bridge in the late nineteenth century, exactly where Whitman’s Brooklyn ferry had once crossed the East River, feeds into Crane’s theory of poetry as well. “Poetry is an architectural art,” he says in the essay he titled “Modern Poetry” (Crane, 2006: 170). Drawing on the actual bridge as a cultural icon and national symbol, The Bridge is a construction that transcends itself. Each new poem written, each new poem independently published in a little magazine, became one more step in the construction of the bridge. In a letter to Yvor Winters of February 26, 1927, Crane insisted that his main interest as a poet was in “construction” (the emphasis is Crane’s) (2006: 525). The idea is already present in his muchquoted 1926 letter to Harriet Monroe (Crane, 2006: 165–169) about “At Melville’s Tomb” and the “logic of metaphor”—a concept Crane had used in a letter to Alfred Stieglitz as early as July 4, 1923 (2006: 341). The musical metaphor that the poet brings to bear on his harp-like poem adds to the kinetic concept as well. The “symphony” he claimed his poem to be implies musical segments momentarily brought together and made present by the act of playing and listening. Right from the start, the architecture of the bridge presents itself as motion/music, not stasis. Crane’s “synthesis” of America is also America’s ever-expanding “structural identity” (cf. Weber, 1948: 127). The image of the bridge, the actual Brooklyn Bridge crossing the East River and Crane’s poem spanning time, space, and modern consciousness, is an ongoing, unending process, not unlike Leaves of Grass as America’s ever unfinished and “never achiev’d poem,” as Whitman defined it in Specimen Days (1982: 921). It is therefore not at all surprising that Crane should take such a keen interest in the Roeblings as bridge builders, having even toyed with the idea

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of writing the biography of Washington Roebling.6 His admiration for the master engineer implies comparison of himself with the daring builder of the “most superb piece of construction of the modern world,” indeed the “most beautiful bridge in the world.”7 In the symphony played in “Atlantis,” the “floating singer” rises from the “granite and steel” of his own making, the poet as cause and effect, creator and creature of “steeled Cognizance.” As the “concrete evidence of the experience of a recognition” (Crane’s emphasis), poetry is knowledge, both as “perception and thing perceived.”8 Hence the poet’s interest in the construction, not in the finished object. What excites the poet’s imagination is the poetic ever being on the way (unterwegs, as Celan says in the Bremen speech), not the fixed form of the poem on the page, or even in the book. The poet of The Bridge is Columbus, Whitman, and Roebling at the same time, as well as Hart Crane. Unending voyaging and sea crossing, music and poetry writing, the miraculous construction of the “arc synoptic” of New York’s suspended bridge and the dynamic images of process spanning time and space that they all convey, spell out Crane’s theory of the lyric, to which I now turn. II In a fine chapter on The Bridge included in his Hart Crane: A Re-Introduction, Warner Berthoff, after reviewing briefly the history of Crane’s attempt at fulfilling his “impossible ambition,” suggests boldly that “the final organization and sequence of The Bridge are in some considerable measure accidental” (1989: 87). There is nothing new about this assessment. The concept of accident, as diagnosis of Crane’s final product as a “failure,” was implied by early reviewers of The Bridge, notably Yvor Winters (1930: 153–165) and Allen Tate (1930: 580–585). The negative appraisals by these two critics were all the more devastating for Crane because they were both made by his friends and fellow poets. They were both familiar with Crane’s conceptions and intentions. They were both well acquainted with and had already expressed considerable admiration for his work (including individual, previously published poems of The Bridge), and could therefore be legitimately expected to have an informed and sympathetic approach. The Bridge as failed construction, somehow indicative of the deficiency or gradual disintegration of Crane’s imaginative powers, is part of literary history. Winters’s assessment of Crane’s “failure” being a failure of structural composition, presumably due to Crane’s supposedly increasing personal inadequacies, was much later repeated by James Fenton in The New York Review of Books. The title given to Fenton’s review of Langdon Hammer’s new edition of Crane’s letters was “Going Half the Way,” a title

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that unequivocally drove home this meaning (Fenton, 1997). Curiously enough, many sympathetic readers, including more recently those informed by gay studies and queer theory, seem for the past three decades to have either ignored Winters’s indictment altogether or apologetically accepted the diagnosis, only to find in it the right excuse to celebrate the poet’s originality.9 Crane’s genius is usually depicted as somehow contrasting with New Critical views of the ontological status of the poem as a unified object or closed totality, perfectly reflecting the poet’s sustained and integrating vision. This happens whether patterns of imagery and language are tacitly invoked to praise the organic nature of the poem, or whether the romantic idea of the fragment is proffered as the high mark of the poet’s craftsmanship, or whether Crane’s poetry is read as representing an alternative if not oppositional conception of poetry and American culture.10 Berthoff’s position is bolder. He uses the potentially pejorative term (“accidental”) defiantly to signify, paradoxically, the poet’s intellectual and imaginative control of the process and his right to plan as he goes along and as he sees fit for the continuing composition of the poetry book. “Bit by bit,” writes Pessoa/Soares in Livro do desassossego [The Book of Disquietude], only seemingly paradoxically, “I compose this accidental [casual] and thought out book of mine” (Pessoa, 1998a: #13; 55). In Crane, too, each new poem, whether willfully conceived from the start as part of The Bridge project or not, would be considered in due time. I would go even further and suggest outright that there is nothing sacrosanct about the whole of The Bridge. Crane went on publishing individual poems even as he struggled to bring them to a synthetic whole in the poetry book, and even after the book was published. The Bridge as poem moves in literary history along hermeneutical constructions of it or parts of it. When Crane tells Otto Kahn that “each poem” in The Bridge is “a separate canvas,” he is being accurate; when he adds that “none yields its entire significance when seen apart from the others,” he is exaggerating by stating the obvious.11 Nothing exists in itself alone, Wallace Stevens once said, and, of course, a change of context changes the individual poem. Once printed in an anthology, for example, any poem from any poetry book yields a different significance; this is even more marked if a particular poetry book aims to perform a formal integration of experience. This does not invalidate the practice of anthologizing individual poems, nor their independent publication in another format, such as a scholarly essay. Permission has to be requested of authors and publishers, but it is usually only a question of price (capital interferes with hermeneutics, as with everything else). Whatever the case may be, however, the poem’s history should never be hidden from its readers. Poets are free to change their work’s history more or less deliberately, and many have done so. One of the most interesting cases concerns Alberto

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Pimenta’s revisions of all his previous poetry books in his one-volume edition of 1990. Pimenta’s gesture is an ironic commentary on editions of noted Portuguese poets that came out at the time under titles such as Poesia Completa [Complete Poems] and Obra toda [Complete Works]. The title of Pimenta’s book is Obra quase incompleta [Almost Incomplete Works], a provocation that is also a theoretical statement echoing Pessoa in Livro do desassossego: once written, says Soares, the work “imperfects itself”; unwritten, it would be “perfection” (Pessoa, 1998a: #331, 308). With his provocative title—Almost Incomplete Works—Pimenta deconstructs the idea of the desired completeness of the work, while at the same time stressing it. If, as Pimenta repeats frequently in this volume and elsewhere, “everything began in the eighteenth century,” the theoretical premise of the modern poet’s practice cannot but be the romantic fragment with immortal longings for wholeness. The very nature of poetic language is that it arbitrarily separates what is together, as for example, in Catullus’s odi e amo (Pimenta, 2003). For Pimenta, an attentive reader of the German Romantics, poetry is never fixed; it is rather, as Schlegel states in Athenäum fragment 116, “romantische Poesie,” “eternally in the process of becoming and never completed” (“all poesy is or should be romantic”).12 Crane was probably not conversant with the German Romantics, but at least two of his favorite authors, Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter Pater, were. Crane shares their poetic vision. Both Crane and Pimenta see “the poem” as process and see no contradiction between the “fragment” as a “complete” entity—of which the romantic metaphor famously appropriated by Derrida in “Che cos’è la poesia” is the hedgehog—and poetry’s endless becoming (“Werden”) that is the “image of the age” (Derrida, 1991: 221–237). In Crane’s own apt formulation, “Language has built towers and bridges, but itself is inevitably as fluid as always” (Crane, 2006: 164). There are many differences, to be sure, between Crane and Pimenta. History and geography count, as do background and many other factors (didn’t Crane famously state once, “Appollinaire [sic] lived in Paris, I live in Cleveland, Ohio”?13). Be it as it may, Crane and Pimenta do share a tradition in which poetry is conceived of as a making (poiesis) that presents itself as an ongoing process, and each of them particularly values poetry’s intervention in the interruptive tension between part and whole. To put it another way, the Coleridgean predilection for “fusion” should not make us forget that in this tradition the poem is never finished, New Critical verbal icons and well-wrought urns notwithstanding (and “Kubla Khan”—with its sometimes disregarded alternative title “A Vision in a Dream. A Fragment”—is there to state the poetic fact unequivocally). Once poets become fully aware of the utter fluidity and vulnerability of language, the poem does not allow itself to appear as self-enclosed. The following day comes and the poem is no longer the same, as if Pessoa’s fifth degree of lyric poetry were always

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about to be. In “The Book as Architecture,” Charles Bernstein, a contemporary American poet in the same tradition, expresses this concept unsurpassably well: “Building impossible spaces in which to roam, unhinged from the contingent necessities of durability, poems and the books they make eclipse stasis in their insatiable desire to dwell inside the pleats and folds of language” (1999: 57). Matters become far more interesting when a poem is not a mere string of poems (like “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen” or “Voyages”), but a whole poetry book that precisely claims to be a whole, even if it is a whole that is forever being interrupted. The nearly seven years that it took Crane to write The Bridge has often been accounted for by the poet’s difficulty in managing his poetic powers adequately. This is true to the extent that it is true of every poet in the tradition, and as long as it does not turn into an indictment of a particular poet’s poetic “weaknesses,” as Yvor Winters would have it in Crane’s case. To write poetry is very hard work and often a very unconventional kind of work; not something a person can be expected to perform uninterruptedly and efficiently from nine to five. To have a sense of the inadequacy of Winters’s assessment of the “failure” of The Bridge, we must remember that in Winters’s biological approach (Crane’s phrase), Crane’s other “weaknesses” were homosexuality, drinking habits, and his taste for the “Whitmanian.”14 In my assessment of Winters’s assessment of the failure of The Bridge, the “failure” lies rather in Winters’s own failure to take account of the role of the poet’s imagination in the hermeneutical construction of his poem. The Bridge, and Crane’s years of agony over its writing, testifies to this better than any other poetic phenomenon, except, perhaps, Pessoa’s invention of the heteronyms. The hermeneutical construction of The Bridge begins with the writing of the individual poems and the simultaneous conceptualization of the poem as a long poem comprised of sections (similar to “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen”), and eventually as a poetry book. To pronounce The Bridge a completed poem could not have been easy for Crane. He struggled until the very last moment with the final shape of the book. He knew that, regardless of fictions of closure that poets and readers go by at different times, the poem, let alone the poetry book, is never self-contained. It is presided over, rather, by interruption. The Bridge as poem and as poetry book gives eloquent testimony to this concept.15 Of all the fifteen individual poems that comprise The Bridge, only “Quaker Hill” and “Atlantis” were never published separately by Crane, who was always eager to sell a poem for sheer survival (capital and hermeneutics once again). All the other poems appeared in different magazines in the course of 1927 and 1928, in one case with a different title (“The Dance” was “Powhatan’s Daughter,” Crane’s later title for the second numbered section).

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“Indiana” and “Cape Hatteras” bring us back to the hermeneutics-and-capital issue: each of them afforded Crane a modest fee by being published in a magazine as an individual poem in 1930, after The Bridge had already come out, “Indiana” bearing a different title as well (“Eldorado”). Among the Crane/Winters papers a tentative table of contents of The Bridge is extant, probably made in 1927, that differs considerably from the final version: “Quaker Hill” is not mentioned, “Mango Tree” (first published in Transition in November 1929) is still considered for inclusion as the middle section (as stated in Crane’s letter to Waldo Frank of August 12, 1926), three more poems are also considered that do not seem to have ever been written, and, more importantly, “Cape Hatteras” (not yet written) appears as the third section right before “Cutty Sark” (Parkinson, 1978: 66; Crane, 2006: 480). It was only after the event of its composition that Crane came to define “Cape Hatteras,” his “rhapsodic address” to Whitman, as the “‘center’ of the book, both physically and symbolically.”16 “On écrit qu’à la pointe de son savoir,” says Gilles Deleuze (1974: 4), a statement that is true with a vengeance when referring to poetry. “Na falta de saber, escrevo” [Wanting knowing, I write], we read in Pessoa’s Livro do desassossego (Pessoa, 1998a: #87, 116). Meter-making argument, not argument-making meter (Emerson is right) is what poetry is all about. Moreover, The Bridge was already in press when Crane added the gloss to “Powhatan’s Daughter,” in an attempt at “binding together [its] general theme.” The poet is obviously concerned with the whole poem’s “entire significance,” even if his poetry book remained in fluctuation until the very end and beyond. The two 1930 editions (the Black Sun Press in Paris and the Liveright in New York City) are not exactly alike. And every time the book is reprinted, separately or in a Complete Poems, with or without a new introduction and notes, literary history changes. This is not to say that “the poetry book” is a useless concept. Poets usually take great care with their final structure and composition and the order of poems on the pages. Some posthumous collected poems ordered chronologically are, for this reason, disastrous, as is the case with Rampersad’s edition of Langston Hughes’s poetry (1994). And yet, the final result of the poet’s efforts may not turn out to be exactly what was originally planned: Wallace Stevens forgot to include two very fine, previously uncollected poems (“The Course of a Particular” and “A Discovery of Thought”) in his carefully arranged Collected Poems (1954). Needless to say, nobody ever dared to put them in place, the question being, which place?17 All these problems are magnified in the case of The Bridge. The poet was determined to build an object that had a beginning and an end. Writing to Waldo Frank about the composition of “Atlantis,” the closing poem that was the first part to be written, the poet realized that “a bridge is begun

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from the two ends at once” (Crane, 1997: 266). In response to Allen Tate’s harsh review of The Bridge in Hound & Horn, Crane counters his friend’s accusation of sentimentality over the use he makes of Whitman by insisting on the coherence of the vision of America underlying his poetic synthesis. Nonetheless, there is something of the nature of the “accident” in Crane’s construction. Not that Crane would deliberately condone “accidents” in poetic construction. With regard to artistic endeavor, he was never too fond of Dadaist randomness. He always argued, rather, for “much conscious effort,” as he put it in an early letter to Munson (January 28, 1921, Crane’s emphasis).18 And yet, accident in the simple, primary sense of anything that happens (or “a way of happening,” as Auden would say in his elegy for Yeats) is part of Crane’s poetic conception as well. “Accidental,” in my title as in Crane, really means “contingent”—in its etymological sense of contiguity (Lat. contingere > CON- tangere). In Crane’s conception, The Bridge happens (perhaps rather, goes on happening) alongside the happenings it claims to sing: America, poetry, the poem, the poet—and love. As Crane writes in “Modern Poetry” (1930), as if heeding McGann’s caveats against “romantic ideology,” the poetic process “demands [. . .] an extraordinary capacity for surrender, at least temporarily, to the sensations of urban [read “modern”] life” (2006: 171). Crane’s half-facetious remark on his composition of “The Mango Tree” (transition 18, 1929) in a letter to Susan Jenkins Brown (May 22, 1926) is perhaps worthy of more attention than it has received so far. “I enclose an accidental calligramme committed this morning accidentally on my way to the Bridge,” writes Crane, obliquely emphasizing, no less by the poem’s tree shape, his own view of the intricate, self-interruptive relationship between poetry and material reality (1997: 254). As The Bridge neared publication, Crane grew increasingly reluctant to release it. Not because he thought the poem was not yet complete but rather because he was unwilling to pronounce it complete. Hadn’t he assured Otto Kahn already in a letter of September 19, 1926, that “the poem [was then] already an epic of America, incomplete as it [was]”? (Crane, 2006: 488–489). How could America or its epic ever be complete? Wouldn’t Crane’s epic of America, interrupted as it is by the lyric for being an epic of the modern consciousness as well, have to go on forever and forever incomplete, like Whitman’s ongoing and organic Leaves of Grass? If The Bridge can be said to be America’s “cartogram” (Crane’s neologism to define “Cutty Sark”), how could it bear poetic closure?19 What eventually loosened Crane up was the idea, proffered by Caresse Crosby (who, in any case, considered the poem to be already complete), that further editions could easily incorporate new additions, much in the manner of Whitman’s book. Once he realized that the poem could go on almost indefinitely in this way even after publication, Crane agreed to have it published. “For all I know,” he wrote with

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evident relief to Caresse Crosby on April 25, 1929, “the Bridge may turn into something like the form of Leaves of Grass, with a number of editions, each incorporating further additions” (Crane, 2006: 615).20 That the “further additions” end up being those provided by its readers does not alter the theoretical principle one bit. As I conclude, I am tempted to see The Bridge as Derrida’s “poétique”: the poem as a “story of heart” (remember Crane’s punning on his name in his poetry)—an experience or voyage that “does not hold still within names, nor even within words” (or poems, I would add). The Bridge may well turn out to be American poetry’s version of the hedgehog, the strange little animal that has fascinated poets and philosophers, from Archilochos to Friedrich Schlegel to Derrida. “The fox knows many tricks,” says Archilochos, “the hedgehog only one, but it is a good one” (Archiloque. Fragments, 1958). The trick the hedgehog knows, according to Schlegel, makes it just momently self-enclosed and self-sufficient. But, in Derrida’s perception of the poetic, the hedgehog’s real trick is that it is never complete unto itself after all. It is helpless on the road (or bridge), interrupting and susceptible to interruption, dangerous and utterly vulnerable in its many bristling spines. There is no poem without accident.

NOTES 1. Crane, 2006: 161; Pessoa, 1998a: 55 (I compose, bit by bit, this accidental and thought out book). My translation. When not otherwise indicated, all translations are my own. 2. For a comparative study of The Bridge and Mensagem as “epics of the modern consciousness,” see Ramalho-Santos, 2003b, Chapter 3. 3. When “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen” appeared in Secessions at the end of 1923, supposedly as a whole but in fact “edited” and “revised” by Philip Wheelwright, Crane pronounced it “slain” (see Unterecker, 1969: 313). For a more recent account of the vicissitudes of the publication of the three-partite composition, see Fisher, 2002: 193–194. 4. See letters to Wilbur Underwood, February 20, 1923 (Crane, 2006: 325) and Otto Kahn, December 3, 1925 (Crane, 2006: 424). 5. Letter to Waldo Frank, June 20, 1926 (Crane, 2006: 466). 6. Letter to Allen Tate, March 27, 1927 (Crane, 1997: 331). The project was also financial, of course: penniless Crane hoped the biography would yield some commercial profit, while serving as good publicity for The Bridge, as well. 7. Letter to his mother, May 11, 1924; letter to Waldo Frank, April 21, 1924 (Crane, 2006: 387, 384). 8. Letter to Gorham Munson, March 17, 1926 (Crane, 2006: 436).

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9. As Lee Edelman (1987) has shown, the ghost of Winters tends to haunt much admiring criticism of Crane in the form of an apologetic tone. 10. The bibliography of works on Crane has grown tremendously in the past decades. A modest sample of the critical range I suggest above would include Ickstadt, 1970; Hazo, 1977; Brunner, 1985; Bennett, 1987; Yingling, 1990. More recently, John T. Irwin’s erudite, monumental Hart Crane’s Poetry (2011), which discovers unsuspected resonances in Crane’s oeuvre. 11. Letter to Otto Khan, September 12, 1927 (Crane, 2006: 554). John Irwin (Part One) provides the best and most thorough and insightful comments on Crane’s architectural/musical conception and construction of The Bridge. 12. Quotations are here from Schulte-Hasse, 1997: 320–321; see also fragment 260 (322). 13. Letter to Gorham Munson, May 25, 1922 (Crane, 2006: 276). It is quite significant that Irwin chose this statement as subtitle for his very thorough study of Crane’s poetry. 14. Yvor Winters, “The Significance of The Bridge, by Hart Crane, or What Are We to Think of Professor X?” (Winters, 1947: 577–603). See also Crane’s letter to Winters, May 29, 1927 (Crane, 2006: 541–546). 15. On interruption as a useful—Pessoan—concept for reading the lyric, see chapter 4, supra, and cf. Ramalho-Santos, 2003b: 222–256. 16. Letter to Caresse Crosby, December 26, 1929. See also letter to Allen Tate, July 13, 1930 (Crane, 1997: 421, 433). (Crane, 2006: 633–634, 645–647). 17. Stevens acknowledges his forgetfulness concerning “The Course of a Particular” in a letter to Robert Pack of April 14, 1955 (Stevens, 1966: 881). Both poems were later included in Opus Posthumous (Stevens, 1957: 95–96). 18. See Crane, 2006: 241. Writing about the same time to Matthew Josephson (January 14, 1921), Crane makes his misgivings about the modishness of Dada even clearer: “I hear that ‘New York’ has gone mad about ‘Dada’ and that a most exotic and worthless review is being concocted by Man Ray and Duchamp, billets in a bag printed backwards, on rubber deluxe, and so on. This is worse than the Baroness [Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven]” (Crane, 2006: 241). 19. See letter to Edgell Rickword, January 7, 1927 (Crane, 2006: 507). 20. See also Fisher, 2002: 401–402.

Chapter 10

Being Blind. Being Nobody. Being a Poet Emily Dickinson “Reads” Fernando Pessoa

In Memoriam Edwin Honig

Fernando Pessoa’s interest in English-language poets throughout his life is well documented. A list of names of English-language authors, clearly penned by a very young Pessoa, still in Durban, South Africa, shows the poet-to-be evidently eager to get himself an education in English.1 His list goes from Old English to the end of the nineteenth century, probably taking advantage of the Palgrave Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics and A History of English Literature, by E. J. Matthew. Of both Pessoa owned copies.2 This very early list includes the names of three American poets: [Edgar Allan] Poe, [John Greenleaf] Whittier, and [Henry Wadsworth] Longfellow. Poe, of course, is one of the usual suspects, since Pessoa earned a copy of Poe’s Choice Works. Poems, Stories, Essays, with an introduction by Baudelaire (1902), when he was awarded the Queen Victoria Memorial Prize in 1903. In Atlantic Poets, I pay some attention to Pessoa’s reception of Poe. Whitman, the major suspect, is not on that particular list, he would appear later, but we all know how important Pessoa’s encounter with Whitman was. Like many other scholars, I have also considered Pessoa’s reception of Whitman from different angles. An enlightening revisitation of Whitman’s influence on Pessoa is Richard Zenith’s “Pessoa and Whitman Revisited” (2013).3 The most comprehensive work tracing the interest of Pessoa in Englishlanguage poets is still George Monteiro’s Fernando Pessoa and Nineteenthcentury Anglo-American Literature (2000).4 The book includes excellent chapters on the Americans Whitman, Hawthorne (whose The Scarlet Letter Pessoa translated), and Poe, with a brief reference, in the Poe chapter, apropos of Pessoa’s translations, to Whittier, whose “Maud Muller” Pessoa also 143

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translated. An American poet Pessoa does not seem to have known at all is Emily Dickinson, even though scholars familiar with the work of both poets have frequently brought them together.5 Poets in the Western lyrical tradition do not usually like to hear about “influence.” Unless, like Robert Duncan, they proudly assume and thrive on being “derivative.” When explicitly asked, poets in this tradition often fail to acknowledge the most important names in their poetic development. T. S. Eliot, for example, fiercely denied that he (or Pound) had suffered any influence from Whitman, even though scholarship tells you differently.6 Pessoa, himself, whose Álvaro de Campos wrote a very complex salutation to the Bard of American Democracy, sometimes forgets to mention Whitman when asked to provide a list of poets who had influenced him most.7 Perhaps this is precisely because, as acknowledged in “Saudação a Walt Whitman,” Álvaro and Walt are one by mutual agreement. Very close to the beginning of his ode to Whitman, Álvaro blurts out: “Tu sabes que eu sou TU e estás contente com isso” [You know I am YOU and you’re happy about it] (Pessoa, 1981: 271).8 I once suggested, taking off from Eduardo Lourenço’s original insight about Pessoa’s discovery of Alberto Caeiro and the heteronyms, that Pessoa’s momentous encounter with Whitman resembled Jacob’s wrestling with the angel of God and earning Israel as a new name. Pessoa’s encounter with Whitman yielded him many hetero-names, the major ones being Pessoa, Alberto Caeiro (the “master”), Ricardo Reis, Álvaro de Campos, and Bernardo Soares (Ramalho-Santos, 2003b: 208).9 I also suggested then that, rather than suspending the (Bloomian) anxiety of influence by inventing his precursor in “master” Caeiro, as I had argued before, by creating the heteronyms Pessoa brilliantly demystifies the very notions of author, authorship, authority, and poetic influence.10 The study of relationships between poets is, of course, extremely important. But I agree with Harold Bloom’s wise suggestion that the term “intra-poetic relationships” is a far more accurate description of poetry and what poetry is all about than anxiety-ridden “poetic influence.”11 Pessoa’s involvement with other poets has been productively explored by many critics, including myself, but it has increasingly become far more interesting to me to understand poetry and how poetry works by reinventing Walter Benjamin’s concept of “constellations.”12 Benjamin speaks of constellations of ideas. I speak of constellations of poets; or constellations of poems. Dickinson and Pessoa are, to my mind, poets of one constellation. I agree with Jedd Deppman that “certain strains in postmodern thought can help make visible central aspects of [Dickinson’s] poetry, and [that] her poetry has the power to illuminate and respond to contemporary situations” (2008: 8). Though I am grateful to Deppman for his rigorous study of Dickinson’s affinity with philosophy, I would not endorse his argument that Dickinson’s poems “are” philosophy.

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Poetry is not philosophy. As Dickinson states in one of her poems, the “rainbow” is “more convincing than philosophy” (J97/Fr76). And when she decides to “think” about death in “Of death I try to think like this” (J1558/ Fr1588), her poem ends up translating its thinking into pure poetic imagery.13 As Pessoa’s Caeiro also knows very well, “Com filosofia não há árvores: há ideias apenas / With philosophy there are no trees: only ideas” (“Não basta abrir a janela” / It is not enough to open the window) (Pessoa, 1981: 165). I do agree, however, that Dickinson’s poetry speaks to modernist concerns. Her anti-foundational and anti-metaphysical tenets help us to understand Alan Badiou’s surmise about the challenge that Fernando Pessoa’s poetry poses to contemporary philosophy’s struggle to overcome Plato and metaphysics.14 Furthermore, besides sharing many common literary origins, both poets are mainly concerned with the construction of the poetic subject, the lyric subject actually identifying himself or herself as a poet. Both Dickinson and Pessoa often resort, for that purpose, to the tropes of sight, nothingness, and poetry itself.15 There is no evidence that Pessoa ever read Dickinson, and Dickinson, of course, could not have read Pessoa at all. However, it is possible to overhear a dialogue going on between the two poets. Actually, Dickinson’s poems often sound as if she has indeed read Pessoa and chooses to respond to him by questioning his poetic imagining. It is as if Emily Dickinson at some point came to an uncanny momentous encounter with Pessoa, thus making one more poetic constellation appear. Constellations of poets are constituted by poems gravitating toward particular topics, especially concerning poetic selfidentification. I propose to look here at three self-images in these two poets’ poetry: being blind, being nothing, and being a poet. * Being Blind In “The Creations of Sound,” Wallace Stevens speaks of a poet he calls “X” whose poems, regrettably, “do not make the visible a little hard / To see” (Stevens, 1997: 274). Harold Bloom believes that “X” is T. S. Eliot and I see no reason not to agree (177: 152).16 But I would like to argue as well that Stevens, when writing this poem, may have had in mind Dickinson’s poems on seeing and not seeing. According to Bloom, Dickinson is, unlike Eliot, one of the rare poets that have the privilege of making the visible a little hard to see. That is to say, poets who actively use the imagination to question the act of reducing reality to what exists. I am thinking, in particular, of “Before I got my eye put out” (J327/Fr336), “From Blank to Blank” (J761/Fr484), “What I see not, I better see—” (J939/Fr869), “The Sun and Moon must make their haste” (J871/Fr1063), “Who saw no Sunrise cannot say” (J1018/Fr1028),

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and “Had we our senses” (J1284/Fr1310). The first of these poems begins: “Before I got my eye put out / I liked as well to see—/ As other Creatures, that have Eyes / And know no other way—” The poem goes on to demonstrate the need literally to make the visible a little hard to see and so document the superior existential experience of knowing by some other way rather than by eyeseeing, that is to say, by just having a soul instead of eyes and, therefore, by not being able physically to see at all. Or by being blind. Like Tiresias. “What I see not, I better see—” explains how a shut-eye resents being “interrupted” by “jealous Daylight.” “From Blank to Blank” closes with the extraordinary line, to which I come back later, “’Twas—lighter to be—Blind.” In “The Sun and Moon must make their haste,” a “Hindered Eye” is promised a divine “Candle.” In “Who saw no Sunrise cannot say,” it is as if seeing were really the other, diminished side of blindness, as when blindness is blessed for not finding the eye. In “Had we our senses,” the blessing amounts again to being blind, since seeing reality would be too devastating. “How well that we are blind,” the poem goes on, and it concludes “We could not look upon the Earth— / so utterly unmoved—” I argue that these Dickinsonian poetic statements sound like metaleptic responses to the Pessoan heteronym who emphatically insists that he is not even a poet and rather claims merely to see. “Eu nem sequer sou poeta: vejo” [I am not even a poet: I see], says Alberto Caeiro in “A espantosa realidade das coisas” [The amazing reality of things], a poem from “Poemas inconjunctos” (Pessoa, 1981: 168–169).17 Pessoa called these Caeiro poems poemas inconjunctos because he did not see them as in conjunction with O guardador de rebanhos [The Keeper of Sheep] (1981: 137–162) or “O pastor amoroso” [The Shepherd in Love] (1981: 163–164), his two real sets of poems. Since in the Portuguese language “inconjunto” does not register as a word to mean the opposite of “conjunto” [set, ensemble], Pessoa, who spelled both words “conjuncto” and “inconjuncto,” must be borrowing his meaning from the English word “inconjunct.” In English, “inconjunct” means “celestial bodies lacking conjunction,” and that is how Pessoa, whose interest in astrology is well known, wanted these poems to be read. Not as Assorted Poems, Miscellaneous Poems, or Uncollected Poems, as translators and critics usually have it, and not as poems not part of a set (“conjunto”), but rather as poems lacking conjunction: Inconjunct Poems / Poemas inconjunctos (Pessoa, 1981: 165–180). These poems are out of shepherd orbit, so to speak, and yet they are somehow still part of the same constellation. And this is precisely what the Dickinson poems about seeing and not seeing mentioned earlier help us to see. All poems by Caeiro are totally dependent on seeing, seeing is actually the poet’s absolute origin of poeming. Seeing is the poet’s inspiration. A totally material inspiration that replaces the poet’s identity, his ultimate degree of poetry, as it were. His

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capital “I” is his seeing “eye.” Pessoa’s Caeiro relies on physical, empirical sight for being a poet. Going over The Keeper of Sheep, we realize that the Child Jesus coming down to earth taught the poet how to see (“Num meiodia de fim de primavera” / On a midday in late spring); the poet knows that the main thing is to know how to see (“O que nós vemos das cousas são as cousas” / What we see of things are the things); so he goes about merely looking and seeing (“Eu nunca guardei rebanhos” / I never kept sheep), his seeing coincides with the thing itself (“O meu olhar é nítido como um girassol” / My gaze is as clear as a sunflower); and he is the exact size of what he sees (“Da minha aldeia vejo quanto da terra se pode ver do universo” / From my village I see as much of the earth as can be seen from the universe). However, in poem XXVI of O guardador de rebanhos the poet also recognizes that the utter materiality of seeing only the visible, which is his main poetic ambition, is extremely difficult: “Que difícil ser próprio e não ver senão o visível” [How difficult to be ownmost (eigenen) and see only the visible] (“Às vezes, em dias de luz perfeita e exacta” / Sometimes, when the light is perfect and exact). Read from Dickinson’s standpoint, Caeiro’s poems actually problematize, however paradoxically, mere physical sight as the source of the poetic. As in one of the poems of “Poemas inconjunctos,” Não basta abrir a janela Para ver os campos e o rio. Não é bastante não ser cego Para ver as árvores e as flores. É preciso também não ter filosofia nenhuma. Com filosofia não há árvores: há ideias apenas. Há só cada um de nós, como uma cave. Há só uma janela fechada, e todo o mundo lá fora; E um sonho do que se poderia ver se a janela se abrisse, Que nunca é o que se vê quando se abre a janela. [It is not enough to open the window To see the fields and the river. It is not enough not to be blind To see the trees and the flowers. It is also necessary to have no philosophy. With philosophy there are no trees: only ideas. There is only each one of us, like a basement. There is only a closed window, and the whole world outside; And a dream of what could be seen if the window opened, Which is never what is seen when the window is opened.]

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Consider the triple image of the window: a window that can be easily opened through yielding diminished results (não basta abrir a janela / it is not enough to open the window), a single window that is closed (há só uma janela fechada / there is only a closed window), and a window that might open but probably won’t (se a janela se abrisse / if the window opened). Opening a window facilitates sight, but seeing, that is to say, not being blind, is not enough to see really. To have a clear view of things, as when you look through an open window, is no guaranty of sight. Seeing requires no thinking, no opinion, no ideas, no dreaming. And yet, the poem ends up suggesting that a closed window promises an ampler sight than an open window. What is at stake here is the nature of the poetic imagination, as becomes clear when we ask Dickinson to “read” this Caeiro poem in “Before I got my eye put out” (J327/Fr336). Both poets, Dickinson and Caeiro, strive to understand where the “talent which is death to hide” comes from. I have just quoted from John Milton’s sonnet “When I consider how my light is spent.” Dickinson’s poem teaches Caeiro what Pessoa knew very well: that Milton wrote his best poetry after having become blind (after he had his eye put out). So, perhaps, better to have the poet’s imagination (i.e., in Dickinson’s terms, the poet’s “soul”), rather than the poet’s eyes, on the windowpane. As Dickinson once confided to her would-be mentor, Thomas Higginson, “the ‘Supernatural’ [is] only the Natural, disclosed” (1986: 424 [L280]). This pronouncement is better understood in the light of a brief poem about “unfurnished eyes” and “Revelation” (J685/ Fr500): Not “Revelation”—’tis—that waits, But our unfurnished eyes—

Caeiro had no way of knowing, but Dickinson and Pessoa were both fully aware of Wordsworth’s difficulties with what he called the “tyranny” of the eye, when the “most despotic” of the senses becomes “master” of the heart— and “master” cannot but be a crucial concept in this book (The Prelude 1805, 11, 170ss). Caeiro is apparently unaware of the danger of such tyranny: “Vi como um danado” [I saw like a doomed one], is how Caeiro identifies himself in “Se, depois de eu morrer, quiserem escrever a minha biografia” [If, after I die, they want to write my biography]. Dickinson, however, Tiresias like, chooses “to shut [her] eyes” for “’Twas lighter—to be Blind—” (J761/ Fr484). The best reading of Caeiro’s “dream” in the two last lines of “Não basta abrir a janela”—“E um sonho do que se poderia ver se a janela se abrisse, / Que nunca é o que se vê quando se abre a janela” [And a dream of what could be seen if the window opened / Which is never what is seen when the window is opened]—is a remark by Dickinson in one of her letters that sounds like a warning to Caeiro about “unfurnished eyes”: “To see is perhaps never quite the sorcery that it is to surmise” (Dickinson, 1986: 619 [L 565]).

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Interestingly enough, however, Caeiro, the poet who is no poet and, as he claims, merely sees, ends up engaging in surmise, as well: “Também sei fazer conjecturas” [I can also make conjectures], begins another of the inconjunct poems that goes on surmising why things, plants, animals, human beings, or gods are what they are. “Também sei fazer conjecturas” clearly contradicts the remark by Thomas Crosse, a critic invented by Fernando Pessoa, in an intended preface for an English translation of Caeiro’s poetry to be published in England: “[Caeiro] sees things with the eyes only, not with the mind” (Pessoa, 1994: 222). Another poem by Emily Dickinson cautions readers (and Caeiro) against “eyes only”: “The Sun and Moon must make their haste—” (J871/ Fr1063) speaks of the “Hindered Eye” that has the privilege of depending on a candle entertained by a superior “Lord.” Dickinson’s poem is also the perfect reading of that Caeiro poem whose poet finally agrees to acknowledge the power of the imagination beyond the physical eye. Caeiro’s “dream” closing the poem “Não basta abrir a janela” [It is not enough to open the window] is not unlike Keats’s dream in his “Ode to Psyche,” a poem both Dickinson and Pessoa knew very well: “Surely I dreamt to-day, or did I see / The winged Psyche with awaken’d eyes?” Underlying all these poems about seeing and not seeing is another crucial Western text also well known of both Dickinson and Pessoa, Paul’s 1 Corinthians (13:12): “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known” (King James).18 With a difference: due to the power of their imagination, poets do not have to wait for the afterlife to experience sight and gather vision in their hands: non-Pessoa Caeiro surmises beyond seeing; as does Emily Dickinson in her blindness: “What I see not, I better see— / Through Faith” (J939/ Fr869) or “By a departing light / We see acuter” (J1714/ Fr1749). If you consider the sounds that make up the texture of the poems, you might be willing to agree that poets often follow King Lear’s advice and “look” with their ears. Or as an American poet much closer to us, próspero saíz, puts it: “What the eye sees must / in the end / be heard.” In one of the fragments of Livro do desassossego (The Book of Disquietude], Pessoa also sees with the ear.19

* Being Nothing / Being Nobody Consider the following Dickinson poem (J288/ Fr260): I’m Nobody! Who are you? Are you—Nobody—Too?

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Then there’s a pair of us? Don’t tell! they’d advertise—you know! How dreary—to be—Somebody! How public—like a Frog— To tell one’s name—the livelong June— To an admiring Bog!

This poem sounds like a facetious commentary on several Pessoan selfcommiserating outbursts about experiencing nothingness, purposelessness, and absurdity. I am thinking especially of orthonymous Pessoa’s “Nada sou, nada posso, nada sigo” [I am nothing, can nothing, follow nothing], “Nada que sou me interessa” [Nothing of what I am interests me]; Ricardo Reis’s Shakespearean “Nada fica de nada” [Nothing will come of nothing];20 and, above all, Álvaro de Campos’s “Tabacaria” [Tobacco Shop]. Dickinson’s “I’m nobody, who are you?” reads like a jocoserious response to the poet’s anxiety in all these poems about the incomprehensibility of being and existence, identity and self-understanding, recognition and sense of future. I will linger briefly on the most famous of the Pessoa poems mentioned, “Tabacaria” (Tobacco Shop) (Pessoa, 1981: 296–300). This is the poem in which Álvaro de Campos as the subject of modernity chooses to surmise about his own wretched being-there as no more than the wriggling cut-off tail of a lizard. In chapter 2, I comment on this metaphor. What I would like to stress now is the poet’s concern with his future and his legacy. Says the lyric subject, admitting his desire for perennity: “Mas ao menos fica da amargura do que nunca serei / A caligrafia rápida destes versos” [But at least, out of the bitterness at what I’ll never be, / There remains the quick calligraphy of these lines]. Later in the poem, however, it seems there is no such certainty about either calligraphy or verses remaining at all. Calligraphy and verses get confused with the seemingly more precarious signboard of the tobacco shop. Eventually, the poet fears, the tobacco shop and its signboard will disappear, and so will the verses themselves. Language itself will vanish and drag along the poet’s writing into total annihilation, thus forfeiting poetic immortality. And that is when Emily Dickinson would reassure the despondent Portuguese modernist poet. If read in the context of Dickinson’s letter to Higginson of June 7, 1862 (1986: 408 [L265]), “I’m Nobody” becomes an address to a poet, or rather, to the poet, or to poetry itself. In her letter, Dickinson reassures Higginson, who was evidently concerned that so uncouth a poet might rush to publication ungroomed, that “to publish” is “foreign to [her] thought as Firmament to Fin.” Dickinson’s response has been variously critiqued by scholars of different persuasions. Susan Howe, for example, after explaining that poetry is Emily Dickinson’s religion, insists that “[t]he decision not to publish her poems in

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her lifetime (. . .) [f]ar from being the misguided modesty of an oppressed female ego,” “is a Calvinist gesture of self-assertion by a poet with faith to fling election loose across the incandescent shadows of futurity” (1985: 49). Perhaps. But then why did Dickinson approach Higginson in the first place asking him if her “Verse” was “alive”? No doubt because she wanted her poems to “breathe” in the world at large.21 She did want to be acknowledged, but she was fully aware of her own poetic power and would not be recognized except on her own terms. As Caeiro says in one of the “Poemas inconjunctos,” beautiful poems will never be left unpublished (“Se eu morrer novo” / If I die young). No poet worthy of the name would want to be somebody—and be recognized, now or in the future, by an oxymoronic admiring bog. Being nobody, or being “the slightest in the House” and quietly “taking the smallest Room”—such are the nineteenth-century woman poet’s unassuming gestures that allow her to “catch the Mint,” that is to say, really to be the accomplished poet she knows she is. Her quiet domesticity—which George Monteiro once beautifully captured in a charming poem22—could be read as a response to Campos’s overreaching desire obstreperously to be “all people and all places” in “Ode triunfal” [Triumphal Ode]. The discreet sedentariness of Dickinson’s “I was the slightest in the House” (J486/Fr473) warns the Portuguese modernist poet, as Álvaro de Campos, against the price of incessantly sailing and feeling everything in every way (in “A passagem das horas” / The Passing of Hours), and thus running the risk, of which he is actually fully aware, of ending up being smothered by his own roaring through life as a mere passenger, and not living at all.

* Being a Poet In “Ali não havia electricidade” [There was no electricity there] (Pessoa, 1981: 329), the poet as Pessoa’s Álvaro de Campos says: “Sou nada . . . / Sou uma ficção” (I am nothing . . . / I’m a fiction). The immediate stimulus to the writing of the poem is 1 Corinthians 13:2: “And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.” The disconsolate closure of the Campos poem is: “Meu Deus, e eu que não tenho a caridade!” [My God, and I who do not have charity!]. To this Pessoan anxiety, Dickinson “replies” with her statement to Higginson in another letter (1986: 411–412 [L 268]): “When I state myself, as the Representative of the verse—it does not mean—me—but a supposed person.” I am tempted to read—a supposed pessoa. Or pessoas.

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Dickinson’s myriad personae, voices, and vocabularies, as identified by so many scholars,23 speak eloquently to the Pessoan fiction of self-interruptive heteronyms. To be a poet is to be other, an otherness that materializes itself in the poem. Fernando Pessoa, the feigner, faker, or pretender, who invented the “fiction” of “pessoas-livros” [persons-books], reenacted Rimbaud’s “Je est un autre” in his fifth degree of poetry better than anyone else.24 I have already suggested that the creation of the heteronyms amounts to a theoretical questioning of the (romantic) idea of authorship and originality; let me add now that the heteronyms also theorize the concept of poetry itself as a phenomenon of utter alterity (outridade was Pessoa’s neologism for it) (Pessoa, 1998: 262 [#266]). In one of the mysterious “Master Letters” (Dickinson, 1986: 373 [L233]), Dickinson acknowledges this much: “God made me—[Sir] Master—I didn’t be—myself.” This is what a true poet is: not her- or himself, but rather her or his poeming, the implication being that the poet’s dedication to poetry is absolute. Remember Pessoa’s break-up letter to his girlfriend, Ophelia Queiroz, dated November 29, 1920: “O meu destino pertence a outra Lei (. . .) e está subordinado cada vez mais à obediência a Mestres que não permitem nem perdoam” [My fate has to do with another Law (. . .) and is increasingly subordinated to obedience to Masters who neither consent nor forgive]. Almost ten years later, after the romantic attachment had been briefly resumed, regardless of their show of tender feelings toward the addressee throughout, Pessoa’s playfully teasing love letters only get really serious, even solemn, when his literary life is in question, as again in the letter dated September 29, 1929 (“a minha vida gira em torno da minha obra literária” [my life turns around my literary work]) (Pessoa, 1978: 133, 150–151). Ophelia Queiroz and Fernando Pessoa, two empirically existing persons living in Lisbon in the 1920s, did have a romantic and sensuous involvement. The publication, in 1996, of Ophelia’s love letters to Fernando helped to clarify the terms of that namoro [dating], including its erotic content, as Anna Klobucka has shown.25 Nonetheless, unlike Ophelia’s, Pessoa’s “ridiculous” love letters are fictional, signed and written by a supposed, multifarious pessoa: “Fernando Pessoa” and “Fernando,” as a fiction of himself, “Íbis,” “Nininho,” or even “Álvaro de Campos.” The word “fingir” [feigning, faking, pretending] is abundantly repeated in his letters. The letter writer is so well aware of his multiple impersonations that he allows himself to ask Ophelia a comically absurd and agrammatical question: “Gosta de mim por mim ser mim ou por não? Ou não gosta mesmo sem mim nem não? Ou então?” [Do you love me for me being me or not? Or don’t you love me even without me or not? Or what then?].26 We can read, through all the effusiveness and silly diminutives that are her trademark, the increasing misgivings of young, marriageable Ophelia about the indecisiveness of her secretive suitor Fernando.

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In the letter of November 27, 1920, she is clearly annoyed at his neglectfulness: “Há quatro dias que me não aparece e nem ao menos se digna escreverme” [You haven’t shown up in four days and don’t even deign to write].27 It is not that Pessoa chose literature because he could not choose love, as maintained by Antonio Tabucchi (1984: 54); he rather went on choosing not to choose as long as he possibly could. In his letters, the wayward lover was really nursing mainly his own poetic self and finding himself confirmed in his poetic power and vocation. This strategy becomes clearer if we reconsider Dickinson’s “Master Letters” (1986: 333, 373, 391 [L187, L233, L248]).28 The controversy about the possible identity of the addressee of Dickinson’s letters has been amply discussed. I agree with Marta Werner that identifying the “Master” is far less relevant than understanding how Dickinson, in the period between 1854 and 1861, was “trying to imagine the course and shape of her poetic life” (Werner, 2021: 11). That the “Master Letters” are love letters is not disputed; the object of love is, as is the kind of love in question. To the best of my knowledge, Robert Weisbuch (1975: 183) was the first to suggest that the letters may be fictional, and, if not, that the identity of the “Master” is irrelevant. After engaging in a careful reading of the “Master Letters,” as she goes on unveiling many possible literary and other influences on Dickinson’s poetic imagination, Susan Howe (1985: 27) surmises: “Far from being the hysterical jargon of a frustrated and rejected woman to some anonymous ‘Master’-Lover, these letters were probably self-conscious exercises in prose by one writer playing with, listening to, and learning from others.” Martha Nell Smith (1992: 3) claims to suspend the biographical while reading the “Master Letters” and reads them rather as “records of literary progress.” Judith Farr goes even further. After agreeing with Weisbuch, in her scholarly book on Dickinson (1992), that the “Master Letters” amount to far more than simple love letters, in her epistolary novel about Dickinson, Farr imagines, and boldly asserts, that the “Master Letters” are addressed to the poet’s muse (1996). Let me conclude by suggesting, rather, that, even if Dickinson wrote them for the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, as Robert Habegger (2002) argues once again forcefully, or for anyone else, the “Master Letters” speak powerfully of an extraordinary kind of passion, a “love so big it scares her, rushing among her small heart—pushing aside the blood and leaving her faint.” Indeed, I believe that the “Master Letters” are best read as addressed to poetry itself. “Master—open your life wide, and take me in forever—I will never be tired—I will never be noisy when you want to be still” (L248 [“Oh did I offend it—”).29 This is a moving plea that actually sounds like a comforting response to Álvaro de Campos’s tormented ode to his Master Caeiro, in search of his seemingly lost poetic self: “Mestre, meu mestre querido! / Coração do meu corpo intelectual e inteiro! / Vida da origem da minha inspiração! / Mestre, que é feito de ti nesta forma de vida?

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(. . .) Mestre, meu mestre! / Ergo as mãos para ti, que estás longe, tão longe de mim” [Master, my beloved master! / Heart of my body, intellectual and whole! Life of the origin of my inspiration! / Master, what happened to you in this form of life? (. . .) Master, my master! / I raise my hands to you, and you so far away, so far from me] (Pessoa, 1981: 303–304). Campos’s address to Caeiro is really an anguished outburst about the power of poetry and the poet’s urgent need of surrendering to it, when master and poet become one— poetry itself. The same is true of Dickinson’s addresses to the master in seven of her poems, the most famous of them all being “My life had stood a loaded gun” (J754/Fr764). *

TO CONCLUDE The Dickinson / Pessoa constellation that I briefly sketched here shows that, in poetry, there is no “Master.” Only poetry is. “Wonder stings me more than the bee,” writes Dickinson in one of the “Master Letters” (L248), and the only reason for this is that, as she writes in one of her poems, “Wonder—is not precisely knowing / And not precisely knowing not—” (J1331/Fr1347). As Pessoa / Caeiro also knew very well, wonder is the only true source of poetry—wonder is “o Deus que faltava,” the God that was missing.30 No “Master” is needed. “Nunca tive alguém a quem pudesse chamar ‘Mestre.’ Não morreu por mim nenhum Cristo. Nenhum Buda me indicou um caminho. No alto dos meus sonhos nenhum Apolo ou Atena me apareceu, para que me iluminasse a alma.” [I have never had anyone I could call “Master.” No Christ died for me. No Buddha showed me the way. In my loftiest dreams, no Apollo or Athena ever appeared to enlighten my soul.]—this is Pessoa’s Bernardo Soares in Livro do desassossego [The Book of Disquietude], the book where we find the theory of Pessoa’s poetic practice.31

NOTES 1. I thank Patricio Ferrari for bringing this early Pessoan list to my attention. 2. Cf. Severino, 1983. 3. See also Zenith, 2011: 29–46. 4. An equally inspiring companion piece to this book is Monteiro, 1998. An interesting supplement to the latter book, bringing in Ernest Dowson to discuss Pessoa, is Monteiro, 2013.

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5. One of the first instances may well be Carlos Daghlian’s “Emily Dickinson and Fernando Pessoa. Two Poets for Posterity.” Emily Dickinson Bulletin (September 18, 1971) 66–73. Closer to us, Paulo de Medeiros, 2013. Relevant in this regard is also Medeiros, 2015. For a thorough analysis of Dickinson’s Portuguese reception up to the first few years of the twenty-first century, see Amaral and Freitas, 2009. 6. See, for example, Miller, 1977. Cf. Ramalho-Santos, 2003b: 61ss. 7. See Ramalho-Santos, 2003b: 208. In “Pessoa and Walt Whitman Revisited,” Zenith reveals a manuscript written in English, in which Pessoa claims that there is no influence of Whitman on Caeiro (p. 42). 8. My translation. When not otherwise indicated all translations are mine. 9. Cf. Lourenço, 1973: 46–47, 205. 10. See Ramalho-Santos, 1985: 98, 2003b, 208, 69. 11. Bloom, 1973, 1975. Cf. Ramalho-Santos, 2003b: 5. 12. Benjamin first spoke of “constellations of ideas” in his “Epistemo-critical Prologue” [Erkenntniskritische Vorrede] to Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, 1925. I quote from Projekt Guttenberg—De: https://www​.projekt​-gutenberg​.org​ /benjamin​ /trauersp​ /trauersp​ .html. See also Benjamin 1977. The “constellations” (Sternbilder/Konstellationen) metaphor crops up frequently in the Arcades Project as well. 13. For the importance of distinguishing poetry from philosophy, see chapter 5 supra: “The God That Was Missing. Poetry, Divinity, Everydayness.” 14. See Badiou, 1998: 61–89; Badiou, 2005: 36–45. 15. I first examined the poetic affinities between Dickinson and Pessoa, by way of the concept of poetic arrogance, in Atlantic Poets, chapter 4 (“Center, Margin, and Poetic Arrogance”). 16. See also Cook, 2007: 181. For a well-argued identification of “X” as Allen Tate, see Filreis 1990: 125ss. 17. See chapter 1 of this volume (“The Great Book,’” Caeiro, and Pessoa’s Theory of Poetry”), especially n. 26. 18. Pessoa’s reading of 1 Corinthians is documented in Álvaro de Campos’s, “Ali não havia electricidade” (There was no electricity there) (Pessoa, 1981: 329): “A ‘Primeira Epístola aos Coríntios’ . . . / Reli-a à luz de uma vela subitamente antiquíssima” [The First Epistle to the Corinthians . . . / I reread it by the light of a candle suddenly most ancient]. I come back to this poem later. 19. “By a departing light / We see acuter, quite, / Than by a wick that stays. / There’s something in the flight / That clarifies the sight / And decks the rays” (J1714/ Fr1749); cf. King Lear, IV, 6 (Lear to blinded Gloucester: “Look with thine ears”); saíz 1996: 37; and Pessoa 1998a: 157 (#139): “Posso ao menos sentir-me triste, e ter a consciência de que, com esta minha tristeza, se cruzou agora—visto com o ouvido—o som súbito do eléctrico que passa, a voz casual dos conversadores jovens, o sussurro esquecido da cidade viva.” [I can at least feel sad, and realize that this my sadness was just now crossed—seen with the ear—by the sudden noise of a passing tram, of the casual voices of young people, and the forgotten whisper of the living city.] 20. Pessoa 1981: 79, 433, 223. Reis’s “Nada fica de nada” echoes Lear’s outraged response to Cordelia’s honest reply to her silly father’s ridiculous and dangerous

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contest for daughterly love: “Nothing.” And the King, before disinheriting his up until then favorite daughter: “Nothing will come of nothing.” 21. See Ana Luísa Amaral’s cogent discussion of this problem (Amaral 1995: 142ss). 22. George Monteiro, “Setting Out” (September 10, 2010): http://portuguese​ -american​-journal​.com​/poem​-setting​-out​-by​-george​-monteiro/: Mornings, before starting down to her day, she salted the pocket of her clean apron with a pencil stub and a scrap of paper, folded once—so that she need not search about for the wherewithal to squirrel away a sudden thought or secure a singular word, as she played at domesticity.

23. See, for example, Deppman 2008: 48. 24. Cf. “Autopsicografia” [Autopsychography]: “O poeta é um fingidor” [The Poet is a Faker] (Pessoa 1981: 98); for Pessoa’s conception of his professional literary works as pessoas-livros, see Pessoa 1966: 100–101; see also Rimbaud’s letter to Paul Demeny (May 15, 1871) (Rimbaud 1966: 304). 25. Cf. Pessoa, 2012. See also Klobucka, 2007: 224–241. 26. Pessoa, 1978: 157, 2012: 243. 27. Pessoa, 2012: 190. Pessoa’s reply was the already mentioned break-up letter. 28. For a recent, magisterial contextualization of Dickinson’s “master documents,” including a facsimile edition of the letters together with two other “constellated documents,” see Werner, 2021. 29. Dickinson, 1986: 391–392. See also “Comentaries on the ‘Master’ Documents” in Werner, 2021: 82ff. Werner’s remarks on the “gender of the ‘Master’” and Dickinson’s use of “it” (n. 167, p. 85) are also pertinent to my thinking. 30. See chapter 5 supra and Ramalho-Santos, 2013: 23–35. 31. Cf. chapter 1.

Source of Texts

“The ‘Great Book,’ Caeiro, and Pessoa’s Theory of Poetry” and “Being Blind. Being Nothing. Being a Poet: Emily Dickinson ‘Reads’ Fernando Pessoa” are here published for the first time. An earlier version of “The Tail of the Lizard: Pessoan Disquietude and the Subject of Modernity” was published in Portuguese Modernisms. Multiple Perspectives on Literature and the Visual Arts. Ed. Steffen Dix e Jerónimo Pizarro (Londres: Legenda, 2011), pp. 264–276. “The Art of Rumination: Pessoa’s Heteronyms Revisited” first appeared in Journal of Romance Studies, vol. 3, no. 3, pp. 9–24. A much shorter version of “Poetic Interruption: A Pessoan Concept for Reading the Lyric” appeared in Persona, no. 9, Oct. 1983, pp. 15–19. “‘The God That Was Missing’: Poetry, Divinity, Everydayness” was of my contribution to Sacvan Bercovitch’s Festshrift, entitled The Turn Around Religion in America. Literature, Culture, and the Work of Sacvan Bercovitch. Ed. Nan Goodman e Michael Kramer (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing, 2011), pp. 378–407. “Modernist Muses That Matter. Inspiration in Pessoa and Stevens” was first published in The Wallace Stevens Journal, vol. 29, no. 1, 2005, pp. 44–55. “The Truant Muse and the Poet’s Body” first came out in Embodying Pessoa. Corporeality, Gender, Sexuality. Ed. Anna M. Klobucka e Mark Sabine (University of Toronto Press, 2007), pp. 181–200. An earlier version of “Orpheu et al. Modernism, Women, and the War” came out in Pessoa Plural. A Journal of Fernando Pessoa Studies, no. 11, 2017, pp. 44–65. “The Accidental Bridge: Hart Crane’s Theory of Poetry” was first published in The American Poetry Book. Ed. Stephen Matterson and Michael Hinds (Rodopi, 2004), pp. 89–98. All essays are here published with revisions.

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Index

Adorno, Theodor, 4, 53–55 Aldington, Richard, 120 Altieri, Charles, 94 Amaral, Ana Luísa, 4, 58–63; Works (“A cerimónia” (“The ceremony”), 63; “Das mais puras memórias: ou de lumes” (“About the Purest Memories: or about Light”), 59; “O drama em gente: A outra fala” (“The Drama in People: The Other Speech”), 59; “Entre mitos: ou parábola” (“Among myths: or parable”), 61; Escuro/Darkness, 4, 58–63; “Génese” (“Genesis”), 61; “O sonho” (“The Dream”), 62; “Outras vozes” (“Other voices”), 62) Anderson, Margaret, 114–19, 126 Archilochos, 141 Aristotle, 66, 94 Auden, W. H., 140 Badiou, Alan, 24, 30–31, 35, 36n2, 145 Balibar, Etienne, 24, 29–30, 35 Balso, Judith, 77 Barros, Manuel de, 53 Bartleby (Melville), 32 Bataille, George, 23, 32 Baudelaire, Charles, 43, 87, 102, 143; Works (“La muse malade”, 87)

Beach, Sylvia, 114, 115 Benjamin, Walter, 144 Berkman, Alexander, 119 Bernstein, Charles, 2, 138 Berthoff, Warner, 135, 136 Blake, William, 60, 61, 97; Works (America, a Prophecy, 60; Poetical Sketches, 97; Songs of Innocence and Experience, 61) Blanchot, Maurice, 4, 14–15, 17, 27, 48–49, 54, 85 Blast: Review of the Great English Vortex, 113, 117 Bloom, Harold, 1, 2, 4, 40, 92, 144–45 Bodenheim, Maxwell, 116 Borges, Jorge Luis, 57 Brook, Rupert, 116 Brown, Susan Jenkins, 140 Brown, Susan Margaret, 76, 101 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 71 Browning, Robert, 3, 71 Bruns, Gerald, 94 Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman), 114–15 Butler, Judith, 86, 105 Byron, Lord George Gordon, 57 Cabete, Adelaide, 121 Cadava, Eduardo, 23

171

172

Index

Caeirismo, 8, 16 Caeiro, Alberto (Fernando Pessoa), 1, 11, 13, 15–17, 30, 33–34, 40–42, 45–47, 50, 51, 58, 68, 72, 75–78, 81, 98–106, 144–49, 151, 153–54 Callimachus, 86 Camões, Luís Vaz de, 58, 63; Works (Os Lusíadas (The Lusiads), 58–59, 62) Campos, Álvaro de (Fernando Pessoa), 10, 15, 26–27, 30–35, 41–42, 45–51, 58, 68, 89–91, 95, 97, 101–5, 107–9, 114, 122–23, 131, 144, 150–54 Carvalho, Ronald de, 122 Castro, Ivo, 16–17 Celan, Paul, 24, 98–99, 135; Works (“Atemwende”, 87, 107; Der Meridien, 98) Clampitt, Amy, 57 Clark, Timothy, 85, 90 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 53, 55–57, 62, 70, 137; Works (“Kubla Khan”, 53, 55, 56, 137) Connor, Peter, 23 Constellation, 1, 4, 13, 16–17, 45, 144–46, 154 Côrtes-Rodrigues, Armando, 122 Crane, Hart, 2–4, 58, 70, 115, 131–41; Works (“At Melville’s Tomb”, 134; “Atlantis”, 133, 135, 138, 139; The Bridge, 4, 58, 131–36, 138–41; “The Broken Tower”, 2; “Cape Hatteras”, 139; “Cutty Sark”, 139–40; “The Dance”, 138; “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen”, 132–33, 138; “General Aims and Theories”, 131, 133; “Indiana”, 139; “The Mango Tree”, 139–40; “Modern Poetry”, 134, 140; “Powhatan’s Daughter”, 133, 138; “Quaker Hill”, 138, 139; “Van Winkle”, 133; White Buildings, 132–34) Crosby, Caresse, 140–41 Cunha, Teresa Sobral, 7, 8, 121

Cysneiros, Violante de (Armando Côrtes-Rodrigues), 122 Damon, S. Foster, 61 Deconstruction, 56, 70, 92 de Man, Paul, 57 Deleuze, Gilles, 24, 139 Deppman, Jedd, 144 Derrida, Jacques, 137, 141 Descartes, René, 23 Dickinson, Emily, 3–4, 14, 55, 68–72, 77, 99, 131, 143–54; Works (“Before I got my eye put out” (J327/Fr336), 145–46, 148; “By a departing light (J1714/ Fr1749), 149; “From Blank to Blank” (J761/Fr484), 145–46; “Had we our senses” (J1284/Fr1310), 146; “I’m Nobody! Who are you?”, 149–50; “I reckon — when I count at all —" (J569/Fr533), 68; “I was the slightest in the House —” (J486/ Fr473), 69, 151; “Many a phrase has the English language —” ((J276/ Fr333), 71; “Master Letters”, 152– 54; “My Life had stood a Loaded Gun” (J754/Fr764), 14, 154; “Not ‘Revelation’ – ’tis – that waits” / J685/Fr500), 148; “Of Death I try to think like this —” (J1558/Fr1588), 77, 145; “Those – Dying then” (J1551/Fr1581), 69; “The Sun and Moon must make their haste” (J871/ Fr1063), 145–46, 149; “To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee” (J1755/Fr1779), 70; “What I see not, I better see –” (J939/Fr869), 145–46, 149; “Who saw no Sunrise cannot say” (J1018/Fr1028), 145–46, 149; “A Word made Flesh is seldom” (J1651/Fr1715), 70) “discoveries”, 8, 49, 61–62, 105–6, 122 Disquietude, 1, 4, 23–27, 34, 49. See also Livro do desassossego Duncan, Robert, 42, 144

Index

The Egoist, 113–14, 120 Eliot, T. S., 2, 115–16, 120, 132, 144– 45; Works (The Waste Land, 132) Ellis, Edith, 118 Ellis, Havellock, 118 Erdman, David, 60, 61 Farr, Judith, 153 Feminism, 4, 61, 115, 117, 121 Fenton, James, 135–36 Fernandez, Ramon, 92 Frank, Waldo, 133, 139 Freud, Sigmund, 23 Gil, José, 24 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 65, 70 Goldman, Emma, 117–19 Guedes, Vicente (Fernando Pessoa), 41, 121 Guibert, Armand, 98 Guimarães, Eduardo, 122 Guisado, Alfredo Pedro, 122 Habegger, Robert, 153 Hall, Stuart, 63n2 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 55, 143 H. D. (Hilda Doolitle), 114, 120 Heap, Jane, 114–15, 117–19, 127 Hegel, G. W. F., 3, 23, 85, 86, 98 Heidegger, Martin, 23–25, 27, 39, 41– 42, 66, 72–73, 85–86, 91, 95 Henderson, Alice Corbin, 114–16, 127 heteronyms, 1, 3, 7, 10–11, 14, 16, 27– 28, 31–35, 39–43, 45–48, 50–51, 58, 89, 99–100, 102–3, 106, 123, 138, 144, 146, 152 Higginson, Thomas, 68–71, 148, 150–51 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 9, 24, 41–42, 45, 67, 72, 101–2; Works (“Brot und Wein”, 9, 25, 102; “Der Einzige”, 45, 101; “Mnemosyne”, 41–42, 51) Homer, 42 Honig, Edwin, 2, 76, 101 Hopkins, Gerald Manly, 24

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Horace, 42 Howe, Susan, 150–51, 153 Hughes, Langston, 139 Husserl, Edmund, 23 influence, 1, 4, 13, 40, 144 inspiration, 1, 4, 11–12, 16, 44–45, 66–67, 85–91, 94, 97, 101–2, 104–7, 122, 146, 149 interruption, 1, 4, 26, 33–34, 48, 53–61, 63, 63n2, 64n6, 98, 133, 138, 141 intersectionism, 7, 8, 122 intersexuality, 109 interval, 10, 24–26, 34–35, 48, 50 Jameson, Fredric, 55 Jarraway, David, 82n16 Joyce, James, 114–15, 132; Works (Ulysses, 114, 132) Kafka, Franz, 9 Kahn, Otto, 136, 140 Keats, John, 3, 71, 149; Works (“Ode on a Grecian Urn”, 71) Kierkgaard, Soren, 39, 88 Klobucka, Anna, 152 Kreymborg, Alfred, 114, 116 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 24, 26, 27, 34–35 Leal, Raul, 122 Levinson, Marjorie, 55 Lewis, Wyndham, 113, 117 Lima, Ângelo de, 120, 122 Linebaugh, Peter, 61 The Little Review, 4, 114–19 Lloyd, Genevieve, 121 Lourenço, Eduardo, 9, 16, 45, 77, 78, 102, 144 Lyric poetry, 1–4, 33, 46, 53–54, 57–58, 78, 80, 86, 97, 100, 102, 123, 137. See also”Os graus da poesia lírica” (The Degrees of Lyric Poetry”)

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Index

Macneice, Louis, 57 Magnusson, A. Lynn, 56 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 15, 24, 99 Mandelstam, Osip, 24 Mansfield, Katherine, 115 Marek, Jane, 117 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 114 Marsden, Dora, 114 Marx, Karl, 23 McAlmon, Robert, 115 McIntosh, James, 70 Medeiros, Paulo de, 9 Milton, John, 2, 148 Modernism, 113–16 Modernity, 2, 4, 9, 14, 23–26, 28, 35, 39, 43, 86–87, 90, 104–8, 132, 133, 150 Monroe, Harriet, 114–16, 134 Montalvor, Luís de, 122 Monteiro, Adolfo Casais, 58, 103 Monteiro, George, 143, 151 Moore, Marianne, 114 Mora, António (Fernando Pessoa), 41 Morali, Claude, 27 Munson, Gorham, 132, 140 Murry, John Middleton, 113, 115 Muse, 2, 4, 31, 41–44, 67, 71, 77, 85– 90, 92–94, 97, 98, 101–9 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 23–24, 27–28, 32, 33, 35, 85–86, 98–99 Negreiros, José de Almada, 122–23 Nezahualcoyotl, 9 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 3, 23–24, 39, 137 O’Neill, Eugene, 133 Orpheu, 4, 113–14, 118, 120–23, 126 Others: A Magazine of New Verse, 114 Pater, Walter, 137 Perrone-Moisés, Leyla, 13 Pessoa, Fernando, 1, 4, 10, 24, 27, 31, 33–34, 39, 51, 53, 57, 87, 89, 98, 113, 132, 143, 145, 149, 152; Works (“Ali não havia

electricidade” (“There was no electricity there”), 151; “Antes o vôo da ave que passa e não deixa rasto” (“Better the flight of the bird that goes leaving no trace”), 99; “Os antigos invocavam as Musas” (“The ancient invoked the Muses”), 42, 88, 103; “Autopsicografia” (“Autopsychography”), 2–4, 28, 48; “Brincava a criança” (“The child was playing”), 28, 50; “Carta da corcunda para o serralheiro” (“Letter from a hunchback girl to a metalworker”), 51n3; “Começo a conhecer-me. Não existo” (“I begin to know myself. I do not exist”), 34; “Criança desconhecida e suja brincando à minha porta” (“Unknown and dirty child playing at my door”), 17; “Cruzou por mim, veio ter comigo na Baixa” (“He passed me, approached me downtown”), 30, 46, 48; “D. Dinis” (“King Dinis”), 62; “D. Philippa de Lencastre” (“Queen Philippa of Lencaster”), 62; “D. Sebastião, Rei de Portugal” (“King Sebastian”), 44; “Ela canta, pobre ceifeira” (“She sings, poor reaper”), 45, 50; “Entre o que vejo de um campo e o que vejo de outro campo” (“Between what I see of a field and what I see of another field”), 17; “Erastratus”, 1–2; “A espantosa realidade das coisas” (“The amazing reality of things”), 15, 17, 146; “Estou doente. Meus pensamentos começam a estar confusos” (“I am sick. My thoughts begin to be confused”), 17; Fausto (Faust), 34; “Os graus da poesia lírica” (“The degrees of lyric poetry”), 2–3; O guardador de rebanhos (The Keeper of Sheep), 11, 15–17, 20n26, 30, 36n2, 46, 50, 68, 75, 79, 98–99, 146, 147; “A guerra

Index

que aflige com os seus esquadrões o mundo” (“The war afflicting the world with its squadrons”), 124; “O homem de Porlock” (“The man from Porlock”), 53, 55, 57, 58; “Insónia” (“Insomnia”), 51, 131; “Lídia, ignoramos. Somos estrangeiros” (“Lydia, we ignore. We are foreigners”), 43; “Li hoje quase duas páginas” (“I read today two pages”), 98; “Lisbon Revisited 1923”, 35, 123; “Lisbon Revisited 1926”, 35; Livro do desassossego (The Book of Disquietude), 4, 7n2, 7n3, 9–11, 13–14, 24–26, 29, 31, 33, 39, 41–42, 48–51, 121, 123, 126, 131, 136–37, 139, 149, 154; “O menino de sua mãe” (“His mother’s little boy”), 124, 126; Mensagem (Message), 4, 44–45, 58–60, 62, 131; “Mestre, meu mestre querido” (“Master, my dear master”), 34, 45, 47, 101–2, 153; “O meu olhar é nítido como um girassol” (“My gaze is clear like a sunflower”), 79, 147; “O mistério das coisas, onde está ele?” (“The mystery of things, where is it?”), 98; “Nada fica de nada. Nada somos” (Nothing remains of nothing. We are nothing”), 34, 43, 150; “Nada sou, nada posso, nada sigo” (“I am nothing, can nothing, follow nothing”), 150; “Não basta abrir a janela” (“It is not enough to open the window”), 145, 147–49; “Nevoeiro” (“Fog”), 44; “Notas para a recordação do meu mestre Caeiro” (“Notes to remember my master Caeiro”), 27, 102; “Num meio meiodia de fim de primavera” (“On a midday in late spring”), 68, 77–78, 147, 148; “Ode marcial” (“Martial ode”), 123, 126; “Ode Marítima” (“Maritime Ode”), 105–6, 122; “Ode triunfal” (“Triumphal ode”), 85, 90,

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106, 122, 151; “Ontem à tarde um homem das cidades” (“Yesterday a city man”), 46; “Ontem o pregador de verdades dele” (“Yesterday the preacher of his truths”), 30; “Opiário” (“Opiarium”), 103; Ora até que enfim . . ., perfeitamente . . .” (“At long last . . ., perfectly . . .”), 90, 104; “O que eu fui o que é?” (“What I was, what is it?”), 34; “O quinto império” (“The fifth empire”), 44; “A passagem das horas” (“The passing of the hours”), 46, 109, 151; “O pastor amoroso” (“The shepard in love”), 16, 146; “Pétala dobrada para trás da rosa que outros dizem ser de veludo” (Back-folded petal of the rose others say is of velvet”), 17; “Poemas inconjunctos” (“Inconjunct poems”), 1, 13, 15–17, 20n26, 30, 81, 98; “Prece” (“Prayer”), 44; “Saudação a Walt Whitman” (“Salutation to Walt Whitman”), 26, 33–34, 68, 109, 144; “Se, depois de eu morrer, quiserem escrever a minha biografia” (“If, after I die, they want to write my biography”), 148; “Se eu morrer novo” (“If I die young”), 151; “Seja o que for que esteja no centro do mundo” (“Whatever it is that is at the center of the world”), 17; “Sou um guardador de rebanhos” (I am a keeper of sheep), 75; “Tabacaria” (“Tobacco Shop”), 10, 31, 35, 43, 45, 46, 103, 150; “Também sei fazer conjecturas” (“I can also make conjectures”), 149; “Tormenta” (“Storm”), 44; “A última nau” (“The last ship”), 44, 62; “Ultimatum”, 114, 123; “Vem sentar-te comigo, Lídia, à beira do rio” (“Come sit by my side, Lydia, by the river”), 34; “Vivem em nós inúmeros” (“Numberless live in us”), 47)

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Index

philosophy, 24, 66, 77, 80, 93, 95, 144, 145 Pimenta, Alberto, 57, 137 Pizarro, Jerónimo, 7, 121 Plato, 2, 3, 24, 66, 85, 145 Poe, Edgar Allan, 143 Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, 4, 114, 116 Portugal Futurista, 113, 123 Pound, Ezra, 2, 113, 115–16, 144 Queiroz, Ophelia, 152 Ransom, John Crowe, 72 Rediker, Marcus, 61 Reis, Ricardo (Fernando Pessoa), 11, 16–17, 33–34, 41–45, 47, 50–51, 58, 102–3, 120–21, 144, 150 Religion, 65, 68–70, 77–78, 80, 119, 150 Ribeiro, António Sousa, 126 Rich, Adrienne, 55 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 54 Rimbaud, Arthur, 10, 24, 28, 100, 109, 124, 152 Roebling, John Augustus, 134 Roebling, Washington, 134 Rosa, António Ramos, 40 rumination, 1, 4, 7–8, 39–44, 46, 48, 50–51, 126 Sá-Carneiro, Mário, 8, 120, 122 saíz, próspero, 87, 97, 99, 107, 149; Works (“In Time Keep the Muse Thin”, 87; “The Modern Muse”, 87; “red sand”, 100) The San Francisco Bomb Case, 119 Saramago, José, 120 Schlegel, Friedrich, 39, 88, 137, 141 Sena, Jorge de, 10 Shakespeare, William, 1, 3, 42, 44, 57, 150 Sidney, Sir Philip, 2–3 Simões, João Gaspar, 16 Smith, Martha Nell, 153

Smith, Stevie, 57 Soares, Bernardo (Fernando Pessoa), 8–11, 16, 17, 25, 28–34, 41, 42, 45, 48–51, 99, 103, 126, 131, 136–37, 144, 154 Stein, Gertrude, 39 Stevens, Wallace, 2–4, 8–9, 39, 46, 68– 76, 81, 85, 87–88, 91–94, 100, 115, 136, 139, 145; Works (“Adagia”, 93; “Add This to Rhetoric”, 73; “The American Sublime”, 74; “Certain Phenomena of Sound”, 74; “The Course of a Particular”, 75, 139; “The Creations of Sound”, 72, 145; “Credences of Summer”, 71, 73; “A Discovery of Thought”, 91, 139; “A Dish of Peaches in Russia”, 74, 88; “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet”, 77, 93, 94; “The Idea of Order at Key West”, 92; Ideas of Order, 74; “Imagination as Value”, 80; “In a Bad Time”, 87; “Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery”, 68, 71; “The Man on the Dump”, 2; “The Man with the Blue Guitar”, 73; “Metaphor as Degeneration”, 93; “Montrachet-Le-Jardin”, 88; The Necessary Angel, 80; “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction”, 39, 46, 73–74, 81, 88, 94; “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven”, 75, 93–95; “Paisant Chronicle”, 88; “Peter Quince at the Clavier”, 88; “The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain”, 94; “The Rock”, 85, 91; “The Sick Man”, 91; “The Snow Man”, 73; “Sunday Morning”, 71–74, 88; “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon”, 74, 92; “To the One of Fictive Music”, 92; “Two or Three Ideas”, 72, 73) Stieglitz, Alfred, 134 Swann, Karen, 94 Tabucchi, Antonio, 153 Tate, Allen, 133, 135

Index

Teive, Barão de (Fernando Pessoa), 41 Trakl, Georg, 24–25 “Violante de Cysneiros”, 122 war, 80, 113, 119–20, 122–24, 126, 127 Weaver, Harriet Shaw, 114–15 Weisbuch, Robert, 153 Weiss, Thodore, 57 Werner, Marta, 153 Whitman, Walt, 4, 34, 40, 42, 65–69, 71–72, 77, 81, 92, 94, 132–35, 138–40, 143–44; Works (“Birds

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of Passage”, 66; “Debris”, 67; “I Hear America Singing”, 67; Leaves of Grass, 65–67, 71, 81, 134, 140–41; Preface, 65–66; “Song of Exposition”, 67; “Song of Myself”, 65–68, 71, 77, 81; “Song of the Universal”, 66; Specimen Days, 134) Williams, William Carlos, 115–16 Winters, Yvor, 134–36, 138, 139 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 23 Wordsworth, William, 2–3, 148 Zenith, Richard, 2, 8, 14, 107, 143

About the Author

Irene Ramalho-Santos is professor emerita of English and feminist studies of the Faculty of Letters and senior researcher of the Center for Social Studies, University of Coimbra. From 1998 to 2019, she was International Affiliate of the Department of Comparative Literature of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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