Yeats and Pessoa: Parallel Poetic Styles

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Yeats and Pessoa Parallel Poetic Styles

LEGENDA legenda , founded in 1995 by the European Humanities Research Centre of the University of Oxford, is now a joint imprint of the Modern Humanities Research Association and 3PVUMFEHF. Titles range from medieval texts to contemporary cinema and form a widely comparative view of the modern humanities, including works on Arabic, Catalan, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Yiddish literature. An Editorial Board of distinguished academic specialists works in collaboration with leading scholarly bodies such as the Society for French Studies and the British Comparative Literature Association.

The Modern Humanities Research Association (mhra ) encourages and promotes advanced study and research in the field of the modern humanities, especially modern European languages and literature, including English, and also cinema. It also aims to break down the barriers between scholars working in different disciplines and to maintain the unity of humanistic scholarship in the face of increasing specialization. The Association fulfils this purpose primarily through the publication of journals, bibliographies, monographs and other aids to research.

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EDITORIAL BOARD Chairman Professor Colin Davis, Royal Holloway, University of London Professor Malcolm Cook, University of Exeter (French) Professor Robin Fiddian, Wadham College, Oxford (Spanish) Professor Paul Garner, University of Leeds (Spanish) Professor Marian Hobson Jeanneret, Queen Mary University of London (French) Professor Catriona Kelly, New College, Oxford (Russian) Professor Martin McLaughlin, Magdalen College, Oxford (Italian) Professor Martin Maiden, Trinity College, Oxford (Linguistics) Professor Peter Matthews, St John’s College, Cambridge (Linguistics) Dr Stephen Parkinson, Linacre College, Oxford (Portuguese) Professor Ritchie Robertson, St John’s College, Oxford (German) Professor Lesley Sharpe, University of Exeter (German) Professor David Shepherd, University of Sheffield (Russian) Professor Michael Sheringham, All Soul’s College, Oxford (French) Professor Alison Sinclair, Clare College, Cambridge (Spanish) Professor David Treece, King’s College London (Portuguese) Managing Editor Dr Graham Nelson 41 Wellington Square, Oxford ox1 2jf, UK [email protected] www.legenda.mhra.org.uk

Studies in Comparative Literature Editorial Committee Professor Stephen Bann, University of Bristol (Chairman) Professor Duncan Large, University of Swansea Dr Elinor Shaffer, School of Advanced Study, London Studies in Comparative Literature are produced in close collaboration with the British Comparative Literature Association, and range widely across comparative and theoretical topics in literary and translation studies, accommodating research at the interface between different artistic media and between the humanities and the sciences.

published in this series 1. Breeches and Metaphysics: Thackeray’s German Discourse, by S. S. Prawer 2. Hölderlin and the Dynamics of Translation, by Charlie Louth 3. Aeneas Takes the Metro: The Presence of Virgil in Twentieth-Century French Literature, by Fiona Cox 4. Metaphor and Materiality: German Literature and the World-View of Science 1780–1955, by Peter D. Smith 5. Marguerite Yourcenar: Reading the Visual, by Nigel Saint 6. Treny: The Laments of Kochanowski, translated by Adam Czerniawski and with an introduction by Donald Davie 7. Neither a Borrower: Forging Traditions in French, Chinese and Arabic Poetry, by Richard Serrano 8. The Anatomy of Laughter, edited by Toby Garfitt, Edith McMorran and Jane Taylor 9. Dilettantism and its Values: From Weimar Classicism to the fin de siècle, by Richard Hibbitt 10. The Fantastic in France and Russia in the Nineteenth Century: In Pursuit of Hesitation, by Claire Whitehead 11. Singing Poets: Literature and Popular Music in France and Greece, by Dimitris Papanikolaou 12. Wanderers Across Language: Exile in Irish and Polish Literature of the Twentieth Century, by Kinga Olszewska 13. Moving Scenes: The Aesthetics of German Travel Writing on England 1783–1830, by Alison E. Martin 14. Henry James and the Second Empire, by Angus Wrenn 15. Platonic Coleridge, by James Vigus 16. Imagining Jewish Art, by Aaron Rosen 17. Alienation and Theatricality: Diderot after Brecht, by Phoebe von Held 18. Turning into Sterne: Viktor Shklovskii and Literary Reception, by Emily Finer 19. Yeats and Pessoa: Parallel Poetic Styles, by Patricia Silva McNeill

Yeats and Pessoa Parallel Poetic Styles ❖ Patricia Silva McNeill

Studies in Comparative Literature 19 Modern Humanities Research Association and 3PVUMFEHF 2010

First published 2010 Published by the Modern Humanities Research Association and 3PVUMFEHF 
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CONTENTS ❖

Acknowledgements

ix

Abbreviations

x

Introduction

1

1 Post-Symbolist Style in the Early Poetry

8

2 Neo-Paganism and the Pastoral Style

39

3 Literary Nationalism and the Epic-Heroic Style

75

4 Dramatic Poetics

107

5 The Metaphysical Aesthetic

134

Conclusion

162

Bibliography

169

Index

177

for my parents, leonel and mizé and for jim

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ❖

I wish to thank the following people and institutions for helping to make this book possible: Helder Macedo for enthusiastically supporting my proposal to do a comparative study of Yeats and Pessoa and for his inspirational contribution in the early but crucial stages of my doctorate; Warwick Gould, Director of the Institute of English Studies of the University of London School of Advanced Studies, and Juliet Perkins, my subsequent supervisor at King’s College London, for jointly overseeing my doctoral project throughout; The Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) for granting financial support for the doctoral research project from which this book stems; The staffs of the Irish and the Portuguese National Libraries for affording me access to manuscripts in the Yeats and Pessoa archives and of the Casa-Museu Fernando Pessoa for allowing me access to the works in Pessoa’s personal library; Manuela Parreira da Silva for sharing important information about Pessoa’s epistolary with me; Richard Zenith for allowing me to use excerpts and occasional whole poems from his translations of the work of Fernando Pessoa; Elinor Shaffer for encouraging me to publish my findings about the reception of Yeats by Pessoa and for proposing my dissertation for publication in this series; Robert Weninger, editor of Comparative Critical Studies, for his constructive commentary on parts of the Introduction and Chapter 1, which were published in a slightly different form in CCS 3.3 (2006), and Edinburgh University Press, for giving me permission to reprint this material; Graham Nelson and Richard Correll, my editors at Legenda, for attentively overseeing the preparation of this monograph for publication; The British Comparative Literature Association for awarding me a generous subvention towards the costs of publication of this book. I am also grateful to my family and friends for their support. I owe special gratitude to my husband for engaging in repeated discussions about Yeats and Pessoa and for his continuous encouragement throughout this research project.

ABBREVIATIONS ❖

Yeats Aut AV CL, I CL, II CL, III CL, IV E&I Exp Myth Selection UP, 1 UP, 2 VP TWO

Autobiographies (1955) A Vision (1937) The Collected Letters of W. B.Yeats: 1865–1895 (1986) The Collected Letters of W. B.Yeats: 1896–1900 (1997) The Collected Letters of W. B.Yeats: 1901–1904 (1994) The Collected Letters of W. B.Yeats: 1905–1907 (2005) Essays and Introductions (1961) Explorations (1962) Mythologies (2005) A Selection from the Poetry of W. B.Yeats (1913) W. B.Yeats: Uncollected Prose, 1886–1896 (1970) W. B.Yeats: Uncollected Prose, 1897–1939 (1975) The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B.Yeats (1966) The Wanderings of Oisin (1889)

Pessoa C, I C, II EA FPC OPP, I OPP, II OPP, III PAC PCAC PFP, 2 PFP, 3 PFP, 4 PFP, 5 PI, III PRR PIng RRP Zenith 1 Zenith 2

Correspondência: 1905–1922 (1998) Correspondência: 1923–1935 (1999) Escritos Autobiográficos, Automáticos e de Reflexão Pessoal (2003) Fernando Pessoa: Cartas (2007) Obra Poética e em Prosa: Poesia (1986) Obra Poética e em Prosa: Prosa 1 (1986) Obra Poética e em Prosa: Prosa 2 (1986) Poesias de Álvaro de Campos (1990) Poemas Completos de Alberto Caeiro (1994) Poemas de Fernando Pessoa: 1915–1920 (2005) Poemas de Fernando Pessoa: 1921–1930 (2001) Poemas de Fernando Pessoa: 1931–1933 (2004) Poemas de Fernando Pessoa: 1934–1935 (2000) Poemas Ingleses: The Mad Fiddler (1999) Poemas de Ricardo Reis (1994) Poesia Inglesa (1995) Ricardo Reis: Prosa (2003) A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems (2006) Fernando Pessoa & Co.: Selected Poems (1998)

INTRODUCTION ❖

Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) has been frequently compared to W. B. Yeats (1865–1939) in cursory synopses, which invariably allude to their deployment of poetic masks, their association of poetry and nationalism, and their shared interest in occultism. These affinities are somewhat unexpected, since the two poets originated from different countries and moved in different literary circles; however, they should not be entirely surprising, considering the fact that they were near contemporaries and belonged to overlapping historical and literary periods. Moreover, both poets emerged from smaller nations on the western periphery of Europe, each undergoing a distinct literary Renaissance or revival movement concomitant with the poets’ literary debuts. The extent of the affinities between Yeats’s and Pessoa’s personal interests, circumstances and poetry justifies the need for a comprehensive comparative study of their works. A sustained examination of their poetic works will detect shared inf luences and parallels in their poetic development, which could account for the previously noted affinities. Such a study will lead to a clearer view of their poetic practices and of the aesthetic principles underpinning those practices, contributing to a better understanding of the works of two major twentiethcentury poets whose poetic oeuvres have had a significant and long-lasting impact on modern poetry, both in their own countries and internationally. The discovery of an undated handwritten letter addressed to the Irish poet in the Pessoa archive at the National Library in Lisbon offered definitive proof not only that he knew of Yeats’s existence, but also that he intended to establish contact with him.1 The unfinished and frequently unintelligible nature of the autograph indicates that this was a preliminary draft, hurriedly jotted down and to be resumed on a future occasion (which probably never materialized). The fact that no documents other than this draft have been discovered in the Pessoa archive strongly suggests that he never actually sent the letter. Pessoa’s letter to Yeats was intended as ‘an inquiry concerning the Irish movement in modern poetry and drama’.2 He begins by explaining his limited knowledge of the Irish Revival and of Yeats: You will excuse my ignorance both concerning you and the Irish movement, and my frank statement of that ignorance, when I explain that it is extremely difficult for one living outside England, and never having lived there, without English, or Irish, acquaintances anywise connected with literature, to seize any thing but the coarser, more popular and more newspaper-quoted [...] (FPC, 77)

His explanation is consistent with the situation of Portuguese writers at the start of the twentieth century, following a long-standing tradition of French literary inf luence. However, Pessoa was an exception, mainly due to the fact that between

2

Introduction

the ages of eight and seventeen he had lived in South Africa, where he received his schooling in English. His proficiency in the English language is corroborated by the fact that he won the Queen Victoria Memorial Prize (awarded for best ‘English style’) for his essay in the matriculation examination to the University of the Cape of Good Hope in 1903.3 He did not go on to study at an English university, returning to Lisbon in 1905. Although he never travelled to Britain, he followed the developments in contemporary English literature closely by ordering publishers’ catalogues and subscribing to various English-language publications. My doctoral research has uncovered new evidence regarding the reception of Yeats by Pessoa.4 In his letter to Yeats, Pessoa states that he first came across his name ‘upon the undetailing pages of casual English publications’ (FPC, 77). Although he does not mention the names of those publications, records in his archive show that he subscribed to The Review of Reviews, Public Opinion, Rapid Review, and T. P.’s Weekly, all of which qualify as the type of publication he described in the excerpt quoted above. In a letter from 26 December 1912, Pessoa mentions T. P.’s Weekly, which featured brief references to Yeats’s plays in several issues during that year.5 However, Pessoa’s primary source was a special issue of The Poetry Review on ‘Modern English Poetry’ dating from April 1912, which featured an article on Yeats by James H. Cousins entitled ‘William Butler Yeats: The Celtic Lyrist’.6 This article played a pivotal role in Pessoa’s reception of the Irish poet and was instrumental in prompting him to write the letter to Yeats. Cousins identifies Yeats as the ‘head of the modern Celtic school of poetry’, which he considered ‘of considerable significance [...] on account of its contribution of a distinctive racial and temperamental quality to modern poetry’ (PR, 156). His comments about the Irish Revival betray a racial bias shared by the Portuguese poet, who regarded literary revivalism as an assertion of racial supremacy. Pessoa’s statement in the drafted letter that the Celtic movement had the potential of fulfilling the ‘literary greatness’ of the Irish nation (FPC, 77) sanctions Cousins’s argument and develops his reasoning to its logical consequences. In his explanation of the reasons for his ‘inquiry’ in the drafted letter, Pessoa states, ‘my chief interest in the Irish movement is due to my conviction of its importance [...] for some part of the literary and artistic future of Europe’ (FPC, 77). This statement shows that Pessoa’s interest in the Irish Revival of the 1890s originated in the fact that he perceived it as a precursor to and a model for other movements of a similar nature in other nations, such as the one that was then taking place in Portuguese literature, known as ‘Renascença Portuguesa’.7 Intuiting similarities between the Irish and the Portuguese literary movements as comparable instances of cultural revivalism, Pessoa understandably wished to know more about the Irish movement. This interest also led him to mention Yeats to the leader of the ‘Renascença Portuguesa’, Teixeira de Pascoaes. A letter from Pascoaes addressed to Pessoa features another likely reference to Yeats: ‘Não conhecia nem de nome, o poeta irlandês de que me fala. Muito lhe agradeço a tradução prometida’ [I wasn’t familiar with the Irish poet you speak of, not even by name. I am much obliged for the promised translation].8 Although Pascoaes does not indicate the poet’s name, the fact that he mentions him while discussing literary revivalism suggests that both

Introduction

3

he and Pessoa were probably referring to Yeats. Pascoaes’s letter, dated 21 October 1912, provides further corroboration that Pessoa became acquainted with Yeats during the course of that year. Moreover, the fact that in his letter Pascoaes thanks Pessoa for his offer to translate a work by the unnamed Irish poet suggests that Pessoa might already have been familiar with Yeats’ poetry at that time through a hitherto unknown source, or that he at least intended to acquire an edition of Yeats’s poems in the near future. Pessoa’s interest in Yeats also led him to acquire his works. He had three books written, edited, or prefaced by Yeats in his personal library:9 an edition of William Blake’s poems edited by Yeats,10 an edition of Rabindranath Tagore’s poems with an introduction by Yeats,11 and, most importantly, an edition of Yeats’s own poems.12 Published ‘for Continental Circulation only’ (as announced on the cover), the 1913 Tauchnitz anthology of Yeats’s poems aimed at making his poetry known to a European readership, giving prominence to the poems of the Celtic Twilight period, which had made Yeats internationally known. The volume comprised a selection of his early poems up to the 1912 edition of The Green Helmet and Other Poems. It also included some of Yeats’s narrative poems, namely Book III of ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ (1889), ‘The Old Age of Queen Maeve’ (1903) and ‘Baile and Aillinn’ (1902), as well as three of his plays, The Countess Cathleen (1892–1912), On Baile’s Strand (1904) and Deirdre (1906). The order in which Pessoa acquired these editions is not known, although, based on their publication dates, his first contact with Yeats’s work was possibly through his edition of Blake’s poems. The presence of these books in Pessoa’s library confirms that he was acquainted with Yeats’s early poetry and drama, as well as with his role as editor and critic. The discovery that Pessoa knew of Yeats and was also acquainted with some of his works raises questions about the impact that he might have had on Pessoa’s poetry. The extent of this impact is examined at length in the first chapter of the book, which focuses on Yeats’s early poetry and Pessoa’s English poetry. However, this monograph is not concerned exclusively with reception (which in the case of these two poets has a limited scope). Adopting a comparative case studies approach, it maps the mani fest affinities between Yeats’s and Pessoa’s poetic works, derived to a great extent from a lifelong commitment to what Pessoa called ‘outrar-se’ [selfothering] and Yeats ‘remaking’, by resorting to comparable strategies of stylistic diversification. Style is conventionally taken to mean ‘the manner of expression characteristic of a particular writer’ (OED). However, Yeats and Pessoa shared a f luid concept of style, which encompassed the diction associated with a particular dramatis persona or with a given poetic genre donned as a stylistic mask and therefore subject to continuous reformulation. They derived inspiration for this understanding of style from the late nineteenth-century aestheticism of Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater. Wilde’s works of fiction and his essays underscored the dramatic quality of literary self-representation, which the two poets incorporated as a stylistic device in their poetic production. Pater exercised a profound and pervasive inf luence on Yeats’s and Pessoa’s understanding of poetry, which was ref lected in their poetic practices in a number of different ways. Pater’s celebration of Hellenism in The Renaissance

4

Introduction

fuelled the poets’ interest in Greek poetry, which underpinned their re-enactment of classical poetic genres. His claim that modern artistic expression springs out of ‘a quickened, multiplied consciousness’,13 which is ‘for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions’,14 provided an aesthetic model for their multifaceted poetics. More importantly, in ‘Winckelmann’ Pater refers specifically to ‘poetry’, by which he means ‘literary production which attains the power of giving pleasure by its form’, claiming that ‘[o]nly in this varied literary form can art command that width, variety, delicacy of resources, which will enable it to deal with the conditions of modern life’.15 Pater’s modern conception of literature provided a seminal inspiration for Yeats’s and Pessoa’s poetic praxis, enabling them to rehearse different poetic stances either latent in their multifaceted personalities or absorbed from poetic tradition without committing to any one in particular. The disparate, often opposing, existential and poetic stances in their poetry are inspired by the antinomian dialectic of drama, as is the embodiment of these antinomies as different personae with varying degrees of autonomy. However, the correlation between those discrete stances and specific poetic genres, modes and forms ascribes a stylistic quality to the process. Moreover, the antinomian dialectic was not confined to the substance of their poetic utterances but extended to formal elements, resulting in the juxtaposition of adverse poetic genres and the alternation of the ‘sublime’ or ‘elevated’ and the ‘prosaic’ or ‘mean’ styles in their poetry.16 The multiplication of personality through stylistic variation in order to better express its multifaceted quality was the essence of the poets’ at once ontological and aesthetic project. Yeats surmised it as ‘an experiment in living’,17 which in his case involved the transfiguration of the lyric voice over time. Pessoa carried this ‘experiment’ to its ultimate consequences through the creation of the heteronyms, writing in diverse styles concurrently. Paradoxically, for Yeats as for Pessoa, style functioned as an ordering principle of the diversity of themes and genres as well as of interests and inf luences converging in their poetry. Their poetics of stylistic diversification derived from a conviction that style offered the solution to the threat of dispersion posed both by their manysided personalities and by the chaotic nature of modern experience. Their view coincides with Pater’s characterization of Goethe in ‘Winckelmann’ as the model of the artist who, ‘possessing all modern interests, ready to be lost in the perplexed currents of modern thought, [...] defines, in clearest outline, the problem of culture — balance, unity with oneself, consummate Greek modelling’.18 Both poets regarded style as a structural cement that could weld together their diverse creative output. This approach resembles Pater’s characterization of the ‘function of the mind, in style’ as the ‘kind of constructive intelligence’ in ‘poetic literature’.19 The importance of this constructive principle is evident in the architectural imagery that pervades their poetry. Yeats and Pessoa also regarded style as ascesis in the Paterian sense, that is, as an aesthetic discipline that required them to excise those aspects of existence that could not be incorporated into poetry. This discipline also required self-transcendence through the adoption of antithetical stances as the embodiment of otherness. Both poets believed that this distillation of the personality and life was ultimately conducive to an enhanced artistic expression and to greater metaphysical

Introduction

5

insight. The metaphysical dimension of Yeats’s and Pessoa’s understanding of the function of style corresponds somewhat to that which Pater described as the ‘religious feeling in operation as soul in style’.20 The latter part of this monograph will consider whether Pessoa and Yeats achieved these goals successfully or rewardingly in their poetry. The focal point of this monograph is the study of the poetry of Pessoa and Yeats within a comparative case studies framework. In the case of Pessoa, it includes selections both from his English and his Portuguese poetry.21 This monograph examines Yeats’s and Pessoa’s use of stylistic variation to transform their incipient neo-Romantic and post-Symbolist diction into a protean modern lyric voice. The first chapter traces common inf luences from Romantic, Victorian and Symbolist poetry in their early poetic works. It examines how the two poets engaged with poetic tradition by incorporating themes, imagery and diction characteristic of those literary movements and by appropriating those aesthetic principles with which they felt affinity into their early theories of poetry. Additionally, it identifies an incipient pattern of thematic and stylistic diversification in their early poetry, namely through imitation of past poetic styles. Pessoa’s reception of Yeats’s poetry is also considered here as part of a generalized phenomenon of pastiches of early inf luences that pervaded his poetry in English. This chapter focuses specifically on Pessoa’s The Mad Fiddler, as this collection displays the greatest number of affinities with Yeats’ early poetry. The second chapter is concerned with Yeats’s and Pessoa’s incorporation of neoclassical features into their poetry as a reaction to their post-Symbolism. This departure was a new (and in some instances concomitant) development of the NeoPaganism underpinning their post-Symbolism, which explains the continuities between the two styles. This chapter maps the challenges the poets faced in their attempts to re-enact the principles of classical pastoral poetry in a modern context, arguing that they successfully surmounted those difficulties by devising stylistic masks. These allowed them to combine the escapism and artificiality of this poetic mode (with which the post-Symbolist style had obvious affinities) with its mundane subject matter and manner. The deployment of stylistic masks coincided with changes in their poetry towards a more realistic representation of experience, which were ref lected in the juxtaposition of a lofty style with a prosaic one. This resulted in the subversion of their pastoral models, introducing significant thematic and stylist variation in their poetry and leading to the appearance of an adverse pastoral sub-genre in some of their poems. The third chapter traces Yeats’s and Pessoa’s re-enactments of the heroic epos and the elevated style of the epic genre as an antithesis to the mundane ethos and prosaic style of pastoral poetry, which occurred to a great extent concurrently with it. Moreover, it explores the association between the poets’ visionary nationalism and theories of authoritarianism and their re-enactment of heroic and epic poetry. The similarities between the works of the two poets regarding these poetic genres reveal extensive parallels between their types of literary nationalism, of which Pessoa would have been aware when he became acquainted with Yeats’s works. Further more, the chapter argues that in a manner similar to their deployment of

6

Introduction

the pastoral mode, the poets subverted their epic-heroic style by simultaneously rehearsing the elegiac and anti-heroic modes in their poetry. The fourth chapter examines Yeats’s and Pessoa’s innovative incorporation of principles from the dramatic genre into their discourses on poetry and their poetic practices, in particular through their use of personae. It contends that their methods of stylistic diversification provided the two poets with a means of rehearsing distinct poetic stances and genres in order to attain relativity of subject matter and expression, while maintaining the authenticity conventionally associated with the lyric. It traces the development of the poets’ evolving dramatic poetics through the overarching metaphor of construction in their poetry, which equates the process of dissociation of the self to a demiurgic act of creation, resulting in a poetic universe inhabited by inter-related discursive selves. Moreover, this chapter illustrates the extent to which the aesthetic positioning and the poetic practice of the two poets ref lect the tendency for depersonalization in modern poetry. The fifth chapter argues that Yeats’s and Pessoa’s strategies of stylistic diversification examined in the previous chapters constitute a hermeneutic method of ontological, epistemological and metaphysical inquiry. It examines the manner in which these issues were articulated in the sub-genre of metaphysical poetry, embodied by such personae as Ribh and Crazy Jane in Yeats’s oeuvre and Álvaro de Campos in Pessoa’s, which constitute consummate instances of the artifice of ‘self-othering’. Furthermore, it traces the Apollonian and Dionysian aesthetic principles that informed the poets’ theories of poetry and their pursuit for unity and totality through diversity in their poetry. Finally, it appraises Yeats’s and Pessoa’s poetic oeuvres in relation to the underlying metaphor of ontological, epistemological and metaphysical quest. Notes to the Introduction 1. Teresa Rita Lopes first mentioned the existence of a letter addressed to Yeats in Fernando Pessoa et le drame symboliste: héritage et création (Paris: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian / Centro Cultural Português, 1977), p. 126. The drafted letter to Yeats was originally published in Fernando Pessoa: correspondência inédita, ed. by Manuela Parreira da Silva (Lisbon: Livros Horizonte, 1996), pp. 83–84. It has been re-published more recently with some variations in Fernando Pessoa: cartas, ed. by Richard Zenith, Obra essêncial de Fernando Pessoa, 7 (Lisbon: Assírio e Alvim, 2007), pp. 76–77. 2. Fernando Pessoa: cartas, ed. by Richard Zenith, Obra essencial de Fernando Pessoa, 7 (Lisbon: Assírio e Alvim, 2007), p. 77 (hereafter indicated in the text as FPC, followed by the page number). 3. João Gaspar Simões, Vida e obra de Fernando Pessoa: história duma geração, 4th edn (Lisbon: Livraria Bertrand, 1980), p. 83. 4. Parts of this section of the introduction have been published in ‘Affinity and Inf luence: The Reception of W. B. Yeats by Fernando Pessoa’, Comparative Critical Studies, 3.3 (2006), 249–67. 5. Fernando Pessoa: correspondência, ed. by Manuela Parreira da Silva, 2 vols (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 1998–99), i: 1905–1922, p. 59 (hereafter cited in the text as C, followed by volume and page number). The issues of T. P.’s Weekly’s in which Yeats features date from 7, 14, and 28 June and 1 November 1912. Pessoa’s letter was addressed to the Poetry Society, enquiring about membership and subscription to The Poetry Review, which Pessoa claims to have found out about through T. P.’s Weekly. In it, he expresses an interest in receiving the issues of the periodical ‘from its beginning’ (C, I, 58–59). As the periodical had been founded in January 1912, and the Poetry Society had a policy of sending new subscribers the annual volume with all the issues, Pessoa would have received the April issue of that year, which featured an article on Yeats.

Introduction

7

6. James H. Cousins, ‘William Butler Yeats: The Celtic Lyrist’, Poetry Review, 1 (1912), 156–58 (hereafter quoted in the text as PR, followed by the page number). 7. The ‘Renascença Portuguesa’ consisted of an association founded in Porto in 1912 with the objective of retrieving the country’s national literary roots. It published a periodical, A Águia, to which Pessoa contributed articles. 8. The letter to Pascoaes in which Pessoa mentioned the name of the Irish poet has since been lost. Pascoaes’s response to that letter was published in Isabel Murteira França, Fernando Pessoa na intimidade (Lisbon: Publicações Dom Quixote, 1987), p. 168. I thank Manuela Parreira da Silva for drawing my attention to this letter. 9. Elsa Conde, ‘Biblioteca de Fernando Pessoa: lista bibliográfica’, in Tabacaria, 0 (Feb 1996), 63–119 (pp. 77, 90, 91). Examination of the original copies in Pessoa’s library has revealed underlined passages and marginalia, proving that he read all three books. I thank Casa Fernando Pessoa for allowing me access to the books. 10. Poems of William Blake, ed. by W. B. Yeats (London: Routledge; New York: Dutton, 1905). 11. Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali Song-Offerings and Fruit-Gathering, intro. by W. B. Yeats (Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1922). 12. W. B. Yeats, A Selection from the Poetry of W. B. Yeats (Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1913). Hereafter cited in the text as Selection, followed by page number. 13. Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1888), p. 252. Pessoa had a 1912 edition of this book. 14. Pater, The Renaissance, p. 250. 15. Pater, The Renaissance, p. 243 (my emphasis). 16. These terms refer to the classical theories of style, expressed by Aristotle in chapter 22 of The Poetics, and by Longinus and Demetrius in their essays On the Sublime and On Style. See Aristotle: The Poetics; Longinus: On the Sublime; Demetrius: On Style, ed. and trans. by W. Hamilton Fyfe (London: Heinemann; New York: Putnam, 1927), pp. 85, 247, 290. 17. Joseph Ronsley, ‘Yeats’s Lecture Notes from “Friends of My Youth” ’, in Yeats and the Theatre, ed. by Robert O’Driscoll and Lorna Reynolds (London: Macmillan, 1975), pp. 60–81 (p. 74). 18. Pater, The Renaissance, pp. 240–41. 19. Walter Pater, Appreciations (London: Macmillan, 1889), p. 21. 20. Pater, Appreciations, p. 23. 21. Whenever possible I quote from the multi-volume critical edition of the poetic works of Fernando Pessoa, but as this is not yet complete I also quote from the three-volume Obra Poética e em Prosa, ed. by António Quadros and Dalila Pereira Costa (Porto: Lello & Irmão, 1986).

CHAPTER 1

❖

Post-Symbolist Style in the Early Poetry Any thorough investigation of Yeats’s and Pessoa’s use of stylistic masks as a process of ontological, metaphysical and aesthetic inquiry must begin by examining their early poetry. The distinctive features of the idiosyncratic method of poetic composition that attained full expression in their mature poetry are already intimated in the early poems. This exercise in literary archaeology is intended to unearth not only the inf luences that informed their poetic apprenticeship but also the way in which the two poets reacted to those inf luences. Before such an investigation, though, a brief word about the parallels between the young poets’ formative inf luences, which help to explain the affinities between the texts discussed in this chapter. Despite the twenty-three-year age difference between them and their provenance from different countries with disparate literary traditions, Yeats and Pessoa were subject to the inf luence of strikingly similar figures and movements. This can be ascribed largely to Pessoa’s colonial education in Durban, South Africa, which provided him with a sound knowledge of the English classics.1 After returning to Portugal, Pessoa continued schooling himself in his adoptive English literary tradition. He had a particular interest in the Romantics, especially Shelley, Keats and Wordsworth, identifying these poets as ‘Inf luences’ in a note drafted in 1914.2 Pessoa was also familiar with Tennyson and other representative Victorians like Browning, Arnold and Rossetti.3 Yeats’s Victorian education, largely supervised by his father, exposed him to virtually the same movements and figures, whose inf luence he acknowledged in his autobiography.4 In ‘Coole and Ballylee, 1931’, Yeats refers to himself and the other members of the Irish Revival as ‘the last romantics’,5 acknowledging his debt to the English Romantic tradition. However significant, Romanticism was not the only literary movement to exert a powerful impact on Yeats and Pessoa: Symbolism is another significant source of inf luence in their poetry. In the 1890s, Yeats became acquainted with the poetry of the French Symbolists indirectly through Arthur Symons’s The Symbolist Movement in Europe. In the section of The Trembling of the Veil entitled ‘The Tragic Generation’, Yeats praises Symons’s ‘metrical translations’ and acknowledges that those ‘from Mallarmé may have given elaborate form to my verses of those years, to the latter poems of The Wind Among the Reeds, to The Shadowy Waters [...]’ (Aut, 320). This inf luence was lasting, for Yeats’s poetry continued to exhibit Symbolist traits long after the period to which Symbolism was circumscribed. For this reason, Anna Balakian includes Yeats among other writers like Paul Valéry, T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens, whom she calls ‘post-Symbolists’ and describes as:

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writers, posterior to the Symbolist generation, who accepted the Symbolist school and who, through their total or partial adherence to its poetic principles [...], maintained the presence of Symbolism as a literary convention and signature well into the twentieth century.6

Pessoa was also a post-Symbolist. In the aforementioned 1914 note, he acknowledges the inf luence of the French Symbolists during the period between 1909 and 1911, immediately preceding his literary debut in Portuguese literary magazines (EA, 150). Unsurprisingly therefore, Yeats’s and Pessoa’s early poetry ref lects their response to the inf luences mentioned above. Their poems from this phase re-enact the escapist topos predominant in Romantic and Victorian poetry, interspersed with the visionary mood and vague diction of Symbolist poetry. These traits are manifested chronologically in Yeats’s early poetry, in accordance with the periods when he came under the sway of those inf luences. Thus, the Romantic inf luence is strongest in The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889), is mixed with Victorian and PreRaphaelite inf luences in The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics (1892), and is less evident in The Wind Among the Reeds (1899), which was predominantly inspired by the Symbolist aesthetic. In Pessoa’s case, these inf luences surface in his early poetry in English, the language in which he first started writing. Pessoa wrote several works in English, including: 35 Sonnets (1918), a collection of pseudoShakesperian sonnets; Antinuous (1918–21), an elegy evocative of Milton’s ‘Lycidas’; Epithalamium (1921), a celebratory piece in the manner of Donne’s ‘Epithalamions’; and Inscriptions (1921), a collection of epigrams inspired by The Greek Anthology. His poetic corpus in English also includes a series of unpublished poems written between 1904 and 1909, attributed to the proto-heteronym Alexander Search, which betray the inf luence of the English Romantics and of Edgar Allan Poe. The direct correlation between these works and Pessoa’s chronological mapping of inf luences in the note from 1914 mentioned earlier (EA, 150) confirms their status as creative responses to his readings from 1904 (after his high school graduation) to 1913. As pastiches of the poetic diction associated with certain poets or movements that inf luenced Pessoa during a given period they signal the poet’s versatility, likewise illustrating the incipient stylistic diversity of his early English poetry. The Mad Fiddler The conf luence of Romantic, Victorian and Symbolist inf luences is most salient in another of Pessoa’s works in English entitled The Mad Fiddler, which constitutes the main focus of this chapter. The poems in this collection, written between 1910 and 1918, were contemporary with Pessoa’s reading of Symbolist and post-Symbolist poets, including Yeats.7 Indeed, it was while Pessoa was writing The Mad Fiddler that he became acquainted with Yeats’s poetry through the aforementioned Tauchnitz anthology (1913). From the time of its inception Pessoa had intended to publish The Mad Fiddler in an Anglophone country.8 Letters to English publishers — such as John Lane and Harold Monro — attest to several attempts on the part of the poet to have the collection published in Britain between the years of 1915 and 1917. In a letter to Harold Monro from 1915, Pessoa claims, ‘Though in my own language,

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Portuguese, I am far more “advanced” than the English Imagists, yet the English poems I send you are the nearest I have, in English, to a conventional standard of poetry’ (C, I, 193). By qualifying the English poems extracted from The Mad Fiddler that he enclosed with the letter as ‘conventional’, Pessoa underpins their genetic relationship with poetic traditions that preceded Imagism, namely those of Romantic, Victorian and Symbolist poetry. The dated quality of the poems partly explains why his attempts to publish the collection in Britain were unsuccessful, as they differed substantially from the poetry published at the time by publishers like Monro.9 However, this was not due to ignorance on the part of Pessoa, who owned copies of Richard Aldington’s Images: 1910–1915 and F. S. Flint’s Cadences (1915) published by the Poetry Bookshop, but stemmed from a deliberate intention to reinstate a traditional style of poetry that resembles Yeats’s notorious resistance to modern poetry. The rejections by British publishers likely caused Pessoa to feel insecure about the collection, which might explain why he failed to publish it along with the other English Poems. Notwithstanding this, the poems assembled in The Mad Fiddler are superior in quality to the remainder of Pessoa’s English poetry. They display a greater f luency, ease and formal freedom, while retaining a rhyming scheme as well as aspects of English prosody that correspond to the ‘conventional standard of poetry’ Pessoa speaks of in his letter to Monro. A case in point is the adoption, in a great number of poems, of trimeter (traditionally associated with light or superficial subjects) to address metaphysical themes, in the manner of Longfellow, Poe and Swinburne.10 However, the true merit of The Mad Fiddler lies in its overall coherence. In one of several prefaces in English which Pessoa wrote for the collection, he refers to ‘the threefold law of unity — unity of purpose, unity of structure and unity of development’ which characterizes a work of art, claiming that: a poem — must be a coherent whole, organically sound; it must be structurally a whole, admitting into its substance no element, however beautiful in itself, which does not contribute to its unity; and it must be coherently developed, having a length adapted to its subject, a development linked to the underlying emotion. (PI, III, 117–18)

In another preface, Pessoa identifies the ‘underlying emotion’ of the collection as religious, and its chief subject as philosophical; namely, the domain of metaphysics: As the deepest of all feelings is the religious feeling, & the highest of all intellectual activities the philosophical one, it is obvious that the intensest way to express a sensation or an emotion is to express it religiously & philosophically. Many people think still that Shelley is a pantheist; he is only a man who felt Nature exceedingly, &, every one who feels Nature exceedingly must feel pantheistically. (PI, III, 114)

The combination of physical and spiritual features in Pessoa’s formulation betrays an underlying dialectical principle informing the orchestration of the collection. Therefore, its external structure should ref lect that dialectic, in accordance with the law of unity put forward in the previous excerpt. This is illustrated by the antithetical articulation between the poems and the parts that constitute the collection. Luísa Freire considers the eight parts into which the book is subdivided as stages of a mystical path towards enlightenment and (Self )-realization.11 In her

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view, the antinomian manifestations of the poems convey the inner conf lict of the poet in search of an ontological and epistemological solution, signifying his hope and discouragement.12 Thus, the rehearsal of diverse and antithetical poetic moods and modes in the various parts of the collection can be regarded as an incipient exercise of the heteronymic process of thematic and stylistic diversification that Pessoa would develop fully in his mature production. Romantic Pantheism The fact that Pessoa mentions Shelley as an example of an accomplished pantheist in the preface to The Mad Fiddler indicates that the English poet was an important source of inspiration for the collection.13 A draft letter to an unknown English publisher, estimated to be from 1916, corroborates the previous assertion: Suppose English Romanticism had, instead of retrograding to the TennysonianRossetti-Browning level, progressed right onward from Shelley, spiritualissing [sic] his already spiritualistic pantheism. You would arrive at the conception of Nature (our transcendentalist pantheists are essentially poets of Nature) in which f lesh and spirit are entirely mingled in something which transcends both. If you can conceive a William Blake put into the soul of Shelley and writing through that, you will perhaps have a nearer idea of what I mean. (C, I, 233)

In this excerpt, Pessoa refers to the poetry of the Portuguese ‘transcendentalist pantheists’ (the generation of poets immediately preceding his own), inscribing it in a Romantic tradition that developed throughout Europe from Shelley’s ‘spiritualistic pantheism’. Pessoa’s reference to Blake in this context shows that he was aware of his importance as the founder of that tradition in modern English poetry. According to Yeats, ‘The poems mark an epoch in English literature, for they were the first opening of the long-sealed well of romantic poetry; [...] being the true heralds of our modern poetry of nature and enthusiasm’.14 The mingling of ‘f lesh’ and spirit’ that occurs in ‘transcendentalist pantheist’ poetry, which Pessoa associates with Blake and Shelley in the passage above, is what he seeks to attain in The Mad Fiddler. By stressing the ‘religiosity underlying these poems’ in the preface to the collection (PI, III, 117), Pessoa indirectly declares himself a disciple of the tradition of spiritualistic pantheism. The same can be argued of Yeats. When he claimed to have ‘made a new religion, almost an infallible Church of poetic tradition’ (Aut, 115–16), he was undoubtedly thinking of Blake, whom he deemed the founding figure of the modern conception of ‘the religion of art’.15 Blake exercised an extremely important and long lasting inf luence on Yeats, who spent four years editing his ‘Prophetic Books’ in collaboration with Edwin Ellis (Aut, 161). The ‘new religion’ he refers to above was also inspired by Shelley, whom he overtly imitated in his early poetry (Aut, 66). Yeats’s claim that he began impersonating ‘a sage, a magician or a poet’ (Aut, 66) in emulation of the protagonists of Shelley’s poems illustrates the impact of the English Romantic on the budding Irish poet.16 The eponymous Shelleyan hero of Alastor became Yeats’s ‘chief of man’ and the vehicle of expression for his escapist fantasies ‘to disappear from everybody’s sight’ (Aut, 66). Yeats celebrated these two poets as prominent exponents of the Romantic tradition of mystical poetry in two essays

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from Ideas of Good and Evil (a title which he derived from Blake). In ‘William Blake and the Imagination’ (1897), he describes Blake as a self-styled ‘symbolist’ (E&I, 114), whose inf luence reached beyond Romanticism to the Symbolist movement of the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Yeats attributes the modernity of Blake’s poetry to a pantheistic philosophy which relies on ‘the sympathy with all living things’ and regards ‘imagination’ as an ‘emanation of divinity’, an idea which, Yeats claims, he borrowed from ‘old alchemist writers’ (E&I, 112). In ‘The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry’ (1900), he characterizes the English Romantic as a ‘poet of essences’, who expresses ‘the abundance and depth of Nature’ by resorting to ‘ancient symbols’ (E&I, 87), likewise derived from ‘the traditions of magic and of the magical philosophy’ (E&I, 78). Unsurprisingly, therefore, Yeats’s appreciation of the underlying philosophies in Blake’s and Shelley’s poetry displays close affinities with the ‘spiritualistic pantheism’ that Pessoa ascribed to them in the passage quoted earlier, revealing analogous metaphysical conceptions informing their early poetry. The Romantic pantheism that both Pessoa and Yeats endorsed as young poets is most evident in the representation of Nature in their early poetry. Spatial representation in Yeats’s early poetry was to a great extent modelled after the Romantic tradition and it was largely inspired by Shelley (Aut, 64) and ‘Coleridge of the Ancient Mariner, and Kubla Khan’ (Aut, 313). His preference for ‘strange and far-away places for the scenery of art’ (E&I, 296) is conspicuous in the ‘Indian’ lyrics and in the lands ‘of the heart’s desire’ which pervade his early poems and plays, which have an imaginary quality. Despite acknowledging the fascination those places exerted on him, a letter to Katharine Tynan from 21 December 1888 shows that Yeats realized quite early on that he needed ‘to substitute more and more the landscapes of nature for the landscapes of Art’ and that the natural landscapes should be ‘familiar landscapes we love’.17 By 1906, Yeats claimed not to ‘believe in the reality of imaginations that are not inset with the minute life of long familiar things and symbols and places’ (E&I, 296). On the one hand, the emphasis on familiar places in Yeats’s poetry ref lects the ‘specificity of location and love of landscape’, which were ‘important themes in Irish lyrics’.18 On the other hand, Yeats’s ‘sense of place’, ‘could be considered a natural outgrowth of the Pantheism or nature-worship of the Romantics’.19 The conf luence of English Romantic and indigenous Irish poetic inf luences in his early poetry is evident in the lyric ‘The Meditation of the Old Fisherman’. Although Yeats ascribed the origin of the poem to the personal account of a Sligo fisherman,20 it revisits several topoi of the Romantic meditative poem: You waves, though you dance by my feet like children at play, Though you glow and glance, though you purr and you dart; In the Junes that were warmer than these are, the waves were more gay, When I was a boy with never a crack in my heart. The herring are not in the tides as they were of old; My sorrow! for many a creak gave the creel in the cart That carried the take to Sligo town to be sold, When I was a boy with never a crack in my heart. And ah, you proud maiden, you are not so fair when his oar Is heard on the water, as they were, the proud and apart,

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Who paced in the eve by the nets on the pebbly shore, When I was a boy with never a crack in my heart. (VP, 90)

In accordance with the Romantic spiritual pantheist tradition, the fisherman persona ascribes the emotions he experienced when he was a boy to the natural elements with which he has had a lifelong contact due to his profession, namely the waves. By means of this identification, the comparison between the waves in the present and in the past signifies the comparison between the fisherman’s present and past self. Therefore, the greater gaiety of the waves in the past represents the subject’s more complete state of happiness in his childhood, before his heart was cracked as a result both of the emergence of self-consciousness in adolescence and of the realization of approaching death in old age. The meditative tone of the poem and the reference to childhood as ‘gay’ resonates of Wordsworth’s ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’. The contrast between past and present continues in the second stanza, which in this revised version of the poem mentions Sligo as the spatial context of the fisherman’s meditation.21 The semantic association between a definite locale and the substance of his meditation ref lects the specificity of location of the Gaelic lyric tradition. The inf luence of this tradition is also evident in the third stanza, which alludes to maidens, a common convention of the Celtic lamentation genre which recurs in other meditative poems such as ‘The Lamentation of the Old Pensioner’ (1890). The Mad Fiddler provides an exemplary illustration of the depiction of landscape in Pessoa’s English poetry. The poems in this collection do not portray Pessoa’s native landscape; rather, they display an imaginary quality derived from poetic tradition. A case in point, ‘The Shining Pool’ (1915) emulates the meditative quality of Romantic Nature poetry, revisiting several Wordsworthian topoi. The poem depicts an imaginary scenario in which a man wanders through the countryside as if seeing things for the first time, conveying his transfigured vision of the world: He only shall through greener vales Than even those that shine right through The windows-panes of children’s tales Wander, who thinks the world anew. (PI, III, 40)

The last line evokes the object of Wordsworth’s poetry: ‘to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us’.22 The speaker’s contemplation of the countryside scene affords him an animist communion with Nature, which appears to him populated by supernatural forces: Only for him who sits and sings On the stiles and forgets his road Does the fairies’ bird spread his wings And the fairies’ f lowers grow more broad. (PI, III, 40)

His reverie culminates in an elated state analogous to the gaiety experienced by the contemplative subject in Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’:

14

The Post-Symbolist Style But greener valleys than To-Day And dearer thoughts than being gay Shall tap at his window and wake His freshness other thirsts to slake. (PI, III, 40)

However, the speaker’s blissful epiphany transfigures the present time and place and has a metaphysical quality intimated by the reference to ‘other thirsts’, suggesting spiritual quests and thereby surpassing the ephemeral gaiety of the Wordsworthian lyric: But incorporeal, like a wish, His soul shall like a rainbow cross The rain-green pastures of his loss And earth shall blossom into speech. (PI, III, 40–41)

The association of concrete and abstract nouns in the last stanza signals the intermingling of the physical world and mystical or emotional spheres, which is reinforced by the simile of the soul as a rainbow. Thus, at the end of the poem the speaker is presented with a choice. If he embraces anew the pantheistic wonderment before Nature lost since his childhood, he will gain access (as suggested by the verb ‘cross’ which symbolically unites the physical and the spiritual world like a bridge) to a fuller understanding of Nature, which will yield its secrets to him. This view of the poet as someone who is able to decipher the secret language of Nature and to interpret it to other men through his verses is akin to Wordsworth’s pantheistic view of the poet as the priest of Nature. Yeats conveyed a similar pantheistic outlook in ‘The Holy Places’ (1906), remarking ‘that a man should find his Holy Land where he first crept upon the f loor, and that familiar woods and rivers should fade into symbol with so gradual a change that he may never discover [...] that he is beyond space [...]’ (E&I, 297). This excerpt reveals the metaphysical quality of Yeats’s understanding of place. This type of representation is particularly evident in The Wind Among the Reeds (1899). The following stanza from ‘Into the Twilight’ (1899) is exemplary of Yeats’s aesthetic of the holy places, particularly prominent at an early stage of his poetry: Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill: For there the mystical brotherhood Of sun and moon and hollow and wood And river and stream work out their will; (Selection, 114)

The expression ‘mystical brotherhood’ underscores the symbolic power of landscape to officiate the transition from the natural to the supernatural or spiritual realm. Nature is also imbued with transcendental qualities in Pessoa’s English poetry. Several poems in The Mad Fiddler convey what Pessoa called ‘transcendentalismo panteísta’ [pantheistic transcendentalism],23 which he describes as: A espiritualização da Natureza e, ao mesmo tempo, a materialização do Espírito, a sua comunhão humilde no Todo, comunhão que é, já não puramente panteísta, mas, por essa citada espiritualização da Natureza, superpanteísta, dispersão do ser num exterior que não é Natureza, mas Alma. (OPP, II, 1179) [The spiritualization of Nature and, at the same time, the materialization of Spirit, their subservient communion in the Whole, a communion which is no longer

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purely pantheistic, but, due to the aforesaid spiritualization of Nature, has become super-pantheistic, the dispersion of the being in an exterior plane which is not Nature, but Soul.]

In this passage, Pessoa emphasizes the supremacy of the spiritual element — the soul — in the process of synthesis of material and ethereal realities that constitutes pantheistic transcendentalism. The following stanzas from ‘A Summer Ecstasy’ and ‘Inversion’ illustrate this process: I saw the inner side Of summer, earth and morn. I heard the rivers glide From Within. I was borne To see, through mysteries, How God everything is. (PI, III, 81) Here in this wilderness Each tree and stone fills me With the sadness of a great glee. God in His altogetherness Is whole-part of each stone and tree. (PI, III, 84)

These poems have several affinities with ‘Into the Twilight’. As in the Yeatsian stanza quoted above, the speaker senses a mystical unity between the natural elements he enumerates and the supernatural, signified here by the word ‘God’. Moreover, the reference to ‘mysteries’ and ‘altogetherness’ is semantically close to Yeats’s ‘mystical brotherhood’, revealing an analogous mysticism of Nature. Faraway lands The imaginary status of landscapes in The Mad Fiddler owes a considerable debt to Coleridge’s ‘The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner’ and ‘Kubla Khan’, which Pessoa considered accomplished examples of ‘the fantasy literature that erupted with the German transcendentalists’.24 According to Pessoa: ‘No Kubla Khan tudo é outro, tudo é além’ [‘In Kubla Khan everything is an other, everything is a beyond’].25 The speakers of Pessoa’s poems in The Mad Fiddler display a persistent wish to ‘Set out from sight of shore!’ (‘The Lost Key’, PI, III, 65) toward ‘placeless lands’ (‘The Foreself ’, PI, III, 73,) and ‘landscapes far away’ (‘Her Fingers Toyed Absently with her Rings’ PI, III, 64), thus signaling their debt to Romantic escapism. The escapist topos features most prominently in two poems from 1913. ‘Fierce dreams of something else!’ expresses the subject’s desire to exchange ‘Life ever at to-day!’ for ‘Some other place and thing!’(PI, III, 44). The second poem is entitled ‘Elsewhere’: Let us away, my child, Away to Elsewhere. There days are ever mild And fields are ever fair. The moon that shines on whom There wanders happy and free Hath woven its light and gloom Of immortality.

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The Post-Symbolist Style Seeing things there is young, Told tales sweet as untold, There real dream-songs are sung By lips we may behold. Time there’s a moment’s bliss, Life a being-slaked thirst, Love like that in a kiss When that kiss is the first. We need no boat, my child, But our hopes while still fair, No rowers but fancies wild. O let us seek Elsewhere!26

This poem exemplifies the fusion of Romantic, Victorian and Symbolist inf luences in The Mad Fiddler. The opening line echoes the opening of Matthew Arnold’s ‘The Forsaken Merman’, ‘Come, dear children, let us away’.27 In turn, the descriptive adjectives ‘mild’ and ‘fair’ resemble those used by Baudelaire in the depiction of his ideal paradise in ‘L’Invitation au voyage’ — ‘Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté, / Luxe, calme et volupté’.28 Similarly to the Baudelairean ‘là-bas’, ‘Elsewhere’ semantically embodies the remoteness from everyday reality which constitutes a key trait of the exotic landscape, found also in ‘Kubla Khan’ and in Mallarmé’s ‘Brise Marine’, for example, encapsulating both Romantic and Symbolist escapism. Moreover, its allure and the fact that it can only be reached through ‘fancies wild’, reinforces the imaginary quality of Elsewhere, which is the fruit of the subject’s imagination, hopes and dreams, very much like the vision of ‘Kubla Khan’. The repetition of ‘away’ in the opening lines of ‘Elsewhere’ introduces an incantatory rhythm, maintained through the repetition of ‘There’ throughout the poem. These devices emphasize its theme, which consists of an invitation to travel analogous to that in Baudelaire’s poem. ‘Elsewhere’ has several aspects in common with the representation of the Celtic fairy paradise in Yeats’ early poetry, particularly in ‘The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland’ (1892). The indefiniteness suggested by the term elsewhere is matched by the imprecise location of fairyland in Yeats’s poem, a ‘dim [...] isle, / somewhere to north or west or south’.29 The descriptions of Elsewhere in Pessoa’s poem and of fairyland in the 1892 version of Yeats’s poem recall the dimness of Tennyson’s landscapes. Moreover, both places appear to exist in a perennial present, unaffected by time and change. Indeed, the emphasis placed on the novelty of the sensations and emotions experienced by the inhabitants of Elsewhere and fairyland evokes the ‘quickened sense of life’ extolled in Pater’s The Renaissance,30 which reverberates in the phrase ‘quicken boughs’ in the original version of ‘The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland’ (Selection, 20). The characterization of Elsewhere as a locus amoenus with ‘mild’ days and ‘fair’ fields is paralleled in Yeats’s poem by the depiction of fairyland as bountiful, evident in the lines ‘And how beneath those three times blessed skies / A Danaan fruitage makes a shower of moons’ (Selection, 21). The sacredness of the land is ref lected by the perennial bliss of those who inhabit it, namely the Tuatha Dé Danaan (the

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pre-Christian gods of Ireland) as stated in the 1892 version of the poem, which Yeats characterizes as a ‘gay, exulting, gentle race’ (Selection, 21). These epithets are matched in Pessoa’s poem by the adjectives ‘happy’ and ‘free’ used to describe those who ‘wander’ through Elsewhere. In both poems, the carefree existence of the inhabitants is emphasized by references to music and to love. Thus, the ‘dreamsongs’ of ‘Elsewhere’ find their counterpart in the ‘leafy tunes’ of ‘The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland’ (Selection, 21). Similarly, the unsullied and enduring quality of love in ‘Elsewhere’ is also patent in ‘The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland’: ‘Where people love beside star-laden seas; / How time may never mar their faery vows’ (Selection, 20). Since ‘The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland’ was included in the Tauchnitz anthology, it is possible that Yeats’s poem could have constituted a source of inspiration for ‘Elsewhere’. The affinities between the imagery of the two poems corroborate that possibility. Moreover, the adjective ‘woven’ in the second stanza of Pessoa’s poem could constitute a vestige of that inf luence, in terms of diction. This participle, a favourite and recurrent word in Yeats’s early poetry, occurs in the line ‘Under the woven roofs of quicken boughs’ (Selection, 20; my emphasis), in the first stanza of ‘The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland’. Islands The depiction of fairyland as an island in ‘The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland’ attests to the importance of this topos in Yeats’s early poetry. The island was his preferred setting for earthly paradise, resuming the association of the idyllic island with Paradise in classical and Celtic mythology, and in the Christian tradition of the Blessed Isles. The three islands in The Wanderings of Oisin (1889), where the eponymous hero spends three hundred years, are central to this topos, representing the Celtic Paradise or Tir nà nOge (the land of the Young). Notwithstanding this, The Wanderings of Oisin emulates the stylized landscape of Art, and is rich in literary allusion. In The Tragic Generation, Yeats refers to Spenser’s ‘islands of Phaedria and of Acrasia’ thus: ‘In those islands certain qualities of beauty, certain forms of sensuous loveliness were separated from all the generous purposes of life, as they had not been hitherto in European literature — and would not be again [...] till Keats wrote his Endymion’ (Aut, 313). According to him, Spenser’s imaginary islands inspired the ‘thing of beauty’ that Keats strove to create in his idylls. Therefore, Yeats’s paradise islands are imaginary literary landscapes reminiscent of Spenser and Keats. Nowhere is this more evident than in the first island, depicted as an idyllic Arcadia untouched by Time and Change, as summarized in the verses below: ‘O Oisin, mount by me and ride To shores by the wash of the tremulous tide, Where men have heaped no burial-mounds, And the days pass by like a wayward tune, Where broken faith has never been known, And the f lushes of first love never have f lown; (VP, 8)

According to Daniel Albright, ‘the first of Yeats’s islands then is and is not Tir nà nOg: there is perpetual dancing, and all the stageprops of human joy, but there is

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[...] no animal fertility’,31 which is an essential component of the land of the Young, exposing the island’s fallacy as an accurate re-enactment of a pagan earthly paradise. Indeed, as Albright observes, the last line quoted above suggests ‘Keats’s Grecian Urn, where the lovers never, never can kiss [...] and life, to adapt Pater’s phrase, has approached the condition of music’.32 Pessoa’s islands are also depicted as beautiful and remote paradises and display a musical quality similar to that in The Wanderings of Oisin. This is evident in the poem entitled ‘The Island’ from The Mad Fiddler: Weep, violin and viol, Low f lute and fine bassoon. Lo, an enchanted isle Moon-bound beneath the moon! My dream-feet rustle through it Chequered by shade and beam Oh, could my soul but woo it From being but a dream! Violin, viol and f lute. Lo, the isle hangs in air! Through it I wander, mute With too much loss of care. And the air where’t doth f loat No air’s, but light of moon. Its paths are known to each note Of viol and bassoon. Yet is it real, that isle, As our clear islands mortal? Do f lute, bassoon and viol But ope with sound a portal, And show, somehow, somewhere, To what looks out from me That pendulous island rare In a moon-woven sea? Maybe ‘tis truer than ours. How true are these? But lo! That isle that knows no hours Nor needeth hours to know, And that hath truth and root Somewhere known of the moon, Fades in the fading of f lute, Violin and bassoon. (PI, III, 33; my emphasis)

The opening lines of this poem echo the line ‘The f lute, violin, bassoon’ in the third stanza of part XXII of ‘Maud’, by Alfred Tennyson.33 Pessoa’s intentional allusion ref lects his replication of ‘Tennyson’s fine music of paragraph’ (OPP, III, 167). Another intertextual presence felt in this poem is that of Edgar Allan Poe, namely in the imagery used to describe the island: thus Pessoa’s ‘pendulous island’ that ‘hangs in air’ evokes Poe’s ‘The City in the Sea’, where ‘all seem pendulous in air’.34 This allusion ascribes a mysterious quality to Pessoa’s island akin to that

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of Poe’s strange and surreal cityscape. These examples illustrate Pessoa’s deliberate use of Romantic and Victorian imagery in the construction of his own version of the island paradise. In accordance with this poetic convention, the island in Pessoa’s poem is portrayed as a place out of time and removed from the outside world. The adjective ‘enchanted’ attributes magical and oneiric qualities to the island, which are evocative of Poe’s ‘Dream-Land’.35 In turn, the compound adjectives used to describe this landscape resemble the epithet ‘dream-heavy land’ in Yeats’s ‘He Remembers Forgotten Beauty’ (Selection, 119). The fact that Pessoa underlined the latter adjective in his copy of the Tauchnitz anthology shows that he was acquainted with Yeats’s early preference for compound adjectives, having possibly derived inspiration from it. By contrast to the aforesaid ‘quickened sense of life’ in ‘Elsewhere’, ‘The Island’ displays a listlessness evident in the adverbial locution ‘too much loss of care’, that is comparable to the lethargic mood of Book III of The Wanderings of Oisin, in which ‘the metre gutters out into a shadowy intricacy of rhythm, as Oisin spends his last hundred years on the most subtle, the most aesthetic island of all’.36 Considering that the Tauchnitz anthology of Yeats’s poetry included Book III of The Wanderings of Oisin, it is not implausible that it might have inspired ‘The Island’. Another analogy between Pessoa’s and Yeats’s poems consists in the use of music not in a conventional manner as the conveyer of sensations or emotions, but as a catalyst to a mental state of visionary trance. Thus, Oisin’s century-long sleep on the third island was ‘Wrapt in the wave of that music, with weariness more than of earth’, induced by the sound of a ‘bell-branch’ (Selection, 35). Similarly, the speaker in Pessoa’s poem can only envision the island with the aid of the musical instruments, the sound of which opens ‘a portal’ to the imaginary world, evoking Blake’s concept of the ‘doors of perception’ in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite’.37 No more than a figment of the speaker’s imagination, the island is summoned into existence by music at the start of the poem. This is formally signified by the alliteration of the consonant ‘v’ in the words ‘violin’ and ‘viol’ repeated at the beginning of the first two stanzas, which evokes the sound of the instruments. Similarly, the alliteration of the consonant ‘f ’ in the line ‘Fades in the fading of f lute’ at the close of the poem symbolizes the fading of the vision. The evocative power of music in Pessoa’s poem recalls the genesis of ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ (1892), which, according to Yeats, lay in the ‘little tinkle of water’ from ‘a fountain in a shop-window’ (Aut, 153) that, like a soft melody, instantly revived his memories of the Irish island. Yeats’s process of evoking the island ‘in the mind’s eye’ also resembles Blake’s concept of the visionary power of the senses. ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ is the most accomplished of Yeats’s island poems. It ref lects the impact of Romantic escapism on the poet as a young man, in particular the inf luence of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, acknowledged by Yeats in Reveries over Childhood and Youth: ‘I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill’ (Aut, 71). The poem draws on the poet’s personal experience — ‘when walking through Fleet Street [London] very homesick’ (Aut, 153) — to re-enact the nostalgia of the city

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dweller for the countryside of his youth. ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ constitutes one of the most prominent instances of idealization of the countryside in Yeats’s poetry. The island featured in this poem is depicted as an idyllic setting evocative of both the biblical Eden in the Christian tradition and of the Golden Age in pagan literature, as inferred from the references to the ‘honey-bee’ and the singing ‘cricket’ in the first two stanzas. This imagery underlines its perennial harmony, abundance and mildness, which is reinforced by the onomatopoeic alliteration of the ‘b’, the ‘v’, and the aspired ‘h’ — ‘Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee, /And live alone in the bee-loud glade,’ (VP, 117; my emphasis) — and of the first light ‘l’ — ‘I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore’ (VP, 117; my emphasis) — that recreates, respectively, the humming of the bees and the lapping of lake water. Thus, the form of the poem illustrates its argument, not only through figures of speech but through prosody as well. The trochaic variation to the mostly iambic meter of the phrase ‘cabin build there’ underscores the opposition of the manmade object to the natural world. These stylistic processes reinforce the dichotomy in the third stanza between the monotonous grey colour of the city streets, where the speaker presently finds himself, and the colourful hues of the island, where he wishes to be. The verbs ‘shall’ and ‘will’ convey his desire to leave for this island paradise and the adverb ‘now’ suggests that his departure might be imminent. However, it remains doubtful whether this will ever take place, as he is concerned mainly with imagining the island and makes no definite effort to attain it. Yeats described ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ as ‘my first lyric with anything in its rhythm of my own music’ (Aut, 153). The predominant metre of the poem is the hexameter, with a variation in some lines where only four syllables are stressed. The syllabic variations of the feet break away from the conventional Alexandrine line, underlining the accentual nature of the metre, which, on the one hand, ref lects Yeats’s claim that he ‘had begun to loosen rhythm’ (Aut, 153) and, on the other, approximates the poem to oral poetry. This effect is equally achieved by the repeated anapests, which confer a colloquial tone to the poem and are strategically placed to ensure a harmonious f low to the lines, contradicting the artificial pause of the caesura. The caesura is also countered by internal rhymes — ‘there/there’, ‘there/ where’, ‘for/or’ — which ascribe a sense of familiarity to the verses, increasing the reading speed. The musical quality of the poem is further enhanced by figures of repetition such as the anaphora of ‘And’ and the anadiplosis of ‘dropping’, which ease the f low of the lines into one another, as well as by the alliteration of the ‘b’, ‘h’ and ‘l’ sounds in lines 3 and 10. In his recorded reading of the poem for a BBC broadcast,38 he takes great care to emphasize the beats of the verses with a repetitive ‘monotony’ so as to suggest the rhythm of the poem, which he deemed necessary ‘to prolong the moment of contemplation’ or ‘hypnotic trance’ (E&I, 159). Referring to his delivery in ‘My Own Poetry Again’, he states, ‘perhaps you will think that I go too near singing it. That is because every poet who reads his own poetry gives as much importance to the rhythm as to the sense. A poem without its rhythm is not a poem’.39 ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ ref lects the ‘change of style’ in European poetry with the advent of Symbolism, concurrent with ‘the change of substance’ which

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Yeats characterizes as a ‘return to imagination’ in ‘The Symbolism of Poetry’ (1900, E&I, 163). He describes this new style as consisting of ‘wavering, meditative, organic rhythms, which are the embodiment of the imagination, that neither desires nor hates, because it has done with time, and only wishes to gaze upon some reality, some beauty’ (E&I, 163). This reality or beauty is described as ‘something that moves beyond the senses’, which, the poet argues, ‘you cannot give a body to [...] unless your words are as subtle, as complex, as full of mysterious life as the body of a f lower or of a woman’ (E&I, 164; my emphasis). The references to f lower and woman are allusions to key symbols in Yeats’s early poetry, the Rose and his idealized representation of women, which he regarded as intimations of supersensory beauty. The analogy implies that words deliberately arranged into a pattern through rhythmic and prosodic processes function in the same suggestive manner as those symbols. The poet’s somewhat obscure formulation at the turn of the century would be conveyed with clearer outline a decade later in ‘A People’s Theatre’ (1919), in which he states, ‘I desire a mysterious art, always reminding and half-reminding those who understand it of dearly loved things, doing its work by suggestion, not by direct statement, a complexity of rhythm, colour, gesture [...] a memory and a prophecy’.40 In the same essay, he also reiterated the transcendentalist view put forward in ‘The Symbolism of Poetry’, claiming to ‘value all I have seen or heard because of the emotions they call up or because of something they remind me of that exists, as I believe, beyond the world’ (Exp, 254). Pessoa used a similar expression to describe the Portuguese poetry of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: ‘O encontrar em tudo um além — é justamente a mais notável e original feição da nova poesia portuguesa’ [Finding in everything a beyond — this is precisely the most notable and original feature of the new Portuguese poetry] (OPP, II, 1176). Pessoa found inspiration for this view of poetry in Edgar Allan Poe, whose essays ‘The Philosophy of Composition’ and ‘The Poetic Principle’ exercised a profound impact on him. In the latter essay, Poe claimed that ‘Music, in its various modes of meter, rhythm, and rhyme, is of so vast a moment in Poetry’, adding, ‘It is in Music, perhaps, that the soul most nearly attains the great end for which when inspired by the Poetic Sentiment, it struggles — the creation of supernal Beauty’.41 Pessoa’s views in this regard also ref lect the Paterian creed expressed in ‘The School of Giorgioni’ that ‘All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music’.42 The prominence that Pessoa affords to music in The Mad Fiddler derives to a great extent from Symbolist aesthetic theory denoting the inf luence of Verlaine’s and Mallarmé’s theories of poetic composition. In a text in English estimated to be from 1907, Pessoa states: In idealistic compositions the symbol must be vague. By vague, however, I do not mean obscure. Its meaning should be grasped as vague in its limits and in its boundaries — in itself it must be clear. The idealistic symbol must resemble those lofty woman [sic] creations of Shelley; the outlines, the contours of whose ineffable beauty are uncertain and undestined.43

This excerpt has several aspects in common with Yeats’s aesthetic positioning in ‘The Symbolism of Poetry’, likewise emphasizing the indefinite and numinous quality of the poetic symbol.

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The similarities extend to the terminology that Pessoa uses to describe the suggestive power of poetic language in an essay about ‘the new Portuguese poetry’ entitled ‘A nova poesia portuguesa no seu aspecto psicológico’ (1912) — ‘São vagas, subtis e complexas as expressões características do seu verso’ [Its characteristic forms of expression are vague, subtle and complex] (OPP, II, 1174). In another fragment, presumably from 1915, Pessoa distinguishes lyric poetry as the most inherently musical among all kinds of poetry because of its origins in song: ‘Toda a poesia lírica tem, ou deve ter, uma música própria (como Tennyson tem). — A Arte que poetas líricos, às vezes instintivos de todo, têm, é uma composição musical’ [All lyric poetry has or should have a music of its own (as Tennyson does) — the art of the lyric poet is a musical composition even if totally instinctive at times] (OPP, III, 89). In his opinion, the musical quality of lyric poetry derived mainly from rhythm, which distinguished poetry from prose (OPP, III, 83). This view resembles Yeats’s insistence on the importance of rhythm as a means of increasing the suggestive power of words in ‘The Symbolism of Poetry’. Lands of the Heart’s Desire The ethereal and incantatory quality that Yeats assigns to rhythm is epitomized by the invocation of place names from the Sligo region in the first three stanzas of ‘The Stolen Child’, namely the ‘rocky highland / of Slewth Wood in the lake’, ‘the hills above Glen-Car’, and the ‘dim grey sands [...] / Far off by furthest Rosses’.44 Despite the familiarity of these place names, the natural spaces they refer to possess an uncanny quality, conveyed by the phrase ‘the woods and waters wild’ in the 1889 version of the poem in The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (TWO, 58). These types of spaces constitute ‘a territory at once natural and supernatural, permeated by that daimonic otherness localized by Yeats as a faery presence’.45 The fairies that inhabit these natural spaces are characterized in the poem as equally wild and uncanny presences. Their wayward and carefree way of life — which includes stealing berries, dancing and leaping, climbing trees, playing pranks — is at odds with human existence. This tension is achieved mainly through the device of the dramatic monologue, which allows the fairies to express their point of view about the humans, whom they regard as being ‘full of troubles’ and ‘weeping’ (TWO, 59). The sole exception to this way of life is childhood, when human beings engage in similar activities to those of the fairies. Therefore, they attempt to lure a child ‘away’ to their world before it grows into a ‘solemn-eyed’ adult (TWO, 59), as conveyed in the refrain: Come away, O human child! To the woods and waters wild With a fairy, hand in hand, For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand. (TWO, 58–59)

Ultimately, then, ‘The Stolen Child’ illustrates ‘the fascination of fairyland as something inimical to life in the real world’.46 Pessoa addresses the same theme and resorts to similar imagery and diction in ‘Elf Dance’:

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First there was but the moon And the black-tremmelled trees In the lunar lagoon Of the forgotten breeze. Then some unseen thing stirred Where the moon-silence snowed And a vague whirl unheard Vacantly tip-toed. Slowly, idly, alone, Beyond the eyes of sight, Somewhere invisibly shown, They danced their delight. Their far vagueness wound Round the heart a pain, A phantom fear found Voluble and vain. The heart remembered lives Before loves and homes, Whose rare memory revives Only when this dance comes. A wish for a vague thing soon, A loosened sense of selves, A thing in the soul like moon, Aught in the hopes like elves — Tip-toe aerial gliding Shadow-lunar blent, Bending, mingling, hiding, To and fro they went. (PI, III, 35–36; my emphasis)

As with ‘The Stolen Child’, the elves in Pessoa’s poem are presented in a natural setting of woods and lake unsullied by the presence of human beings. Yet its borders overlap with the space inhabited by Man, which allows for these phantasmatic beings to cross over to the real world of human experience. Another common element to the two poems is that the crossings occur in moonlit landscapes. Pessoa’s poem depicts the advent of the fairy host into a natural setting ‘Where the moonsilence snowed’, calling to mind the line ‘Where the wave of moonlight glosses’ of ‘The Stolen Child’ (TWO, 58). Additionally, Pessoa’s ‘elves’ display the same childlike demeanour as the Yeatsian ‘faeries’, which included ‘dancing’, ‘gliding’, and playing a ‘low pipe’. Despite their apparent carefree manner, the elves in Pessoa’s poem induce at once ‘fear’ and ‘longing’ in the speaker, rendering him incapable of resisting their lure, like the child being carried away by the fairies in Yeats’s poem. Apart from the thematic affinities between the two poems, the underlined verses in the stanza above describe the elves’ dance in a similar manner to that in Yeats’s poem, resembling the lines ‘Mingling hands and mingling glances / [...] / To and fro we leap’ (TWO, 58–59; my emphasis). The close similarities between these lines in terms of diction would suggest direct inf luence, were it not for the fact that ‘The

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Stolen Child’ is not among the poems included in the Tauchnitz edition of Yeats’s poetry (unless Pessoa came across it through another source, yet unknown). However, other poems featuring in the anthology of Yeats’s poems display an analogous theme, imagery and diction to ‘The Stolen Child’. Its scenario is summarized in the line ‘Ah, Faeries dancing under the moon’ from the poem ‘To Ireland in the Coming Times’, which opens the anthology (Selection, 14). Its central imagery is evoked in ‘The Withering of the Boughs’ (1903), ‘I know where a dim moon drifts, where the Danaan kind / Wind and unwind their dances when the light grows cool’ (Selection, 149). Likewise, its diction recurs in the lines ‘Tossing and tossing to and fro’ and ‘Peering and f lying to and fro’ from ‘The Two Trees’ (1892) (Selection, 26). Therefore, Pessoa could have derived inspiration for ‘Elf Dance’ from these poems. It is possible that the echoes of early Yeatsian diction in Pessoa’s poems result from what Claudio Guillén has termed ‘involuntary reminiscence’, which ‘affects only the initial “vocabulary” of a poet: the sum of elements preserved in the memory or the sensibility of the poet before the genesis of a particular poem begins’.47 This would explain not only the echoes of Yeatsian diction in Pessoa’s English poetry, but also the reverberations of other poems from the English tradition in both Pessoa’s and Yeats’s early poetry. Therefore, it is more likely that Pessoa and Yeats both derived the theme and imagery of ‘The Stolen Child’ and of ‘Elf Dance’ from Victorian fairy poetry. For instance, Yeats’s refrain calls to mind the opening lines of Matthew Arnold’s ‘The Forsaken Merman’ — ‘Come, dear children, let us away: / Down and away below!’ — which is repeated throughout the poem with the variation ‘come away’.48 The repetition of these lines in Arnold’s poem ascribes the same spellbinding effect to the cry of the ‘sorrow-laden’ merman as that ascribed to the repeated calling of the fairies at the close of each stanza in Yeats’s poem. Moreover, the Yeatsian fairies entice the child to the water, as indicated in the refrain of ‘The Stolen Child’, striking another resemblance with ‘The Forsaken Merman’. This poem was also a possible source of inspiration for Pessoa, whose acquaintance with Arnold’s poem has been demonstrated by the allusion in the opening line of ‘Elsewhere’, ‘Let us away, my child’, mentioned earlier. The relationship between music and the supernatural realm is also addressed by the title poem of The Mad Fiddler, which opens the collection: Not from the northern road, Not from the southern way, First his wild music f lowed Into the village that day. He suddenly was in the lane, The people came out to hear, He suddenly went and in vain Their hopes wished him to appear. His music strange did fret Each heart to wish ‘twas free. It was not a melody, yet It was not no melody.

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Somewhere far away, Somewhere far outside. Being forced to live, they Felt this tune replied. Replied to that longing All have in their breasts, The lost sense belonging To forgotten quests. […] As he came, he went. They felt him but half-be. Then he was quietly blent With silence and memory. Sleep left again their laughter, Their tranced hope ceased to last, And but a small time after They knew not he had passed. […] (PIng, 318-20)

Yeats’s ‘The Fiddler of Dooney’ (1892) is a potential source of inspiration for this poem. The entrancing fiddler, whose music causes folk to momentarily lose their identity and dance in unison ‘like a wave of the sea’ (Selection, 18), could have provided a plausible model for the central persona of Pessoa’s ‘The Mad Fiddler’ and the entire collection. The poems also share formal similarities, namely in their rehearsal of the ballad form, evoked by the characteristic quatrains and the plain diction of oral poetry. However, ‘The Mad Fiddler’ exhibits closer thematic affinities with ‘The Madness of King Goll’, particularly with the version that was published in The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889), entitled ‘King Goll’: Once, while within a little town That slumbered ’neath the harvest moon, I passed a-tiptoe up and down, Murmuring a mountain tune Of how I hear on hill heads high A tramping of tremendous feet. I saw this harp songless lie Deserted in a doorway seat, And bore it to the woods with me. Of some unhuman misery Our married voices wildly trolled. (They will not hush, the leaves a-f lutter round me — the beech-leaves old.) And toads, and every outlawed thing, With eyes of sadness rose to hear, From pools and rotting leaves, me sing The song of outlaws and their fear. My singing sang me fever-free; My singing fades, the strings are torn; I must away by wood and sea And lift an ulalu forlorn,

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The personae of the Mad Fiddler and King Goll resemble each other in that they are both described through the epithet ‘mad’ and both of them play a stringed musical instrument. The Mad Fiddler’s ‘wild and strange’ music and King Goll’s ‘wildly trolled’ song possess an ineffable quality, intimating not only their madness but also an association with supernatural powers. The latter is reinforced in Pessoa’s poem by the ethereal presence of the fiddler, conveyed by the adjective ‘half-be’, and further corroborated by his mysterious appearance and disappearance. Yeats’s King Goll, in turn, claims to follow ‘the tramping of tremendous feet’, an enigmatic expression which confirms his state of madness but also ascribes a supernatural quality to his condition, encapsulated in the popular Irish metaphor ‘to be away with the fairies’. Moreover, the music played by King Goll and the Mad Fiddler mesmerises their listeners. King Goll’s song spellbinds his listeners, while it frees him from his suffering. Similarly in Pessoa’s poem, the Mad Fiddler’s at once alluring and disturbing music entrances the villagers. The memory of his tune causes them to experience restlessness and regret, providing them with an epiphany of the type of existence that their hearts secretly desire, which is essentially a contemplative life of ‘dreaming’. The dichotomy between the active and contemplative life is the central theme of ‘The Madness of King Goll’. However, it has a fuller dramatic expression in The Shadowy Waters, wherein Yeats recasts the type of the wandering hero in pursuit of a mad dream that King Goll represents, as Forgael. Like King Goll’s, his magical harp has the power to awaken the ‘dreams’ that ‘live in us’ (a reference to all humanity), ascribing a universal value to Forgael’s angst: All would be well Could we but give us wholly to the dreams, And get into their world that to the sense Is shadow, and not linger wretchedly Among substantial things; for it is dreams That lift us to the f lowing, changing world That the heart longs for. […] (VP, 230)

Forgael is the messenger or representative of Aengus, the Celtic equivalent to Apollo in classical mythology. Pessoa’s fiddler, in turn, evokes the archetypal figure of Orpheus. If we take these personae to be metaphors for the figure of the poet, who communes with the supernatural powers, then the readers could also (in theory) partake of the epiphany experienced by the two personae and the villagers or town-dwellers, thus fulfilling the Romantic goal of aesthetic empathy exalted in the poetry of Blake, Shelley, Coleridge and Wordsworth. Despite the remarkable extent of the affinities between King Goll and the Mad Fiddler, the argument for direct inf luence is unsustainable, as ‘The Madness of King Goll’ did not feature in the Tauchnitz edition. Rather, they illustrate Yeats’s and Pessoa’s parallel re-appropriation of a favourite Romantic topos, namely the

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representation of the poet as spokesperson of the people, expressing their deepest feelings and desires. Indeed, the similarities between the two poems likely derive from a common Romantic source of inspiration. Blake’s ‘Mad Song’ is a plausible model for the misery-stricken King Goll pouring out his sadness into a song: Lo! to the vault Of paved heaven, With sorrow fraught My notes are driven: They strike the ear of night, Make weep the eyes of day; They make mad the roaring winds, And with tempests play. […]49

The same mood pervades the adjoining ‘Song’ in Yeats’s edition of Blake’s poems, with which Pessoa was familiar. Its opening lines — ‘Memory, hither come, / And tune your merry notes:’ 50 — introduce the keyword ‘memory’, which recurs in Pessoa’s poem and is alluded to in Yeats’s through the reference to King Goll’s ephemeral ‘remembering hour’. They imply that the ‘Song’ perpetuates the persona’s existence by creating a lasting impression on its listeners, emphasizing the Romantic belief in the suggestive power of the poem. This view resonates in the closing stanzas of ‘The Mad Fiddler’: Yet when the sorrow of living, Because life is not willed, Comes back in dream’s hours, giving A sense of life being chilled, Suddenly each remembers — It glows like a coming moon On where their dream-life embers — The mad fiddler’s tune. (PIng, 320, my emphasis)

Bearing in mind that Pessoa had become acquainted with Blake’s poetry precisely through Yeats’s edition and hence through the Irish poet’s selection of Blake’s poems, the similarities between their poems raise the possibility of indirect inf luence through mediated reception. Symbolist Soulscapes Yeats expanded on the correspondence between the supernatural and the natural worlds in ‘The Moods’, published in The Wind Among the Reeds (1899): Time drops in decay, Like a candle burnt out, And the mountains and woods Have their day, have their day; What one in the rout Of the fire-born moods Has fallen away? (Selection, 112)

This poem evokes the opening line of Tennyson’s ‘Tithonus’ — ‘The woods decay, the woods decay and fall’ 51 — which immediately ascribes an elegiac tone to it,

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emulating the original Tennysonian elegy for Hallam. Through this allusion, Yeats draws an interesting parallel between Tennyson’s Tithonus, a man who became immortal but continued to experience the decay of the natural world, and the persona of his lyric, an ethereal being, whose demise causes decay in the natural world. Yeats’s conception of ‘moods’ in this instance has a different import from the conventional meaning of the word. According to Warwick Gould and Deirdre Toomey, Yeats vacillates between two conceptions of the ‘moods’. In the first, they are subjective and individual [understood as ‘subjective experience’ after Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance] while in the second they are immanent [...] and humanity is subject to them.52

He derived the latter meaning from several occult sources which come to the fore in Rosa Alchemica, wherein they were described as ‘bodiless souls who descended into’ physical forms, working ‘all great changes in the world’.53 In an essay from 1895 with the same title as the poem, he defines them as ‘daemons’, beings endowed with supernatural qualities but with corporeal counterparts, who establish a link between the ethereal and the physical world (E&I, 195). Both the poem and the essay reveal the inf luence of the Swedenborgian system of correspondences between the natural and the supernatural world. This worldview was common to writers interested in and inf luenced by Swedenborg’s mystical writings, with which Yeats became acquainted through Blake. Yeats’s poem can be compared with another poem from The Mad Fiddler, entitled ‘Mood’: My thoughts are something my soul fears. I tremble at my very glee. Sometimes I feel arrive in me A dim, a cold, a sad, a fierce A lust-like spirituality. It makes me one with all the grass. My life takes colour at all f lowers. The breeze that seemeth loth to pass Shakes off red petals from my hours And my heart sulters without showers. (PI, III, 82–83)

The mysterious way in which the spiritual mood befalls the speaker recalls the descent of the Yeatsian ‘daemons’ or ‘moods’ upon the human and the natural world, engendering an analogous web of correspondences between inner life and the external reality of the natural world, which culminates in a pantheistic communion with the divine. Notwithstanding this, the imagery and diction of Pessoa’s poem differ substantially from the Victorian diction of ‘The Moods’. For instance, the union of the sensual and the ethereal is epitomized by the expression ‘lustlike spirituality’, which resonates of Baudelairean diction. Moreover, the way in which the speaker evokes external images as ref lections of his own emotions in the remaining stanzas emulates Baudelaire’s ‘Spleen’ poems. Indeed, ‘Mood’ appears to emulate Baudelaire’s conviction that ‘artistic creation’ was ‘a spiritual activity’, an attempt to find ‘earthly symbols for spiritual truth’.54

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As the previous poem illustrates, Pessoa’s ‘transcendentalist pantheism’ was greatly inspired by Baudelaire’s theory of correspondences, which was most prominently expressed in the poem ‘Correspondances’ of Les Fleurs du mal. The affinities with the latter poem are particularly noticeable in Pessoa’s ‘The Labyrinth’, which describes a vision wherein ‘each thing was linked into each other thing’ and ‘the outward and the inward became one’ (PI, III, 79), as illustrated by this stanza: There was no difference between a tree And an idea. Seeing a river be And the exterior river were one thing. The bird’s soul and the motion of its wing Were an inextricable oneness made. And all this I saw, seeing not, dismayed With the New God this vision told me of; (PI, III, 79)

The synthesis of concrete, material objects with abstract, spiritual realities recalls the lines, ‘Ô métamorphose mystique / De tous mes sens fondus en un’ of Baudelaire’s ‘Tout Entière’.55 The sense of unity conveyed by the second line of the Baudelairean poem is matched by the noun ‘oneness’ in the stanza above, whereas the adjective ‘dismayed’ resembles the amazement denoted by the interjection ‘Ô’ in the first line. The whole vision culminates in the advent of a ‘New God’, signalling the genesis of Pessoa’s Neo-Paganism as a new form of spirituality. However, Pessoa’s pantheistic depiction in this poem likely owed as much to Blake’s statement in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell — ‘I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception: but my senses discovered the infinite in everything’ 56 — which Pessoa had underlined in his copy of Blake’s works edited by Yeats. Conclusion The poems from The Mad Fiddler analysed thus far show that the inception of Pessoa’s Neo-Paganist aesthetic can be traced back to the pantheistic worldview that pervaded his poetry in English immediately preceding and concomitant with the creation of the heteronyms, Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos. The proof that Pessoa’s Neo-Paganism was a bilingual phenomenon, occurring both in his English and Portuguese poetry, can be found in a fragmentary poem entitled ‘Into a vision’, which is a variation of ‘The Labyrinth’ discussed above. The speaker claims to have undergone a transformation which has made him ‘No pantheist, but pantheism Itself ’ (PI, III, 196). This line closely resembles Álvaro de Campos’s description of Alberto Caeiro in ‘Notas para a Recordação do Meu Mestre Caeiro’: ‘O meu mestre Caeiro não era pagão: era o paganismo’ (OPP, II, 1053) [My master Caeiro was not a pagan; he was paganism itself ], identifying pantheism and paganism as analogous worldviews in Pessoa’s aesthetic thought. According to Campos, Caeiro embodies paganism through ‘consubstantiation’ (OPP, II, 1053), a term which also describes befittingly the type of transformation undergone by the speaker of the English poem and is in agreement with the new form of spirituality centred on the individual proposed by Pessoa’s Neo-Paganism. If, like Anne Terlinden, one considers The Mad Fiddler ‘a kind of “English microcosm” of Pessoa’s

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aesthetic theory’,57 the prefaces to this collection can be regarded as ‘metatexts’ (in the Genettian sense). Referring to his aesthetic theory in a preface in English from 1917, Pessoa states, ‘I called this attitude Sensationism, but if followed to its spiritual source, it might be called High Paganism’ (PI, III, 114). This assertion establishes a common philosophical positioning underpinning the English poems in The Mad Fiddler and Pessoa’s poetic production in Portuguese between 1913 and 1917, identifying them as representative of the Sensationist or Neo-Paganist aesthetic in the two languages. In a letter to an unknown English publisher estimated to be from 1916, Pessoa claims that Sensationism represents ‘a new species of Weltanschauung’ both ‘in its metaphysical substance’ and ‘in its innovations as to expression’ (C, I, 231). The new worldview suggested by the German term echoes in the line ‘He [...] who thinks the world anew’ (PI, III, 40) from ‘The Shining Pool’ in The Mad Fiddler. Similarly, Pessoa’s description of the ‘religious and philosophical’ attitude of this collection as ‘to feel Nature exceedingly’ (PI, III, 114) in the aforementioned 1917 preface resonates in Campos’s line ‘Sentir tudo excessivamente’ [to feel everything excessively] in ‘Afinal a melhor maneira de Viajar é sentir’,58 which came to encapsulate Sensacionismo. In another preface to The Mad Fiddler Pessoa claims, ‘Some of [the] poems seem to be based on a Christian and mystical philosophy; others on a pantheistic conception of the world; others, still, on what may be best described as a transcendentalist attitude’ (PI, III, 40). His summary of the types of mysticism found in the collection not only illustrates the thematic diversity of the collection but also reveals a syncretic tendency characteristic of the Sensationist or pantheistic aesthetic. This eclecticism is not limited to themes only; it is also evident in the varied imagery and diversity of styles rehearsed in the collection. Therefore, the identification between Pessoa’s early English and Portuguese poetry is not confined to the aesthetic and philosophical principles informing it, but encompasses stylistic practices as well. In a letter to John Lane from 23 October 1915, Pessoa dissuades the English publisher from attributing ‘certain eccentricities and peculiarities of expression’ in the English poems he was enclosing to the fact that their author was ‘a foreigner’ (C, I, 175). Instead, he should regard them ‘as forms of expression necessarily created by an extreme pantheistic attitude, which as it breaks the limits of definite thought, so must violate the rules of logical meaning’ (C, I, 176). Therefore, according to Pessoa, the ‘strangeness’ (C, I, 176) of their English did not derive from lack of proficiency in the language but constituted a deliberate stylistic choice in concurrence with a new aesthetic, which required a different form of expression. The most accomplished poems of The Mad Fiddler convey the novelty of the pantheistic aesthetic through ‘the semantic and syntactic shocks between words so that their symbolic meaning is increased by a breaking of their usual meaning’.59 In the same letter, Pessoa claims to ‘practice the same thing, to a far higher degree, in Portuguese’ (C, I, 176), establishing a common denominator between The Mad Fiddler and poems like ‘Impressões do Crepúsculo’ (1913), ‘Hora Absurda’ (1916) and ‘Chuva Oblíqua’ (1915), which relied on the use of neologisms and the subversion of linear syntax.

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Pessoa’s observation implies that his Portuguese poetry displayed an even greater degree of lexical and syntactic oddity than did his English poetry. This is con firmed by the comparison of contemporary poems in the two languages which address the same theme. In part I, ‘Summer Moments’, from The Mad Fiddler, the speaker describes an idyllic scene that encompasses a ‘golden day’ with ‘glad horizons’, ‘happy hills’ and ‘fields’. To this pleasant external scenery the subject opposes his tempestuous interior landscape — a ‘lone shore / Struck by the sea’ (PI, III, 93) — re-enacting the Romantic dichotomy between land and sea as embodying respectively positive and negative connotations.60 In keeping with the pantheistic stance, Nature is endowed with a regenerative quality, which has a soothing effect on the speaker of the poem: ’Tis very little, I know, But it is happiness, And the hours are but few That we can really bless. They are hours like this, freed From belonging to thought, When we have nought to heed Save a breeze that is nought. Let me therefore, breathe in Into my memory This hour, and may it begin Again whenever I see My heart grow heavy and hot, My thoughts grow close and late. O soft breeze, fan my thought! O calmness, brush my fate! (PI, III, 98)

The speaker’s emergence from his prostration into an ecstatic state of bliss and his relish at the prospect of his future retrieval of this emotion through memory recall Wordsworth’s definition of poetry as originating in ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’.61 In part II of ‘Summer Moments’, the speaker compares his elated state of mind to childhood, likewise following in the footsteps of Wordsworth: I am again The child I was, Having no pain More than the grass. (PI, III, 95)

The simile reinforces the association between the speaker and the natural world, basing the identification between child and grass upon their unconsciousness as an essential pre-requisite for internal harmony and happiness. ‘Chuva Oblíqua’ [Oblique Rain] (1914),62 contemporary to a great number of the poems in The Mad Fiddler, addresses the same theme as ‘Summer Moments’, also displaying similar imagery. The parallelism is evident in the opening scene of the poem, which intersects a dreamt sombre seaport with a real sunny countryside landscape. These images re-enact the same dichotomies of earth–water, light– shadow as the English poem. However, they are expanded further through the

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intersection of different planes in each of the six parts into which ‘Chuva Oblíqua’ is divided. Thus, the opposition between the bright exterior plane of the countryside and the sombre internal port in the first part is inverted into the contrast between the artificially lit interior of a church and the darkness outside it in part II, only to be reversed again through the contrasting dark abyss of the Pyramids and an outdoor boat procession on the Nile in part III, culminating in the climactic fusion of day and night landscapes in parts V and VI. According to Yvette Centeno, ‘Em “Chuva Oblíqua” a intersecção parece ser o esforço de um eu para a Totalidade, realizando-se a partir dos fragmentos de si que intersecciona e até por vezes funde em transitória união’ [In ‘Chuva Oblíqua’ the intersection appears to be the effort of a subject towards Totality through the fragments of itself that it intersects and sometimes even fuses in transitory union].63 In part VI, the transient union of the fragmented self is sought in childhood memories, as it had been in ‘Summer Moments’. Yet, the recollection of childhood in ‘Chuva Oblíqua’ only affords a f leeting moment of comfort and is summarily overturned by the absurd imagery and deconstructive strategy at the end of the poem: Lembra-me a minha infância, aquele dia Em que eu brincava ao pé de um muro de quintal Atirando-lhe com uma bola que tinha dum lado O deslizar dum cão verde, e do outro lado Um cavalo azul a correr com um jockey amarelo... [...] Todo o teatro é um muro branco de música Por onde um cão verde corre atrás da minha saudade Da minha infância, cavalo azul com um jockey amarelo...64 [It reminds me of my childhood, that day When I was playing by a backyard wall Throwing at it a ball that had on one side A slithering green dog, and on the other, A running blue horse with a yellow jockey... [...] The whole theatre is a white wall of music Through which a green dog chases after my longing For my childhood, blue horse with a yellow jockey...]

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The denouement of the poem ref lects the impossibility of re-integration and the speaker’s permanent fractured self hood, which is ref lected stylistically on the jagged, fragmentary diction of ‘Chuva Oblíqua’. As well as displaying a clearly modernist style, the Portuguese poem offers a more realistic and complex portrayal of the divided nature of modern man than the Romantically inspired ‘Summer Moments’. The depiction of reality as fragmentary in the Portuguese poem also counters the spiritualistic pantheism of The Mad Fiddler, which favoured a unitary conception of the world encompassing both the natural and the supernatural, epitomized by the theory of correspondences. Another striking difference between the two poems is the inability of the subject in the Portuguese poem to escape present reality either into a reassuring time in the past, usually equated with childhood, or into an imagined far-off place, where he could live a life of inconsequential bliss, both of which are recurring topoi in the English poems analysed in this chapter.

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Yeats’s poetry underwent an analogous development during the turn of the century, ref lecting his growing dissatisfaction with alienating escapist fantasies and the ascendancy of dreams. The intertextual allusions to past themes and imagery in the self-referential poems from that period show that the process of poetic appraisal was gradual but profound. The poet’s disenchantment with dreams is dramatized in ‘The Withering of the Boughs’ (1900). The speaker of the poem addresses the moon as if it were a confidant, complaining that ‘the roads are unending, and there is no place to [his] mind’ (Selection, 149), which suggests that he cannot find appeasement for his restlessness, even though he is familiar with soothing places like ‘the leafy paths’ and ‘the island lawns’ (Selection, 149). His discouragement is reinforced by the refrain, which underlines the pernicious effect of dreams: ‘No boughs have withered because of the wintry wind; / The boughs have withered because I have told them my dreams’ (Selection, 149). As with other poems discussed previously, the natural elements, metonymically signified by the noun ‘boughs’, ref lect the dissatisfaction of the subject. A similar scenario recurs in ‘Under the Moon’ (1901), in which the speaker cannot find contentment in mythical lands of the heart’s desire: I have no happiness in dreaming of Brycelinde, Nor Avalon the grass-green hollow, nor Joyous Isle, Where one found Lancelot crazed and hid him for awhile; Nor Ulad, when Naoise had thrown a sail upon the wind, Nor lands that seem too dim to be burdens on the heart; (Selection, 151)

In contrast to these ‘dim’ imaginary landscapes, characterized vaguely as ‘Landunder-Wave, the ‘Land-of-the-Tower’ and ‘the Wood-of-Wonders’ (Selection, 151), he finds that to dream of a beautiful woman ‘is a burden not to be borne’ (Selection, 152). This assertion implies that the beauty of a woman has greater verisimilitude than the superficial landscapes listed in the poem, mere literary conventions, and therefore elicits deeper emotional responses from the poet and the reader alike. However, Yeats did not merely question the conventionality of his early poetry both in terms of themes and imagery. He was equally dissatisfied with the imitative nature of his verse with regard to nineteenth-century poetic diction. As a way of escaping it, he looked for an idiosyncratic style, which relied on more personal sources of imagery, encompassing both Irish and occult subject matter. In defiance of his mainly English poetic tradition, Yeats re-fashioned his poetic persona as the antithetical Celtic bard, whose many facets as a man of contemplation and of action recurred as masks embodied in individual or groups of poems and across his several collections. In ‘Ireland and the Arts’ (1901), he states I could not now write of any other country but Ireland, for my style has been shaped by the subjects I have worked on, but there was a time when my imagination seemed unwilling, when I found myself writing of some Irish event in words that would have better fitted some Italian or Eastern event, for my style had been shaped in that general stream of European literature which has come from so many watersheds, and it was slowly, very slowly, that I made a new style. It was years before I could rid myself of Shelley’s Italian light, but now I think my style is myself. (E&I, 208)

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Pessoa’s early English poetry drew from the same stream (or streams, to be more accurate) of European literature as Yeats’s: that is, the Romantic spiritual pantheistic tradition dating back to Blake and Shelley and the Symbolist movement, closer to the poets’ lifetime in both its English and French expressions. Pessoa’s search for an original style — which relied on the adoption of his native Portuguese language as his preferred mode of expression — led to the creation of the heteronyms, Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos. These fictional poets, in whose guise Pessoa wrote a substantial part of his work, allowed him to engage synchronically with different philosophical and aesthetic positionings and different modes of expression. In this regard, his development would appear to differ from Yeats’s, who in the excerpt above claims to have adopted a single style, which he equates with himself, and which he describes as a diachronic progress. To some extent this was the case, for self-dramatization plays a bigger part in Yeats’s poetry than in Pessoa’s. However, Yeats’s style was not to remain as singular as he envisaged it on this occasion. His experiences in the Abbey theatre in the first decade of the century would prove instrumental in his poetic development. By the time he published The Green Helmet & Other Poems (1910), Yeats had also adopted the mask of the ‘many-sided man’: the figure of the private man, after 1910, became only part of the personae of the lyrics; in Responsibilities (1914), he presents his sense of life not only as it is illustrated in his private experience but as it is revealed in fictive impersonal figures and in the occasions of public life.66

That Pessoa would adopt stylistic diversification sooner than Yeats is not surprising, considering the fact that, being twenty-three years younger, he began writing poetry already within a modernist context. Yeats’s process of stylistic maturation was avowedly longer in that it involved a greater transition from a post-Symbolist to a modern aesthetic. However, what is intriguing is that, having followed somewhat different paths, both poets came into their mature styles in 1914. From 1914 onward, as Pessoa began delineating his new synchronic styles in his Portuguese poetry, he distanced himself from his early poetic models, on occasion even turning against them quite aggressively. Among these discredited literary ‘father figures’ (to invoke Freud’s notion of family romance) was Yeats, whose subsequent works did not find their way into Pessoa’s substantial personal library. In ‘Ultimatum’, published in the periodical Portugal Futurista in 1917, Pessoa dons his most markedly modernist mask as Álvaro de Campos and adopts the conventions of the futurist manifesto to direct a fierce attack on the leading literary figures of Europe. Amid a series of scathing invectives against authors such as Pater, Wilde and the French Symbolists, the following criticism of the Irish poet resounds: ‘Fora tu, Yeats da céltica bruma à roda do poste sem indicações, saco de podres que veio à praia do naufrágio do simbolismo inglês!’ (OPP, II, 1103) [Away with you, Yeats of the Celtic mist circling a signpost with no directions, bag of rotten debris that washed onto the beach from the shipwreck of English Symbolism!]. The rhetorical excess of these lines denotes a palpable ‘anxiety’ regarding the Irish poet, suggesting that he exerted a certain degree of inf luence over Pessoa in accordance with Harold Bloom’s model of inf luence.67

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This anxiety could derive from the fact that Pessoa had been inspired by some of Yeats’s poems in the aforementioned 1913 Tauchnitz anthology. However, the poems analysed in this chapter suggest that the affinities between Yeats’s and Pessoa’s early English poetry derive to a great extent from common inf luences and analogous sources of inspiration for their poems. Indeed, The Mad Fiddler and Yeats’s poems of the ‘Celtic Twilight’ period (late 1880s and 1890s) illustrate the poets’ reception of Romantic, Victorian and Symbolist poetry, which implied a re-enactment of the themes, imagery and diction associated with those movements. As such, the true merit of The Mad Fiddler lies precisely in the very fact that it records Pessoa’s early and remarkably successful forays into the English tradition as pasticheur of his English poetic models, among whom was possibly Yeats. By doing so, he rehearsed a technique of stylistic appropriation and transmutation which would ultimately lead to the multifaceted style of his mature poetry. The bilious rhetoric of ‘Ultimatum’, reinforced by its attribution to Campos (notor ious for his quarrelsome public interventions), underpins a straightforward dismissal of inf luential literary figures and movements on Pessoa’s poetry up to that period. Therefore, by identifying Yeats with the denouement of English Symbolism, Campos metonymically dismisses the post-Symbolist aspects of his early works. In this sense, ‘Ultimatum’ is comparable in function to ‘A Coat’ (1914), which metaphorically enacts Yeats’s stripping down or shedding of his early style. Despite the obvious stylistic differences, both texts document a shift in Pessoa’s and Yeats’s poetic styles. Campos’s derisive tone in the prose piece parallels the sardonic line in Yeats’s poem — ‘But the fools caught it’ (VP, 320) — which refers to his coat as a metaphor for his poetry. And indeed, in the same way that Campos dismisses his own outmoded style through others, the Yeatsian persona sheds his exhausted Pre-Raphaelite diction, resorting instead to a form stemming from oral tradition with colloquial and satiric overtones. There is also a similarity of intention, in that Campos’s attempt to clear the path for new poetic enterprises is comparable to the claim at the close of Yeats’s poem, ‘For there’s more enterprise / In walking naked’ (VP, 320), that is, with originality. Yeats’s and Pessoa’s newfound confidence led them to experiment with different, even antithetical, generic conventions. They believed that because of the association of these genres with intrinsic qualities of poetry, they were less determined by contextual elements than were the literary movements. Therefore, they allowed a more individualized expression, relying on a process of absorption and transformation of past modes of expression. Both poets engaged with traditional poetic stances, like the pastoral, the heroic and elegy. The subsequent chapters of this book scrutinize their contemporaneous engagement with those genres and modes in their poetry, and examine in detail the characteristics of Yeats’s and Pessoa’s mature styles. Notes to Chapter 1 1. Alexandrino Severino, Fernando Pessoa na África do Sul (Lisbon: Publicações Dom Quixote, 1983), pp. 131–32. 2. Fernando Pessoa: escritos autobiográficos, automáticos e de reflexão pessoal, ed. by Richard Zenith, trans. by Manuela Rocha (Lisbon: Assírio e Alvim, 2003), p. 150 (hereafter cited in the text as EA, followed by the page number).

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3. Pessoa’s reading diaries from 1905 to 1907 (Fernando Pessoa: escritos autobiográficos, automáticos e de reflexão pessoal, pp. 22–54) feature their names, and he had copies of their books in his library. 4. W. B. Yeats, Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1955), pp. 64–65, 313 (hereafter quoted in the text as Aut, followed by page number). 5. The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. by Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach (New York: Macmillan, 1957), p. 491 (hereafter quoted in the text as VP, followed by the page number). 6. Anna Balakian, The Symbolist Movement: A Critical Appraisal (New York: New York University Press, 1970), p. 4. 7. Poemas ingleses, ed. by Marcus Angioni and Fernando Gomes, Edição Crítica de Fernando Pessoa, Série Maior, 5, 3 vols (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional–Casa da Moeda, 1993–99), iii: The Mad Fiddler (1999), pp. 18–23 (hereafter quoted in the text as PI, followed by volume and page number). In the previously mentioned bibliographical note, Pessoa lists the French Symbolists and the Portuguese Symbolist, Camilo Pessanha, among the prevailing inf luences on him between 1909 and 1911, and the Portuguese post-Symbolist Saudosistas during the years 1912–13 (OPP, III, 1423). 8. In a note in a diary most likely from 1912, Pessoa writes: ‘Make a careful choice of English poems and see to what extent they can be published in England or the United States’ (PI, III, 11). 9. Anne Terlinden, Fernando Pessoa: The Bilingual Portuguese Poet: A Critical Study of ‘The Mad Fiddler’ (Brussels: Publications des Facultés Universitaires Saint-Louis, 1990), p. 133, mentions a negative response in a letter from the English publisher Constable & Co. from 6 June 1917. 10. Paul Fussell, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, rev. edn (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979), p. 72: ‘Another unique nineteenth-century phenomenon is the attempt to enlist triple base-rhythms in support of non-frivolous subjects, as Longfellow, Poe, and Swinburne tried to do.’ 11. Luísa Freire, Fernando Pessoa: entre vozes, entre línguas (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 2004), p. 22. 12. Freire, pp. 22–23. 13. Pessoa had an edition of The Complete Poetical Works of Shelley: Including Materials Never Before Printed in Any Edition of the Poems, ed. by Thomas Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1904). The marginalia in his copy of the book show that he had read extensively from it, and an entry in a readings diary from 1906 proves that he was reading Alastor (EA, 50). Shelley’s inf luence is conspicuous in a poem from The Mad Fiddler entitled ‘Elevation’ (PI, III, 102–05), which emulates Shelley’s ‘To a Skylark’. 14. Poems of William Blake, p. xxiii. Pessoa placed a line down the side of this passage of the introduction in his copy of the book, marking it ‘NB’. 15. W. B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (New York: Macmillan, 1961), p. 111 (hereafter cited in the text as E&I, followed by page number). 16. This section of Yeats’s autobiography refers to the period following his return to Dublin in 1881, when he came into contact with Professor Edward Dowden of Trinity College, whom he called his ‘sage’ (Aut, 86). In W. B. Yeats: A Life, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997–2003), i: The Apprentice Mage: 1865–1914, p. 29, Foster posits that as ‘the foremost Shelleyan of his time’, Dowden undoubtedly contributed to the poet’s ‘early and enduring reverence for Shelley’s poetry’. 17. The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. by John Kelly and others (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986–), i: 1865–1895, ed. by John Kelly and Eric Domville, p. 119 (hereafter cited in the text as CL, followed by volume and page numbers). 18. Deborah Fleming, ‘A Man Who Does Not Exist’: The Irish Peasant in the Work of W. B. Yeats and J. M. Synge (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), p. 81. 19. Ann Saddlemyer, ‘The Cult of the Celt: Pan-Celticism in the Nineties’, in The World of W. B. Yeats: Essays in Perspective, ed. by Robin Skelton and Ann Saddlemyer (Victoria, BC: University of Victoria, 1965), p. 19. 20. Yeats’s Poems, ed. by A. Norman Jeffares, 3rd edn (London: Macmillan, 1996), p. 494. 21. The reference to Sligo did not feature in the 1889 version of the poem published in The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889), where the fish was taken to ‘the far-away town’, denoting an indefinite description of place more in line with Romantic and Victorian poetry. The Romantic inf luence is also conspicuous in the use of the archaic apostrophe ‘Ye’ in the 1889 version.

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22. George Monteiro, Fernando Pessoa and Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Literature, Studies in Romance Languages, 46 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000), p. 14 (cites Wordsworth). 23. Fernando Pessoa: obra poética e em prosa, ed. by António Quadros and Dalila Pereira Costa, 3 vols (Porto: Lello & Irmão, 1986), ii: Prosa 1, p. 1189 (hereafter quoted in the text as OPP, followed by volume and page number). 24. Fernando Pessoa: obra poética e em prosa, ed. by António Quadros and Dalila Pereira Costa, 3 vols (Porto: Lello & Irmão, 1986), iii: Prosa 2, p. 143 (hereafter quoted in the text as OPP, followed by volume and page number). 25. Fernando Pessoa: crítica, ensaios, artigos e entrevistas, ed. by Fernando Cabral Martins (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 2000), p. 491. 26. Fernando Pessoa: poesia inglesa, trans. and ed. by Luísa Freire, bilingual edn (Lisbon: Livros Horizonte, 1995), p. 332 (my emphasis). Hereafter quoted in the text as PIng, followed by page number. 27. The Poems of Matthew Arnold: 1840 to 1866 (London: Dent; New York: Dutton, 1908; repr. 1910), p. 228. The copy of this edition in Pessoa’s library includes ‘The Forsaken Merman’ (pp. 228–32), which is marked in the text. 28. Charles Baudelaire, Les fleurs du mal (Paris: Gallimard, 1861; repr. 1972), p. 84 (my emphasis). Pessoa owned a copy of the book from 1934 but claimed to have known it as early as 1905 (EA, 150). 29. This version of the poem featured in A Selection from the Poetry of W. B. Yeats, p. 20. Therefore, it is the text that Pessoa read. I will quote from this anthology whenever referring to a poem that was included in it. 30. Pater, The Renaissance, p. 252. 31. Daniel Albright, The Myth Against Myth: A Study of Yeats’s Imagination in Old Age (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 66. 32. Albright, The Myth Against Myth, p. 67. 33. The Works of Alfred Lord Tennyson (London; New York: Macmillan, 1894, repr. 1902), p. 300. This was the edition in Pessoa’s library. The verses immediately following these ones are underlined in Pessoa’s copy, proving that he read this poem and thought these lines worthy of note. 34. The Works of Edgar Allan Poe: Including the Choicest of his Critical Essays, intro. by Charles Baudelaire (London: Chatto & Windus, 1872). Pessoa had an edition from 1902. He underlined and annotated this poem, translating some lines in the margins. 35. Poe, pp. 50–51. Pessoa also knew and admired this poem. He wrote ‘Spiritually stupendous’ by the lines ‘From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime / Out of space — out of Time’. 36. Albright, The Myth Against Myth, p. 109. 37. Poems of William Blake, p. 185. Pessoa underlined this excerpt in his copy of Blake’s poems. 38. W. B. Yeats, ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, in The Poetry Archive, read by W. B. Yeats. [accessed 24 April 2007]. 39. W. B. Yeats, Later Articles and Reviews: Uncollected Articles, Reviews, and Radio Broadcasts Written after 1900, ed. by Colton Johnson, 3rd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), p. 290. 40. W. B. Yeats, Explorations, sel. by Mrs. W. B. Yeats (New York: Macmillan, 1962), p. 255. Hereon cited in the text as Exp, followed by page number. 41. Poe, p. 647. 42. Pater, The Renaissance, p. 140. 43. Fernando Pessoa: Páginas de estética e de teoria e crítica literárias, ed. by Georg Rudolf Lind and Jacinto do Prado Coelho, Obras completas de Fernando Pessoa, 2nd edn (Lisbon: Ática, 1994), p. 27 (my emphasis). 44. W. B. Yeats, The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (London: Kegan Paul, 1889), pp. 58–59. 45. Nicholas Meihuizen, Yeats and the Drama of Sacred Space, Costerus New Series, 116 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), pp. 109–10. 46. Edmund Wilson, quoted in Frank Hughes Murphy, Yeats’s Early Poetry: The Quest for Reconciliation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1975), p. 17. 47. Claudio Guillén, Literature as System: Essays Towards the Theory of Literary History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 37–38.

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48. Matthew Arnold, Poetical Works (London: Macmillan, 1893), pp. 170–74. This was the edition in Yeats’s library. See Edward O’Shea, A Descriptive Catalog of W. B. Yeats’s Library (London: Garland, 1985), p. 8. 49. Poems of William Blake, p. 10. Yeats’s reference to ‘the singer of the ‘Mad Song’ in his introduction (p. xxiii) confirms the importance he ascribed to this poem, which did not go unnoticed by Pessoa, as inferred from his underlining of this crucial section in his copy of the edition. 50. Poems of William Blake, p. 9. The title of this poem is underlined in Pessoa’s copy of the edition. 51. Alfred Lord Tennyson: Selected Poems, ed. by Aidan Day (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 296. 52. W. B. Yeats, Mythologies, ed. by Warwick Gould and Deirdre Toomey (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2005), pp. 283 (n.1), 218 (n.10). 53. Yeats, Mythologies, p. 187. 54. Enid Starkie, From Gautier to Eliot: The Influence of France on English Literature, 1851–1939 (London: Hutchinson University Library, 1960), p. 35. 55. Baudelaire, p. 72. 56. Poems of William Blake, p. 169. 57. Terlinden, p. 218. 58. Poemas de Álvaro de Campos, ed. by Cleonice Berardineli, Edição Crítica de Fernando Pessoa, Série Maior, 2 (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional–Casa da Moeda, 1990), p. 263 (hereafter quoted in the text as PAC, followed by page number). 59. Terlinden, p. 168. 60. W. H. Auden, The Enchafèd Flood; or, The Romantic Iconography of the Sea (London: Faber & Faber, 1951), p. 65. 61. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, ed. by Michael Mason, with a preface by John Mullan, 2nd edn (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2007), p. 82. 62. Pessoa mentions this poem in the letter to Harold Monro, saying also that he encloses a translation of it to substantiate his claim that his Portuguese poetry is more advanced than that of the English Imagists (C, I, 193). 63. Yvette K. Centeno, ‘Fragmentação e totalidade em “Chuva Oblíqua”, de Fernando Pessoa’, in Fernando Pessoa: tempo, solidão, hermetismo, ed. by Stephen Reckert and Yvette K. Centeno (Lisbon: Moraes Editores, 1978), pp. 103–24 (p. 111). 64. Fernando Pessoa: obra poética e em prosa, ed. by António Quadros and Dalila Pereira Costa, 3 vols (Porto: Lello & Irmão, 1986), i: Poesia, p. 173. Hereafter quoted in the text as OPP, followed by volume and page number. 65. My translation. Whenever possible I use existing translations of Pessoa’s work in Portuguese (sourced in the text), but in the case of poems and prose passages that have not been previously translated, I provide my own. 66. Thomas Parkinson, W. B. Yeats Self-Critic: A Study of His Early Verse (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), p. 101. 67. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, 2nd edn (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 5–7.

CHAPTER 2

❖

Neo-Paganism and the Pastoral Style Despite Yeats’s and Pessoa’s avowed dismissal of their early post-Symbolist styles, certain aspects of their early poetry examined in the previous chapter continued to feature in their subsequent works — namely a propensity for escapism, a pantheistic representation of Nature and a focus on the interrelation between the physical and the metaphysical facets of the human condition. However, they were transformed by an inf lux of new elements, ref lecting changes in the poets’ aesthetic thought and poetic practice. Thus, the yearning for a life of dreams in a dim idealized location remote from everyday life, derived from Romantic, Victorian and Symbolist poetry, was replaced by an interest in the distant but definite past of pre-Christian civilizations characteristic of High Modernism. The Celtic and Greek cultures presented Yeats and Pessoa respectively with a more authentic and pervasive pagan worldview than the vague pantheism of the English Romantic mystical poets, and therefore they were more fitting as a dramatized poetic expression of their NeoPaganism. The re-creation of an ancient era when men perceived the world in pagan terms contrasted sharply with the present condition of modern man. These contrasting worldviews, often expressed by different personae, also unsettled the metaphysical bias prevalent in Yeats’s and Pessoa’s early poetry, allowing them to address the dichotomy between the temporal demands of the material world and the pull toward the transcendental in a more complex manner. In his first published article, ‘The Poetry of Sir Samuel Ferguson’, Yeats highlights the importance of ancient legends as a source of inspiration and a strategy to transcend subjectivity. He claims that the ‘seven great cycles of legends — the Indian; the Homeric; the Charlemagnic; the Spanish [...]; the Arthurian; the Scandinavian; and the Irish’, are ‘the voice of some race celebrating itself ’, adding that poets universally go ‘back to their old legends [...] seeking the truth about nature and man, that they may not be lost in a world of mere shadow and dream’.1 Yeats’s fascination with Celtic civilization developed from his research into Irish folklore during the late 1880s, conducted while compiling Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888) and Representative Irish Tales (1891). It also ref lected the primitivism and pan-Celticism of late nineteenth-century comparative ethnography: ‘Contemporary primitivist ethnography taught Yeats that to look to the oral cultures of Galway and Sligo was not to turn inwards, away from Europe, but to go deeper into the wellsprings of the modern world’.2 These perspectives coalesced in ‘The Celtic Element in Literature’ (1897). In this essay, Yeats ‘re-states’ (to use his own term) the racially

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based arguments of Ernest Renan’s The Poetry of the Celtic Races (1896) and Matthew Arnold’s The Study of Celtic Literature (1891). Adopting a primitivist comparative approach, he ascribes the characteristics that these two critics had attributed to the Celts instead to the ‘primitive imagination’ of the ‘ancient farmers and herdsmen’, and ‘the ancient hunters and fishers’ (E&I, 181, 82, 84). Thus, for example, what Arnold had understood as Celtic magic naturalism is characterized by Yeats as ‘the ancient religion of the world’ (E&I, 176). He contended that the ‘Gaelic legends’ unearthed by ‘the Celtic movement’ had given access to an ancient literary tradition ‘that has been for centuries close to the main river of European literature’ (E&I, 185–86). He dated this ancient literary tradition back to Antiquity, establishing a direct line between it and the works produced by the Irish Revival, including, of course, his own poetry. In subsequent essays of the late 1890s and early 1900s, such as ‘Ireland and the Arts’ (1901), he ascribes similar origins to the pagan worldview of the Greek and the Celtic races, drawing several parallels between their myths and legends. His comments indicate that he regarded the Irish Revival as comparable to the rediscovery of Greek literature in the early modern Renaissance, reprising Walter Pater’s argument in The Renaissance and Victorian Hellenism. The Hellenistic bias of Victorian critics like Walter Pater, Matthew Arnold and Oscar Wilde also exercised a significant inf luence on Pessoa. Pessoa’s neoclassicist heteronym, Ricardo Reis, identifies them as key figures in the concerted modern effort to ‘reconstruct paganism’.3 However, he dismisses their pseudo-paganism, claiming that it is tainted with Christian values, due to the prevalence of Roman culture in Western thought. Pessoa was also aware of a distinctive tendency in modern European literature to ‘a so-called neoclassicism’ which ‘includes a counteraction to Romantic and post-Romantic principles’ (OPP, III, 140). He refers to ‘a French neoclassical school’,4 alluding to the École Romane which included figures like Jean Moréas, who had published a manifesto of the Romanic poets defending neoclassical principles, and Charles Maurras, who expressed a radical anti-Romanticism. Pessoa criticized the French movement for lacking the purity of the Greek pagan ideal and for its political associations with the far right. As a counterpart to these past and contemporary movements, Pessoa founded an intellectual movement called ‘Neopaganismo Português’ in 1917 (OPP, III, 366), which comprised himself and the heteronyms Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos. In a text from 1918 that was the intended preface to Athena (the magazine of the movement), he states: ‘O facto de que em Portugal aparecem estes temperamentos parece indicar que tem o nosso país que tomar sobre si a vanguarda [...] do movimento neo-pagão’ [The fact that these temperaments appear in Portugal seems to indicate that our country will assume the vanguard of the Neo-Paganist movement] (PCAC, 255). This argument was echoed by Reis, who claimed that Portuguese Neo-Paganism initiated ‘uma renascença neo-clássica da Europa’ [a neoclassical renaissance in Europe] (RRP, 167). These claims resemble Yeats’s observations about the Irish Revival, denoting a comparable nationalist agenda underlying these movements. Moreover, Pessoa’s emphasis on the NeoPaganism of the heteronyms proves that they were devised primarily as a counterreaction to the post-Symbolist aesthetic that pervaded his early poetry, in the same

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way that Yeats’s inclusion of heroic figures from Celtic pagan Ireland as personae in his poetry distanced it from the mainstream European traditions that informed his early poetry. Pastoral themes Yeats’s and Pessoa’s Neo-Paganist and neoclassicist preferences had significant stylistic repercussions for their poetry, leading them to engage with the pastoral mode. Their re-enactment of pastoral poetry comprises both imitation and subversion of classical pastoral conventions. Yeats acknowledged the imitative quality of his early attempts at pastoral, referring to The Island of Statues (1885) as ‘an Arcadian play in imitation of Edmund Spenser’ (Aut, 92). Subtitled An Arcadian Faery Tale, which evokes the idyllic paradise immortalized by Virgil’s Eclogues, this work was modelled after Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender. In a letter to Katharine Tynan from 31 January 1889, Yeats explains the genesis of The Island of Statues thus: My ideas of a poem have greatly changed since I wrote the Island. Oisin is an incident or series of incidents the ‘Island of Statues’ a region. There is a thicket between three roads, some distance from any of them, in the midst of Howth. [...] That thicket gave me my first thought of what a long poem should be, I thought of it as a region into which one should wander from the cares of life. The charecters [sic] were to be no more real than the shadows that people the Howth thicket. There [sic] mission was to lesson [sic] the solitude without destroying its peace. (CL, I, 135; my emphasis)

The underlined phrase shows that his conceptualization of the pastoral play matches the traditional conception of ‘the pastoral oasis [...] as a temporary retirement to the periphery of life, as an attempt to charm away the cares of the world’.5 This parallel underpins the escapist theme of the play, which is intrinsic to the pastoral mode, in particular Romantic pastoral. Yeats’s use of the word ‘region’ in this passage evokes Endymion, which John Keats described as ‘a little Region to wander in’.6 Like Keats, Yeats envisaged the poem itself as a ‘poetic enclosure’, ‘as its own kind of transforming locality capable of reshaping nature in art’.7 Yeats’s belief in the power of Art to transfigure reality and to create the ultimate ‘Arcady’ can be traced to the epilogue to The Island of Statues, initially entitled ‘Song of the Last Arcadian’ and, subsequently, ‘The Song of the Happy Shepherd’ (1885).8 His decision to open his Collected Poems with this poem denotes his conscious commitment to the pastoral tradition. In ‘A General Introduction for my Work’ (1937) he states, ‘I must choose a traditional stanza, even what I alter must seem traditional. I commit my emotion to shepherds, herdsmen...’ (E&I, 522). In conformity with this assertion, the poem is written in the odic form, displaying the conventional three-stanza structure and the characteristic invocation of the classical composition: ‘But O, sick children of the world’ (VP, 65). On the other hand, the poem introduces stark variations of metre and rhyme, and subverts several pastoral conventions. Its opening line — ‘The woods of Arcady are dead’ (VP, 64) — announces the demise of the classical pastoral setting. This is corroborated in the last stanza by the reference to the death of the ‘hapless faun’ (VP, 67): that is, Pan, the mythological figure associated with the classical pastoral tradition. The

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shepherd persona laments the loss of the Golden Age, when the world ‘on dreaming fed’ (VP, 64), and its substitution by a materialistic view of the world in the modern age. In order to retrieve ‘the antique joy’ associated with mythical Arcady, he rejects the dominion of science and a life of action, described respectively as ‘Grey Truth’ and ‘dusty deeds’ (VP, 65), in favour of the contemplative life, ref lecting the belief that ‘the bucolic dream has no other reality than that of imagination or art’.9 According to Yeats’s version of pastoral, Arcady exists outside of space and time on an idealized sphere where ‘Words alone’ (VP, 65) can provide the enduring antidote to Man’s anxiety over his mortality. Hence the shepherd persona advises his angst-ridden implied reader to Go gather by the humming sea Some twisted, echo-harbouring shell, And to its lips thy story tell, And they thy comforters will be, Rewording in melodious guile Thy fretful words a little while, Till they shall singing fade in ruth And die a pearly brotherhood; For words alone are certain good: Sing, then, for this is also sooth. (VP, 66)

The image of the shell as a symbol of poetry involves an intertextual allusion to the shell from which pour out ‘articulate sounds / A loud prophetic blast of harmony;’ in Book Fifth of Wordsworth’s The Prelude.10 The depiction of the shell as comforting and soothing in Yeats’s poem replicates elements from the 1805 edition of The Prelude, in which the shell offers ‘A joy, a consolation, and a hope’, and from the 1850 edition, in which it has the ‘power / To exhilarate the spirit, and to soothe’.11 Moreover, the characterization of the sounds that issue from it as ‘melodious guile’ evokes the harmonious quality of the shell in Wordsworth’s poem, corroborating his association of poetry with ‘song’ and ‘ode’. However, Yeats’s choice of the term ‘guile’ introduces an ambivalent note. On the one hand, it highlights the manmade craftiness of poetry, which differs from Wordsworth’s depiction of it as emanating from Nature, symbolized by the image of the shell in The Prelude. On the other hand, it intimates the fictional quality of poetry as a deliberate deceit, a soothing lie with which both poet and listener (or reader) willingly engage. Ultimately, though, the rhyming couplet at the close of the passage quoted above, sealed by the archaism ‘sooth’ (meaning ‘truth’ in OED), corroborates the Wordsworthian belief in the power of poetry to transform human cares and suffering into joyous song. This premise is subverted in the companion poem to ‘The Song of the Happy Shepherd’, antithetically entitled ‘The Sad Shepherd’ (1885). The speaker follows the advice laid out in the previous poem and pours out his sorrows to a seashell hoping to find comfort in hearing the melodious echo of his own voice. However, his expectations are shattered, for the shell ‘Changed all he sang to inarticulate moan’ (VP, 69), which is the opposite of the ‘articulate sounds’ uttered by Wordsworth’s shell. Additionally, in complete opposition to the situation depicted in Wordsworth’s lines quoted above and ‘The Song of Happy Shepherd’, the shell causes bewilderment and alienation, signifying the failure of poetry to provide

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comfort. Furthermore, ‘The Sad Shepherd’ also unsettles the correlation between Nature and the creative process in Romantic pastoral by depicting the indifference of the shell and other natural elements towards the shepherd, despite his repeated attempts to confide in them. Therefore, the situation of the speaker in this poem is rather modern: ‘Here the possibility of a life of dreams and poetry, which has no other goal than pure self-expression and solipsism, is rejected as a negation of life’.12 However, the modernity of the theme sharply contrasts with ‘the poem’s artificially antique style’, namely its archaic diction and convoluted syntax derived from the ‘contrived rhyme’, which ‘interrupts the normal grammatical unit and becomes itself undercut by the enjambment’.13 The formal conventionality of ‘The Sad Shepherd’ deliberately signals its association with the pastoral tradition as a constitutive part of a dialectic that included the antithetical belief in the regenerative power of poetry expressed in ‘The Song of Happy Shepherd’. Yeats’s sustained endorsement of these two opposing stances allowed him to incorporate reality into his re-enactments of pastoral. Yeats’s middle period displays further instances of the pastoral mode. ‘In the Seven Woods’, the title poem of Yeats’s 1903 collection of poetry, re-enacts the dichotomy between the distopian urban location and an idealized rural setting in Virgil’s Eclogues, in which the political clamour in Rome in the first century bc constituted the original impulse to pastoral poetry. Similarly, the Seven Woods offer the speaker a temporary respite from ‘The unavailing outcries and the old bitter ness’ of the political disputes that dominated contemporary cosmopolitan Ireland: I have heard the pigeons of the Seven Woods Make their faint thunder, and the garden bees Hum in the lime-tree f lowers; and put away The unavailing outcries and the old bitterness That empty the heart. I have forgot awhile Tara uprooted, and new commonness Upon the throne and crying about the streets And hanging its paper f lowers from post to post, Because it is alone of all things happy. I am contented, for I know that Quiet Wanders laughing and eating her wild heart Among pigeons and bees, while that Great Archer, Who but awaits His hour to shoot, still hangs A cloudy quiver over Pairc-na-lee. (VP, 198)

The reference to ‘the lime-tree f lowers’ in the Galway woods and the ‘paper f lowers’ that hung from posts in the streets of Dublin establishes an opposition between natural and artificial landscapes. However, the fact that the woods were part of Lady Gregory’s demesne, Coole Park, and would have likely been planted by the workers of the estate, endows the locus amoenus of the poem with an ambivalent quality as both a natural and an artificial landscape. The poem is also stylistically ambivalent, sharing some features with the early lyrics and introducing others which became characteristic of Yeats’s middle period. On the one hand, the allegorical personification of ‘Quiet’ (VP, 198) to reinforce the peacefulness of the Seven Woods is a stylistic device evocative of the late

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nineteenth-century diction, harking back to the poems of The Wind Among the Reeds (1897). On the other hand, the periphrastic allusion to ‘the Great Archer’ (VP, 198), possibly a reference to Apollo or Cupid, introduces a classical dimension uncommon in Yeats’s early poetry but characteristic of Yeats’s middle style. The classicist bias is evident in the subsequent collection, The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1912), which features several poems that make direct allusion to Hellenic antiquity such as ‘A Woman Homer Sung’, ‘No Second Troy’ and ‘Peace’. The elevated register of ‘In the Seven Woods’ ref lects the formal inf luence of classical pastoral, congruent with the aristocratic setting of the poem. However, the choice of the adjective ‘contented’ (VP, 198) to convey the speaker’s feelings while in the woods is indicative of the stance of the modern poet who is aware of the relativity of nature’s comforting power, displaying a more realistic treatment of the pastoral convention of the regenerative power of nature than ‘The Song of the Happy Shepherd’. Pessoa’s ‘Ela canta, pobre ceifeira’ (1914–24),14 also conveys a desire for harmonious integration in Nature inspired by Romantic pastoral: Ela canta, pobre ceifeira, Julgando-se feliz talvez; Canta, e ceifa, e a sua voz, cheia De alegre e anónima viuvez, Ondula como um canto de ave No ar limpo como um limiar, E há curvas no enredo suave Do som que ela tem a cantar. (OPP, I, 187) [She sings, poor reaper, perhaps Believing herself to be happy. She sings, she reaps, and her voice, Full of glad and anonymous widowhood, Wavers like the song of a bird In the air as clean as a doorstep, And there are curves in the soft tissue Of the sound her song is weaving.]15

The opening reference to the singing reaper evokes Wordsworth’s ‘The Solitary Reaper’, with which this poem has a direct intertextual relationship.16 As in the Wordsworthian lyric, the speaker in Pessoa’s poem is depicted in a rural setting, vaguely alluded to by the general noun ‘campo’ (countryside). The pastoral theme is patent in the depiction of country life as salutary in Wordsworth’s and in Pessoa’s poems, both of which praise the reaper’s cheerful singing and her active engagement in labour. Additionally, in Pessoa’s poem, these activities not only sustain the reaper in her daily life but also offer her comfort in her widowed loneliness. This characterization ref lects what Helder Macedo calls ‘o sentido arcádico tradicional do campo como regeneração moral e espiritual’ [the traditional arcadian sense of the countryside as moral and spiritual regeneration],17 evident for instance in Cesário Verde’s ‘De Verão’, which Pessoa probably also had in mind when writing this poem. The regeneration to which Macedo alludes encompasses

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both the object of contemplation, the reaper, and the passive subject who witnesses the scene and who delights, even if momentarily, in the beauty of the sound of her singing. According to George Monteiro, Pessoa ‘writes a poem that, directly engaging Wordsworth’s poem, imagines what he perceives to be the unrealized essence of the earlier poem’ — that is, a ‘psychological inquiry’ into ‘what happens to the song in itself and what occurs to him [the speaker] as he listens to it’.18 The type of relationship between the two poems that Monteiro alludes to corresponds to a ‘misreading’ in the Bloomian model of inf luence, defined as ‘a corrective movement [...], which implies that the precursor poem went accurately up to a certain point, but then should have swerved, precisely in the direction that the new poem moves’.19 More precisely, Pessoa’s poem diverges from its model in that the reaper’s song has both an uplifting and a disheartening effect on the listener, inspiring at once joy and sadness: Ouvi-la alegra e entristece, Na sua voz há o campo e a lida, E canta como se tivesse Mais razões pra cantar que a vida. Ah, canta, canta sem razão! O que em mim sente ’stá pensando. Derrama no meu coração A tua incerta voz ondeando! (OPP, I, 187) [Hearing her brings joy and sadness, The field and its toil are in her voice, And she sings as if she had More reasons than life for singing. Ah, sing, sing for no reason! In me what feels is always Thinking. Pour into my heart Your waving, uncertain voice!] (Zenith 1, 284; my correction)

The speaker is unable to comprehend what causes the reaper to break into song for no reason. Envious of her ability to express her emotions lyrically while he (qua failed poet) remains perplexed and immersed in his thoughts, he expresses a desire to partake of her singing, as indicated by the phrase ‘pour into my heart’, suggesting the regenerative power of music. Moreover, the sound of the reaper singing triggers the speaker’s internal conf lict between his desire to retrieve harmony with Nature and his sense of alienation from it. These opposing thoughts lead him to express a paradoxical desire for the reaper’s blithe unconsciousness while maintaining his self-consciousness: Ah, poder ser tu, sendo eu! Ter a tua alegre inconsciência, E a consciência disso! Ó céu! Ó campo! Ó canção! A ciência

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Neo-Paganism and the Pastoral Style Pesa tanto e a vida é tão breve! Entrai por mim dentro! Tornai Minha alma a vossa sombra leve! Depois, levando-me, passai! (OPP, I, 188) [Ah, to be you while being I! To have your glad unconsciousness And be conscious of it! O sky! O field! O song! Knowledge Is so heavy and life so brief! Enter inside me! Make My soul your weightless shadow! And take me with you, away!] (Zenith 1, 284–85)

The speaker also pines for the reaper’s sense of unity, her concrete integration in reality and her ability to express her emotions truthfully, despite being painfully aware that he cannot attain them. Therefore, this poem questions the recovery of the integrated self through contact with Nature that Romantic pastoral, and Wordsworth’s poetry in particular, proposed, and in this respect is comparable to ‘The Sad Shepherd’. However, the resemblance is confined to theme only, for stylistically it diverges substantially from the anachronistic parabolic mode of Yeats’s poem. Instead, it displays a direct, simple diction and a quatrain form characteristic of the Portuguese oral tradition while addressing a rather modern existential dilemma. Pastoral masks Following an incursion into a more realistic subject matter and naturalistic style in Responsibilities (1914), The Wild Swans at Coole (1919) signalled Yeats’s renewed engagement with the pastoral mode. Yeats dons the shepherd mask in ‘Shepherd and Goatherd’, which was written to commemorate the death of Lady Gregory’s son, Robert Gregory, and therefore draws on the conventions of pastoral elegy. In a letter to Lady Gregory from 22 February 1918, Yeats states that he is trying to write a poem about her son ‘in manner like one that Spenser wrote for Sir Philip Sidney’, namely ‘Astrophel’.20 In another letter written on 19 March of the same year, he announces that the poem is also modelled on Virgil’s fifth eclogue.21 Arguably the most conventional among Yeats’s pastoral poems, ‘Shepherd and Goatherd’ emulates the situation of Virgil’s pastoral elegy, in which a younger and an older herdsman meet to lament and celebrate the death of a heroic figure, the shepherd Daphnis, to which Yeats juxtaposes the contemporary reality of Gregory’s death in the First World War. Likewise, the dramatic structure of Yeats’s poem is patterned after the dialogue form of Virgil’s fifth eclogue.22 However, the title of the poem also alludes obliquely to Theocritus’s ‘Idyll 5’, entitled ‘Goatherd and Shepherd’, which depicts a singing contest between the goatherd Comatas and the shepherd Lacon. This intertextual allusion underlines the poem’s self-ref lexive engagement with the conventions of the pastoral mode.

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Accordingly, the poem re-enacts the metaphorical identification between herdsman and poet that underpins bucolic poetry through the self-conscious references of the shepherd and the goatherd to their poetic trade:23 I am looking for strayed sheep; Something has troubled me and in my trouble I let them stray. I thought of rhyme alone, For rhyme can beat a measure out of trouble And make the daylight sweet once more; but when I had driven every rhyme into its place The sheep had gone from theirs. (VP, 339)

This stanza revisits the convention of the shepherd–poet, equating ‘the herdsman’s attention to his animals’ with ‘the poet’s care for words’ in classical pastoral.24 Thus, the shepherd’s concern over the death of a fellow shepherd leads him to compose ‘rhymes’, distracting him from his menial shepherding role and causing his sheep to stray. The shepherd’s claim that the disrupted peace of this Arcadia can only be retrieved through the soothing powers of metre and rhyme recalls the pastoral of the comforting word proposed many years earlier in ‘The Song of the Happy Shepherd’. The recurrence in poems from different stages of Yeats’s poetic development of the conviction that ‘words alone [i.e., poetry] are certain good’ demonstrates its centrality in his poetic thought and practice. ‘The Fisherman’ (written in 1914) also revisits the self-ref lexive theme of Yeats’s early pastoral poems, ‘The Song of the Happy Shepherd’ and ‘The Sad Shepherd’, proposing, as an alternative to the solipsist impulse of confiding in a ‘shell’, the selfothering exercise of creating a fictional persona. Yeats refers to the creation of this persona in ‘The Growth of a Poet’ (1934), stating, [W]hen I was very bitter I used to say to myself, ‘I do not write for these people who attack everything that I value, not for those others who are lukewarm friends, I am writing for a man I have never seen’. I built up in my mind the picture of a man who lived in the country where I had lived, who fished in mountain streams where I had fished; I said to myself, ‘I do not know whether he is born yet, but born or unborn it is for him I write’. I made this poem about him; it is called ‘The Fisherman’.25

In this passage, Yeats emphasizes the imaginary quality of the fisherman. However, in order to avoid the artificiality of the conventional pastoral mask, Yeats replaced the figure of the shepherd with a more concrete counterpart from life, evoking the fishermen he had seen as a young man in Sligo. The concern with verisimilitude is evident through allusion to details of his face and to his clothes, which originate from a specific region in Ireland: Although I can see him still, The freckled man who goes To a grey place on a hill In grey Connemara clothes At dawn to cast his f lies, It’s long since I began To call up to the eyes This wise and simple man.

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Neo-Paganism and the Pastoral Style All day I’d looked in the face What I had hoped ’twould be To write for my own race And the reality; The living men that I hate, The dead man that I loved, The craven man in his seat, The insolent unreproved, And no knave brought to book Who has won a drunken cheer, The witty man and his joke Aimed at the commonest ear, The clever man who cries The catch-cries of the clown, The beating down of the wise And great Art beaten down. Maybe a twelvemonth since Suddenly I began, In scorn of this audience, Imagining a man, And his sun-freckled face, And grey Connemara cloth, Climbing up to a place Where stone is dark under froth, And the down-turn of his wrist When the f lies drop in the stream; A man who does not exist, A man who is but a dream; And cried, ‘Before I am old I shall have written him one poem maybe as cold And passionate as the dawn.’ (VP, 347–48, my emphasis)

The reference to writing for his ‘own race / And the reality’ and subsequent lines in the first stanza of the poem allude to the poems of Responsibilities, which engaged more overtly with contemporary Ireland, denoting a change in Yeats’s poetry towards more realistic themes. Through them, Yeats relinquished the shepherds, herdsmen and foxhunters to whom he claimed to ‘commit [his] emotions’ (E&I, 522) in his early poetry. In this poem, Yeats’s fisherman persona is contrasted to the persona of the poet and to his readers through a series of dichotomies. Accordingly, the fisherman is depicted as a ‘wise and simple man’ (VP, 347) in contrast to the poet’s readers, described pejoratively as ‘knave’, ‘clown’ and merely ‘clever’ or ‘witty’ in a worldly way (VP, 347). His communion with the natural world contrasts with the poet’s and the readers’ alienation from it as urbanites. The fisherman’s trade befits the type of the active man traditionally opposed to the poet, depicted as a man of contemplation in Yeats’s poetry. Moreover, his skill at his trade, intimated by the lines ‘And the down-turn of his wrist / When the f lies drop in the stream’ (VP, 348), not only distinguishes him from the poet’s readers, whom he portrays as incompetent in

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the management of contemporary Ireland, but from the poet himself, who displays doubts about his poetic abilities. The fisherman’s self-possession is contrasted with the latter’s insecurity, confirming his status as a role model for the poet, who aspires to attain poetic excellence. In praise of the fisherman, the poet vows to write a ‘Poem maybe as cold / And passionate as the dawn’ (VP, 348). This metapoetic gesturing suggests that ‘The Fisherman’ is the actualization of the ideal poem he aspires to write in the same way that the persona of the fisherman embodies at once his ideal self and the ideal (implied) reader he intends to write for. Pessoa’s poem ‘Pescador do mar alto’ (1915) also features a fisherman: Pescador do mar alto, Deus te dê boa pesca! Tu estás com tua tarefa E eu a tudo falto... Pescador O que és tu para seres mais feliz do que eu? Tens a alma guardada No cofre da inconsciencia... E a lucida innocencia Que vem de não ser nada... Teu caminho na vida É claro e a estrada que tu segues definida. [...] Meu Deus! Ter-te por alma! Não ser inteiramente Mais que tu realmente. Que benevola calma Para com o meu ser... Assim... Olho-te e não sei o que eu hei de dizer... Teu barco alça a vela... Segues pello mar fóra... Deus te dê boa hora E uma amiga estrella! Sabe sempre ficar Ignorante, audaz, livre, alegre e ligeiro como o mar. Olha. Eu tenho a alma alta E o pensamento attento... Soffro do pensamento E a alma em falta Por isso invejo o teu Somno da vida activa sob o infinito ceu. (PFP, 2, 65–66; my emphasis) [God give you a good fishing, Fisherman in the high seas! You keep to your duties And I miss everything... Fisherman What are you to be happier than me?

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Neo-Paganism and the Pastoral Style Your soul is kept In the safe of unconsciousness... And the lucid innocence Of not being anything... Your path in life Is clear and the road you follow is well defined. [...] My God! To have you for a soul! Not to be entirely More than you really are. What a benevolent calm Towards my being... Thus... I look at you and don’t know what to say... Your boat sets sail... You head out to sea... God give you good luck And a friendly star! May you always remain Ignorant, bold, free, happy and nimble as the sea. Look. I have a superior soul And an alert mind I suffer from thinking And my sould is lacking For this reason I envy your Dream of active life under the infinite sky.]

Pessoa’s fisherman represents the integrated man whose unconscious naïveté affords him a safe passage through the perils and obstacles of life, symbolized by the sea. This is signalled by the positive connotations of the adjectives used to describe him in the last line of the fourth stanza quoted, which contrast with the suffering inf licted on the speaker by the ‘pain of thinking’. The antonymous relationship established by the epithets which depict the two personae semantically conveys the antithetical association between them, defining their role as opposites. Accordingly, the fisherman is depicted as the archetypal active man and is the antithesis of the contemplative self-conscious speaker, who envies his ‘dream of active life’. His attention to his task, corroborated by the line ‘You keep to your duties’, is contrasted with the speaker’s lack of commitment to writing, emphasizing the latter’s scepticism as to whether he will bring his work to completion. As was the case with ‘Ela canta, pobre ceifeira’, the speaker’s sense of incompletion leads him to express a wish to be like the fisherman, though he is all too conscious of the impossibility of that wish ever being fulfilled. The only alternative left to the speaker in the last stanza is to write a poem about the fisherman, thereby hoping to achieve a momentary identification with him by singing his praise, ‘E eu poderia, cantandote, sentir-me-te uma vez’ (PFP, 2, 66) [And by singing you, I could for once feel myself being you]. Similarly to ‘Ela canta, pobre ceifeira’, the argument of this poem is expressed through a simple diction evocative of the spoken language. Stylistically, it also emulates traditional Portuguese poetry. It comprises seven sestets, displaying

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for the most part a regular ABBACC rhyming scheme, and a loose six syllable metric pattern elevated to twelve in the last line of each stanza. The exceptions to this metric pattern occur in the fifth and seventh stanzas, which have fifteen syllables in the last line in order to highlight respectively the uniqueness of the fisherman and the poet’s identification with him. ‘Stream and Sun at Glendalough’, from The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933), re-enacts the pastoral setting and mood but is transfigured by the meditative quality that pervades Yeats’s late poetry. The opening lines of the poem describe a scene evocative of Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’, an analogy reinforced by the use of the word ‘gay’ to describe the mood of the speaker: Through intricate motions ran Stream and gliding sun And all my heart seemed gay: Some stupid thing that I had done Made my attention stray. (VP, 506–07)

However, the harmony between the speaker and the surrounding natural world is only apparent and quickly overturned by a pessimistic thought that crosses his mind, for, as stated in the opening line of the ensuing stanza, ‘Repentance keeps my heart impure’ (VP, 506). The mood changes just as suddenly to ecstatic joy in the third stanza: What motion of the sun or stream Or eyelid shot the gleam That pierced my body through? What made me live like those that seem Self-born, born anew? (VP, 507)

The gleam of sunshine ref lected on the stream induces the speaker’s epiphany, which is accompanied by a sense of rejuvenation which surpasses in intensity the common gaiety experienced by the speaker of Wordsworth’s poem. The speaker’s ecstatic condition is triggered by a natural phenomenon, the sunlight, to which is ascribed a spiritual quality. In fact, the alternation of positive and negative emotions in the poem ref lects the motions of the sunlight described in the first stanza, ultimately leading to joy brought about by the sudden breakthrough of the light through the clouds. From this it ensues that the late Yeatsian subject is capable of achieving an ephemeral moment of self-cohesion and harmony with the external world despite his modern awareness that he is a divided being torn by regret, filled with remorse. The closing questions display the rhetorical quality characteristic of Yeats’s mature style, dramatically conveying the speaker’s bewilderment before his epiphany. An unpublished poem from 1925 attributed to Pessoa orthonym evokes a similar pastoral setting to that of Yeats’s poem, but displays a more ambivalent mood: A luz do sol affaga o immenso dia. Um sopro brando, quasi não de inverno, Sobriamente os campos inebria. Ah, mas o que ha de eterno? Em que é que a alma sem sonhar confia?

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Neo-Paganism and the Pastoral Style Meu coração nada recebe da hora Salvo o vacuo de nada receber. Como criança abandonada, chora, Que não sabe o que q’rer, Nem por onde ir, nem porque se demora. E alheio a isto, que sou eu, que brando O sol de inverno lembra a primavera! Que affago busca o que em mim stá sonhando? Que spera quem não spera? Que fica a quem só sabe estar passando?26 [The sunlight caresses the immense day. A soft breeze, hardly wintry, Soberly inebriates the fields. Ah, but what is there that is eternal? What can the soul trust without dreaming? My heart receives nothing from this hour But the emptiness of receiving nothing. Like an abandoned child, it whines That it doesn’t know what it wants, Nor which way to go, nor why it lingers. And indifferent to all this, which is me, How the dim winter sun recalls spring! What caress does what in me dreams seek? What does one who is hopeless hope for? What remains to one who is merely passing?]

As in Yeats’s poem, although the speaker sympathetically describes the comforting effects of the sunlight (metaphorically conveyed as a caress) on the countryside scene that he contemplates, he is soon distracted by deep metaphysical thoughts. However, the solace provided by the wintry sunlight does not extend to him, who remains troubled by his thoughts. Therefore, he does not experience a momentary reintegration like the epiphany in Yeats’s poem, remaining separated from the natural surroundings, as conveyed by the ‘indifference’ that he ascribes to the winter sun in the third stanza. Whereas the questions at the close of the first stanza have an antithetical relationship to the previous lines, the ones at the end of the poem are more ambivalent; they express the speaker’s desire to find comfort through dreaming while rhetorically emphasizing his inability to attain it. Heteronyms Pessoa’s engagement with the pastoral mode extended to his heteronymous poetry, notably, the poetry attributed to Álvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis and Alberto Caeiro. The celebration of the regenerative power of Nature constitutes the theme of Álvaro de Campos’s ‘Dois Excertos de Odes’ (1914) that illustrates his transitory engagement with the pastoral mode. This poem inverts the imagery of sunlight in ‘A luz do sol affaga o immenso dia’, as evident in the ensuing excerpt:

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Vem, Noite antiquíssima e idêntica, Noite Rainha nascida e destronada, Noite igual por dentro ao silêncio. Noite Com estrelas lantejoulas rápidas No teu vestido franjado de Infinito. (PAC, 74) [Come, ancient and unchanging Night, Queen Night who was born dethroned, Night inwardly equal to silence, Night With sequin-stars that f licker In your dress fringed by Infinity.] (Zenith I, 161)

Alexandrino Severino identifies Milton’s odes ‘L’Allégro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’ as possible sources for this poem, highlighting similarities in terms of structure (both are two-part compositions), of content and of imagery.27 The similarities are particularly patent in the apostrophe to Night that opens the first part of Campos’s poem, which resembles the following passage from ‘Il Penseroso’: Come pensive nun, devout and pure, Sober, steadfast and demure, All in a robe of darkest grain, Flowing with majestic train, 28

The parallelism with Milton’s odes extends to the religious imagery used to depict the figure of the Night, which is personified as ‘Nossa Senhora’ [Our Lady] and ‘Mater-Dolorosa’ in Campos’s poem and as a nun in Milton’s. The religious motif is reinforced by the fact that the apostrophes in both poems have the quality of a prayer. In conformity with Campos’s Neo-Paganism, the Night is also depicted as the embodiment of the Great Mother Earth, as indicated by the reference to the pantheistic fusion of the various natural elements in her body in the passage below: E traz os montes longínquos para o pé das árvores próximas. Funde num campo teu todos os campos que vejo, Faze da montanha um bloco só do teu corpo, Apaga-lhe todas as diferenças que de longe vejo. (PAC, 74) [And bring the far-off hills as near as the nearby trees, Merge every field I see into your one field, Make the mountain one more block of your body, Erase all the differences I see from afar.] (Zenith 1, 161)

In this excerpt, he invokes the Night as a pagan deity, expressing his desire for integration in the natural world, which is prevented by the physical distance that separates him from the bucolic scene before him. However, this distance also metaphorically stands for the alienating forces of the city setting in which he presently finds himself — ‘Nos grandes terraços dos hotéis cosmopolitas / Ao som europeu das músicas e das vozes longe e perto’ (PAC, 75) [On sweeping terraces of cosmopolitan hotels / To the European sound of songs and voices near and far] (Zenith 1, 162). The latter imagery ref lects the dichotomy between the city and the countryside in the poetry of Cesário Verde, to whom Campos refers as master in the second

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part of the poem, alluding to his chef d’oeuvre, ‘O Sentimento de um Ocidental’. Helder Macedo identifies the contrast between the city and the countryside as the structuring antinomy of Cesário’s poetry.29 As with Cesário, in Campos’s poem the countryside he observes constitutes (to borrow Macedo’s term) the ‘antinomian metaphor’ of the city wherein he dwells.30 Therefore, the city has negative connotations: it is described as ‘solo de angústia e de inutilidade / Onde vicejo’ (PAC, 76) [the soil of anxiety and barrenness / Where I thrive] (Zenith 1, 162), and it causes him to feel ‘o cansaço de tudo em nós que nos corrompe / Para uma sensação exacta e precisa e activa da Vida (PAC, 78) [the weariness weighing on everything in us, hindering / An active and accurate feeling of Life] (Zenith 1, 164). In turn, the positive connotations he associates with the active life are analogous to that expressed in Yeats’s and Pessoa’s fisherman poems. As the speakers of those poems, he believes that his desire to become integrated in the natural world has the quality of ‘sonhos que vêm ter connosco ao crepúsculo, à janela. [...] / E que doem por sabermos que nunca os realizaremos...’ (PAC, 75) [dreams that come to us at dusk, by the window [...] / And that pain us, for we know we’ll never carry them out] (Zenith 1, 161–62). Conscious of the impossibility of returning to a holistic unity, he exhorts the Night to disperse him in all directions and through all times, which is paradoxically a desire for pantheistic totality. The poetry of Ricardo Reis presents a more sustained treatment of the pastoral mode. Alienated from modern life, Reis seeks solace in nature and antiquity, claiming, ‘Para o espírito que se sente exilado entre a confusão e imperícia da vida contemporânea, há momentos em que o peso dessa diferença tão dolorosamente se acentua, que é preciso qualquer ref lexo da placidez e da grandeza antigas’ (RRP, 159) [To one who feels exiled among the confusion and ineptness of contemporary life, there are moments in which the weight of that difference is so painfully heightened that he needs some ref lection of the calm and grandeur of ancient times]. This statement confirms Reis’s status as a ‘non-recognizer’, described by Stephen Spender as the type of poet who ‘does not recognize the world of today, or the need to deal with it’ and who thinks that ‘there is a contradiction between modern life and poetic dream: that modern life can be got away from in the dream: that the dream is in some way beautiful, unworldly, “ancient” ’.31 Spender’s characterization aptly describes Reis who, like other ‘non-recognizer’ poets, seeks ‘to avoid the issue [of modernity] by writing in conventionally accepted forms, used in conventional ways, choosing conventionally poetic subjects’.32 Reis’s choice of themes, forms and style of writing closely adhere to classical conventions. His odes imitate the concision and formal rigidity of Horace while faithfully re-enacting the ‘subtly heightened vocabulary and refined exactness of verse technique’ of Alexandrian poets, such as Theocritus.33 Reis’s ‘non-recognizer’ stance is evident in ‘Vós que, crentes em Cristos e Marias’ (1914): Vós que, crentes em Christos e Marias, Turvaes da minha fonte as claras aguas Só para me dizerdes Que ha aguas mais alegres

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Banhando prados com melhores horas, — D’essas outras regiões pra que fallar-me Se estas aguas e prados São de aqui e me agradam? Esta realidade os deuses deram E para bem real a deram externa. Que serão os meus sonhos Mais que a obra dos deuses? Deixai-me a Realidade do momento E os meus deuses tranquillos e immediatos Que não moram no Incerto Mas nos campos e rios. Deixai-me a vida ir-se pagãmente Acompanhada plas avenas ténues Com que os juncos das margens Se confessam de Pan. (PRR, 105–06) [Ah, you believers in Christs and Marys Who muddle my fountain’s clear waters Merely to tell me There are happier waters Flowing in meadows with better hours Why speak to me of those other places If the waters and meadows In this place please me? This reality was given by the gods, Who made it external to make it more real. Can my dreams be greater Than the work of the gods? Leave me with only the Reality of the moment And my tranquil and manifest gods who live Not in the Uncertain But in fields and rivers. Leave me this life that paganly passes On the banks of rivers amid the soft piping By which the rushes Confess they’re of Pan.]34

The poem opens with a formal invocation typical of the classical ode, which functions as a challenge to those who uphold Christian religious beliefs. Reis rejects Christian monotheism and proposes polytheism and a pagan way of life as an alternative. Accordingly, the poem recreates a conventional bucolic setting through references to the countryside and to the sound of shepherd’s pipes and the god Pan, traditionally associated with classical pastoral poetry. Reis’s pantheistic vision of the natural world expressed in the fourth stanza of this excerpt resumes the theme of regeneration of the subject through Nature at the centre of the pastoral tradition. In his critique of Christian transcendentalism, which he deems illusory, he argues that by contrast polytheism is real since the deities are part of the natural world

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and therefore more immediate and accessible to him. He emphasizes their actuality through the use of deitics and by capitalizing the word ‘Reality’ in the fourth stanza. Reis’s assertion of the immanence of the transcendent in reality is inspired by the classical philosophical doctrines of Stoicism and Epicureanism, which emphasize the visible, concrete reality. Reis describes himself as Epicurean and Stoic, stating, Ao pagão moderno, exilado e casual no meio de uma civilização inimiga, só pode convir uma das duas formas últimas da especulação pagã — ou o estoicismo, ou o epicurismo. [...] Por mim, se em mim posso falar, quero ser ao mesmo tempo epicurista e estóico. (RRP, 161) [Exiled and casual amid a hostile civilization, the modern pagan can only avail himself of two ultimate forms of pagan speculation — either Stoicism or Epicureanism. [...] For myself, if I may talk of myself, I want to be a Stoic and an Epicurean at the same time.]

‘Sabio é o que se contenta com o espectaculo do mundo’ (1914) exemplifies Reis’s treatment of the Horatian motto ‘Carpe Diem’, associated with the Epicurean posture: Sabio é o que se contenta com o espectaculo do mundo E ao beber nem recorda Que já bebeu na vida, Para quem tudo é novo E immarcessivel sempre. Corôem-o pampanos, ou heras, ou rosas voluteis, Elle sabe que a vida Passa por elle e tanto Corta á f lôr como a elle De Atropos a thesoura. Mas elle sabe fazer que a côr do vinho esconda isto, Que o seu sabôr orgiaco Apague o gosto ás horas Como a uma voz chorando O passar das bacchantes. E elle espera, contente quasi e bebedor tranquillo, E apenas desejando N’um desejo mal tido Que a abominavel onda O não molhe tão cedo. (PRR, 94–95) [Wise the man who’s content with the world’s spectacle, And who drinks without recalling That he has drunk before, For whom everything is new And forever imperishable. Crown him with vine leaves, ivy or twining Roses. He knows that life Is passing by him and that The shears of Atropos cut The f lower and cut him.

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He knows how to hide this with the color of the wine And to erase the taste of time With its orgiastic f lavor, The way a weeping voice is hushed When the bacchantes pass by. And he waits, a calm drinker and almost happy, Only desiring With a desire scarcely felt That the abominable wave Not wet him too soon.] (Zenith 1, 89)

Although almost entirely faithful to the Epicurean doctrine of existence in the present, the expression ‘almost happy’ in the last stanza gives away Reis’s ‘sad Epicureanism’ (OPP, II, 1068), due to his awareness of Time passing and of his mortality, betraying the self-conscious condition of the modern poet. Moreover, his condition as a modern paganist causes him to have doubts about his classical worldview, as conveyed in ‘Os deuses desterrados’ (1914): Os deuses desterrados, Os irmãos de Saturno, Ás vezes, no crepusculo Vêm espreitar a vida. Vêem então ter comnosco Remorsos e saudades E sentimentos falsos. É a presença d’elles, Deuses que o desthronal-os Tornou espirituaes, De materia vencida, Longinqua e inactiva. [...] Vêm fazer-nos crêr, Despeitadas ruinas De primitivas forças, Que o mundo é mais extenso Que o que se vê e palpa, Para que offendamos A Jupiter e a Apollo. (PRR, 95–96) [Sometimes at dusk The banished gods, Saturn’s brothers, Come to peep on life. Then we are visited by Remorse and longing And false emotions. It is their presence, Dethroned gods Who became spiritual, Of vanquished matter

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Neo-Paganism and the Pastoral Style Distant and inactive. [...] Resentful ruins Of primitive powers, They make us believe That the world is larger Than what we see and feel To make us cause offence To Jupiter and Apollo.]

This poem alludes to the Titans, the mythological entities dethroned by Jupiter in Hesiod’s Theogony which, according to Reis, have become spiritualized but still make their presence felt at dusk, causing him to feel remorse and longing for the past. He refers to these emotions as false because they contradict his Epicurean lifestyle, based on the tranquil enjoyment of the present moment, and his Stoic belief in immanent gods. The disturbing effect of the primitive deities on him ref lects an encroaching transcendentalism in his worldview brought about by the absence of sunlight. The previous poem revisits the dichotomy of day and night of Campos’s ‘Dois Excertos de Odes’. However, contrary to the situation depicted in Campos’s ode, the night in Reis’s poem does not have a consoling effect but is perceived as a disturbing element. It represents the Dionysian facet of the pagan worldview, symbolizing the passage of time and mortality that are perceived as threats to the predominantly Apollonian stance of Reis’s escapist pastoral, as acknowledged in ‘Não canto a noite porque no meu canto’ (1923): Não canto a noite porque no meu canto O sol que canto acabará em noite. Não ignoro o que esqueço. Canto por esquecel-o. Pudesse eu suspender, inda que em sonho, O Apollineo curso, e conhecer-me, Inda que louco, gemeo De uma hora imperecivel! (PRR, 148) [I don’t sing the night, since in my song The sun I sing of will end in night. I’m aware of all I forget. I sing to forget it. Could I only stop, even if in a dream The course of Apollo and know myself, Even if mad, as the twin Of an imperishable hour!] (Zenith 1, 107)

The encroaching darkness that will interrupt the Apollonian path signifies literally the night and figuratively death, which the subject wishes to avoid through suspension in the perennial present of the song or poem, rather similarly to the speaker of Yeats’s ‘The Song of the Happy Shepherd’. However, he knows that it is a dream. As depicted in ‘The Sad Shepherd’, Reis’s attempt at a comforting

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pastoral is thwarted by a pessimistic worldview, characterized by Pessoa as a ‘sad Epicureanism’ (OPP, II, 1068) that pervaded his poetic output. The heteronym Alberto Caeiro was Pessoa’s most accomplished pastoral mask, which explains why the other heteronyms and the orthonym alike regarded him as their poetic master. The title of his first collection, O Guardador de Rebanhos (1911–12) [The Keeper of Sheep] alludes to the original context of bucolic poetry. However, as Caeiro explicitly announces in the opening poem of the collection, ‘Eu nunca guardei rebanhos’, he is not literally a shepherd, but a poet donning the mask of the shepherd to write poetry: Eu nunca guardei rebanhos, Mas é como se os guardasse. Minha alma é como um pastor, Conhece o vento e o sol E anda pela mão das Estações A seguir e a olhar. Toda a paz da Natureza sem gente Vem sentar-se a meu lado. [...] Não tenho ambições nem desejos Ser poeta não é uma ambição minha. É a minha maneira de estar sòsinho. [...] Quando me sento a escrever versos Ou passeando pelos caminhos ou pelos atalhos, Escrevo versos num papel que está no meu pensamento, Sinto um cajado nas mãos E vejo um recorte de mim No cimo d’um outeiro, Olhando para o meu rebanho e vendo as minhas idéas, (PCAC, 41) [I’ve never kept sheep, But it’s as if I did. My soul is like a shepherd. It knows the wind and sun, And walks hand in hand with the Seasons Looking at what passes. All the peace of Nature without people Sits down at my side. [...] I have no ambitions and no desires. To be a poet is not my ambition, It’s my way of being alone. [...] When I sit down to write verses Or I walk along roads and pathways Jotting verses on a piece of paper in my mind, I feel a staff in my hand And see my own profile

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Neo-Paganism and the Pastoral Style On top of a low hill Looking after my f lock and seeing my ideas, Or looking after my ideas and seeing my f lock, (Zenith 2, 45–46)

By professing to be a shepherd only in a figurative sense, Caeiro distances himself from the ‘poets masquerading as shepherds, pasturing metaphorical sheep or goats’ in Virgil’s Eclogues.35 His self-conscious assumption of the shepherd mask exposes the fallacy of this pastoral convention. Paradoxically, by imagining himself as an actual shepherd through a series of similes and metaphors, Caeiro endorses the metaphorical identi fication between poet and herdsman. His claim to find peace in a natural setting free of human presence is in keeping with the traditional depiction of the pastoral poet, for whom it is easier [...] to reach moral truth and peace of mind (in other words, innocence and happiness) by abandoning the strife of civil and social living and the ordeal of human fellowship for a solitary existence, in communion with nature and with the company of one’s musings and thoughts.36

Caeiro’s assertion that writing poetry is his way of being by himself is in accordance with the pastoral escapist ethos. This is corroborated by his fictional biography, for, according to Ricardo Reis, he spent most of his life in an isolated farm in Ribatejo (RRP, 45). The animist image of his soul being led by the hand of the seasons and the personification of ‘quiet Nature’ sitting beside him in the first stanza eloquently illustrate his communion with the natural world. Moreover, Caeiro’s claim that he writes his poems while strolling along the country paths ascribes a natural quality to the process of writing poetry, as an attempt to recreate his bodily movement within the rhythmic unit of the verse. Although Caeiro claims to have no ambitions, his self-othering impulse betrays a desire for the way of life of the shepherd, indicating that he is not entirely satisfied with his current existence. Moreover, he is not immune to sad thoughts: Os meus pensamentos são contentes. Só tenho pena de saber que elles são contentes, Porque, se o não soubesse, Em vez de serem contentes e tristes, Seriam alegres e contentes. (PCAC, 41) [My thoughts are content. My only regret is that I know they’re content, Since if I did not know it They would be content and happy Instead of sadly content.] (Zenith 2, 45)

Like the speaker of Pessoa’s ‘She sings, poor reaper’, he regrets his self-awareness, which momentarily disrupts his elated mood. However, unlike the orthonym, he displays a poised attitude which resembles the equanimity of the Virgilian shepherd, who ‘can face the world aequo animo, because he has learned to sing songs which acknowledge the conditions of their creation’37: Mas a minha tristeza é socego Porque é natural e justa

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E é o que deve estar na alma Quando já pensa que existe (PCAC, 41) [Yet my sadness is a comfort For it is natural and right And is what should fill the soul Whenever it thinks it exists] (Zenith 2, 45)

Nonetheless, these contradictory emotions reveal inconsistencies in his pastoral mask. The reference to the poet’s gaze in the first poem evokes Schiller’s characterization of the ‘naïve’ poet, ‘who sees from within, as it were, as a part of nature’.38 The fact that Reis referred to these poems as ‘de criança’ (RRP, 45) [of a child] is in keeping with this naïve stance. The term ‘olhar’ [look] which as in English is simultaneously a verb and a noun, recurs alongside other synonyms throughout Caeiro’s poetry, with particular frequency in the poems collected in O Guardador de Rebanhos, such as in ‘O meu olhar é nitido como um girassol’: O meu olhar é nitido 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 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... (PCAC, 44) [My gaze is clear like a sunf lower. It is my custom to walk the roads Looking right and left And sometimes looking behind me, And what I see at each moment Is what I never saw before, And I’m very good at noticing things. I’m capable of feeling the same wonder A newborn child would feel If he noticed that he’d really and truly been born. I feel at each moment that I’ve just been born Into a completely new world...] (Zenith 1, 11)

Caeiro’s attitude is compared to the bewilderment of a child, ref lecting an equally non-metaphysical approach to poetry — signified by the verbs ‘olhar’, ‘ver’ [see] and ‘reparar’ [notice] — which regards it as ‘to see the object as in itself it really is’.39 Finally, the closing lines convey the same idea of being born anew suggested by the rhetorical question at the close of ‘Stream and Sun at Glendalough’, although in Caeiro’s mind ostensibly there is not the faintest doubt about the restorative powers of nature. The reference to the world at the close of Caeiro’s poem (by which he means, of course, the natural world) also resembles Yeats’s references to his

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natural surroundings in ‘Stream and Sun at Glendalough’, suggesting that Nature is particularly conducive to the poetic subject’s state of unity. Caeiro’s childlike bewilderment evokes the celebration of youthful innocence and joy in Blake’s Songs of Innocence, which is a possible model for Caeiro’s first collection.40 The naïve quality of his poetry is also patent in the simplicity of the language, which resembles the plain impressionistic speech of a child. Caeiro discards traditional metre and rhyme in favour of free verse. In spite of this, it has been argued that the predominant accent in Caeiro’s verse is the hexameter (similarly to that of Walt Whitman and William Blake) due to the longstanding associations it has with the oral poetic tradition.41 Indeed, this characteristic of Caeiro’s prosody could also have constituted a conscious attempt to reinstate ‘the metre of the Idylls [which] is the hexameter’.42 Rhythm also plays a significant part in his prosaic style, as explained by the other heteronyms in metatextual essays about their master: Campos describes Caeiro’s rhythm as ‘prosaico sem prosa, poético sem quase poesia’ [prosaic though not prose, poetic but with very little poetry] (PCAC, 273). Caeiro also avoids complex tropes, with the exception of simple similes and metaphors. Yet even then, the aim of his similes is one of perceptual clarification, namely a concrete, naïve expansion of the first term,43 as is the case with the lines ‘O meu olhar é nitido como um girassol’ [My gaze is clear like a sunf lower] and ‘Creio no mundo como num malmequer’ [I believe in the world as in a daisy] (PCAC, 44). However, this naïve outlook is at odds with Caeiro’s intellectual sophistication in his revisionist redress of pastoral in other poems. ‘Sou um guardador de rebanhos’ resumes the self-ref lexive theme of ‘Eu nunca guardei rebanhos’, elaborating on the association between keeping sheep and writing poetry: 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 bocca. Pensar uma f lor é vel-a e cheiral-a E comer um fructo é saber-lhe o sentido. Por isso quando num dia de calor Me sinto triste de gosal-o tanto, E me deito ao comprido na herva, E fecho os olhos quentes, Sinto todo o meu corpo deitado na realidade, Sei a verdade e sou feliz. (PCAC, 58) [I’m a keeper of sheep. The sheep are my thoughts And each thought a sensation. I think with my eyes and my ears And with my hands and feet And with my nose and mouth. To think a f lower is to see and smell it, And to eat a fruit is to know its meaning.

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That is why on a hot day When I enjoy it so much I feel sad, And I lie down in the grass And close my warm eyes, Then I feel my whole body lying down in reality, I know the truth, and I’m happy.] (Zenith 2, 52)

The metaphorical association of sheep and thoughts introduces an intellectual dimension which is absent in conventional bucolic poetry, where the poet’s ‘metaphorical sheep’ have a merely decorative function. Through a succession of metaphors, Caeiro radically argues that intellectual reasoning is a sensorial experience. These metaphors translate abstract notions like thought and knowledge into concrete sensory experiences, ref lecting what Pater called the ‘readiness [of Greek thoughts] to be transformed into objects for the senses’.44 The poem culminates in an epiphanic moment of enlightenment and happiness that, although resembling the active man’s carefree integration in Nature in Pessoa’s poems about the reaper and the fisherman, differs from it as the poet is fully conscious of his state of being. Caeiro’s equation of reason with sensation in ‘Sou um guardador de rebanhos’ is a reaction to the dilemma of the modern poet, ‘forced to deal with Nature as an idea and as a concept’.45 The importance he ascribes to sensations denotes a desire to simplify man’s relationship with the physical world, providing a viable psychological solution to his sense of alienation, which is also congruent with the pastoral genre, since pastoral is canonically defined as the ‘process of putting the complex into the simple’.46 For this reason, Caeiro presents his argument through epigrammatic assertions which resemble Socrates’ syllogisms, ascribing to it the logical quality of a philosophical discourse. Although Caeiro repeatedly denied having a philosophy — in the second poem of O Guardador de Rebanhos, entitled ‘O meu olhar é nítido como um girassol’, he states, ‘Eu não tenho filosofia: tenho sentidos’ [I don’t have a philosophy, I have senses] (PCAC, 44) — his positioning before reality can be considered as an epistemology comparable to Socrates’s in that it leads to knowledge of himself, the world and the ‘truth’, as stated at the end of the poem quoted above. Luís de Oliveira e Silva compares Caeiro’s sensationism to Locke’s materialist phenomenology and Rousseau’s ‘raison sensitive’.47 The comparison is apt, since Caeiro’s poetry proposes a rational system of thought based on the subjection of the intellect to the senses. For this reason, his poetic stance embodies the Sensationist aesthetic, which owes much to the Greek philosophical tradition, particularly ancient Stoicism.48 Stoicism provided Pessoa with a philosophical framework for Caeiro’s poetry. One of the key tenets of this doctrine is that when one experiences something, one sees and feels it directly and so perceives it as it really is.49 Caeiro argues as much in ‘A espantosa realidade das coisas’ (1915) from Poemas Inconjuntos [Uncollected Poems]: A espantosa realidade das coisas É a minha descoberta de todos os dias. Cada coisa é o que é, E é difícil explicar a alguem quanto isso me alegra, E quanto isso me basta. (PCAC, 122; my emphasis) [The astonishing reality of things Is my discovery every day.

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Neo-Paganism and the Pastoral Style Each thing is what it is, And it’s hard to explain to someone how happy this makes me, And how much this suffices me.] (Zenith 1, 58)

Reis describes Caeiro as an absolute objectivist (RRP, 57). Caeiro’s objectivism is a reaction to the subjectivism prevalent in nineteenth-century literature, and particularly to the post-Symbolist Portuguese transcendentalists like Teixeira de Pascoaes and Pessoa’s orthonymous poetry. Consequently, he is extremely critical of their sentimental treatment of Nature, claiming in ‘Li hoje quase duas páginas’: Os poetas mysticos são philosophos doentes, E os philosophos são homens doidos. Porque os poetas mysticos dizem que as f lores sentem E dizem que as pedras teem alma E que os rios teem extases ao luar. (PCAC, 78) [Mystic poets are sick philosophers, And philosophers are lunatics. Because mystic poets say that f lowers feel And that stones have souls And that rivers are filled with rapture in the moonlight.] (Zenith 1, 31)

Drawing on characteristic images from the poetry of the Portuguese transcentalists, Caeiro criticizes their excessive use of personification, dismissing it as unhealthy and insane. As a counterpart to the transcendentalists’ subjective use of personification, Caeiro proposes a primitivist animism, which makes a single appearance in ‘Também sei fazer conjecturas’ from Poemas Inconjuntos: Também sei fazer conjecturas. Há em cada coisa aquilo que ela é que a anima. Na planta está por fora e é uma ninfa pequena. No animal é um ser interior longínquo. No homem é a alma que vive com ele e é já ele. Nos deuses tem o mesmo tamanho E o mesmo espaço que o corpo E é a mesma coisa que o corpo. Por isso se diz que os deuses nunca morrem. Por isso os deuses não têm corpo e alma Mas só corpo e são perfeitos. O corpo é que lhes é alma E têm a consciência na própria carne divina. (PCAC, 151) [I can also make conjectures. There is in each thing an animating essence. In plants it’s a tiny nymph that exists on the outside. In animals it’s a remote inner being. In man it’s the soul that lives with him and is him. In the gods it has the same size And fills the same space as the body And is the same thing as the body. For this reason it is said that the gods never die. For this reason the gods do not have body and soul

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But just body, and they are perfect. The body is their soul, And they have consciousness in their divine f lesh.] (Zenith 2, 91)

Caeiro’s attitude ref lects ‘that primitive tree-worship which, growing out of some universal instinctive belief that trees and f lowers are indeed habitations of living spirits, is found almost everywhere in the earlier stages of civilisation’.50 The hypothetical nature of his argument suggested by the word conjectures is countered by the use of the present tense, which affords his conjecture a quality of assertion of belief. Therefore, in this poem Caeiro conveys a Stoic belief in immanent gods comparable to Reis’s polytheism in ‘Vós que, crentes em Cristos e Marias’. Caeiro’s attitude towards Nature also resembles Campos’s all-embracing pantheism in ‘Dois Excertos de Odes’, for instance in ‘Bendito seja o mesmo sol de outras terras’ from O Guardador de Rebanhos: Bendito seja o mesmo sol de outras terras Que faz meus irmãos todos os homens Porque todos os homens, um momento no dia, o olham como eu, E nesse puro momento Todo limpo e sensível Regressam imperfeitamente E com um suspiro que mal sentem Ao Homem verdadeiro e primitivo Que via o sol nascer e ainda o não adorava. (PCAC, 88) [Blessed be the same sun of other lands For making all men my brothers Since all men, at some moment in the day, look at it as I do. And in that pure, limpid, And sensitive moment They partially return With a sigh they hardly feel To the true and primitive Man Who saw the sun come up and did not yet worship it.] (Zenith 2, 61)

The fraternal communion with other men that Caeiro claims to feel is comparable to the original etymological sense of caritas, signifying ‘an unlimited lovingkindness to all others’ (OED). The religious quality of his emotion is underpinned by the blessing that opens the poem. However, the fact that Caeiro addresses that blessing to the sun indicates that his philosophical outlook is essentially pagan. The momentary epiphany described in this poem takes Caeiro back to a time before Christianity, associating it with the pagan pantheism of primitive man. The return to mankind’s original state of purity through a sudden epiphany resembles the lines ‘vago soluço partindo melodiosamente do antiquíssimo de nós’ (PAC, 75) [hint of a sigh rising melodiously / From the most ancient part of us (Zentith 1, 162)] in Campos’s ‘Dois Excertos de Odes’. However, Caeiro differs from Campos in that he ostensibly succeeds in retrieving the link to the Golden Age of man. This most likely derives from the fact that he has chosen what Reis called ‘O Apolíneo curso’ (PRR, 148) [the Apollonian path] rather than the Campos’s Dionysian one, as corroborated by the reference to the sun in the poem.

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Caeiro’s primitivist stance in ‘Bendito seja o mesmo sol de outras terras’ also resembles Yeats’s claim that the Celtic imagination is the descendant of what he calls ‘the primitive imagination’ in ‘The Celtic Element in Literature’ (E&I, 182). Yeats’s comparison of the Celtic race to the world’s ancient civilizations owes much to the image of the primitive man in James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890), with which he had become acquainted in the same year he wrote the essay.51 Late nineteenth-century cultural primitivism informed Yeats’s revival essays and ‘The Celtic Element in Literature’ in particular. Here he claims that the ancient Celts displayed ‘the ancient religion of the world, the ancient worship of Nature and that troubled ecstasy before her’ (E&I, 176), which he opposes to the homely ‘modern way’ of looking at nature as ‘friendly’ and ‘pleasant’ (E&I, 178). The ‘troubled ecstasy’ before Nature that Yeats ascribes to primitive man in his essay, which he describes as ‘the impassioned meditation which brings men beyond the edge of trance and makes trees, and beasts, and dead things talk with human voices’ (E&I, 175), is comparable to Caeiro’s state of mind in the aforementioned poem. Not only that, but the animistic pantheism Caeiro expresses in this poem has a counterpart in Yeats’s poetry, namely in the lines ‘the mystical brotherhood / Of sun and moon and hollow and wood’, from ‘Into the Twilight’ (VP, 148). Despite the parallels between Caeiro’s positioning and that of Yeats in the Celtic Twilight essays and poems, there are substantial differences in their Neo-Paganist approaches. In ‘Bendito seja o mesmo sol de outras terras’, Caeiro claims that only immersion in Nature can afford an empathetic holistic vision. This differs considerably from the view held by Yeats’s shepherd persona in ‘The Song of the Happy Shepherd’, for whom art is the only way to access the Golden Age. Additionally, Yeats’s early poetry differs significantly from that of Caeiro by failing to address the ‘realistic naturalism’ of the Celtic race, understood as ‘a love of Nature for herself ’ (E&I, 173). However, Yeats’s poetic development gradually drew toward a more naturalistic worldview, evinced in later essays and poetry. In ‘First Principles’ (1904), he resumes the comparison between ancient and contemporary literature in ‘The Celtic Element in Literature’, concluding that writers in ancient times had not to deal with the world in such great masses that it could only be represented to their minds by figures and by abstract generalisations. Everything that their minds ran on came on them vivid with the colour of the senses, and when they wrote it was out of their own rich experience... (Exp, 148)

Yeats’s emulation of the old writers led to this defence of a sensorial form of expression as opposed to the abstract ‘modern way’, intimating a shift in his poetic subject from the sphere of imagination to that of the senses that drew him nearer to Caeiro’s Sensationism. This shift is evident, for instance, in ‘Men Improve with the Years’ (1917), in which the speaker avows to be ‘Pleased to have filled the eyes / Or the discerning ears, / Delighted to be but wise’ (VP, 329). His assertion recalls Blake’s concept of Wisdom, understood as the knowledge of truth based on the experience of reality, which is comparable to Caeiro’s Sensationist philosophy. Yeats’s later pastoral masks re-enact the lifestyle of the herdsman in classical bucolic poetry, who ‘lives at the edge of society [...]. However miserable and entrapping his circumstances, he possesses or appears to posses an outsider’s freedom. An aura

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of wildness, of heretical unconstraint, attaches itself to him’.52 The characterization of Theocritus’s herdsmen aptly describes Yeats’s beggars, who constitute the poet’s preferred masks in Responsibilities (1914). They recur in poems like ‘The Three Beggars’, ‘The Three Hermits’, ‘Beggar to Beggar Cried’, ‘Running to Paradise’, ‘The Hour before Dawn’ and in subsequent collections. Their condition as outcasts from society allows them to express subversive viewpoints, which makes them ideal mouthpieces in Yeats’s mature pastoral of the discomforting word. Subsequently, this role was taken up by figures like Tom the Lunatic, Crazy Jane and The Wild Old Wicked Man, whose names suggest the inversion of the paradigm of wisdom associated with the shepherd in conventional pastoral. Accordingly, the poems attributed to these personae — ‘Tom the Lunatic’ (1931), ‘The Wild Old Wicked Man’ (1938), and the Crazy Jane set — enact a parody of the genre in Yeats’s later poetry. Moreover, whereas the earlier fisherman persona was heavily idealized, these pastoral masks are realistically portrayed, representing ‘the peasant’s practical morality and lusty personality’.53 Therefore, the initial idealism of Yeats’s pastoral masks gave way to an increasing naturalism, evident both in the themes and in the prosaic diction of these poems. Conversely, Caeiro’s poetry develops from an objective towards a progressively subjective viewpoint. From the onset, he acknowledges his difficulty in sustaining a Sensationist stance, claming in poem XXVI from O Guardador de Rebanhos, ‘Que diffícil ser proprio e não ver senão o visivel!’ [How difficult it is to be oneself and to see nothing but the visible] (PCAC, 76). His subsequent collections display increasing contradictions to his objectivism as a result of his increasing subjectivity. This is particularly evident in Caeiro’s second collection of poetry, O Pastor Amoroso [The Shepherd in Love] which refers to a romantic episode in his fictional life. This collection can be regarded as an attempt to re-enact the convention of the amorous shepherd. However, Caeiro’s poems are rather unconventional, bypassing the apology of the beloved to focus obsessively on how the poet’s enamoured condition utterly transforms his way of seeing the world, as shown in ‘Quando eu não te tinha’ (1914): Quando eu não te tinha Amava a Natureza como um monge calmo a Cristo... Agora amo a Natureza Como um monge calmo à Virgem Maria, Religiosamente, a meu modo, como dantes, Mas de outra maneira mais comovida e próxima. [...] Tu não me tiraste a Natureza... Tu mudaste a Natureza... Trouxeste-me a Natureza para o pé de mim, Por tu existires vejo-a melhor, mas a mesma, Por tu me amares, amo-a do mesmo modo, mas mais, Por tu me escolheres para te ter e te amar, Os meus olhos fitaram-na mais demoradamente belas todas as coisas, Não me arrependo do que fui outrora porque ainda o sou. (PCAC, 103) [Before I had you I loved Nature as a calm monk loves Christ.

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Neo-Paganism and the Pastoral Style Now I love Nature As a calm monk loves the Virgin Mary, Religiously (in my manner), like before, But in a more heartfelt and intimate way. [...] You haven’t taken Nature from me, You’ve changed Nature. You’ve brought Nature closer. Because you exist I see it better, though the same as before. Because you love me I love it in the same way, but more. Because you chose me to have you and love you My eyes gaze at it more than at anything. I don’t regret what I was before, for I am still what I was.] (Zenith 2, 69)

In this poem, Caeiro describes how his perception of Nature was altered from a detached contemplation, to an emotional and even mystical engagement by the presence of the beloved. He claims that this new way of seeing is not qualitatively different from his previous outlook, but is merely a variation in degree, resulting from an intensification of his vision. In reality, though, his heightened sentimentality is diametrically opposed to his former objectivism, which was closer to the Greek worldview. Moreover, Caeiro’s positioning in this poem denotes the intrusion of Christian sentiment, signalled by the metaphorical identification of himself as a monk and of Nature as Christ or the Virgin Mary. His attitude to Nature is comparable to Mariolatry; it resembles the ecstatic state of being traditionally associated with Christian mystics, differing only in that the object of his adoration is not the actual Virgin Mary but Nature. Although brief, Caeiro’s assumption of the amorous shepherd mask, has devastating consequences, compromising his poetic stance, as shown in ‘O pastor amoroso perdeu o cajado’ (1930): O pastor amoroso perdeu o cajado, E as ovelhas tresmalharam-se pela encosta, E, de tanto pensar, nem tocou a f lauta que trouxe para tocar. Ninguém lhe apareceu ou desapareceu ... Nunca mais encontrou o cajado. Outros, praguejando contra ele, recolheram-lhe as ovelhas. Ninguém o tinha amado, afinal. Quando se ergueu da encosta e da verdade falsa, viu tudo; Os grandes vales cheios dos mesmos verdes de sempre, As grandes montanhas longe, mais reais que qualquer sentimento, A realidade toda, com o céu e o ar e os campos que existem, estão presentes. (E de novo o ar, que lhe faltara tanto tempo, lhe entrou fresco nos pulmões) E sentiu que de novo o ar lhe abria, mas com dor, uma liberdade no peito. (PCAC, 110) [The shepherd in love lost his staff, And the sheep scattered over the slope. And so lost was he in thought that he didn’t even play his f lute. No one came or went. He never found his staff. Other men, cursing him, rounded up the sheep. He had not, after all, been loved. When he stood up from the slope and the false truth, he saw everything:

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The wide valleys full of the same shades of green as always, The tall mountains in the distance, more real than any feeling, All of reality, with the sky and air and fields that exist, they’re here. (And again the air, that he’d missed for so long, entered fresh into his lungs.) And he felt the air reopen, with pain, a freedom in his chest.] (Zenith 2, 71)

Caeiro explains that his enamoured state has led him to favour thoughts over sensations, causing his metaphorical sheep to stray, rather like the shepherd in Yeats’s ‘Shepherd and Goatherd’. This event signifies the momentary breakdown of his shepherd mask, which is symbolically reinforced by his relinquishing his f lute and staff. Whereas in Yeats’s poem the breakdown was caused by death, in this poem it was caused by the loss of love, ref lecting the intrusion of reality and of emotion in Caeiro’s pastoral fantasy. When he discovers his love had not been returned, Caeiro retrieves his Sensationist outlook, but he is now subject to suffering from his chagrin d’amour. By the time he writes the poems in Poemas Inconjuntos [Uncollected Poems], Caeiro can no longer accommodate the naïve pastoral mask and displays an opposite worldview to that of the opening poem of O Guardador de Rebanhos, evident in ‘Pastor do monte, tão longe de mim com as tuas ovelhas’ (1919): Pastor do monte, tão longe de mim com as tuas ovelhas — Que felicidade é essa que pareces ter — a tua ou a minha? A paz que sinto quando te vejo, pretence-me, ou pertence-te? Não, nem a ti nem a mim, pastor. Pertence só á felicidade e á paz. Nem tu a tens, porque não sabes que a tens. Nem eu a tenho, porque sei que a tenho. Ella é ella só, e cahe sobre nós como o sol, Que te bate nas costas e te aquece, e tu pensas noutra coisa indifferentemente, E me bate na cara e me offusca, e eu só penso no sol. (PCAC, 118) [Hillside shepherd, so far away from me with your sheep, Is the happiness you seem to have your happiness or mine? Does the peace I feel when I see you belong to you or to me? No, shepherd, neither to you nor to me. lt belongs only to peace and happiness. You don’t have it, because you don’t know you have it, And I don’t have it, because I know I do. It exists on its own, and falls on us like the sun, Which hits you on the back and warms you up, while you indifferently think about something else, And it hits me in the face and dazzles my eyes, and I think only about the sun.] (Zenith 1, 74)

Contrarily to ‘Eu nunca guardei rebanhos’, in this poem Caeiro resorts to a spatial metaphor to convey his alienation from the shepherd figure he invokes. The physical distance between them is symbolic of their disparate philosophical positioning. Whereas the shepherd is harmoniously integrated in the natural world as signified by the image of the sun bathing him in its warmth, he is at odds with it, as indicated figuratively by the blinding effect of the sunlight as he attempts to

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stare directly at it. This metaphor signifies his inquiring attitude, which contrasts with the indifference of the shepherd. His desire to partake of the shepherd’s blithe unconsciousness is analogous to that of Pessoa in the orthonymous poems about the reaper and the fisherman discussed earlier. Therefore, Caeiro’s viewpoint in this poem is nearer to that of the modern poet who, ‘separated from nature by culture and society, experiences an aggravated sense of loss and psychic fragmentation’.54 This is particularly evident in his last poems, which display the greatest number of inconsistencies, suggesting the imminent breakdown of his shepherd mask. The impossibility of accommodating Caeiro’s classical worldview to contemporary reality undoubtedly led Pessoa to stage the untimely death of this heteronym. Notwithstanding this, Caeiro represented Pessoa’s greatest effort of ‘depersonalization’ from his own poetic stance, both in terms of subject matter and of style. Caeiro is the equivalent to the Yeatsian fisherman in Pessoa’s poetic universe, symbol izing ‘o homem liberto do subjectivo, instintivo e contente’ [the instinctive and happy man, freed from the subjective], who constitutes the anti-self to the sophisticated and angst-ridden orthonym, ‘[a]prisionado na meditação e no sonho inúteis’ [imprisoned in futile meditation and dream].55 Moreover, Caeiro’s Sensationism — associated with the increased state of self-awareness and self-contentment that Pessoa referred to as wisdom — finds an equivalent in Yeats’s ‘secret discipline’, described in ‘A Prayer for my Daughter’ as being conducive to ‘selfpossession’ or self-tran scendence. Similarly, Yeats’s effort to simplify his elaborate Pre-Raphaelite style of the nineties to correspond to the ‘cold and passionate’ style endorsed in ‘The Fisherman’ and effected in ‘Adam’s Curse’ and subsequent poems is comparable to Pessoa’s relinquishment of his overwrought post-Symbolist diction in favour of Caeiro’s prosaic style. Yet, in both cases, the apparent simplification of poetic diction masks the increased complexity of the subject matter and the laboriousness of poetic composition. Caeiro’s ostensibly impressionistic diction masks the philosophical and aesthetic sophistication of his syllogistic poems. David Jackson regards him as a successor of the metaphysical poets for his use of the ‘conceit’, whereby ‘ideal simplicity [is] approached by resolving contradictions’.56 Like Marvell’s ‘Thoughts in a Garden’, he argues, ‘Caeiro’s Nature is also a conceit, a garden where truth and knowledge are pursued, albeit in an adverse and primitivist version of the gardens of earthly delights’.57 His classification of Caeiro’s poetry as ‘adverse pastoral’ highlights its deliberate subversion of the genre, whereas the reference to primitivism underlines its conformity to one of the founding principles of classical pastoral: that is, the naïve perspective. Caeiro constitutes Pessoa’s attempt to subvert the pastoral genre from within itself. Therefore, the paradoxes in his poetry can be regarded either as ref lections of the underlying contradictions of the pastoral mode or as attempts to dislodge and recast its conventions in a modern context. Conclusion The adoption of pastoral masks was Pessoa’s and Yeats’s most innovative and accomplished re-enactment of the founding convention of pastoral poetry, which concurrently enabled them to create idiosyncratic versions of this poetic genre. Their masks resemble Theocritus’s herdsmen in that they embody a viewpoint and

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mode of expression opposite to that of the sophisticated urban dwelling poet: The bucolic disguise [...] gives Theocritus the partial freedom which suits his poetic voice. [...] He takes strength from the single-hearted confidence of emotion and spontaneity of song which he associates with them [herdsmen] and which he cannot quite share. Behind much of his poetry there is a palpable lyrical impulse, but self-consciousness holds him back.58

The ‘confidence of emotion and spontaneity of song’ ascribed to Theocritus’s shepherds in this passage are matched by the figure of the reaper in Pessoa’s ‘Ela Canta Pobre Ceifeira’. Her spontaneous, expressive singing causes amazement and jealousy in the speaker who, as the embodiment of the introspective type of poet, cannot partake of her carefree integration into reality. Similarly, one finds in Yeats ‘an almost bitter admiration for the “dumb” life of uncreative full-blooded action’ and ‘bitter regret that the poetic occupation has barred him out from poetic existing’.59 These antithetical emotions feature in ‘The Tower’, which rehearses his poetic ‘will’: I leave both faith and pride To young upstanding men Climbing the mountain-side, That under bursting dawn They may drop a f ly; Being of that metal made Till it was broken by This sedentary trade. (VP, 416)

The reference to dropping a f ly in the fifth line alludes to the fisherman persona of the homonymous poem, which is not only the consummate embodiment of the man of action for Yeats, but also the re-enactment of ‘the romantic pastoral image of the noble countryman’.60 Yeats’s preferred pastoral mask was to a great extent inspired by Romantic pastoral, which tended to cast ‘innocence, freedom, and wholesome values’ 61 in opposition to the decadent values of modernity. The same can be argued of Pessoa’s reaper persona, which, as mentioned earlier, is intertextually linked to a specific Wordsworthian poem. Conversely, the poets’ pastoral masks also ref lect the modern ist idealization of the primitive that ruled over the arts and literature in the first decade of the twentieth century. According to Deborah Fleming, ‘The ideal of a peasant audience is a feature of modernism, as is, for example, T. S. Eliot’s desire to write for an “untutored savage”: it represents unapproachable simplicity in a complex age’.62 Pessoa’s and Yeats’s pastoral masks can be seen as equivalents to T. S. Eliot’s ‘savage’, representing an idealized audience as a counterpart to their actual readers. More importantly, though, they constitute an attempt at providing alternative cultural and literary models for the modern societies of their respective countries. This appears to be the role of the fisherman persona, which Yeats hoped could inspire young Irish poets, and of Pessoa’s heteronym Alberto Caeiro, who embodies the modern poetic voice freed from the formal constraints of prosody and of poetic imitatio. Both of these figures constitute symbols of the success in life and poetry which the two poets aspired to attain for themselves and hoped to inspire in others.

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The extent and range of the works discussed in this chapter denote a sustained effort on the part of Yeats and Pessoa to engage with the pastoral mode. In Yeats’s case, this interest resulted in a continuous f low of poems that spanned several collections. Although Pessoa’s orthonymous poetic production displays individual instances of pastoral poems, this poetic genre was a decisive and continued source of inspiration for the poetry of Alberto Caeiro, which in turn significantly inf luenced Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos. Pessoa’s and Yeats’s engagement with pastoral poetry derived from a shared personal interest in the philosophy, aesthetics and literary genres of pagan antiquity, betraying a tendency to idealize primitive civilizations as counterpoints to the modern way of life. This escapist fantasy corresponds to the attitude of the ‘non-recognizer’ underpinning the primitivist and neoclassicist bias of modern poets.63 For this reason, Yeats’s pastoral poems display several similarities with Pessoa’s orthonymous poems on the same subject, as well as with the poems of Álvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis and Alberto Caeiro examined in this chapter. The versions of pastoral produced by the two poets incorporated elements from ancient and more recent traditions, drawing on Classical bucolic poetry, on Renaissance (in Yeats’s case only) and on Romantic pastoral. The type of relationship they established with pastoral poetry is best described by Genette’s term ‘architextuality’,64 as the relationship of literary texts to a type of discourse through generic, modal, thematic and formal links, thereby re-appraising its generic conventions, themes and forms. Some of the poets’ re-enactments of the pastoral mode have a conventional facet, which is particularly salient in the formal elevation and emotional and stylistic restraint characteristic of Yeats’s middle style and of Reis’s Odes. This ref lects the tendency in modern poetry that Pessoa identified as ‘a imitação dos clássicos, a limpidez da linguagem, a cura excessiva da forma [...]’ [the imitation of the classics, the clarity of language, the excessive attention to form].65 On the other hand, the poets’ re-enactments of particular topoi belonging to or associated with the Classical and Romantic pastoral traditions repeatedly subvert and de-construct the received conventions of the locus amoenus, of evasion from reality and of the shepherd–poet mask. The poems analysed in this chapter denote an increasing criticism of the pastoral mode, underscoring its inherent escapism and its failure to provide a truthful ref lection of the self and of the world. Notes to Chapter 2 1. Uncollected Prose by W. B. Yeats, ed. by John P. Frayne and Colton Johnson, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1970–75), i: First Reviews and Articles, 1886–1896, ed. by John P. Frayne, p. 81 (hereafter quoted in the text as UP, followed by volume and page number). 2. Scott Ashley, ‘Primitivism, Celticism and Morbidity in the Atlantic fin de siècle’, in Symbolism, Decadence and the Fin de Siècle: French and European Perspectives, ed. by Patrick McGuinness (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000), pp. 175–93 (p. 180). 3. Ricardo Reis: prosa, ed. by Manuela Parreira da Silva (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 2003), p. 94 (hereafter cited in the text as RRP, followed by page number). Reis highlights the contribution of these three authors, identifying each of them in turn as the key figure in European NeoPaganism: Wilde (p. 50), Arnold (p. 170), and Pater (p. 136). 4. Poemas completos de Alberto Caeiro, ed. by Teresa Sobral da Cunha (Lisbon: Editorial Presença, 1994), p. 255 (hereafter quoted in the text as PCAC, followed by the page number).

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5. Renato Poggioli, ‘Pastorals of Innocence and Happiness’, in The Pastoral Mode: A Casebook, ed. by Bryan Loughrey (London: Macmillan, 1984), pp. 98–109 (p. 106) (my italics). 6. The Letters of John Keats, ed. by Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), i: 1814–1821, p. 170. 7. Harold E. Toliver, ‘Pastoral Contrasts’, in The Pastoral Mode: A Casebook , ed. by Bryan Loughrey (London: Macmillan, 1984), pp. 124–29 (p. 127). 8. Yeats subsequently decided to exclude The Island of Statues from his oeuvre, but he kept this poem. 9. Renato Poggioli, The Oaten Flute (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), p. 2. 10. William Wordsworth: The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850: Authoritative Texts, Context and Reception, Recent Critical Essays, ed. by Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams and Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, 1979), p. 157. 11. Wordsworth, The Prelude, pp. 156–57. 12. P. Th. M. G. Liebregts, Centaurs in the Twilight: W. B. Yeats’s Use of the Classical Tradition, Costerus New Series, 88 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993), p. 27. 13. Vereen M. Bell, Yeats and the Logic of Formalism (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006), p. 48. 14. The first version of this poem appears in a letter to Armando Cortes-Rodrigues from 19 January 1915 (CI, 144) but dates from 1914, as confirmed by Pessoa’s claim that he had intended to send this letter to his friend in December 1914 (CI, 134). 15. Fernando Pessoa, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems, ed. and trans. by Richard Zenith (London: Penguin, 2006), p. 161 (hereafter quoted in the text as Zenith I, followed by a page number). I have substituted ‘widowhood’ in place of the word ‘poverty’ in the last line of the first stanza of Zenith’s translation so as to render my argument more clearly, and have used italics to show the amendment. I thank Richard Zenith for granting me permission to use his translations with certain alterations to make them more literal, so as to better coincide with the points I raise. 16. See Monteiro, pp. 13–40, for a detailed study of the similarities between Pessoa’s poem and Wordsworth’s ‘The Solitary Reaper’. 17. Helder Macedo, Cesário Verde: o romântico e o feroz (Lisbon: Plátano Editora, 1988), p. 46. 18. Monteiro, pp. 26, 28, 27. 19. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 14. 20. The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. by Allen Wade (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954), p. 646. 21. The Letters of W. B. Yeats, p. 647. 22. Brian Arkins, Builders of My Soul: Greek and Roman Themes in Yeats (Gerrards Cross: Smythe, 1990), p. 145. 23. Theocritus, The Idylls, trans. with an intro. and notes by Robert Wells (London: Penguin, 1989), p. 24: ‘At a literal level bucolic song means anything — whatever the subject — sung by a herdsman. But the term also has a metaphorical dimension. Theocritus’s bucolic poems present both an archaic (but always existing) world where the herdsman is indeed a singer of songs and a sophisticated world where the herdsman conceals the Alexandrian scholar-poet’. 24. Theocritus, p. 31. 25. Yeats, Later Articles and Reviews, p. 252 (my emphasis). 26. Poemas de Fernando Pessoa, ed. by Ivo Castro, Edição Crítica de Fernando Pessoa, Série Maior, 1 (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional–Casa da Moeda, 1997–), iii: 1921–1930, ed. by Ivo Castro (2001), p. 79. Hereafter quoted in the text as PFP, followed by volume and page number. 27. Severino, p. 235. 28. The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language, ed. by Francis Turner Palgrave (London: Oxford University Press, 1928; repr. 1944), p. 99. Pessoa was familiar with this poem through the 1902 edition of the book, which he used to prepare for the entry examination to the University of Cape of Good Hope in 1904: he focused specifically on Book II (pp. 1–31, 71–90), which included poems by Milton, Dryden and Marvell (Severino, pp. 131–32). 29. Helder Macedo, Nós: uma leitura de Cesário Verde (Lisbon: Plátano Editora, 1975), pp. 37–38. 30. Macedo, Cesário Verde, p. 55.

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31. Stephen Spender, The Struggle of the Modern (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1963), p. 159. 32. Spender, p. 165. 33. Theocritus, p. 22. 34. Fernando Pessoa, Fernando Pessoa & Co.: Selected Poems, trans. and ed. by Richard Zenith (New York: Grove Press, 1998), pp. 104–05. Hereafter quoted in the text as Zenith 2, followed by page number. 35. Virgil in English, ed. by K. W. Gransden (London: Penguin, 1996), p. xii. 36. Poggioli, ‘Pastorals of Innocence and Happiness’, p. 104 (my emphasis). 37. Paul J. Alpers, The Singer of the Eclogues: A Study of Virgilian Pastoral: With a New Translation of the Eclogues (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), p. 154. 38. Robert F. Garratt, ‘The Place of Writing and the Writing of Place in Twentieth Century Irish Poetry in English’, in Poetry in the British Isles: Non-Metropolitan Perspectives, ed. by Hans-Werner Ludwig, Lothar Fietz and Christopher Harvie (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1995), pp. 173–92 (p. 174). 39. Matthew Arnold, Essays Literary and Critical, 2 vols (London: Dent, 1938), i, p. 249. 40. The abundant marginalia to Songs of Innocence in Pessoa’s copy of Blake’s poems attests to this hypothesis. Moreover, Caeiro’s later poems, collected by Reis under the heading Poemas Inconjuntos (1913–1915) [Uncollected Poems], also resemble Blake’s Songs of Experience. 41. Pauly Ellen Bothe, ‘Algumas ref lexões sobre o ritmo na poesia versilibrista de Fernando Pessoa: Alberto Caeiro e Álvaro de Campos’, in A arca de Pessoa: novos ensaios, ed. by Steffen Dix and Jerónimo Pizarro (Lisbon: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2007), pp. 243–55 (pp. 250–51). 42. Theocritus, p. 32. 43. Luís Oliveira Silva, O materialismo idealista de Fernando Pessoa (Lisbon: Clássica Editora, 1985), p. 60. 44. Pater, The Renaissance, p. 215. 45. Garratt, p. 174. 46. William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (New York: New Directions, 1947), p. 53. 47. Silva, pp. 28, 40. 48. See Luís de Sousa Rebelo, A tradição clássica na literatura portuguesa (Lisbon: Livros Horizonte, 1982), p. 293. 49. Pessoa’s acquaintance with this doctrine was mediated by the criticism of Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater. In the preface to The Renaissance, Pater quotes Arnold’s claim that ‘the aim of all true criticism’ is ‘to see the object as in itself it really is’ (The Renaissance, p. x). 50. Walter Pater, Greek Studies (London: Macmillan, 1895), p. 3. 51. Warwick Gould, ‘Frazer, Yeats and the Reconsecration of Folklore’, in Sir James Frazer and the Literary Imagination: Essays in Affinity and Influence, ed. by Robert Fraser (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), pp. 121–53 (p. 122). 52. Theocritus, p. 32. 53. Fleming, p. 11. 54. Garratt, p. 174. 55. Jacinto do Prado Coelho, Diversidade e unidade em Fernando Pessoa, Colecção Presenças, 2 (Lisbon: Verbo, 1982), p. 185 (my translation). 56. K. David Jackson, ‘Adverse Genres in Pessoa: Alberto Caeiro’s Other Version of Pastoral’, Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies, 3 [Pessoa’s Alberto Caeiro] (1999), 149–60 (p. 154). 57. Jackson, p. 154. 58. Theocritus, p. 32. 59. Spender, p. 30. 60. Fleming, p. 6. 61. Fleming, p. 48. 62. Fleming, p. 7. 63. Spender, p. 159. 64. Gérard Genette, The Architext: An Introduction, trans. by Jane E. Lewin (Berkeley and Oxford: University of California Press, 1992), p. 82. 65. Fernando Pessoa: Páginas íntimas e de auto-interpretação, ed. by Georg Rudolf Lind and Jacinto do Prado Coelho, Obras completas de Fernando Pessoa (Lisbon: Edições Ática, 1966), pp. 167–68.

CHAPTER 3

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Literary Nationalism and the Epic-Heroic Style Aware of the thematic and formal limitations of pastoral poetry, Pessoa and Yeats turned to heroic poetry for inspiration, particularly the epic genre, which in Greek antiquity constituted an adverse mode to the escapist, sedentary attitude dominant in bucolic poetry.1 Their engagement with the epic genre constituted a conscious departure from the escapist tendencies dominant in their poetry towards an increased naturalism. They achieved this by incorporating the direct experience of the world which constitutes the subject matter of epic poetry, which also allowed them to address their contemporary historical contexts. Therefore, this chapter is principally concerned with the interrelation between Yeats’s and Pessoa’s re-enactments of heroic poetry and the idiosyncratic type of literary nationalism that underpinned their engagement with the epic genre. Literary Nationalism According to the known facts about Pessoa’s reception of Yeats, Pessoa first became acquainted with the Irish poet as the leader of the Irish Literary Revival in 1912. Yeats’s commitment to the Revival obeyed a twofold purpose, bettering the nation through self-advancement and art, as well as a more obviously political function. These were goals with which Pessoa could certainly identify, himself a young poet attempting to launch his literary career and endowed with what he called ‘an intense desire of bettering the condition of Portugal’ (EA, 87). This was not a vague desire but rather a full-scale cultural project that encompassed, in Pessoa’s words, the ‘writing of Portuguese pamphlets, editing of older national literary works, creation of a magazine, of a scientific review, etc’ (EA, 88). His intentions closely resemble Yeats’s, whose head was filled ‘with thoughts of making a whole literature’ based on ‘old legends’ and ‘the beliefs of the people’ (E&I, 4), which led to the publication of anthologies of Irish prose — Representative Irish Tales (1891) — and poetry — A Book of Irish Verse (1895) — and to the creation of the Irish Revival and the Irish National Theatre (Aut, 200). Yeats’s successful marriage of personal, literary and patriotic goals was a seminal inf luence on Pessoa’s incipient literary nationalism, as the aforesaid letter he drafted to the Irish poet attests. Unsurprisingly therefore, Pessoa’s series of articles published in several issues of the periodical A Águia in 1912 display several parallels with Yeats’s essays

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about the Irish Revival. Yeats’s criticism from the Revival period invariably establishes a symbiotic relationship between the nation and its literature. This link is immediately evident in a lecture delivered to the National Literary Society in 1893, emblematically entitled ‘Nationality and Literature’. Pessoa’s debut article, ‘A nova poesia Portuguesa sociologicamente considerada’,2 displays striking parallels with Yeats’s lecture not least in its programmatic quality. Adopting an organicist view of history, the two poets argue that a nation’s ‘vitality’ is evident in its literary production. Their syllogistic reasoning leads to the same conclusion: that the literary movements contemporaneous to their literary debut had ushered in a period of maximum vitality of their respective nations. Considering that Pessoa was not familiar with Yeats’s essays, these similarities did not derive from direct inf luence; rather, they stemmed from their belief in a similar type of literary nationalism. In ‘Nationality and Literature’, Yeats compares the development of a national literature to that of a tree: ‘In its youth it is simple, and in its mid-period it grows in complexity, as does the tree when it puts forth many branches, and in its mature age it is covered by an innumerable variety of fruit and f lowers and leaves of thought and experience’ (UP, 1, 268–69). The image of the tree is reminiscent of the biological theories of German Romantic organicism, which applied this metaphor to cultural phenomena: ‘All these organisms share the same exemplary itinerary: they all “germinate, produce buds, blossom, and wither away” ’.3 Most likely, he encountered these theories indirectly through the auspices of the English Romantics, particularly Coleridge, who addressed them at length in Biographia Literaria. Elaborating on the Romantic metaphor of the tree, Yeats associates the different stages of development of a literature with distinct literary genres: the earliest stage corresponding to the impressionistic mode of the epic genre, the midperiod to the dramatic genre, and the later period to the lyrical genre, ref lecting a growing intellectual complexity. He illustrates his argument with examples from Greek and English literature, which he deems among ‘the older literatures of Europe’ (UP, 1, 273). To these two, he opposes contemporary Irish literature, characterizing Ireland as ‘a young nation’ still in its ‘epic or ballad period’ (UP, 1, 273). Hence his predilection for youthful, legendary heroes like Oisin or Cuchulain, who symbolize the vitality of the nation. According to him, There is a distinct school of Irish literature, which we must foster and protect, and its foundation is sunk in the legend lore of the people and in the National history. The literature of Greece and India had just such a foundation, and as we, like the Greeks and the Indians, are an idealistic people, this foundation is fixed in legend rather than in history. (UP, 1, 273–74)

This explains Yeats’s preference for the early Celtic mythical cycles as sources of inspiration for his works, in accordance with the primitivist bias of the Irish Revival. In ‘A nova poesia portuguesa sociologicamente considerada’, Pessoa also resorts to organicist imagery to describe the development of historical literary periods, in order to illustrate his argument that literary movements can anticipate social and political revolutions. Referring to the ‘Renascença Portuguesa’, he states, A actual corrente literária portuguesa é completa e absolutamente o princípio de uma grande corrente literária, das que precedem as grandes épocas criadoras

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das grandes nações de quem a civilização é filha. [...] Prepara-se em Portugal uma renascença extraordinária, um ressurgimento assombroso. (OPP, II, 1153) [The current Portuguese literary movement is completely and absolutely the beginning of a great literary movement of the type that precedes the great eras that create great nations which give birth to civilization. [...] Portugal is making preparations for an extraordinary renaissance, an astounding revival.]

His argument betrays the inf luence of nineteenth-century ‘regenerationist’ theories, which tended to adopt a cyclical view of history based on the alternation of periods of decadence and regeneration. This view can be traced in the following excerpt from Pessoa’s article: ‘O período — o verdadeiro período — subdivide-se, por sua parte, em três estádios, classificáveis de sua juventude, virilidade e velhice’ (OPP, II, 1157) [This period — the true period — is in turn divided in three stages, which can be classified as its youth, virility and old age]. This passage echoes Thomas Carlyle’s identification between physiological and cultural development, recalling his statement that ‘society has its periods of sickness and vigor, of youth, manhood, decrepitude, dissolution, and new birth’.4 Pessoa found an indigenous equivalent to Carlyle’s social philosophy in Oliveira Martins’s organicist historicism. Martins’s definition of Portugal as ‘a nação “decrépita e doida” ’5 [the decrepit and mad nation] conveys an image of decadence through personification of the nation, matching Carlyle’s depiction of the chronic ill health of the English nation in Past and Present.6 Both Carlyle and Oliveira Martins were convinced that the fact that their countries had reached the ultimate state of decadence signalled their imminent regeneration. Similarly, in ‘A nova poesia portuguesa’, Pessoa argues that the emergence of a revivalist literary movement in a socially and politically decadent Portugal heralded a period of national resurgence. This view also informed the structure of Mensagem (1934),7 the only collection of Pessoa’s Portuguese poetry published in his lifetime, which contrasts the heroic Portugal of the past with its present decadent counterpart as a catalyst for its future resurgence. Subsequently, Pessoa renounced Yeats’s revivalism. In a fragment in English, thought to be from 1914, he dissociates Sensationism from the Irish Revival, stating: We do not fall into the narrowness of regionalist movements and such like; we must not be confounded with things like the ‘Celtic Revival’ or any Yeats fairy-nonsense. We are not Portuguese writing for Portuguese; [...]. We are Portuguese writing for Europe, for all civilisation; we are nothing as yet, but even what we are now doing will one day be universally known and recognised. (OPP, III, 187)

Pessoa’s reference to Yeats’s interest in folklore as ‘fairy-nonsense’ underscores a revisionism of Yeats’s early style that ironically also applies to his own postSymbolist poetry, in which fairy poems also feature prominently. His criticism of the Irish Revival as a regionalist movement denotes a skewed interpretation (amounting to a misreading in the Bloomian sense), since one of its goals was to raise awareness of Irish literature at home and abroad, particularly in Britain: hence Yeats’s involvement in the foundation of Irish cultural societies in London. Pessoa’s criticism was not exclusively directed at Yeats’s poetry and the Irish Revival. In the

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same fragment he also criticized the traditionalism of the ‘Renascença Portuguesa’, which he had celebrated only two years before in the articles of A Águia. Whereas the Irish and the ‘Renascença Portuguesa’ revival movements had focused solely on the past, argued Pessoa, Sensationism was more interested in the future of Portuguese literature, which he was convinced would be as glorious as its past. However, this too is a misreading of the Irish Revival, since Yeats also believed that ‘an important destiny’ awaited Ireland and that poetry ‘can but express the accidents and the energies of her past, and criticism does its natural work in trying to prophesy this expression’.8 These statements from ‘The Literary Movement in Ireland’ (1901) establish continuity between Ireland’s past and future, denoting a similar investment in the future as in Pessoa’s passage above. Indeed, Yeats’s closing statement is: ‘A few years will decide if the writers of Ireland are to shape themselves in our time for the fulfilment of this prophecy’ (UP, 2, 196). Yeats’s remarks corroborate the underlying affinities between his and Pessoa’s literary nationalism, characterized by Darlene Sadlier as having a ‘Janus-faced quality’: Similar to William Butler Yeats in Ireland but with significant local differences, his [Pessoa’s] work manifests contradictory impulses that are held in productive tension. On one hand, he attempted to define an authentic ‘national’ tradition, expressing nostalgia for the epic glories of a Lusitanian empire; on the other hand he was keenly aware of vanguard poetic movements and he participated in the worldwide drive to ‘make it new’.9

Therefore, Pessoa’s rebuff of Yeats and the Irish Revival should be seen as part of a concerted strategy to highlight the novelty of the Sensationist movement he created in 1914. Pessoa’s and Yeats’s re-enactments of heroic and epic poetry can be seen as yet another manifestation of the primitivist Neo-Paganism that informed their re-enactments of the pastoral mode discussed in the previous chapter. Yeats’s essays from the Revival period reiterate his belief that the wealth of Irish history and legends preserved in its folklore was comparable to that of Greek folk literature.10 In ‘Ireland and the Arts’ (1901), he argues, ‘The Greeks looked within their borders, and we, like them, have a history fuller than any modern history of imaginative events; and legends which surpass, as I think, all legends but theirs in wild beauty’ (E&I, 205). The parallel with the Greek culture is reinforced in the preface to Lady Gregory’s Cuchulain of Muirthemne (1902): ‘the Irish stories make one understand why the Greeks called myths the activities of the daemons. The great virtues, the great joys, the great privations [...]. Poets have taken their themes more often from stories that are all, or half, mythological’.11 In a letter to Katharine Tynan from 27 April 1887, Yeats states, ‘I feel more and more that we shall have a school of Irish poetry — founded on Irish myth and History — a neo-remantic [sic] movement’ (CL, I, 10–11). Although his interest in folklore and mythological cycles is comparable to that of the Romantics, Yeats, like the Victorians, drew substantial inspiration from ancient Greece. Yeats’s ideal of expressing the imagination of the race as Homer had done is also a ref lection of Victorian thought. The same can be argued of Pessoa, who was significantly inf luenced by Carlyle’s view that the essential characteristics of the race could be found in its past.12

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However, Pessoa also found a counterpart to Victorian dialogue with the national past in contemporary Portuguese thinkers. Sampaio Bruno’s O Encoberto (1904) was instrumental in acquainting Pessoa with the comparative primitivist ethnography of Frazer, Renan and Arbois de Jubainville. More importantly, though, the book traced the progress of the Portuguese legend of Dom Sebastião, which was the main source of inspiration for Mensagem. Finally, Pessoa also derived inspiration from the previously mentioned ‘Renascença Portuguesa’, which, like the Irish Revival, displayed a neo-Romantic primitivism. The past history of the nation was central to this literary movement. Its leader, Teixeira de Pascoaes, stated, ‘A minha obra [...] dimanará de cinco fontes, onde eu irei beber com devoção: as Lendas portuguesas, o Génio da Língua, a Poesia popular, as Obras dos escritores representativos e as Vidas dos nossos heróis’ [My work will emanate from five sources: the Portuguese legends, the wealth of the language, popular poetry, the works of representative writers and the lives of our heroes].13 Pascoaes’s words undoubtedly inspired Pessoa, who developed a longstanding interest in popular poetry (ref lected in his collection of Quadras ao Gosto Popular), in national heroes, and in the national legend of Dom Sebastião that featured in Mensagem. Roughly around the time of its publication he wrote, ‘Temos, felizmente, o mito Sebastianista, com raizes profundas no passado e na alma portuguesa [...] não temos que criar um mito, se não que renová-lo’ [Luckily we have the Sebastianic myth, with its deep roots in the past and in the Portuguese soul [...] we don’t have to create a myth, but rather to make it new].14 The similarity of this statement to Yeats’s remarks about the Irish legends is remarkable, denoting a similar intention on the part of the two poets to seek inspiration for their epic re-enactments in indigenous legends. Considering the mythological nature of their material, the epic genre would have appeared as the most suitable mode of expression to Yeats and Pessoa. They were likely inf luenced by the Victorian conception of the epic ‘as the loftiest of poetic forms and the supreme literary genre’,15 which had led poets like Tennyson and Arnold to write poetry with an epic quality inspired by classical models. In order to avoid the imitative quality of Victorian epic-heroic poetry that they had studied and learned from in their formative years, Pessoa and Yeats selected native legends and myths from their own countries as the material for their re-enactments of the genre. They believed that by drawing directly from their national literary traditions, they would create works which would surpass other re-enactments in originality. This conviction justifies their self-inf lated forecasts concerning the value of their works and their own status as poets. In the last of the articles published in 1912, Pessoa announces in a prophetic tone the impending arrival of a ‘Great Poet’, whom he qualifies as ‘Supra-Camões’ (OPP, II, 1153). The prefix ‘supra’ suggests that the new poet (undoubtedly himself ) would write an epic poem that would supersede Camões’s Renaissance epic, Os Lusíadas, widely regarded as the greatest work in the Portuguese literary canon. Yeats also compared Irish poets (including himself ) to Homer, boldly suggesting, ‘we may have to go where Homer went if we are to sing a new song’.16 Masked by the collective pronoun, Yeats insinuates himself as the modern great poet who will compose the ultimate Irish epic out of the nation’s rich well of myths and legends, which he had spent several years compiling.

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The Wanderings of Oisin and Mensagem The Wanderings of Oisin (1889) and Mensagem (1934) constituted the poets’ most explicit and accomplished re-enactments of the epic. These works resume the original epic design to tell ‘the tale of the tribe’,17 as well as a didactic goal to propose new cultural models to the poets’ contemporaries. Concerning their overall structure, they fall into the category designated as ‘epic discourse-type’:18 that is, although they maintain an epic quality, they do not abide strictly by conventional generic principles. A principal characteristic of ‘epic discourse-type’ found in Yeats’s and Pessoa’s works consists of generic ambivalence. This ambivalence derives to a great extent from the visionary nationalism underpinning these works, which display symbolic imagery inspired by the poets’ shared interest in occultism and millenarianism. The plurality of goals that converge onto Yeats’s and Pessoa’s re-enactments of epic-heroic poetry requires a twofold interpretation, the one addressing issues of genre, the other focusing on their symbolic significance. In the preface to Lady Gregory’s Cuchulain of Muirthemne (1902), Yeats endorses ‘an art that is half epical [sic], half lyrical’,19 and even, occasionally, dramatic. Elsewhere, he stresses the epic content of his material whilst acknowledging its mixed generic form: ‘The tumultuous and heroic Pagan cycle [...] having to do with vast and shadowy activities and with great impersonal emotions, expressed itself naturally — or so I imagined — in epic and epic-lyric measures’.20 Adopting the Homeric epic as a model, the poet attempted a re-enactment of the epic poem in The Wanderings of Oisin (1889). Not only does it adopt the narrative verse traditionally associated with epic poetry, but it also displays obvious thematic affinities with classical epics. The title of the poem alludes to the Homeric model, ref lecting the tradition of nineteenth-century ‘minor adaptations of Ulysses’s fabulous wanderings’.21 Moreover, Yeats’s epic poem focuses on the Ossianic cycle, which the poet judged an appropriate epic subject matter because it recaptured the ‘exiles, [...] f lights across the seas’ (E&I, 182–83) of the Celtic mythological sagas. However, the Homeric parallelism is not limited to theme; it also comprises the characterization of the protagonist, Oisin, whose depiction as a warrior evokes the Homeric heroes, Odysseus and Achilles. The Wanderings of Oisin focuses almost exclusively on the protagonist, corresponding to the celebration of the super-human feats of a single individual in the Homeric epics. In turn, Oisin’s adventures in the three fairy islands evoke the ‘three stages in the unfolding of the new era, corresponding to the childhood, youth and manhood of the boy’ in Virgil’s sixth messianic Eclogue.22 In accordance with the Virgilian model, childhood is associated with natural bounty, which predominates in the first island, significantly called the ‘Island of Living’ because its inhabitants are the immortals of the Land of the Young. Youth is associated with heroic deeds epitomized by the second island, also called ‘Island of Victories’, where Oisin engages in endless battle with a demon, symbolizing what Yeats describes in ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’ as ‘the toil of growing up’ (VP, 479). Finally, the third island brings about the lethargic existence associated with old age, but Oisin’s vision on the island prophetically anticipates a new Golden Age when ‘mankind

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will have learnt to accept the earth’s bounty, and [...] man’s needs shall be satisfied in his own land’.23 This new age, which corresponds to manhood in the Virgilian prophecy, is signified by Oisin’s desire to return to Irish soil, which eventually leads him to break Niamh’s enchantment and leave the islands to return to his own land of Ireland. However, unlike the Virgilian prophecy, the protagonist does not find satisfaction in the earth’s bounty but what Yeats would later call ‘the desolation of reality’ in ‘Meru’ (VP, 563). The def lation of the questing impulse at the close of The Wanderings of Oisin recalls the denouement of the Odyssey, wherein Ulysses learns ‘that in time a man tires of heroic effort and spectacular surroundings, and will want to return — not, indeed, as a nonentity or as a failure, but as a man satisfied and completed by experience and knowledge — to his own little kingdom’.24 However, Oisin’s homecoming is paradoxically a defeat, subverting the Homeric model. According to Joseph Campbell, ‘the returning hero, to complete his adventure, must survive the impact of the world’.25 However, as Campbell observes, ‘Oisin [...] lost his centering in it and so collapsed’.26 As a result, not only does he lose his youth but he is forced to surrender his god-like immortal status, unlike Ulysses, who willingly ‘rejects the immortality offered to him by Calypso on Ogygia [which] forms the prelude to his return to what is for him more real, a normal life, accepting the limitations but also the joys of common humanity’.27 Oisin, in turn, is all too aware of the sorrows of humanity, as illustrated by the following line from The Wanderings of Oisin: ‘And the dreams of the islands were gone, and I knew how men sorrow and pass,’ (VP, 59). Moreover, his refusal to accept the Catholic Ireland he returns to proves that he has not achieved the ‘reintegration with society, [...] which, from the standpoint of the community, is the justification of the [hero’s] long retreat’.28 Instead, he prefers the idealized heroic pagan Ireland of the past symbolized by the Fenians. Notwithstanding these parallels with classical epics, Yeats drew inspiration mainly from native sources, namely ‘The Lay of Oisin on the land of Youth’ by the eighteenth-century Gaelic poet Michael Comyn and the ‘middle Irish dialogues of St. Patrick and Usheen’.29 Therefore, the parallels with the Homeric epics derive more from inherent similarities between the Irish mythical sagas and the Greek legends that constituted the subject matter of Homer’s epics than from deliberate imitation. This is mainly due to the fact that, like the Odyssey, The Wanderings of Oisin relies quite heavily on elements of the folktale. Indeed, the fact that the greater part of the two works is set in enchanted lands illustrates their common reliance on folk sources, not necessarily resulting from direct inf luence. Although Yeats’s sources were mainly Irish, Tennyson’s ‘The Voyage of Maeldune’ (1880) and ‘The Lotus-Eaters’ (a model for Book III) also exercised some inf luence, particularly noticeable in the diction of the 1889 version of The Wanderings of Oisin.30 The affinities with Tennyson’s poems show the inf luence of Victorian epic renditions on Yeats, as well as a common interest of nineteenth-century poets in the Celtic genre of voyage tales known as immrama, which also inspired Tennyson’s poem. Harold Bloom traces the genealogy of The Wanderings of Oisin to ‘the English Romantic tradition’ of ‘the internalization of quest-romance’.31 Shelley’s solitary heroes were particularly appropriate models for Yeats’s questing protagonist. In

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Reveries over Childhood and Youth, Yeats states, ‘I soon chose Alastor for my chief of men’ (Aut, 64). Keats was another important inf luence from English literature, as confirmed by the obvious similarities between the plot of Endymion and that of The Wanderings of Oisin: a mortal who falls in love with a goddess, dwells with gods, and finally returns to earth, dissatisfied with immortality. Hyperion was another likely model for Yeats’s poem. Referring to it, James Land Jones states: The Titans and the Olympians belong to differing levels of consciousness because they have differing perceptions of time. The Titans live in the present alone, unperplexed by the past or the future [...] The Olympians, in rebelling, have introduced the Titans to a new consciousness of time, mortality, and selfdivision...32

His comment highlights the clash of the primitive and modern worldviews underpinning Keats’s poem, which is also present in The Wanderings of Oisin. Accordingly, in Yeats’s poem, the Titanic perception of time corresponds to the timelessness that Oisin experienced on the enchanted isles and is especially evident in the depiction of the sleeping giants on the third island. In turn, the Olympian notion of time is signified by Oisin’s persistent memory of his past earthly existence throughout the book, which culminates in his return to Ireland and his symbolic fall into ‘the human condition, the separation of the self from the world, attended by awareness of time, sorrow, and mortality’.33 Indeed, The Wanderings of Oisin constituted a rather Keatsian failure to produce a conventional epic poem in more ways than one. According to Martin McKinsey, ‘By design, Yeats’s poem ran counter to [...] epic assumptions. To Arnoldian swiftness and clarity it counterposed dreaminess and languor, a pre-Raphaelite embarrassment of detail shading into symbol and allegory’.34 Yeats’s subsequent dissatisfaction with the poem led him to revise it extensively so as to expunge the post-Symbolist inf luences in tone and diction. Likewise, his doubts about its viability as a long poem led him, in subsequent re-enactments of the genre, to substitute the narrative structure typical of the classical epic for poems of shorter breadth better suited to a modern epic stance. Consequently, he developed a web of texts often intertextually linked by an epic quality, ranging from heroic battle poems such as ‘The Rose of Battle’ and ‘The Valley of the Black Pig’, to poems on the theme of wandering such as ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’. He also introduced another generic variation by extending the epic theme to his plays, namely the Cuchulain cycle — At The Hawk’s Well, The Green Helmet, On Baile’s Strand and The Only Jealousy of Emer — combining epic and dramatic discourses. He resorts both to dramatic monologue (in individual lyrics) and to poetic drama (in his verse plays) to transfigure the lyric into the epic through the dramatic, encompassing all three classical genres. Like Yeats, Pessoa believed that ‘supreme poetry’ incorporates all the Aristotelean genres. While he considered Aristotle’s division of poetic genres into lyric, elegiac, epic and dramatic ‘useful’, he also deemed it ‘false’, arguing in turn, ‘Os géneros não se separam com tanta facilidade’ (OPP, I, 711) [The genres cannot be so easily separated]. The juxtaposition of the Aristotelean poetic genres is evident in Pessoa’s principal re-enactment of the epic, Mensagem. This multi-part poem

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was not written in the narrative form conventionally associated with the epic, but comprises individual lyrics intertextually linked by a common theme and diction. Geoffrey Barrow identifies ‘a distinctive tone in each part of the work. The poems based upon the heraldic symbols of the Portuguese shield in Part I, for example, are predominantly explanatory poems’, whereas, ‘the poems in Part II are more descriptive’, focusing on key events of Portuguese history.35 These tones contrast starkly with ‘the more emphatically vatic and strongly lyric tone of the poems in Part III’.36 This constitutes an important departure from the conventional epic form, traditionally marked by the impersonality of the narrative voice. The lyric and the epic are considered to be the furthest apart of the genres by critical tradition. In ‘The Three Voices of Poetry’, T. S. Eliot claims that the voice of the ‘poet talking to himself ’, or lyric, and the voice of the ‘poet addressing the audience’, which he identifies as dominant in the epic, are entirely distinct.37 Pessoa transcended the gap between these two genres by combining the impersonal epic voice with the personal lyrical voice in Mensagem. Additionally, the poems about historical figures from Portuguese history which intersperse the different parts consist of dramatic monologues. They endow the individual poems with lyrical subjectivity while maintaining the impersonality of the poem as a whole through an ensemble of voices which Pessoa described as ‘poesia lírica posta na boca de diversos personagens’ (OPP, I, 711) [lyric poetry uttered by diverse characters]. Despite celebrating the heroism of the historical dramatis personae, these poems display an elegiac quality. The elegiac quality of Mensagem is corroborated by its intertextual links to other poems in Pessoa’s orthonymous poetry, such as ‘À Memória do Presidente-Rei Sidónio Pais’ (1920), ‘Quinto Império’ (1935) and ‘Elegia na Sombra’ (1935). These poems display a heroic theme but are also pervaded with an elegiac and lyrical tone, which will be discussed at length. Irene Ramalho Santos describes Mensagem as a ‘lyric poem in Pessoa’s sense of the third degree of the lyric (hence, dramatic), with epic longings’.38 The epic element should not be underestimated though, as Mensagem resulted from Pessoa’s desire to emulate the classical epics. In an outline of the poem, likely from 1920, Pessoa rehearses The idea of the epic poem representing the Portuguese sea voyages and discoveries as resulting from the wars between the old and the new gods — Hyperion, Apollo, etc... As in the Iliad, the war is the ref lection of the war among gods, here the sea voyages shall be the wars between the old gods, and the new gods who hinder them... The new gods will win... recreating, in a way, Keats’s life of Hyperion.39

This passage illustrates the plurality of inf luences underpinning the genesis of the poem. The inf luence of the classical epics is evident in the poet’s goal to write an epic celebrating the deeds of the Portuguese in the tradition of Homer’s Iliad. This inf luence is most obvious in the second part of Mensagem, which portrays the Portuguese sea voyages. They can be regarded as the ‘high historical undertaking’ which, according to Joseph Campbell, initiates ‘the call to adventure’ of the quest poem.40 By choosing to substitute seafarers for warriors and by focusing on the sea exploits (the early modern age’s equivalent of the ancient wars), Pessoa alludes to

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the tradition of the Odyssey. He establishes the Portuguese as the new Argonauts, metonymically represented by the ‘alma do Argonauta’ [the soul of the Argonaut] of Vasco da Gama in ‘Ascensão de Vasco da Gama’ (OPP, I, 1159). Additionally, the allusion to Hyperion shows that Pessoa’s epic designs were substantially inspired by ‘Keats’s failed romantic redefinition of the epic’.41 According to Santos, ‘Pessoa’s association of the genesis of the poem with Keats’s conception of Hyperion suggests [that] the glorifiable feats of Portuguese history are reassessed by Pessoa in Mensagem as, primarily, acts of sheer creativity’.42 She explains that both poets drew inspiration from the mythopoeic concept, derived from Plato’s The Republic, ‘that creating, shaping, and bringing together total order to the world and society is a poetic activity that combines in itself the ample vision of prophecy with the comforting limits of the law’.43 Hence, their poems depicted the creation of a new world order. This new world order, led by a new race of gods, as Pessoa mentions in the excerpt quoted above, is embodied by the Portuguese sailor in the poem ‘O Mostrengo’, which re-enacts the clash between Apollo and the Titans that constitutes the central theme of Hyperion. As one of the few poems displaying epic action in Mensagem, it depicts the confrontation of the hero with the ‘threshold guardian’ that, according to Campbell, marks ‘the crossing of the magical threshold’.44 Therefore, it illustrates the juxtaposition of conventional epic elements such as the quest with others from the Romantic tradition in Pessoa’s poem. Pessoa intended to call his epic poem ‘Portugal’ almost until the time of publication, which indicates that the Portuguese people constitute the subject of his epic poem. By counterposing the celebration of the heroic deeds of a collective hero to those of a single individual he subverts the Homeric epic, re-enacting the Renaissance epos of Os Lusíadas. Although Pessoa disavowed the inf luence of Camões, his epic poem can be regarded as ‘a metapoetic intertext’ to Os Lusíadas,45 partaking of its celebration of past national heroes and of its prophetic tone about the future of the nation.46 Both Camões and Pessoa found a model for this visionary nationalism in Virgil’s Aeneid. Like the latter, Mensagem has a civilizational goal. Thus, the quest of the Portuguese people resembles Aeneas’s ‘pursuance of a divine mission [...] to found a new city he knew not where and a new way of life different from the heroic and the Trojan world’.47 Likewise, the symbolic embodiment of the national character by historical figures which represent different heroic facets recalls the ‘contrasting sides of Aeneas: the angry warrior and the rational and merciful peacemaker’.48 Like Aeneas, the historical figures in Pessoa’s poem can be characterized as spiritual heroes, drawing strength from supernatural sources, as stated in this quatrain from the third poem in the first part, entitled ‘O Conde D. Henrique’: Todo o começo é involuntário Deus é o agente. E o herói a si assiste, vário E inconsciente. (OPP, I, 1147) [Every beginning is involuntary. God is the prime mover. The hero is his own spectator, Uncertain and unaware.] (Zenith 1, 375)

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Finally, the dialectic of despondency and hopefulness about the fulfilment of Portugal’s imperial destiny conveyed in Mensagem is comparable to the conf lict between pathos (‘sadness at the doubtful doom of human kind’) and optimism over ‘the glory of the Roman vision of the golden age for the world’ in the Aeneid.49 The Wanderings of Oisin and Mensagem display the closest affinities in their use of occult symbolism, which denotes analogous designs and common mystical inf luences. The most striking of these parallels concerns the tripartite structure of the two works. This pattern resumes the Renaissance conception of the three states of the universal man — pleasure, action and contemplation — underpinning the symbolic value of these works as enactments of a journey of self-discovery and self-transcendence that is at once individual and collective. The Wanderings of Oisin is divided into three books, featuring three islands, which, according to Yeats, represent ‘three incompatible things which man is always seeking — infinite feeling, infinite battle, infinite repose’ (CL, I, 141). Yeats derived these ideas from the three ages in Vico’s cyclical notion of history, which he evokes when describing the three islands as ‘The choral song, a life lived in common, a futile battle, then thought for its own sake, the last island’ in the ‘Introduction to The Cat and the Moon’.50 Mensagem is structured according to a similar allegorical pattern, which Pessoa described in the following way: ‘Temos pois que a Nação Portuguesa percorre, em seu caminho imperial, três tempos — o primeiro caracterizado pela Força (Vis) ou as Armas (Arma), o segundo pelo Ócio (Otium) ou o Sossego (Quies), e o terceiro pela Ciência (Sciencia) ou Inteligência (Intellectus)’ (OPP, III, 712–13) [Thus the Portuguese nation follows three stages in its imperial path, the first characterized by Strength or Weapons, the second by Idleness or Quietude, and the third by Science or Intelligence]. The first of these periods is epitomized by the first word of the Latin epigraph to part I, Bellum, which refers to the foundation of Portugal and the (re-)conquest of the territory from the Moors. The second period, epitomized by the Latin epigraphs to the second part, Possessio Maris, and to the third part, Pax, can either be seen as referring to the peace resulting from the Portuguese dominion of the sea during the discoveries or as an ironic reference to the idle state of modern Portugal. On the other hand, the knowledge of the world possessed by the Portuguese navigators can be regarded as illustrative of the science (or, more precisely, knowledge) associated with the third period. However, within the symbolic framework of Mensagem, this knowledge also includes the visionary knowledge of the future encapsulated in the prophecies of the third part. The unconventional symbolism that pervades Mensagem and The Wanderings of Oisin suggests that Pessoa and Yeats drew inspiration from similar occult theories and sources. One of them is the theosophical principle of the ‘initiatory scale’,51 featured in Madame Blavatsky’s The Voice of Silence (1889).52 Frank Kinahan highlights the inf luence of A. P. Sinnett’s Esoteric Buddhism (1883) and The Occult World (1881) on the ‘veil of obscurity’ in The Wanderings of Oisin.53 Ronald Sousa argues that ‘Mensagem involves the fusion of various tripartite systems and the application of the series so produced to the interpretation of Portuguese history’, identifying ‘the cycle of life-death-rebirth’ as one of the tripartite schemes which can be used as an interpreting tool to unlock the symbolic meaning of Mensagem.54 According

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to this pattern, the first part of the poem depicts Portugal’s heroic past. The second part, entitled ‘Mar Português’, represents both the dissemination of the Portuguese maritime empire and its denouement following the death of the king, Dom Sebastião, and the subsequent loss of independence. The third part, entitled ‘O Encoberto’, focuses on Dom Sebastião who (qua Arthur) lies dormant under the veil of obscurity of the Blessed Isles depicted in ‘As Ilhas Afortunadas’ (OPP, I, 1163). Most of the poems in this part consist of ‘Avisos’ [Prophecies] announcing the return of Dom Sebastião. Pessoa invests his return with a mystical quality in ‘O Desejado’ [The Desired One]: Vem, Galaaz com pátria, erguer de novo, Mas já no auge da suprema prova, A alma penitente do teu povo À Eucharistia Nova. (OPP, I, 1162) [Now at the decisive hour, come Galahad, Of the homeland and raise once more Your penitent people’s soul To the new Eucharist.]55

This poem alludes directly to the return of the long lost Portuguese king, Dom Sebastião, as an Arthurian figure with Christ-like powers who will restore the glory of the nation, illustrating the ‘misticismo nacionalista’ [nationalist mysticism] (EA, 202) that according to Pessoa underpins the structure of Mensagem. Although the last stage of the life-death-rebirth cycle does not occur in the actual text, the fact that the closing poem ends with the exhortation ‘É a Hora!’ (OPP, I, 1168) [The Hour has come] suggests that the events described in the poem above are imminent. The Wanderings of Oisin can also be interpreted according to ‘the cycle of life-death-rebirth’, corroborating the argument that Pessoa and Yeats drew on analogous occult sources. Book I opens with the defeat of the Fenian clan at a battle, symbolizing the demise of the Celtic heroic era, and Oisin’s departure from his homeland. His elopement with Niahm corresponds to ‘the mystical marriage with the queen goddess of the world’ in the quest narrative, which normally takes place ‘in the blessed isle of the unageing Goddess of Immortal Being’,56 represented by the first island (suitably called ‘The Isle of the Living’). Oisin’s combat with the sea demon in book II, which takes place on the second island (significantly entitled the ‘Isle of Victories’), can be regarded as the hero’s allegorical confrontation with death and is therefore comparable to the sea battle of the Portuguese f leet with ‘O Mostrengo’ in Mensagem. Oisin’s prolonged sleep on the third island in Book III symbolizes the same life-in-death state as that of Dom Sebastião on the Blessed Isles, encapsulated in the line ‘So lived I and lived not, so wrought I and wrought not, with creatures of dreams’ (TWO, 42; my emphasis).57 Oisin’s vision of the Fenians evokes the racial memory, converting him into a symbol of the Celtic race. Finally, his re-awakening and return to Ireland signifies his rebirth and also has a communal dimension: When the hero-quest has been accomplished [...] the adventurer must return with his life-transmuting trophy. The full round, the norm of the monomyth, requires that the hero shall now begin the labour of bringing [the boon] back

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into the kingdom of humanity, where the boon may redound to the renewing of the community, the nation.58

Therefore, Yeats’s and Pessoa’s idiosyncratic use of ‘the cycle of life-death-rebirth’ serves their mystical nationalism by qualifying Oisin and Dom Sebastião respectively as the ‘spirit’ (in Yeats’s terminology) or ‘soul’ (in Pessoa’s) of the nation, which is renewed through the collective sharing of the tale of their heroic feats. Parnell and Pais — historical myth-making and authoritarian nationalism Yeats’s and Pessoa’s myth-making was not limited to the (fictional or historical) past but also extended to contemporary political figures such as Charles Stewart Parnell and Sidónio Pais, whom Yeats and Pessoa respectively envisaged as modern heroes who had died tragically.59 They therefore wrote poems dedicated to these men, celebrating the heroic spirit that they symbolized. A comparative analysis of Yeats’s ‘To a Shade’ (1914), ‘Parnell’s Funeral’ (1935), ‘Come Gather Round me Parnellites’ (1937), and of Pessoa’s ‘À Memória do Presidente-Rei Sidónio Pais’ (1920) reveals a parallel process of hero-making applied to the two dead politicians, whose heroic character is celebrated in the elegiac mode. Parnell’s depiction as a ‘chosen’, ‘proud’ man who ‘fought the might of England’ (VP, 586, st.2) and ‘loved his country’ (VP, 587, st.4) in ‘Come Gather Round me Parnellites’ bears a striking resemblance to Pais’s portrayal as a distinguished leader — ‘Rei-nato’ [born-King], ‘cavaleiro leal’ [loyal knight] (OPP, 1172), ‘soldado-rei’ [soldier-king] (OPP, I, 1172), ‘Pátria, e fé eleita’ [Homeland and chosen faith] (OPP, I, 1172). Yeats’s and Pessoa’s laudatory tone underpins Parnell’s and Pais’s status as heroic patriotic leaders elected to defend and govern the nation, which is reinforced by the vocabulary from quest narratives in Pessoa’s poem. In ‘To a Shade’, Parnell is the one ‘who had brought’, ‘In his full hands what, had they only known, / Had given their children’s children loftier thought’ (VP, 292). Pais is likewise deemed the precursor to a glorious future — ‘Passado de um futuro a abrir’ [The past of a future to unfold], ‘Pendão de glória em glória erguido!’ [Banner raised from glory to glory] (OPP, I, 1179). Thus, both poets underline the men’s potential as architects of national resurgence. However, despite their promising future, the two men were betrayed by their respective nations. In ‘Parnell’s Funeral’, Yeats attributes Parnell’s death to ‘popular rage’, ‘Hysterica passio’ (VP, 542), denouncing the ‘insult’ and ‘disgrace’ to Parnell’s memory on the part of the Irish in ‘To a Shade’ (VP, 292). The Latin phrase, which originates in classical tragedy, implies that Parnell’s death was tragic. In ‘À Memória do Presidente-Rei Sidónio Pais’, Pessoa attributes Pais’s death to the intervention of Destiny — ‘Novo castigo e mal do Fado!’ [New ill and punishment from Fate] (OPP, I, 1177) — depicting Pais as ‘well-loved’ by the Portuguese people. However, considering that Sidónio Pais had in reality been murdered by a fellow countryman, this depiction was a mystification of the poet, part of the mythmaking process undertaken in the poem. Pessoa provides a more candid explanation in the following prose excerpt that denotes a resentment against popular betrayal comparable to that in Yeats’s poem — ‘esse homem, que tinha as qualidades místicas

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do chefe de nação [...] não pôde, leal como era, evitar estar cercado por traidores e bandidos’ [that man, who had the mystical qualities of a nation’s leader [...] could not avoid, devoted though he was, being surrounded by traitors and gangsters].60 Consequently, Parnell and Pais are depicted as sacrificial victims who died as martyrs to the national cause. This is the meaning of the strange pagan imagery evoked in ‘Parnell’s Funeral’: that of the ‘sacrifice’ of the ‘pierced boy’ (VP, 541), whose death (according to Yeats’s notes) ‘symbolised the death and resurrection of the tree-spirit of Apollo’.61 He derived this imagery from Frazer’s The Golden Bough, since, as Warwick Gould observes, ‘the poem had arisen during Yeats’s deepest contemplation of Frazer’s work’.62 According to him, ‘Only Frazerian grand theory could provide a complex enough model, while yet being of epic simplicity and of cyclical remorselessness, by which the fall of Parnell and its historical consequences could be measured’.63 Yeats also found inspiration in Frazer for the juxtaposition of the cult of the death and resurrection of the solar god Attis with that of Christ,64 using both the pagan and the Christian sources as mythical parallels for the real event of Parnell’s death commemorated in the poem. Pessoa, in turn, evokes the Sebastianist myth through a simile, depicting Pais as the reincarnated Portuguese king and as a Christ-like figure — ‘Nele uma hora encarnou el-rei D. Sebastião’ [King Dom Sebastian incarnated in him sometime] (OPP, I, 1177), ‘Ressurrecto da falsa morte’ [Resurrected from false death] (OPP, I, 1173). Pessoa and Yeats also establish a deliberate identification between the two politicians and the nation in their poems, signifying in their implied resurrection metonymically the rebirth of their nations. The characterization of Pais and Parnell as providential figures for Portugal and Ireland also evokes Carlyle’s notion of ‘Hero-Worship’: that is, the celebration of the strong leader who embodies the best qualities of the nation and whose ‘mission is Order’.65 In Ultimatum (1917), ascribed to the heteronym Campos, the ideal form of government is described as either a ‘scientific’ monarchy ruled by the ‘Rei Média’ [Average King] (OPP, II, 1116) or a ‘Ditadura do Homem-Completo’ [Dictatorship of the Complete Man] (OPP, II, 1113), whose personality symbolically represents the totality of the nation’s citizens. Pessoa’s complete man was also inspired by the Renaissance concept of ‘homem harmónico’ [the harmonious man],66 who is endowed with the best possible qualities and therefore can best rule the nation. A similar view was put forward by Yeats in the essay ‘Edmund Spenser’ (1906), which endorsed Spenser’s model for the ideal life of the nation, wherein the Queen (or King) ‘is a living embodiment of the best [the country] can aspire to’.67 Richard Greaves underlines the importance that Castiglione’s works bore in the development of the Yeatsian concept of a ruling aristocratic elite of cultured men.68 Undoubtedly inspired by Plato’s Republic, Pessoa also postulated the creation of an aristocratic republic governed by an intellectual elite.69 In turn, Yeats’s ‘company of governing men’70 and Pessoa’s ‘oligarquia dos melhores’ [oligarchy of the best]71 are most likely re-enactments of the ‘government of the Wisest’ or the ‘Aristocracy of Talent’ advocated by Carlyle.72 The authoritarian nationalism endorsed in Yeats’s Parnell and Pessoa’s Pais poems denotes the poets’ concern with the imposition of order in an otherwise chaotic

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society. This became a prevalent issue in the first decades of the twentieth century, ushering in the modern poetics of ‘order’ which T. S. Eliot identified as the ultimate function of art.73 The most blatant example of this positioning in Yeats’s poetry is ‘The Second Coming’ (1920). The opening stanza provides an allegorical account of the breakdown of contemporary society, highlighting its anarchy: Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. (VP, 401–02)

This scenario is comparable to that depicted in ‘Nevoeiro’ [Fog] (1928), the closing poem of Mensagem: Nem rei nem lei, nem paz nem guerra, Define com perfil e ser Este fulgor baço da terra Que é Portugal a entristecer — Brilho sem luz e sem arder, Como o que fogo-fátuo encerra. Ninguém sabe que coisa quer. Ninguém conhece que alma tem, Nem o que é mal nem o que é bem. (Que ânsia distante perto chora?) Tudo é incerto e derradeiro. Tudo é disperso, nada é inteiro. Ó Portugal, hoje és nevoeiro... É a Hora! (OPP, I, 1168) [No king or law, nor war or peace, Defines with clarity and substance The dimmed splendor of the land That is Portugal wrapped in grief Brilliance without light or warmth, Like the glow of the will-o’-the-wisp. No one knows what he wants. No one knows his own soul. No one knows what’s good or bad. (What distant yearning weeps close by?) All is uncertain and dying. All is scattered, nothing is whole. O Portugal, today you are fog... The Hour has come!] (Zenith 1, 382)

Pessoa’s and Yeats’s poems lament the lack of law and order in an anarchic society because of the absence of a leader, emblematically represented by the figure of the king in Pessoa’s poem and figuratively by the figure of the ‘falconer’ in Yeats’s.

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Opposing this state of affairs, the second stanza of Yeats’s poem makes use of the prophecy of the apocalypse in the Gospel of St John to announce a Second Coming of Christ, which marks the beginning of a new dispensation: Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? (VP, 402)

Yeats’s allusion to the biblical prophecy, reinforced by the apocalyptic tone of the poem, aims to transfigure him into the semblance of a prophet. The imminent arrival of a new era conveyed by the opening lines is comparable to Pessoa’s exclamation, ‘É a Hora!’ [The Hour has come!], at the close of ‘Nevoeiro’, which in turn echoes Carlyle’s ‘The birth-hour is coming’ in Past and Present.74 By including this poem in a poetic set entitled ‘Avisos’ [prophecies], Pessoa also assumes the role of the poet as prophet put forward by Carlyle in Sartor Resartus.75 Pessoa’s use of the exhortative exclamation and Yeats’s use of the exhortative adverbial ‘Surely’ constitute parallel rhetorical strategies, signalling the urgency of their exhortations to their respective nations to awake from their slumber. The poets’ belief in the impending advent of a new historical cycle in which their countries would play a significant part betrays a millenarian view of history. The version of Christ presented in ‘The Second Coming’ is far from the orthodox biblical version, displaying more affinities with the figure of the Antichrist in the Gospel of St John. This inversion has a heretical quality, intimating that the new dispensation announced in Yeats’s poem does not originate in the Christian tradition. Pessoa’s depiction of the ‘Mostrengo’ [Monster] in ‘Antemanhã’ [Before dawn], the fourth poem from the section ‘Avisos’ [Prophecies] of Mensagem, suggests a similar source of inspiration for his vision of the new dawn of time: O mostrengo que está no fim do mar Veio das trevas a procurar A madrugada do novo dia, De novo dia sem acabar; E disse, ‘Quem é que dorme a lembrar Que desvendou o Segundo Mundo, Nem o Terceiro quer desvendar?’ (OPP, I, 1167–68) [The monster living at the Ocean’s end Through darkest shadows came to seek The dawning of the new day,

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The new day that has no end; And said, ‘Who now sleeps remembering He once revealed the Second World But is unwilling to reveal the Third?]76

The closing reference to the Third World is significant. According to Helder Macedo, a filiação da Mensagem na tradição histórico-profética joaquimita é semanticamente central à concepção emblemática da obra, a tal ponto que seria possível transpor a sua organização estrutural numa representação visual das três partes em que se divide — ‘Brasão’, ‘Mar Português’, ‘O Encoberto’ — modelada nas que Joaquim da Fiore fez no seu Liber Figurarum para diagramaticamente prefigurar o advento da redentora Terceira Idade, a Idade do Espírito Santo, correspondente na Mensagem a ‘O Encoberto’.77 [Mensagem’s filiation in the Joachimist historic-prophetic tradition is semantically so central to its emblematic conception, that it would be possible to transpose its structural organization as a visual representation of the three parts that comprise it — ‘Brasão’, ‘Mar Português’, ‘O Encoberto’ — modelled after those that Joachim of Fiore used in his Liber Figurarum to diagrammatically prefigure the advent of the redeeming Third Age, the Age of the Holy Spirit, corresponding to ‘O Encoberto’ in Mensagem.]

Similarly, Warwick Gould and Marjorie Reeves claim that ‘Joachim’s third status clearly inf luenced Yeats’s ideas of the coming historical dispensation’, surfacing in ‘The Second Coming’, which denotes ‘a Joachimist sense of crisis’.78 According to them, Joachimist inf luence on Yeats’s works can be traced to the early stories Rosa Alchemica, The Tables of the Law and The Adoration of the Magi (1897), inspired by Joachim of Fiore’s ‘Age of the Holy Spirit’.79 It recurs in plays like The Unicorn from the Stars (1908), and in the ‘Dove and Swan’ section of A Vision (1937). Most importantly, ‘the Joachimist strain survives in his plans for a “spiritual democracy” ’,80 which can be interpreted as the new dispensation intimated in ‘The Second Coming’, functioning as an antidote to the anarchy of the contemporary world. Mystical Nationalism The section of Autobiographies entitled ‘Ireland After Parnell’ opens with the statement: A couple of years before the death of Parnell, I had wound up my introduction to those selections from the Irish novelists with the prophecy of an intellectual movement at the first lull in politics, and now I wished to fulfil my prophecy. I did not put it that way, for I preferred to think that the sudden emotion that now came to me, the sudden certainty that Ireland was to be like soft wax for years to come, was a moment of supernatural insight. (Aut, 199)

By conferring the status of ‘prophecy’ to the conclusion of his introduction to Representative Irish Tales, Yeats emphasizes the spiritual bias of his works in the 1890s. Likewise, by qualifying his nationalist conviction as ‘supernatural insight’,

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Yeats betrays ‘a spiritual idea of Irishness’ fostered by ‘theories of race’.81 In ‘Hopes and Fears for Irish Literature’ (1892), he claims that the Irish ‘may deliver that new great utterance for which the world is waiting’ (UP, 1, 250). His choice of the term ‘utterance’ underlines the literary quality of the Irish contribution to the world. In ‘First Principles’ (1904), he adopts a similar sibylline tone, stating, ‘if it is a Spirit from beyond the world that decides when a nation shall awake into imaginative energy, [...] it cannot be for us to judge. It may be coming upon us now, for it is certain that we have more writers who are thinking [...] than we have had for a century’ (Exp, 146–47). This statement suggests that the revelation Yeats had in mind combined the political, spiritual and artistic spheres. His use of the word ‘Spirit’ imparts a religious quality to his prognostic, whereas the phrase ‘imaginative energy’ links it to the artistic domain of human activity, recalling William Blake’s argument that ‘ “the human imagination alone” is “the divine vision and fruition” “in which man liveth eternally” ’.82 These statements featured in Yeats’s introduction to Blake’s collected poems, with which Pessoa was familiar. Judging by the various underlined passages (this being one among them) in Pessoa’s copy of the book, Yeats’s remarks about Blake captured his interest, in particular those relating to his mysticism of the arts. Similarly, Yeats’s introduction to Rabindranath Tagore’s collected poems, which Pessoa had also read, establishes Tagore as the Eastern counterpart to Blake, and a representative of ‘a tradition, where poetry and religion are the same thing’.83 Additionally, his praise of the Indian literary nationalist movement, to which Tagore belonged, as a ‘new Renaissance’84 most likely corroborated Pessoa’s conviction that the Irish model of cultural revivalism could be re-enacted in the context of a different literary tradition. Pessoa reveals a similar positioning when he claims, ‘o conceito de Pátria é um conceito puramente místico’ [the concept of Homeland is a purely mystical concept].85 As with Yeats, Pessoa’s mystical nationalism was a lifelong project. He began making lofty predictions about the future of the Portuguese race since the beginning of his literary production, claiming in ‘A nova poesia portuguesa’ that A Alma Portuguesa está criando, através da sua actual Poesia, um novo conceito [...] do Universo e da Vida, e [...] esse conceito é aquele que na linha evolutiva da alma europeia representa [...] a dilatação da alma europeia que representará uma Nova Renascença. (OPP, II, 1182; my emphasis) [The Portuguese soul is creating a new concept of the Universe and of Life through its contemporary Poetry, and that concept is that which in the evolutionary line of the European soul represents its dilation which will represent a New Renaissance.]

As Yeats had done with the Indian revival, Pessoa compares the movement in the arts occurring in Portugal in 1912 to the great European movement of the early modern age, the Renaissance. However, the use of the present continuous indicates that this ‘new Renaissance’ is an ongoing process. Pessoa’s term recalls Carlyle’s notion of ‘Palingenesia’ or ‘spiritual Newbirth’.86 Although Carlyle borrowed these concepts from the German Romantics, he adds a dimension of ‘social change’ to ‘the aim of spiritual regeneration by way of religious faith’ prevalent in the Romantic ‘philosophy of prophetic regeneration’.87 Similarly to Carlyle, Pessoa’s

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concept of regeneration encompassed a social, and inevitably political, dimension alongside the more traditional spiritual sense. In the aforementioned article, he states, ‘a futura criação social da Raça portuguesa, será qualquer cousa que seja ao mesmo tempo religiosa e política, ao mesmo tempo democrática e aristocrática, ao mesmo tempo ligada à actual fórmula de civilização e a outra cousa nova’ [the future social creation of the Portuguese Race will be something that is at once religious and political, democratic and aristocratic, associated with the present formula of civilization and something else, entirely new] (OPP, II, 1194). Pessoa also found a national counterpart to Carlyle in Sampaio Bruno, who refers to ‘palingenesia, simultaneamente nacional e universal’ [national and universal palingenesia], namely ‘a transformação do Predestinado Individual em o Predestinado Colectivo, do Rei na Nação’ [the transformation of the Individual Predestined into the Collective Predestined, of the King into the Nation] in Sebastianism.88 Bruno’s work provided him with a model for applying regeneration theory in a religious and political context, which he followed in Mensagem and in ‘À Memória do Presidente-Rei Sidónio Pais’. Like Yeats, Pessoa also identifies analogies between the Portuguese revival and the birth of European civilization, drawing parallels with the ancient Greeks, whom he identifies as the ancestors of the Portuguese in the lines ‘Transcende Grécia e a sua história / Que em nosso sangue continua!’ [Trancends Greece and its history / Which survives in our blood] from ‘Quinto Império’ (OPP, I, 1184). The link to Greece recurs in the following excerpt in English: ‘If anyone were then fit and disposed to make sociological predictions concerning this little country, it would be natural to forecast a development on cultural and literary lines, and of Lisbon that it might become some sort of new Athens [...]’.89 By juxtaposing the Portuguese culture with the Greek one, the poet asserts the role of the Portuguese as founders of a new pan-European civilization, for, according to him, ‘Só duas nações — a Grécia passada e Portugal futuro — receberam dos deuses a concessão de serem não só elas mas também todas as outras [Only two nations have received from the gods the concession of being not only themselves but also all others — Greece in the past and Portugal in the Future] (OPP, III, 702)’. The universality that, according to Pessoa, links the ancient Greek and Portuguese cultures is epitomized by the lines ‘O Portugal feito Universo’ [Portugal turned into the Universe] in ‘Quinto Império’ (OPP, I, 1185). The concept of a universal Portuguese civilization is closely linked to Pessoa’s term ‘Atlantismo’. He associates it with the discoveries in an outline for a ‘Manifesto sobre o Atlantismo’, presumably from 1913: ‘Foi pelo Atlântico que fomos à procura da glória, à criação da Civilização Maior. É pelo Atlântico, mas em alma e espiritualização, que devemos ir em demanda da Civilização Máxima!’ [It was by way of the Atlantic that we went searching for glory, the creation of a Superior Civilization. It is by way of the Atlantic, but spiritualized as souls, that we should go in search of the Supreme Civilization] (OPP, III, 681). Pessoa celebrates the epic nature of the Atlantic expansion in the second part of Mensagem, which is appropriately entitled Possessio Maris. However, as he claims in the passage above — and prophetically announces in the third part of Mensagem — the ‘Atlantismo da

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Raça’ [Atlanticism of the Race] (OPP, III, 681) will be responsible for introducing a cultural imperialism like that of the Greek civilization to the world. As they had been with Yeats, the arts also play a central role in Pessoa’s conceptualization of the spiritual empire. He claims: ‘Criando uma civilização espiritual própria, subjugaremos todos os povos; porque contra as artes e as forças do espírito não há resistência possível’ [By creating our own spiritual civilization, we will master all peoples; because against the arts and the forces of the spirit there is no possible resistence] (OPP, III, 682). This spiritual empire, also known as ‘Quinto Império’ [Fifth Empire], is said to surpass the four spiritual empires of the past: the Greek and the Roman; the Christian and the European, the last of which he identifies with British hegemony (OPP, III, 712). Pessoa’s mystical nationalism was also informed by occult doctrines. He makes this association in a letter in French addressed to the Count of Keyserling (1930).90 He defines the ‘Portuguese Soul’ in the following manner: L’âme portugaise [...] est triple [...]. Il y a trois Portugal. [...] Le Portugal essentiel — la Grande Âme portugaise, dans toute sa profondeur aventureuse et tragique — vous a été voilé. [...] elle nous est venue d’anciens mystères et d’anciens rêves, d’histoires contées aux Dieux possibles avant le Chaos et la Nuit, fondements négatifs du monde. [...] Cette âme portugaise, héritière [...] de la divinité de l’âme héllenique, s’est fortifiée dans l’ombre et dans l’abîme. (C, II, 199–200) [The Portuguese soul is triple. There are three Portugals. The essential Portugal — the Great Portuguese Soul in all its adventurous and tragic profundity — is veiled to you. [...] it came to us from the ancient mysteries and dreams, the stories told to the possible Gods before Chaos and Night, the negative foundations of the world. [...] That Portuguese soul, descendant [...] of the divinity of the Hellenic soul, has been fortified in the shadow and the abyss.]

This excerpt evokes the mystical tradition of the tripartite soul of the Platonists passed down hermetically over the centuries by the Cabbalists. Pessoa associates the authentic Portuguese soul with ‘ancient mysteries’, establishing its lineage from the older occultist traditions, namely the Orphic mysteries and the Gnostic tradition. Additionally, his choice of esoteric vocabulary (which seeks to obscure as much as to reveal his meaning) confirms his debt to the occult tradition. Simultaneously, Pessoa ascribes a mythical quality to the ‘Portuguese Soul’ and pronounces it the inheritor of the ‘Hellenic soul’. Pessoa’s concept of the ‘Portuguese soul’ is analogous to what Yeats calls ‘the permanent character of the race’ in ‘First Principles’ (Exp, 147). Not only that, but he also attributes the same characteristics to it as those which Yeats attributed to the Celts in ‘The Celtic Element in Literature’ (E&I, 173), namely an adventurous, tragic and mystical nature. The similarities extend to Pessoa’s characterization of the ‘Portuguese soul’ as originating from ancient dreams, which recalls Yeats’s depiction of his ideal of ‘Unity of Culture’ as ‘a nationwide multiform reverie’ (Aut, 263). Yeats believed that by drawing on his country’s legends and folklore, a poet could reveal the Anima Mundi, or rather ‘a Great Memory passing on from generation to generation’.91 Pessoa also believed that poets should derive their inspiration from ‘o que nas almas há de superindividual’ [that which is supraindividual in souls] (OPP, II, 1166).

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Conclusion Pessoa’s and Yeats’s re-enactments of the epic genre differed from that of the Victorians and many of their contemporaries in their underlying mythopoeic goal, that is, the re-invention of the nation through artistic and cultural processes. The two poets emphasized the role of the poet in the making of the national Weltanschauung (a word both of them were fond of using) and displayed for the greatest part of their careers a willingness to embrace that challenge. As he stated in ‘The Fisherman’, Yeats intended ‘to write for [his] own race’, meaning not only that his poetry was addressed to an Irish audience, but that it celebrated the Irish race in the epic sense of the tale of the tribe. He referred to the matter explicitly in his autobiography, emphasizing ‘the moral element in poetry’ as ‘the means whereby [it is] accepted into the social order and become[s] a part of life’ (Aut, 490). For Yeats, the meaning of the word moral is connected to his belief that ‘Supreme art is a traditional statement of certain heroic and religious truths’ (Aut, 490). This statement aptly describes his first play, The Countess Cathleen (1892), which depicts the tragic heroism that he envisioned for a newly fashioned Ireland, symbolically embodied by the heroine. The same goal underpins his exhortation, in part V of ‘Under Ben Bulben’ (1939), to Irish poets to: Sing the lords and ladies gay That were beaten into the clay Through seven heroic centuries; (VP, 640)

As these lines suggest, he urged them to perpetuate not only their heroism but the Anglo-Irish aristocratic tradition, which he sought to reinvest through his poetic craft, and which earned him the epithet of reactionary from some factions of Irish society. However, no work of his had a more direct link to public morality than the play Cathleen Ni Houlihan (1902), stemming from his early Irish republican associations; its heroic patriotism having, according to the poet, inspired a whole generation of Irishmen to heroic feats. Moreover, his commentary on contemporary political events inspired some of his most culturally significant and artistically accomplished poems such as ‘Easter 1916’, ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’ and the Parnell poems. The fact that Pessoa entitled his first article ‘A nova poesia portuguesa sociologicamente considerada’ (OPP, II, 1145) shows that he ascribed a sociological function to poetry, which he described as being ‘Ter uma acção sobre a humanidade, contribuir com todo o poder do meu esforço para a civilização’ [To have an action over humanity, to contribute with all the power of my efforts to civilization] in a letter to Armando Cortes-Rodrigues from 19 January 1915 (C, I, 141). In his opinion, the best way for the poet to exercise inf luence over humanity was by writing poetry with patriotic subject matter and tone, as he stated further ahead in the letter: ‘a ideia patriótica, sempre mais ou menos presente nos meus propósitos, avulta agora em mim; e não penso fazer arte que não medite fazê-lo para erguer alto o nome português através do que eu consiga realizar.’ [the patriotic idea, always more or less present in my intentions, is now enhanced in me; and I cannot think of

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making art that doesn’t aim to raise the Portuguese name high through what I am able to achieve] (C, I, 141). Although this comment applies to his work as a whole, the sociological aspect is chief ly evident in Mensagem, his most patriotic work. Raul Morodo identifies a direct link between the book and contemporary reactionary political movements in Portugal: Tendo em conta a época em que Pessoa escreve [a maioria dos poemas em Mensagem] — isto é entre a ditadura militar nacionalista [1926] e o Estado Novo salazarista [1933] — [...] a projecção política do longo e brilhante poema era indubitavelmente de aproximação ao estado de coisas dominante. Não de identificação, mas sim de concordância nacionalista-imperial.92 [Taking into account the fact that the period in which Pessoa writes the majority of the poems in Mensagem — that is, between the nationalist dictatorship [1926] and Salazar’s New State [1933] — [...] the political projection of the long and brilliant poem was undoubtedly one of approximation to the dominant state of affairs. Not of identification, but of imperial-nationalist agreement.]

The fact that Pessoa also published the political essay ‘O Interregno: Defesa e Justificação da Ditadura Militar em Portugal’ [The Interregnum: Defence and Justification of the Military Dictatorship in Portugal] (1928) in the period leading up to the publication of Mensagem (1934) indicates that he had the contemporary political scene in mind.93 However, to read this work as political in the usual sense of the word would be inaccurate, given the symbolic and mystical quality of the nationalism that pervades it, as discussed earlier. Notwithstanding this, it is clear that Pessoa expected his book to move the Portuguese people to some unspecified form of action. Paradoxically, the esoteric mysticism in Yeats’s and Pessoa’s epic-heroic works allied to their anachronistic mythical method sabotaged their intentions of promoting effective change in Ireland and Portugal through literature. In Yeats’s case, this tendency is predominant in The Wanderings of Oisin, which he considered ‘too remote from common life’ (CL, I, 132), and it resurfaced in his later symbolic Cuchulain plays and poetry. Even a poem like ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’ (1923), which is a direct response and commentary on the political situation of Ireland at the time, displays the poet’s ambivalent position in the ensuing stanza from part V, entitled ‘The Road at My Door’: I count those feathered balls of soot The moor-hen guides upon the stream, To silence the envy in my thought; And turn towards my chamber, caught In the cold snows of a dream. (VP, 424)

These lines illustrate the poet’s (unwilling) alienation from the reality that surrounds him, signalling his escape into the realm of poetry, which becomes increasingly more dissociated from myth-making. A further instance of alienation from contemporary political reality is patent in ‘The Statues’ (1939), in which ‘[t]he national character of the Irish’, as Seamus Deane argues, ‘has become a secret discipline’, accessible only to those initiated into his visionary nationalism.94 In a letter to Katharine Tynan from 22–28 September 1888, Yeats says:

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In the second part of Oisin under disguise of symbolism I have said severel [sic] things, to which I only have the key. The romance is for my readers, they must not even know there is a symbol anywhere. They will not find out. If they did it would spoil the art. Yet the whole poem is full of symbols. (CL, I, 98)

The same can be argued of Mensagem, the esoteric content of which — described by Pessoa as a mixture of ‘misticismo nacionalista’ [nationalist mysticism] and ‘religiosidade herética’ [heretic spirituality] (EA, 202) — distances it from reality, likewise explaining the ‘perplexity and confusion’ felt by many of its readers. The fundamental contradiction at the heart of Yeats’s and Pessoa’s heroic poetry lies in the fact that although it betrays a certain note of political engagement, evident for instance in Pessoa’s ‘À Memória do Presidente-Rei Sidónio Pais’ and Yeats’s Parnell poems, its esoteric symbolism makes it harder for its content to be actualized. For the most part, the poets responded to the problematic national identities of their respective countries by proposing idealized imagined communities. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Pessoa’s O Marinheiro [The Mariner] (1914). This poetic drama features a narrative section in which one of the characters tells the story of a stranded sailor whose fate resembles that of Ulysses and who can therefore be regarded partly as a symbol of the epic hero. However, unlike the archetypal Homeric model, this sailor does not return home to resume his place in society but remains permanently exiled in the imagined homeland that he created to escape the suffering caused by his nostalgia for his real homeland: Como ele não tinha meio de voltar à pátria, e cada vez que se lembrava dela sofria, pôs-se a sonhar uma pátria que nunca tivesse tido [...]. Cada hora ele construía em sonho esta falsa pátria, e ele nunca deixava de sonhar [...]. Um dia [...] o marinheiro cansou-se de sonhar... Quis então recordar a sua pátria verdadeira..., mas viu que não se lembrava de nada, que ela não existia para ele... (OPP, I, 598). [Since he had no way of returning to his homeland, and since remembering it made him suffer, he dreamed up a homeland he’d never had [...]. Hour by hour he built that false homeland in his dreams, and he dreamed continuously [...]. One day [...] the mariner got tired of dreaming... He felt like remembering his true homeland... , but he couldn’t remember anything, and he realized it no longer existed for him...]95

The momentous emotional investment the sailor had made in the fictional homeland meant that it effectively substituted his real homeland in his consciousness. The metaphor in this early work provides the key to understanding Pessoa’s ultimate mythopoeic goal in Mensagem: the substitution of the existing image of the nation for a new one, ‘constructed [...] as the purely imaginary projection of a deterritorialized concept of nation’.96 Pessoa’s conceptualization of the Portuguese nation as imaginary resembles Yeats’s characterization of the modern Irish nation in the following passage: Is there nation-wide multiform reverie, every mind passing through a stream of suggestion, and all streams acting and reacting upon one another [...]? A man walked, as it were, casting a shadow, and yet one could never say which was man and which was shadow, or how many the shadows that he cast. Was not a

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Yeats’s expression ‘multiform reverie’ suggests a unity created out of the diversity of the collective minds of the people, comparable to the ‘fiction of unity and totality through diversity’ intrinsic to Pessoa’s ‘figure of Empire’.97 Likewise, Yeats’s metonymical link between the national ‘multiform reverie’ and the man casting shadows (signifying the poet, whose identity lies neither in himself nor in the shadows but in their continuous ‘interchange’) has a counterpart in Pessoa’s identification of luso-universalism with the ‘radically decentred subject’ of ‘the modernist literary tradition’.98 The ‘originating symbol’ that Yeats refers to at the end of the passage is the fiction of unity that constitutes the foundational myth of a nation, gathering its citizens in a collective ideal. That fiction is the product of a shared history and of the creative imagination of its poets, as was the case with Homer’s epic poems, which have their counterpart in modern heroic poetry. Pessoa makes the same argument in ‘Ulysses’ from the part I of Mensagem: O mytho é o nada que é tudo. O mesmo sol que abre os céus É um mito brilhante e mudo — O corpo morto de Deus, Vivo e desnudo. Este que aqui aportou, Foi por não ser existindo. Sem existir nos bastou. Por não ter vindo foi vindo E nos creou. Assim a lenda se escorre A entrar nas realidade, E a fecundá-la decorre. Em baixo, a vida, metade De nada, morre. (OPP, I, 1146) [Myth is the nothing that is everything. The very sun that breaks through the skies Is a bright and speechless myth — God’s dead body, Naked and alive. This hero who cast anchor here, Because he never was, slowly came to exist. Without ever being, he sufficed us. Having never come here, He came to be our founder. Thus the legend, little by little, Seeps into reality And constantly enriches it. Life down below, half Of nothing, perishes.] (Zenith 1, 373)

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This poem centres on the performative quality of mythopoeic discourse, legitimizing the re-invention of the Portuguese nation through the auspices of poetry. Irene Ramalho Santos highlights Pessoa’s conviction that ‘truth is by nature an aesthetically-created category, or myth, that has the merely functional value of mobilizing human action’, adding that, ‘when such “aesthetic” myth-making is literary, an additional postulate involving the conviction that language has, in one of several ways, great direct effects on reality must also be assumed’.99 Poems such as this one from Mensagem corroborate Pessoa’s familiarity with this kind of performative discourse. Pessoa and Yeats sustained a belief in the mythopoeic power of poetry for most of their writing careers. However, their late poems display a growing scepticism. Several poems from Yeats’s Last Poems and Plays (1940) — notably ‘What Then?’, ‘Are You Content?’, ‘Hound Voice’, ‘High Talk’, and ‘The Circus Animal’s Desertion’ — display a revisionist attitude toward his overall work. This collection also features grave ref lections on the potentially negative repercussions of works with a nationalist bias, as expressed in the following stanza from ‘The Man and the Echo’: All that I have said and done Now that I am old and ill, Turns into a question till I lie awake night after night And never get the answers right. Did that play of mine send out Certain men the English shot? (VP, 632)

The play he is referring to in these lines is none other than the aforementioned Cathleen ni Houlihan, which, if read against the tragic events of the Easter Rising, constitutes a poignant example of the potentially dire consequences of a mythopoeic conception of literature. Although Yeats’s questioning can be regarded partly as a rhetorical device characteristic of his late poetry, it also betrays a candid insecurity concerning the impact of his poetry, beckoning the reassurance of his readers. Pessoa’s orthonymous later poems are also pervaded with a disenchanted tone. In a characteristic paradoxical manner, Pessoa also redressed his epic-heroic poetry through thematic and formal subversion. Indeed, the elegiac tone of several poems in Mensagem can be described as adverse epic, undermining both the celebration of the past heroic deeds of the Portuguese intended in the first and second parts and the impetus toward a future of renewed fame and glory prophetically intimated in the third part of the book. This anti-epic strain is also evident in ‘Elegia na Sombra’ [Elegy in the Shadow] (1935), which was written after Mensagem: Lenta, a raça esmorece, e a alegria É como uma memoria de outrem. Passa Um vento frio na nossa nostalgia E a nostalgia torna-se desgraça. [...] Os heroes resplandecem a distancia Num passado impossivel de se ver Com os olhos da fé ou os da ancia. Lembramos nevoa, sombras a esquecer.

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This poem establishes an antithetical intertextual relationship with Mensagem. By contrasting Portugal’s present decline with its glorious past, it subverts the heroic theme of Mensagem. Moreover, it emphatically denies the poet’s mythopoeic power: [...] O Desejado Talvez não seja mais que um sonho louco De quem, por muito te ter, Patria, amado, Acha que todo o amor por ti é pouco. (PFP, 5, 204) [Perhaps the Desired one Is nothing more than a mad dream Of someone who loved you so, Homeland, That they thought all the love for you is too little.]

Pessoa’s subversion of the epic discourse-type extends to his heteronymous poetry, surfacing in ‘Ode Marítima’ attributed to the heteronym Álvaro de Campos. Referring to this ode in a late poem entitled ‘Há tanto tempo que não sou capaz’ (1934), Campos highlights its general structure of strophe, antistrophe and epode (PAC, 252). His comment traces the inf luence of the classical ode in ‘Ode Marítima’ as the constituent elements of the poem correspond to the three parts of that poetic form. In the classical ode, the strophe corresponded to the portion of the ode sung by the chorus as it moved from east to west (of the stage); the antistrophe, to the response of the chorus in its returning movement from west to east; and the epode completed this movement, comprising the whole chorus singing in unison in the centre. Campos’s long poem re-enacts these three movements, substituting for the chorus the internal stream of consciousness of the speaker and adding a temporal dimension to the spatial one in the original classical ode. Thus, the strophe corresponds to the opening scene, which finds him standing on a deserted peer watching a cruise ship approach the harbour of Lisbon, identified through a

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reference to the river that bathes the city and f lows into the Atlantic. The time of action is the present and the ship is ostensibly hailing from the Mediterranean Sea — as suggested by the epithet ‘classic’ (PAC, 86) that he uses to describe it — towards Lisbon, the western-most tip of Europe. The antistrophe comprises the central part of the poem, which consists of a long section focusing on the sea voyages of the past (previously associated with the East in ‘Dois Excertos de Odes’), describing the same eastward movement as that of the chorus in the classical ode. Allured by the call of the sea, Campos sets out on an imaginary voyage — ‘E começo a sonhar, começo a envolver-me do sonho das ágoas’ (PAC, 86) [And I begin to dream, to be wrapped by the dream of the waters] (Zenith 1, 172) — revisiting the great maritime exploits of ancient times — ‘Chamam por mim, levantando uma voz corpórea, os longes, / As épocas marítimas sentidas no passado, a chamar’ (PAC, 87) [The faraway calls me with a bodily voice, / And it’s every seafaring age there ever was, calling] (Zenith 1, 173). His reverie can be seen as an attempt to recover the maritime symbols of national identity associated with the age of discoveries, evoked in the lines, ‘Portugueses atirados de Sagres / Para a aventura indefinida, para o Mar Absoluto, para realizar o Impossivel!’ (PAC, 90?) [Portuguese launched from Sagres / Into an uncertain adventure, onto the Absolute Sea, to achieve the Impossible] (Zenith 1, 175). However, the heroic facet of the sea adventures is undermined by their inherent violence, encapsulated in the line ‘O cio sombrio e sádico da estrídula vida maritima’ (PAC, 88) [The dark and sadistic libido of the strident maritime life] (Zenith 1, 174). This violence is epitomized by the pirates, whom he then recalls by invoking ‘the song of the Great Pirate as he was dying’: Fifteen men on the Dead Man’s Chest. Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum! [...] 101 Esforço-me e consigo chamar outra vez ante os meus olhos na alma, Outra vez, mas através duma imaginação quase literária, A fúria da pirataria, da chacina, o apetite, quase o paladar, do saque, Da chacina inútil de mulheres e de crianças, Da tortura fútil, e só para nos distrairmos, dos passageiros pobres E a sensualidade de escangalhar e partir as coisas mais queridas dos outros, (PAC, 102) [With a struggle I’m able, but through an almost literary imagination, To bring back into my soul’s field of vision The rage of piracy, of slaughter, the almost mouth-watering appetite for pillage, For the frivolous slaughter of women and children, For the gratuitous torture of poorer passengers, merely to amuse ourselves, And the sensuality of breaking and shattering the things others most cherish, (Zenith 1, 189)

The sadistic imagery with which he describes the demeanour of the pirates introduces a deliberate anti-epic tone to the poem. In the last section, Campos awakens from his reverie — ‘E abro de repente os olhos, que não tinha fechado. / Ah, que alegria a de sair dos sonhos outra vez!’ (PAC, 104) [And I suddenly open my eyes, which I hadn’t closed. / Ah, how good to emerge once and for all from my dreams! (Zenith 1, 191)] — and returns to the

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present, a present informed by the knowledge of the past, thus uniting the two previous parts and providing a fitting epode to the ode: Nada perdeu a poesia. E agora ha mais as máquinas Com a sua poesia também, e todo o novo genero de vida Comercial, mundana, intelectual, sentimental, Que a era das máquinas veio trazer para as almas. As viagens agora são tão belas como eram dantes [...] Os portos cheios de vapores de muitas especies! [...] Tão prazenteiro o seu garbo quieto de cousas comerciais que andam no mar, No velho mar sempre o homerico, ó Ulisses! (PAC, 104–05) [Nothing has lost its poetry. And now there are also machines With their poetry, and this entirely new kind of life, This commercial, worldly, intellectual and sentimental life Which the machine age has conferred on our souls. Voyages are as lovely as they ever were, [...] The ports full of every kind of steamer! [...] So attractive in their stately calm of commercial things that ply the sea, The ancient and forever Homeric sea, O Ulysses!] (Zenith 1, 191–92)

Campos’s apology of the modern voyages is reinforced by his grandiloquent tone, which emulates the tradition of the Pindaric heroic ode, and by the references to Homer and to Ulysses, ascribing an epic dimension to the voyages of modern times. Pessoa’s use of the heteronym to express an antithetical viewpoint to the heroic epos of Mensagem constitutes an instance of stylistic diversification through the deploy ment of personae in his poetry. This chapter has shown how Pessoa and Yeats used dramatis personae inspired by legendary or historical figures from their respective countries in their re-enactments of the epic genre. Yeats’s and Pessoa’s heroic poetry constitutes another example of stylistic diversification, one that provided both an antithesis to their pastoral poetry and a platform for their literary nationalism. It has also shown how they occasionally adopted an anti-epic mode, which intimated their secret doubts and fears about their nationalist poetic stance. The dichotomy between heroic and anti-heroic ref lects the dramatic dialectic underpinning their poetry as a whole, which was often associated with the deployment of different personae. The use of personae as a strategy of stylistic diversification will be examined in the context of their dramatic poetics in the next chapter. Notes to Chapter 3 1. David M. Halperin, Before Pastoral: Theocritus and the Ancient Tradition of Bucolic Poetry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), p. 238: ‘An examination of Theocritus’ poetic technique as well as his choice and treatment of themes reveals a pattern of contrasts or oppositions between bucolic epos and heroic epos — [...] between the heroic and non-heroic registers within the tradition of epos’. 2. This article appeared in the first issue of the periodical A Águia (March 1912), the mouthpiece of the Renascença Portuguesa, and it was followed by three other articles that Pessoa wrote on the same subject, which were published in subsequent issues.

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3. See Charles I. Armstrong, Romantic Organicism: From Idealist Origins to Ambivalent Afterlife (Basing stoke: Macmillan, 2003), p. 20. He quotes Herder’s Ueber die neuere Deutsche Literatur, in Sämtliche Werke. 4. Thomas Carlyle, Characteristics (Boston, MA: Osgood, 1877), p. 28. 5. Helder Macedo, ‘A Mensagem e as mensagens de Oliveira Martins e de Junqueiro’, Colóquio/ Letras, 103 (1988), 28–39 (p. 34). 6. Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present, ed. by Richard D. Altick (New York: New York University Press, 1965), p. 7. Pessoa had a copy of Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus; Heroes and Hero-Worship; Past and Present (London: Chapman and Hall, 1903) in his library. 7. Pessoa conceived of Mensagem in 1915 and wrote various poems for it over the following nineteen years. 8. Uncollected Prose by W. B. Yeats, ed. by John P. Frayne and Colton Johnson, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1970–75), ii: Reviews, Articles and Other Miscellaneous Verse, 1897–1939, ed. by John P. Frayne and Colton Johnson, p. 196. Hereafter quoted in the text as UP, followed by volume and page number. 9. Darlene J. Sadlier, An Introduction to Fernando Pessoa: Modernism and the Paradoxes of Authorship (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), p. 28. 10. Yeats’s interest in this subject is confirmed by the fact that he owned a copy of Greek Folk Poesy: Annotated Translations from the Whole Cycle of Romaic Folk-Verse and Folk-Prose, ed. and trans. by Lucy M. J. Garnett, 2 vols (Guildford: Billing and Sons, 1896). The fact that Pessoa also had a copy of the same edition in his library confirms the poets’ shared interest in this subject. 11. Lady Augusta Gregory, Cuchulain of Muirthemne: The Story of the Men of the Red Branch of Ulster, preface by W. B. Yeats (London: John Murray, 1902), p. xiv. 12. Carlyle makes this point in Book II of Past and Present, entitled ‘The Ancient Monk’, which proposes a model for English society drawn from the Middle Ages. Pessoa had studied this chapter attentively in preparation for the examination for the University of the Cape of Good Hope in 1904. 13. Teixeira de Pascoaes, A saudade e o saudosismo (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 1988), p. 95. 14. Fernando Pessoa, Sobre Portugal: introdução ao problema nacional, ed. by Joel Serrão and others (Lisbon: Ática, 1978), pp. 254–55. 15. Liebregts, p. 57. 16. Lady Augusta Gregory, Gods and Fighting Men: The Story of the Tuatha de Danaan and of the Fianna of Ireland, preface by W. B. Yeats (London: John Murray, 1904), p. xx. 17. M. A. Bernstein, The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 14: ‘The epic presents a narrative of its audience’s own cultural, historical, or mythic heritage, providing models of exemplary conduct [...] by which its readers can regulate their lives and adjust their shared customs’. 18. Robert N. Anderson, ‘Epic and Intertext: What Mensagem Tells Us about Os Lusíadas’, Romance Notes, 28 (1987), 13–19 (p. 13). 19. Gregory, Cuchulain of Muirthemne, p. ix. 20. Yeats’s Poems, p. 483. 21. W. B. Stanford, The Ulysses Theme: A Study in the Adaptability of a Traditional Hero (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1954), p. 193. 22. Joseph B. Mayor, W. Warde Fowler and R. S. Conway, Virgil’s Messianic Eclogue (London: John Murray, 1907), p. 18. 23. Mayor, Fowler & Conway, p. 20. 24. Stanford, p. 176. 25. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (London: Paladin Grafton, 1988), p. 226. 26. Campbell, p. 218. 27. Stanford, p. 139. 28. Campbell, p. 36. 29. See Russell K. Alspach, ‘Some Sources of Yeats’s The Wanderings of Oisin’, PMLA, 58, (1943), 849–66 (p. 853). 30. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life, i, 82: ‘The Laureate’s ‘Voyage of Maeldune’ had appeared in 1880 and WBY’s 1889 publication was full of inescapably Tennysonian echoes’. According to

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Daniel Albright, ed., W. B. Yeats: The Poems (London: Dent, 1994), p. 398, ‘The inf luence of Tennyson is probably as important as that of Comyn and the old dialogues of Oisin and Patrick’, highlighting both ‘The Voyage of Maeldune’ and ‘The Lotos-Eaters’. 31. Harold Bloom, Yeats (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 87. 32. James Land Jones, Adam’s Dream: Mythic Consciousness in Keats and Yeats (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1975), p. 179. 33. Jones, p. 179. 34. Martin McKinsey, ‘Counter-Homericism in Yeats’s “The Wanderings of Oisin” ’, in W. B. Yeats and Postcolonialism, ed. by Deborah Fleming (West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill Press, 2001), pp. 235–52 (p. 239). 35. Geoffrey R. Barrow, ‘The Personal Lyric Disguised: Fernando Pessoa’s Mensagem’, Luso-Brazilian Review, 13 (1976), 91–99 (p. 93). 36. Barrow, p. 93. 37. T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber & Faber; New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1957), pp. 89, 94. 38. Irene Ramalho Santos, Atlantic Poets: Fernando Pessoa’s Turn in Anglo-American Modernism (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2003), p. 45. 39. Pessoa, quoted in Santos, p. 54. 40. Campbell, p. 51. 41. Santos, p. 25. 42. Santos, p. 31. 43. Ibid. 44. Campbell, p. 77. 45. Anderson, p. 15. 46. See Jacinto do Prado Coelho, ‘D’Os Lusíadas à Mensagem’, in Actas do I Congresso Internacional de Estudos Pessoanos (Porto: Centro de Estudos Pessoanos, 1979) pp. 306–16 (p. 312). 47. R. Deryck Williams, The Aeneid (London: Allen & Unwin, 1987), p. 80. 48. Williams, p. 97. 49. Williams, pp. 159, 161. 50. Yeats, quoted in Albright, The Myth Against Myth, p. 62. 51. Sousa, Ronald W., ‘The Structure of Pessoa’s Mensagem’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 59 (1982), pp. 58–66 (p. 60). Pessoa would have read about it in Hargrave Jennings’s The Rosicrucians: Their Rites and Mysteries, 4th edn (London: Routledge, n.d.), a copy of which is extant in his personal library. This book was also among the occultist works which inf luenced Yeats. 52. Sousa, p. 59. Pessoa translated this particular work into Portuguese and therefore was quite familiar with its content. Yeats had first-hand knowledge of the Theosophical doctrine since he was a member of the Theosophical Society in London, as described in ‘Four Years: 1887–1891’ (Aut, 173–82). 53. Frank Kinahan, Yeats, Folklore, and Occultism: Contexts of the Early Work and Thought (Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman, 1988), p. 103. 54. Sousa, pp. 61, 59. 55. Poems of Fernando Pessoa, trans. and ed. by Edwin Honig and Susan M. Brown (San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 1998), p. 195. 56. Campbell, pp. 120, 193. 57. Kinahan, Yeats, Folklore, and Occultism, p. 103. He argues: ‘Sinnett’s volume [Esoteric Buddhism (1883)] provides a firm base for the claim that Oisin’s wanderings through the three islands are a poeticized version of the journey through Devachan, the shadowy realm in which the soul abides while awaiting its next appearance on earth’. 58. Campbell, p. 193. 59. Pais was the leader of an uprising that took place in 1917, becoming president of the Portuguese Republic and establishing a presidentialist government. He was killed in Lisbon by a fellow countryman in 1918. 60. Portugal, sebastianismo e quinto império, ed. by António Quadros, Obra em prosa de Fernando Pessoa (Mem Martins: Publicações Europa-América, 1986), p. 57. 61. Yeats’s Poems, p. 615.

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62. Gould, ‘Frazer, Yeats and the Reconsecration of Folklore’, p. 142. 63. Ibid. 64. Gould, ‘Frazer, Yeats and the Reconsecration of Folklore’, p. 143. 65. Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (London: Fraser, 1841), pp. 232. 66. Quadros, ed., Portugal, sebastianismo e quinto imperio, p. 42. 67. Richard Greaves, Transition, Reception and Modernism in W. B. Yeats (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2002), p. 87. 68. Greaves, p. 84. 69. Raul Morodo, Fernando Pessoa e as ‘Revoluções Nacionais’ europeias (Lisbon: Caminho, 1997), p. 74. 70. Yeats uses this term in a text entitled ‘Michael Robartes Foretells’, published by Walter Kelly Hood, ‘Michael Robartes: Two Occult Manuscripts’, in Yeats and the Occult, ed. by George Mills Harper (London: Macmillan, 1976), pp. 204–24 (p. 220). 71. Pessoa, quoted in Morodo, p. 74. 72. Carlyle, Past and Present, pp. 34, 36. 73. T. S. Eliot, Poetry and Drama (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: Faber & Faber, 1951), p. 87. 74. Carlyle, Past and Present, p. 71. This prognosis occurs in chapter V, ‘Twelfth Century’, of Book II, ‘The Ancient Monk’, with which Pessoa was familiar. 75. See Severino, p. 257. Pessoa read Sartor Resartus while he was preparing for the Intermediate university examination, and was deeply impressed by Carlyle’s ideology. 76. Poems of Fernando Pessoa, p. 200. 77. Macedo, ‘A Mensagem e as mensagens de Oliveira Martins e de Junqueiro’, p. 32. 78. Warwick Gould and Marjorie Reeves, Joachim of Fiore and the Myth of the Eternal Evangel in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Oxford: Clarendon, 2001), p. 222. 79. Gould and Reeves, p. 229. 80. Gould and Reeves, p. 221. 81. Seamus Deane, ‘National Character and National Audience: Races, Crowds and Readers’, in Critical Approaches to Anglo-Irish Literature, ed. by Michael Allen and Angela Wilcox (Gerrards Cross: Smythe, 1989), pp. 40–52 (p. 45). 82. Yeats, ed., Poems of William Blake, p. xxxiv. 83. Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali: Song-Offerings, intro. by W. B. Yeats, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 1913), pp. xiv, xix. 84. Tagore, pp. vii–viii. 85. Quadros, ed., Portugal, sebastianismo e quinto império, p. 67. 86. E. M. Vida, Romantic Affinities: German Authors and Carlyle (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), p. 139. According to Vida, the first term had first been used by the German writer Jean Paul, whereas the second term was ‘Carlyle’s translation of Jean Paul’s “geistige Wiedergeburt” ’. 87. Vida, pp. 136, 138. 88. Sampaio Bruno, O encoberto (Porto: Lello, 1983; repr. from 1904), pp. 249, 244. 89. A grande alma portuguesa: a carta ao conde Keyserling e outros dois textos inéditos, ed. by Pedro Teixeira Mota (Lisbon: M. Lencastre, 1988), p. 17. This text in English was most likely written between 1911 and 1913. 90. This letter was written in response to Keyserling’s conferences delivered at the time of his visit to Portugal on 15 April 1930. Having attended those conferences, one of which was significantly entitled ‘L’ Âme d’Une Nation’, Pessoa wrote the letter to rectify Keyserling’s arguments. 91. W. B. Yeats, Mythologies (New York: Macmillan, 1959), p. 345. 92. Morodo, p. 94. 93. Morodo, p. 97, states that this essay was published in Acção, the newspaper of the Fascist organization ‘Núcleo da Acção Nacional’. The poem ‘Á Memória do Presidente-Rei Sidónio Pais’ had also been published in Acção in 1920. 94. Deane, p. 51. 95. The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa, ed. and trans. by Richard Zenith (New York: Grove Press, 2001), pp. 27, 29. 96. António Souza Ribeiro, ‘ “A Tradition of Empire”: Fernando Pessoa and Germany’, Portuguese Studies, 21 (2005), 201–09 (p. 209).

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97. Ribeiro, p. 209. 98. Ribeiro, p. 209. 99. Santos, p. 61. 100. Poemas de Fernando Pessoa, ed. by Luís Prista, Edição Crítica de Fernando Pessoa, Série Maior, 1 (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional–Casa da Moeda, 1997–), v: 1934–1935 (2000), pp. 201–02. Hereafter cited in the text as PFP, 5, followed by the page number. 101. These lines are an intertextual allusion to Captain J. Flint’s swan song in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. Pessoa had a copy of the 1883 edition of this book in his library.

CHAPTER 4

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Dramatic Poetics Introduction This chapter examines Pessoa’s and Yeats’s incorporation of principles from the dramatic genre into their discourses on poetry and their poetic practices, in particular their use of personae. This aspect of their work has been the subject of previous biographist and psychoanalytic critical readings of each poet. However, this study argues that their dramatic poetics and its accompanying poetic praxis should be regarded as a strategy of stylistic diversification that provided the poets with a means of rehearsing distinct poetic stances and genres, while maintaining the authenticity intrinsic to lyric poetry. This chapter traces the development of the poets’ evolving dramatic poetics through the overarching metaphor of construction in their poetry, which symbolically equates the process of dramatic self-othering to a mythopoeic creative act. Moreover, it seeks to illustrate the extent to which the aesthetic positioning and the poetic practice of the two poets was concomitant with one of the most important aesthetic developments of the period, namely ‘the movement toward depersonalization and abstraction’ which occurred roughly between 1875 and 1927 and ushered in modern poetry.1 The period in which the poets started to write was marked by a dramatic awareness of the fragmentary and chaotic nature of modernity, resulting in numerous reactions from intellectuals and artists. Richard Ellmann noted the aesthetes’ conception of a divided personality, which assumed that ‘a man is really two men. There is the insignificant man who is given, whether by God, by society, or simply by birth; there is the significant man, who is made by the first’.2 One finds examples of several artists experimenting with depersonalization through style in the fin de siècle, such as Wilde and Pater in Britain, Mallarmé and Paul Valéry in France. Another instance of depersonalization was the creation of pseudonyms by writers, including some of Yeats’s acquaintances such as George Russell (‘AE’) and William Sharp (‘Fiona Macleod’). Yeats concurred with this approach to art, as corroborated by the following excerpt from ‘The Death of Synge’: ‘I think that all happiness depends on the energy to assume a mask of some other self; that all joyous or creative life is a rebirth as something not oneself, something which [...] is created in a moment and perpetually renewed’ (Aut, 503). Pessoa also valued depersonalization as a literary device, arguing that ‘No artist should have only one personality. On the contrary, he should have several, each one from like states of mind which would discard the fiction that personality is only one and indivisible’.3

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The axiomatic tone of Yeats’s and Pessoa’s statements is evocative of Wilde’s epigrams. Wilde exercised an important inf luence in the early stages of delineation of the poets’ dramatic poetics of stylistic self-othering. Yeats acknowledged in a letter to Katharine Tynan from late June 1891 that he had read Wilde’s Intentions (CL, I, 252), a collection which included his aesthetic essays ‘The Critic as Artist’, ‘The Decay of Lying’, and ‘The Truth of Masks’. In addition to the essays, he was also familiar with Oscar Wilde’s fiction, notably The Picture of Dorian Gray, wherein the protagonist claims that ‘insincerity is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities’.4 This utterance could aptly describe Yeats’s use of poetic masks. Pessoa, in turn, had an English edition of Wilde’s short stories, which included ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.’.5 One of the discussing parties in this short story structured as a dialogical essay states that ‘all art is to a certain degree a mode of acting, an attempt to realise one’s own personality on some imaginative plane out of reach of the trammelling accidents and limitations of real life’.6 The transcendence of personality through dramatic devices would certainly have captured Pessoa’s interest and inspired his incipient experiments with literary personalities. Development of Yeats’s doctrine of the Mask In Reveries over Childhood and Youth, Yeats claims that from the outset of his career he was concerned with issues of poetic self-representation, as illustrated below: I was about to learn that if a man is to write lyric poetry he must be shaped by nature and art to some one out of half a dozen traditional poses, and be lover or saint, sage or sensualist, or mere mocker of all life; and that none but that stroke of luckless luck can open before him the accumulated expression of the world. And this thought before it could be knowledge was an instinct. (Aut, 87; my emphasis)

This passage retrospectively reconstitutes one of the first formulations of Yeats’s ‘doctrine of the “mask” ’ (Aut, 152). The highlighted expressions represent the key tenets of an incipient poetics. Yeats intuited that lyrical expression relies on a process of self-dramatization whereby the poet embodies a poetic stance inspired by literary tradition. Although it conveys a personal utterance, Yeats thought that lyric poetry is also universal, expressing a comprehensive view of existence recorded by literary tradition over time, as the term ‘accumulated’ suggests. Despite limiting the process of self-othering to a single ‘pose’ and depicting it as accidental not assumed by the poet, as the use of the passive form of the verb suggests, in the passage above Yeats lists an array of antithetical poses, which suggests the potential for adopting different and even opposing stances. Additionally, the fact that each of the poses he lists corresponds to a specific lyrical genre (amorous, religious, philosophical and satirical poetry respectively) ascribes a stylistic quality to the process of selfdramatization, which would become more prominent in future pronouncements. Notwithstanding his insightful realization in the mid-1880s, it took some time for Yeats to incorporate those theories fully into his poetry. Looking back on his early poetry in the section of The Trembling of the Veil entitled ‘Four Years: 1887– 1891’, he states:

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For ten or twelve years more I suffered continual remorse, and only became content when my abstractions had composed themselves into picture and dramatization. My very remorse helped to spoil my early poetry, giving it an element of sentimentality through my refusal to permit it any share of an intellect which I considered impure. (Aut, 188; my emphasis)

This passage revisits his pressing aesthetic dilemma as a young poet — namely, how to avoid the sentimentality that results from lyrical subjectivity without succumbing to the abstraction of overly intellectualized poetry. This was not only a concern of his own but that of an entire generation in the 1890s. In a lecture from 1910 entitled ‘Friends of My Youth’, Yeats makes the following enlightening comment about the poetry of the group of poets comprising the Rhymers’ Club, of which he was also a part: ‘All wished to make their lyrics personal [...] but they wished to make their own poems as personal as if they themselves were characters in a drama’.7 One of the most significant transformations in his poetry occurred during this period through the deployment of personae in several poems of The Wind Among the Reeds (1899). Among these personae were Hanrahan and Michael Robartes, who had featured as characters in his early fiction, respectively Stories of Red Hanrahan (1897) and Rosa Alchemica (1897). Although Yeats referred to them as symbols of ‘principles of the mind’ (VP, 803), the fact that these personae were named ascribed the quality of dramatic monologues to the poems in the collection, illustrating the process through which abstractions are objectified according to the method of ‘dramatization’ Yeats described above. Bearing in mind that the period Yeats refers to in the passage quoted above runs from 1887 to 1891, his acknowledgement that he kept a ‘sentimental’ style for at least ten more years would place the stylistic change in his poetry at the turn of the century, around the time he wrote ‘Adam’s Curse’ (1902), which is considered the breakthrough lyric of Yeats’s naturalistic style. This poem is crucial to understanding his unfolding dramatic poetics. Dramatization is present at several levels, the most obvious one being the external structure of the poem, partly narrative, partly dramatic, featuring two personae engaged in a dialogue. Despite the limited action described in the poem, there is enough differentiation in the utterances of the personae, in accordance with their male and female types, to allow for dramatic tension. Additionally, the self-referential theme addresses the process of writing itself, highlighting the artifice of simplicity that the poet must deploy to convey spontaneity, conventionally associated with sincerity in lyric poetry. The latter can only be achieved through ‘much labouring’, as the poet persona argues in the following lines: A line will take us hours maybe; Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought, Our stitching and unstitching has been naught. (VP, 204)

The poised presentation of the argument in these lines signifies the poetic labour underpinning the ostensibly spontaneous and colloquial tone of the poem as of a real conversation. The studied effortlessness and conversational tone of the poem are the poetic equivalent of Castiglione’s concept of sprezzatura.8 The desire to create a semblance of simplicity brought about a significant transformation in Yeats’s poetry

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— namely the stripping down of the archaic diction and elaborate stylistic devices which marked his early poetry. This affected not only his subsequent works but also the early poems, which were revised assiduously at different stages of his career. The antithetical tensions that unfold in the poem both at semantic and stylistic levels constitute a characteristic feature of Yeats’s dialectical method, a key element of his dramatic poetics. In a letter from 1907 to Thomas MacDonagh, Yeats criticized Browning’s drama for its ‘over much dialectical dialogue’.9 Despite this criticism, it was likely this trait of Browning’s works that inspired him to use this device in his poetry. According to John Kelly, ‘In his youth WBY had admired Browning as one of the few nineteenth-century English poets to write plays that were theatrically viable’ (CL, IV, 783, n. 4), and had ‘praised him for his “dramatic method” ’ (CL, IV, 143, n. 5). Emulating his Victorian model, Yeats’s developed his own dramatic method, which he describes thus in ‘The Bounty of Sweden’: Every now and then, when something has stirred my imagination, I begin talking to myself. I speak in my own person and dramatize myself [...]. Occasionally, I write out what I have said in verse [...]. I do not think of my soliloquies as having different literary qualities. They stir my interest, by their appropriateness to the men I imagine myself to be, or by their accurate description of some emotional circumstance, more than by any aesthetic value. (Aut, 532)

This statement illustrates the extent of the inf luence of drama on his poetry. The words ‘dramatize’ and ‘soliloquies’ assert the dramatic quality of the process, which nonetheless remains in the sphere of the poetic, for he writes ‘in verse’. Yeats’s incorporation of dramatic principles into his theory of poetry as a result of his experience in the Abbey theatre led him to substitute the term ‘pose’ for ‘Mask’, which he described as ‘an emotional antithesis to all that comes out of [one’s] internal nature’ (Aut, 189). This passage underscores a shift in Yeats’s perception of the process of self-representation that is ref lected both in his use of theatrical terminology and in his emphasis on self-othering, suggested by the term ‘emotional antithesis’. Yeats’s defence of the antithetical value of the mask can be traced back to the Aristotelian notion of drama as conf lict. He described this process as bringing ‘life to the dramatic crisis and expression to the point of artifice where the true self could find its tongue’ (Aut, 126). His use of the term ‘expression’ refers specifically to the writing of poetry, ascribing a stylistic quality to dramatization. Against the opposing pitfalls of sentimentality and abstraction, Yeats asserts the imaginative power of the poet to express truthful emotions distilled through style. This view recalls Wilde’s assertion, in ‘The Decay of Lying’, ‘that truth is entirely and absolutely a matter of style’.10 The stylistic underpinning of Yeats’s theory of the Mask is encapsulated in his assertion that ‘Style, personality — deliberately adopted and therefore a mask — is the only escape from the hot-faced bargainers and money-changers’ (Aut, 461). Style is depicted here as that which distinguishes the artistic personality from ‘the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast’ (E&I, 509) that constitutes the poet as a man, and from the factual reality that surrounds him. This statement echoes Wilde’s comment that ‘all art [is]

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an attempt to realise one’s own personality on some imaginative plane out of reach of the trammelling accidents and limitations of real life’.11 Yeats’s positioning also resembles the Pateresque notion of style. In his essay on the subject, Pater states, ‘[i]f the style be the man, in all the colour and intensity of a veritable apprehension, it will be in a real sense “impersonal” ’.12 This assertion reverberates in the following excerpt from Yeats’s autobiography: ‘Does not all art come when a nature, that never ceases to judge itself, exhausts personal emotion in action or desire so completely that something impersonal [...] suddenly starts into its place [...]?’ (Aut, 332). Paradoxically, in the previously mentioned lecture from 1910, Yeats stated that ‘this mysterious thing, personality, the mask, is created half consciously, half unconsciously, out of the passions, the circumstance of life’.13 The reason for this, argues Yeats, is that ‘I can only set up a secondary or interior personality created out of the tradition of myself, and this personality (alas, only possible to me in my writings) [...] must have [a] slight separation from interests [...], while remaining near enough for passion’ (Aut, 463). This passage differs from the one about literary ‘poses’ made at an earlier stage in the development of Yeats’s theory of the mask in claiming that the ‘secondary personality’ is deliberately fashioned (‘set up’) by the poet, despite acknowledging its autobiographical origin. However, the differentiation between the poet and his ‘secondary personality’ may not be as ‘slight’ as suggested in this passage from Estrangement (1909). When describing the ‘anti-self ’, Yeats refers to it as ‘a Mask that delineates a being in all things the opposite to [one’s] natural state’ (Aut, 247). By calling it ‘a being’, he endows this type of mask with greater autonomy than others, stressing the dissociation between this fictional entity and the poet persona. This stylistic device allowed for an objectified poetic diction that was truthful to the emotional and intellectual circumstances of that fictional ‘secondary self ’ as well as to its particular diction and style, as imagined by the poet. The following excerpt from a 1909 journal focusing on ‘The Tables of the Law’ illustrates rather well the logical development of the theory of the Mask and Yeats’s ref lections about its implications: ‘Is it simply the doctrine of the Mask? The choosing of some Mask? [...] Is it becoming mask after mask? [...] a continual change, a phantasmagoria’.14 As this passage suggests, once one secondary personality has been created, others soon follow in an ever-changing scene (as suggested by the term phantasmagoria) that allows the poet to potentially ‘play with all the masks’ (Aut, 470) offered by literary tradition. Among his ‘secondary personalities’, Yeats included his own persona, arguing in Reveries over Childhood and Youth that ‘personal utterance [...] could be as fine an escape from rhetoric and abstraction as drama itself ’ (Aut, 102). This conviction endowed his poetry with a balance of the autobiographical and the impersonal, allowing him to write ‘cold and passionate’ (VP, 348) poems about personal subjects like his family — ‘A Prayer for My Daughter’ (1919), ‘A Prayer for My Son’ (1922) — his friends — ‘The Municipal Gallery Revisited’ (1937) — and his own epitaph — ‘Under Ben Bulben’ (1939). Hazard Adams identifies ‘a narrative-dramatic shape’ in Yeats’s Collected Poems: Each poem is part of a total drama that we can constitute as a story. It is a fictive story, about a poet from young manhood to death [...]. Some poems are dramatic, spoken moments in this story; some are composed poems or

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By arguing that Yeats’s Collected Poems is structured like a drama, Adams underlines its centrality as the overarching principle of Yeats’s poetic production. Additionally, stylistic features more commonly associated with poetry — such as prosody, rhyme and diction — also functioned as a mask in Yeats’s poetry. Speaking retrospectively of his entire oeuvre in a section of ‘A General Introduction for my Work’ (1937) entitled ‘Style and Attitude’, Yeats states: If I wrote of personal love or sorrow in free verse, or in any rhythm that left it unchanged, amid all its accidence, I would be full of self-contempt because of my egotism and indiscretion [...]. I must choose a traditional stanza, even what I alter must seem traditional. I commit my emotions to shepherds, herdsmen, camel-drivers, learned men, Milton’s or Shelley’s Platonist, that tower Palmer drew. (E&I, 522; my emphasis)

This excerpt, in particular the underlined sentence, shows that he relied on the objectivity of the mask — whether that means a persona or the formal arrangement of his verse in a traditional stanza — to eradicate the accidental and circumstantial elements associated with the empirical self from his poetic diction, and in doing so to distance it from a confessional lyricism. Yeats realized early on in his poetic career that the poet’s ‘position in the enunciation is partly gained through deployment of particular forms that carry particular expectations, meanings and reverberations from the past’.16 This led him to experiment with traditional genres and forms, relying on their conventional connotations to express diverse but equally plausible (i.e. sincere) poetic stances. By ascribing those poetic stances to different ‘personalities’, he created a dialogic web of relations in his poetry, which encompasses those between the personae in individual poems or between groups of poems within a collection and in some cases, such as The Tower and The Winding Stair, between the collections themselves. According to Michael Sidnell, ‘After Michael Robartes and the Dancer, discoveries made through the intercourse with the phantasmagoria endow the poetry with certitude and power’.17 The use of personae, in particular the more developed Michael Robartes and Owen Aherne, improved Yeats’s poetry. By allowing him to experience the world from different existential viewpoints, it endowed his poetry with a varied emotional, intellectual and thematic content. The poet’s self-othering was perhaps most radical in the ‘Crazy Jane’ cycle of Words for Music Perhaps as well as in the poems of A Woman Young and Old, first published as a separate collection. In these groups of poems, Yeats achieved a degree of ‘dramatization’ that allowed him to express the emotions and thoughts of a member of the opposite sex. Therefore, the thematic range of these poems differs significantly from the rest of his poetic production. Additionally, self-othering introduced greater stylistic variation in Yeats’s poetry. Urged by the need to devise appropriate forms of expression for the personae he created, Yeats made deliberate stylistic changes in his poetry: ‘When I begin to write I have no object but to find for them [his imagined characters] some natural speech, rhythm and syntax’ (Aut, 532). These changes consisted in

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the introduction of different poetic forms and contrasting styles in his poetry. His use of the ballad form in poems attributed to pastoral masks — namely fishermen, shepherds, foxhunters — contrasts significantly with the urbane, colloquial manner of his poems on contemporary subjects, as well as with the elevated diction of his neoclassical poems. Development of Pessoa’s heteronymy Like Yeats, Pessoa also believed that the poet could evade sentimentalism by incorporating aspects of the dramatic genre into his lyric poetry. In a letter to Gaspar Simões from December 11, 1931, he describes himself as a ‘dramatic poet’: O ponto central da minha personalidade como artista é que sou um poeta dramático; tenho, continuamente, em tudo quanto escrevo, a exaltação íntima do poeta e a despersonalização do dramaturgo. [...] como poeta, sinto; [...] como poeta dramático, sinto despegando-me de mim; [...] como dramático (sem poeta), transmudo automaticamente o que sinto para uma expressão alheia ao que senti, construindo na emoção uma pessoa inexistente que a sentisse verdadeiramente, e por isso sentisse, em derivação, outras emoções que eu, puramente eu, me esqueci de sentir. (C, II, 255). [The central aspect of my personality as an artist is that I am a dramatic poet. In everything I write, I continuously have the intimate exaltation of the poet and the depersonalization of the playwright. [...] as poet, I feel; [...] as dramatic poet, I feel removed from myself; [...] as dramatist (without poet), I automatically transform what I feel into a different expression from what I felt, creating in that emotion a fictional person who would truthfully feel that emotion, and so, as a result of that, would feel other related emotions that I forgot to feel myself.]

In this passage, Pessoa describes the process of self-othering as the transference of his emotions to an imaginary person whose personal circumstances allow for a more sincere expression. He revisits this issue in the self-ref lexive ‘Autopsicografia’ (1932): O poeta é um fingidor. Finge tão completamente Que chega a fingir que é dor A dor que deveras sente. (PFP, 237) [The poet is a faker Who’s so good at his act He even fakes the pain Of pain he feels in fact.] (Zenith 2, 247)

The assertion in the opening line that the poet lies evokes Wilde’s positioning in ‘The Decay of Lying’. However, the last verse of the stanza contradicts the opening argument, ascribing a sincere quality to the emotions felt by the poet while wearing the mask of pretence. Pessoa’s poetic theories and practices developed rather similarly to Yeats’s. From the age of fifteen, Pessoa had created what he called ‘literary personalities’, to which he would confer a name. Given that he was living in South Africa, these were mainly English names, such as Alexander Search and Charles Robert Anon. Much

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of his early poetry and prose, written in English, was signed by these imaginary figures. As with Yeats, these personae had a similar status to that of pseudonyms, allowing Pessoa to convey emotional and mental states which had an autobiographical origin in a disguised form. Teresa Rita Lopes argues that, ‘a fronteira que existia entre ele e estas “personalidades” contíguas era ténue [...] através de todas as suas “personalidades literárias” monologou o seu diário mudando, de vez em quando, de máscara, mas sem perder o suporte, o apoio de um corpo sempre o mesmo’ [the boundary between him and these contiguous personalities was tenuous [...] through all his literary personalities he told his personal story in the form of a continuous monologue, changing masks now and then, but without losing the support of a body which was always the same].18 Pessoa’s main youthful ‘literary personality’ was Alexander Search, who wrote English poems greatly inf luenced by Romantic poetry. Search had an ambiguous status: he was more individualized than the other ‘literary personalities’, possessing a birth date and sketchy biographical data, but Pessoa referred to him as his ‘twin’. The mixture of differentiation and identification between Pessoa and his fictional persona resembles Yeats’s characterization of the ‘secondary personality’. Elsewhere, Pessoa explains that the process of ‘depersonalization’ consists in the poet’s capacity to imagine ‘a fictional entity different from himself, though resembling him [like] a mental son’ (OPP, II, 1020). Subsequently, Pessoa’s dramatic poetics of depersonalization evolved to the creation of fictional poets, in whose name he wrote poems throughout his life. Their genesis dates back to 1912, when Pessoa started sketching poems with different themes and style from those he had produced thus far, and by 1914 he was ascribing these to distinct authors. Referring to the poetry produced in this manner in a letter to Armando Cortes-Rodrigues from 19 January 1915, he states: Isso é toda uma literatura que eu criei e vivi, que é sincera, porque é sentida [...]. Isso é sentido na pessoa de outro; é escrito dramaticamente, mas é sincero (no meu grave sentido da palavra) como é sincero o que diz o rei Lear, que não é Shakespeare, mas uma criação dele. (C, I, 142) [I have created and lived a whole literature, which is sincere, because felt [...]. It is felt in the person of another; it is written dramatically, but it is sincere (in the most serious sense of the word); as sincere as what is said by King Lear, who is not Shakespeare, but a creation of his.]

Pessoa describes poetic depersonalization as essentially dramatic and compares the poems produced in this manner to utterances of dramatis personae in Shakespeare’s plays. Despite the fictional quality of his poetic personae, Pessoa assures his friend of the sincerity of the feelings expressed in their poems, implying that they are no less true for being imagined. He adds, ‘Por isso é sério tudo o que escrevi sob os nomes de Caeiro, Reis, Álvaro de Campos. Em qualquer destes pus um profundo conceito da vida, diverso em todos os três, mas em todos gravemente atento à importância misteriosa de existir’ [That is why everything I wrote under the names of Caeiro, Reis, Álvaro de Campos is serious. I have put a deep understanding of life in each of them, different in all three, but gravely attentive to the mysterious importance of existing in all of them] (C, I, 142). This statement ascribes an important role to

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the deployment of the fictional poets, namely the rehearsal of alternative ontological and metaphysical attitudes to those expressed in the poetry signed in Pessoa’s own name. In the letter to Cortes-Rodrigues mentioned above, Pessoa announces his intention of publishing the works of those fictional poets pseudonymously. Years later, in an introduction to his complete works published in the periodical Presença (1928), Pessoa calls them heteronyms, merging the two Greek etymological roots for other and names to signify the process of writing ‘in the person of an other’ (C, I, 142), as he put it in the 1915 letter. His specialized terminology and lengthy explanations sought to emphasize the significant departure from conventional dramatic poetry that this process of writing poetry represented. Pessoa’s approach differed from that of others (Yeats included) in the autonomy he conferred to the heteronyms. He created names and wrote biographical profiles for each heteronym. Additionally, he established relationships between the three poets: both intertextual relationships between their poems and with those written in his own name, and interactions between the poets in the form of commentaries and essays about each other’s poetry. He states: As obras heterónimas de Fernando Pessoa são feitas por, até agora, três nomes de gente — Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, Álvaro de Campos. [...] As obras destes três poetas formam [...] um conjunto dramático; e está devidamente estudada a entreacção intelectual das personalidades, assim como as suas próprias relações pessoais. [...] É um drama em gente, em vez de em actos. (OPP, III, 1424–25) [The heteronymous works of Fernando Pessoa are, so far, the responsibility of Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, Álvaro de Campos. The works of these three poets constitute a dramatic ensemble; and the intellectual interaction between these personalities, as well as their own personal relations is appropriately studied. It is a drama in persons, instead of acts.]

Resuming the dramatic metaphor of the letter to Cortes-Rodrigues, Pessoa argues that the intellectual and personal exchanges between the heteronyms are the utterances in an unconventional drama that is not performed as in a play but embodied by the fictional poets in their poetry. This excerpt underpins the dialogical facet of Pessoa’s strategy of depersonalization, which is comparable to Bakhtin’s notion of dialogue between various discursive subjects.19 The emergence of the heteronyms brought significant changes to Pessoa’s poetry. Firstly, their poems introduced greater thematic diversity into his poetic production as a whole, complementing the poetry signed by Pessoa himself, which he called orthonymous. Richard Zenith suggests that ‘just as there were various heteronyms, so too there were various orthonyms — Fernando Pessoa the existentialist, Fernando Pessoa the patriot, Fernando Pessoa the occultist, Fernando Pessoa the rhymester’ (Zenith 2, 216). His observation highlights the effect of depersonalization in the orthonymous poetry, namely the generation of further poetic masks concomitant with the heteronyms and likewise sustained throughout the poet’s life. Undoubtedly, though, the biggest impact of depersonalization on Pessoa’s poetry consisted in the introduction of stylistic diversification. The poetic styles of the heteronyms ranged from the free verse poems of Caeiro and

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Campos to Reis’s classical odes, and they differed not only from one another, but also from the styles of the orthonymous poetry, which likewise ranged from traditional folk quatrains to free verse intersectionist poems. The range of styles in Pessoa’s heteronymous and orthonymous poetry shows that the aesthetic motivation underlying depersonalization was his desire to experiment with different literary genres and forms. The genesis of the heteronyms is directly associated with his intention to diversify his style, which underpins their function as stylistic masks.20 Dramatic poetics and poetic creation Yeats’s and Pessoa’s processes of dramatization or depersonalization corresponded to what T. S. Eliot called ‘the third voice’ in ‘The Three Voices of Poetry’: that is, the voice of the poet ‘when he attempts to create a dramatic character speaking in verse; when he is saying only what he can say within the limits of one imaginary character addressing another imaginary character’.21 Their poetic practices were inspired by Browning, who described his ‘dramatic monologues’ as poetry ‘often lyric in expression, always dramatic in principle, and so many utterances of so many imaginary persons, not mine’.22 The similarities between the three poets suggest that they shared a common poetic temperament and dramatic sensibility. Browning’s experimental use of the dramatic monologue in lyric poetry was undoubtedly inspirational for Yeats and Pessoa from a stylistic point of view. However, the generational distance between them endowed Pessoa’s and Yeats’s strategies with greater aesthetic and ontological significance as creative responses to the anxiety of the divided self in modern society. Pessoa’s heteronymy and Yeats’s doctrine of the mask were their respective solutions to the breakdown of the homogenous lyric voice by disseminating it into multifaceted voices, capable of conveying the heterogeneous and f luid realities of the modern self and world. Yeats’s and Pessoa’s lifelong commitment to poetic dramatization or depersonalization proves that they regarded it as a serious and important undertaking, not only from an aesthetic but also from an ontological point of view. Inspired by the Romantic God-like status of the poet — regarded, in the words of A. W. Schlegel, as a ‘creative and shaping mind [...] creating autonomously like nature’23 — they re-enacted the divine creationist act of self-division and multiplication into a variety of beings in their poetry. Drawing on the Christian existentialist model, which relies on the interpersonal relationship between Man and God, Pessoa and Yeats created a body of poetry which ref lects the dramatic quality inherent to the human condition. Their poetic production comprises interrelated discourses expressed by different poetic personae, which microcosmically represent mankind’s macrocosmic web of inter-relations. At the centre of their aesthetics lies a subversion of the mimetic principle that ‘Art imitates Nature’, most likely inspired by Wilde’s statement in ‘The Decay of Lying’ that ‘life imitates art’ and that art supersedes life in creating absolute perfection.24 Yeats ostensibly reiterates the mimetic principle of Aristotle’s Poetics in the following passage from Rosa Alchemica (1897): ‘a man is a great man just in so far as he can make his mind ref lect everything with indifferent precision like a mirror’.25

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However, he undermines it in a subsequent passage in which the narrator falls into a trance and describes the following vision — ‘I heard a voice over my head cry, “The mirror is broken in two pieces”, and another voice answer, “The mirror is broken in four pieces”, and a more distant voice cry with an exultant cry, “The mirror is broken into numberless pieces”.26 Thus, the ‘indifferent precision’ of the mimetic mirror is replaced by a distorted projection of the self and world and the subsequent dissolution of what is perceived as the voice of his conscience into numberless other voices. The allegory of the mirror image recurs in the line ‘Mirror on mirror mirrored is all the show’ from ‘The Statues’ (VP, 610). The assertion that man can only attain a refracted perception of reality exposes the latter’s illusory and multifaceted nature, recalling Shelley’s observation concerning poetic drama in A Defence of Poetry: The drama, so long as it continues to express poetry, is a prismatic and manysided mirror, which collects the brightest rays of human nature and divides and reproduces them from the simplicity of their elementary forms, and touches them with majesty and beauty, and multiplies all that it ref lects, and endows it with the power of propagating its like wherever it may fall.27

Shelley’s equation of the multifarious style of poetry with drama underpins not only Yeats’s but also Pessoa’s dramatic-poetic projects. Pessoa also resorts to the metaphor of breaking the soul into pieces to describe the process of self-division and projection of the speaker’s various facets into other selves in ‘Deixo ao cego e ao surdo’ (1930): Deixo ao cego e ao surdo A alma com fronteiras, Que eu quero sentir tudo De todas as maneiras. Do alto de ter consciência Contemplo a terra e o ceu Vejo-os ter existência: Nada que vejo é meu. Mas vejo tam attento Tam nelles me disperso Que cada pensamento Me torna já diverso. E como são estilhaços Do ser, as coisas dispersas Quebro a alma em pedaços E em pessoas diversas. [...] Assim a Deus imito, Que quando fez o que é Tirou-lhe o infinito E a unidade até. (PFP, 3, 199–200) [The soul with boundaries Is for the deaf and blind

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Dramatic Poetics I want to feel everything In every possible way. From the summit of being conscious, I gaze at the earth and sky, Looking at them existing: Nothing I see is mine. But I see them so intently And am so dispersed in them That every thought I think Makes me into someone else. Since every dispersed facet Is another sliver of being, I break my soul into pieces And into various persons. Thus I imitate God, Who, when he made what is, Took from it the infinite And even its unity.] (Zenith 2, 244; my variation)

The poem relies on a comparison between the persona of the poet and God, whom he claims to ‘imitate’ both in omniscience and in omnipotence, namely the power to will thoughts into action through the auspices of the divine Word. Thus, poetic language is equalled to the Word of God, displaying a perform ative quality comparable to the divine speech-act in the Gospel of St John. This orthonymous poem aptly describes the process of depersonalization, functioning as an ars poetica. The theme of ‘Deixo ao cego e ao surdo’ resurfaces in the poetry of each heteronym, confirming the aforesaid intertextual links in Pessoa’s heteronymous poetic production. Accordingly, the closing lines of the first stanza of ‘Deixo ao cego e ao surdo’ recur in Campos’s ‘Afinal a melhor maneira de viajar é sentir’ [After all, the best way to travel is to feel]: ‘Sentir tudo de todas as maneiras.’ [To feel everything in every possible way] (PAC, 263). The desire for totality underpinning his syncretic aesthetic is patent in the second stanza of the poem: Quanto mais eu sinta, quanto mais eu sinta como várias pessoas, Quanto mais personalidade eu tiver, [...] Mais possuirei a existência total do universo, Mais completo serei pelo espaço fora. Mais analogo serei a Deus, seja ele quem for, Porque seja ele quem for, com certeza que é Tudo, (PAC, 263) [The more I feel, the more I feel as various persons, The more personality I have, The more I will possess the total existence of the universe, The more complete I will be through the entire space. The more analogous I will be to God, whoever he is, Because whoever he is, most certainly he is Everything,]

The process of self-division described in the orthonymous poem quoted above is

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paralleled in these lines by a depiction of Campos’s dispersion into other persons and subsequent embodiment of their lives. Resorting to a spatial metaphor, he describes the process as ‘emotional travelling’ as suggested by the title, which ultimately grants him the power of omnipresence and a divine status. Reis addresses a similar theme in ‘Vivem em nós inúmeros’ (1935): Vivem em nós innumeros Se penso ou sinto, ignoro Quem é que pensa ou sente. Sou sòmente o logar Onde se sente ou pensa. Tenho mais almas que uma. Ha mais eus do que eu mesmo. Existo todavia Indifferente a todos. Faço-os callar: eu fallo. Os impulsos cruzados Do que sinto ou não sinto Disputam em quem sou. Ignoro-os. Nada dictam A quem me sei: eu escrevo. (PRR, 180–81) [Countless lives inhabit us. I don’t know, when I think or feel, Who it is that thinks or feels. I am merely the place Where things are thought or felt. I have more than just one soul. There are more I’s than I myself. I exist, nevertheless, Indifferent to them all. I silence them: I speak. The crossing urges of what I feel or do not feel Struggle in who I am, but I Ignore them. They dictate nothing To the I I know: I write.] (Zenith 2, 137)

On the one hand, he acknowledges that he is inhabited by other selves, regarding himself as a non-entity and merely the stage where existence unfolds like a play. On the other hand, he chooses to repress his self-othering ‘impulses’, silencing his potential alternative voices as a means of maintaining his identity as a poet. Reis’s positioning is diametrically opposed to that of Pessoa orthonym and Campos, who yield completely to their self-othering impulses. Caeiro is even more dismissive of this issue, granting it a mere parenthetic aside in ‘Eu nunca guardei rebanhos’: E se desejo ás vezes, Por imaginar, ser cordeirinho (Ou ser o rebanho todo

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Dramatic Poetics Para andar espalhado por toda a encosta A ser muita cousa feliz ao mesmo tempo), É só porque sinto o que escrevo ao pôr do sol, Ou quando uma nuvem passa a mão por cima da luz E corre um silencio pela herva fóra. (PCAC, 42) [And if sometimes, in my imagination, I desire to be a small lamb (Or to be the whole f lock So as to be scattered across the hillside As many happy things at the same time), It’s only because I feel what I write when the sun sets Or when a cloud passes its hand over the light And a silence sweeps through the grass.] (Zenith 2, 46)

These lines strike a dissonant chord in the holistic orchestration of his ars poetica, conceding to unsuppressed self-othering and dispersion of desires, conveyed through the metaphor of the herd spread across the hilltop. They represent Caeiro’s brief, if significant, surrender to the temptation of ‘imagining’ caused by the temporary eclipse of his solar core personality. As these poems have shown, whether they embrace or disavow self-dispersion, all the heteronyms concede (at least partially) to the multifarious nature of the human soul, reiterating its potential for dramatic ‘depersonalization’. Not only that, but their differing points of view are presented in a dialectic of poems, illustrating the aforesaid dramatic quality of their interactions. Yeats’s and Pessoa’s self-othering strategies also emulate the myth of divine creation by relying on an act of creative will, for, as Pessoa argues in a text in English, ‘Will only will convert our casual thought into a system and thus give it body’ (OPP, III, 42). This statement echoes the Romantic notion that imagination partakes of the divine Will, conferring God-like powers unto the poet. Accordingly, Pessoa and Yeats created fictional accounts of the origin and demise of their main personae. These narratives possessed mythical and mystical qualities comparable to those found in creationist myths. These qualities are present in a letter Pessoa wrote to Adolfo Casais Monteiro, dated 13 January 1935, describing the genesis of the heteronym Alberto Caeiro: Num dia em que finalmente desistira — foi em 8 de Março de 1914 — acerqueime de uma cómoda alta, e tomando um papel, comecei a escrever, de pé [...]. E escrevi trinta e tantos poemas a fio, numa espécie de êxtase cuja natureza não conseguirei definir. Foi o dia triunfal da minha vida [...]. Abri com o título, ‘O Guardador de Rebanhos’. E o que se seguiu foi o aparecimento de alguém em mim, a quem dei desde logo o nome de Alberto Caeiro. (C, II, 343) [On a day on which I had finally given up — the 8th of March 1914 — I approached a high chest of drawers, and taking a sheet of paper, I began to write while standing up. And I wrote thirty or so poems in one sitting, in a sort of ecstasy the nature of which I cannot define. It was the triumphal day of my life. I started with the title ‘The Keeper of Sheep’, and what followed was the appearance of someone in me, to whom I immediately gave the name Alberto Caeiro.]

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Yeats also created fictions about his principal personae, such as Owen Aherne and Michael Robartes, the protagonists of the early stories Rosa Alchemica and The Tables of the Law, who also resurfaced on several occasions in individual poems such as ‘Michael Robartes and the Dancer’, ‘Owen Aherne and his Dancers’ and ‘The Phases of the Moon’, and who featured in the fictional prelude to A Vision. The poets’ power of agency over their fictional creations is particularly evident in the fictional deaths of Caeiro in 1915 and Robartes in 1897, followed by their resurrection at later stages of Pessoa’s and Yeats’s careers, undoubtedly in order to retrieve a point of view antithetical to their own as a catalyst for the renewal of poetic inspiration. Self-othering and the architectural metaphor Pessoa’s and Yeats’s strategies of self-othering reinstate the role of the poet as architect of his own poetic universe. This is the basis for their self-portrayal as demiurgic artisans from a very early stage of their career, but it also explains the prevalence of imagery related to construction in their works, symbolizing the act of creation of a poetic universe. In the second lyric of the poetic set ‘Passos da Cruz’ (1916), Pessoa states, ‘Há um poeta em mim que Deus me disse...’ [There is a poet in me, God told me so] (OPP, I, 1095). After describing a pleasant pastoral scene to prove the point that he is a poet, he states, ‘Minha alma beija o quadro que pintou’ [My soul kisses the painting it painted] (OPP, I, 1095), metonymically asserting his identity as an artist. Yeats, in turn, describes the act of writing metaphorically through an architectural metaphor in these lines from ‘He tells of the Perfect Beauty’ (1896): ‘The poets labouring all their days / To build a perfect beauty in rhyme’ (VP, 164). His reference to the ‘labour’ of writing poetry indicates that he thinks of himself as an artisan, i.e. someone who works hard at his craft, which is precisely how Pessoa refers to himself in ‘Talhei, artífice de um morto rito’ (1933): Talhei, artifice de um morto rito, Na esmeralda de haver um mundo feito Um brazão circunscripto No annel em que é perfeito. (PFP, 4, 142) [Artisan of a dead rite, I carved On the emerald of there being a built world A coat of arms circumscribed To the ring in which it is perfect]

The craftsmanship of the poet is metaphorically equated with the work of the artisan, who, by inscribing the heraldic emblem on the emerald creates a work of art, the poem, symbolized by the perfect ring. Its perfection is formally conveyed by the arrangement of the lines into metric ten- and six-syllable couplets balanced by the perfect abab rhyming pattern enfolding the whole quatrain, thus illustrating the harmonious articulation of fond and forme. The metaphor of the poem as a built structure pervades Yeats’s late self-ref lexive poems. Yeats’s father, John Butler Yeats, believed that the artist ‘constructs for himself habitations’, claiming that ‘art exists that man cutting himself away from nature may build in his free consciousness buildings vaster and more sumptuous

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than these [...] built by science’.28 Following in the same line as his father, Yeats resorted to imagery of built structures in his poetry to represent the creative power of the imagination, notably in ‘The Tower’ (1927). The second part of this poem features the speaker standing on fortified walls (of Thoor Ballyllee one presumes): I pace upon the battlements and stare On the foundations of a house, or where Tree, like a sooty finger, starts from the earth; And send imagination forth Under the day’s declining beam, and call Images and memories From ruin or from ancient trees, (VP, 409–10)

The speaker’s inspection of the ‘foundations of a house’ (most likely the cottage in the vicinity of Thoor Ballyllee) and of the roots of a nearby tree reveal his interest in the origins of manmade erected structures and freestanding natural elements, which translates as a desire to follow to its source his own poetic edifice, symbolized in the poem by the tower. Aided by a powerful imagination, the poet persona embarks on a mental journey to the past, conjuring up from memory historical figures associated with the tower and fictive creations, like Hanrahan, his first persona, that constituted sources of inspiration for his poetry. As a result of this re-constructive exercise, the past emerges vividly in his mind, contrasting sharply with the images of decline and decay in the present day scene that surrounds him — the dying day, the ruins, the ancient (likely dead) trees. This dichotomy underlines the greater endurance of the structures created by the poet’s imagination in relation to those erected by nature or by man in the real world. Houses, battlements and foundations also play a similar role in Pessoa’s aesthetic as emblematic images of his poetic creations. In ‘O Andaime’ [The Scaffold] (1931), they metonymically stand for the poetic edifice built by the poet: Sou já o morto futuro. Só um sonho me liga a mim — O sonho atrasado e obscuro Do que eu devera ser — muro Do meu deserto jardim. Ondas passadas, levai-me Para o olvido do mar! Ao que não serei legai-me, Que cerquei com um andaime A casa por fabricar. (OPP, I, 320) [I’m already my future corpse. Only a dream links me to myself — The hazy and belated dream Of what I should have been — a wall Around my abandoned garden. Take me, passing waves, To the oblivion of the sea! Bequeath me to what I won’t be — I, who raised a scaffold Around the house not built.] (Zenith 1, 300; my variation)

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This poem displays an elegiac quality comparable to Yeats’s ‘The Tower’ in which he announces that he is writing his poetic ‘will’ (VP, 414) and making his ‘soul’ (VP, 416). However, the obsessive references to death and extinction in Pessoa’s poem contrast starkly with Yeats’s vigorous affirmation of the creative power of poetic imagination in ‘The Tower’. The last line of the poem is ambiguous, since the specific construction in the Portuguese language used by Pessoa can refer equally to the present and to a hypothetical future. If it is interpreted as the house ‘never built’ (as was done in the original translation), this line suggests that the poet’s attempt to build a house has failed, denoting his regret over the unfinished state of his poetic edifice, symbolized by the scaffold. However, if understood as the house not yet built, the last line of the poem can be interpreted as signifying the potential for construction, whereby the scaffold gains a positive connotation as the foundations of the house yet to be built by the poet. The term ‘scaffold’ had previously been used to mean a foundation in an utterance attributed to Alberto Caeiro — ‘Não passo de um andaime’ [I am nothing but a scaffold] (OPP, II, 1052). Bearing in mind that Caeiro was Pessoa’s first heteronym and avowedly the poetic master of the other heteronyms and of the orthonym, his statement highlights the potential of the heteronymic enterprise to create a fictional movement of poets or even ‘a whole literature’ (C, I, 142), which would be no small achievement. If read analogously, the image of the scaffold in ‘O Andaime’ can be regarded as the emblem of heteronymy and, therefore, performs a similar function to the foundations in ‘The Tower’, symbolizing the poetic achievement of Pessoa’s oeuvre. However, the ambiguity of tone in Pessoa’s poem differs from Yeats’s straightforward rhetorical stance in Yeats’s poem, denoting a more complex and multi-layered meditation about poetic legacy. Despite his concern with fashioning an emblem of artistic completion in ‘The Tower’, privately Yeats also referred to his poetic oeuvre as the unfinished foundations of a house still in the process of being built. In a letter from 1916 to his biographer Joseph Hone he wrote: ‘You have put together the main outline of my work [...]. Your difficulties have come from my house being still unfinished, there are so many rooms and corridors that I am still building upon foundations laid long ago’ (L, 605). The similarity of expression with Pessoa’s ‘O Andaime’ is striking in that Yeats resorts to the same words, ‘unfinished’ and ‘foundations’, to refer to his works, denoting a more ambivalent posture than the one assumed publicly in ‘The Tower’. The constructive metaphor present in the title poem of The Tower is subverted by the ensuing poem in the collection, ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’ (1923), which focuses on the antithetical notion of ruin in part IV: May this laborious stair and this stark tower Become a roof less ruin that the owl May build in the cracked masonry and cry Her desolation to the desolate sky. (VP, 423)

These lines re-enact the cyclical interdependency of creation and demise which, according to the poet, underscores manmade structures (like the tower) and natural elements alike, as evinced in the first stanza of part VI:

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Dramatic Poetics The bees build in the crevices Of loosening masonry, and there The mother birds bring grubs and f lies. My wall is loosening; honey-bees, Come build in the empty house of the stare. (VP, 424)

This stanza allows different readings. In the first instance, the image of the birds feeding their young in nests built on the chipped masonry of the tower illustrates the argument of building from ruins (put forward in part IV) in a natural context. Conversely, the reference to the ‘loosening’ wall subverts that argument, illustrating the destructive work of time both on the tower, to which it refers literally, and on the poet, to whom it refers figuratively. This strategy of doing and undoing, while characteristic of Yeats’s antithetical style, also ref lects his awareness that ‘any new movement of creativeness must find its birth amid the ruins of an old one’.29 Although Yeats’s poetry does partake of the aesthetic of the ‘unfinished’, simultaneously it aims at what he calls a ‘resurrection into unity’ (Aut, 502), by which he means wholeness or completeness. Unity is represented by holistic symbols in Yeats’s poetry, such as the dancer and the tree. The most eloquent expression of unity in his poetry occurs in the last stanza of ‘Among School Children’ (1927): Labour is blossoming or dancing where The body is not bruised to pleasure soul, Nor beauty born out of its own despair, Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil. O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole? O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance? (VP, 445–46)

Lee Zimmerman claims that this ending ‘is simultaneously ecstatic and plaintive, a bold statement and a frustrated question. The speaker both partakes of the dancer’s perfect unity and stands apart. He is both fulfilled and confronted with fulfilment’s impossibility’.30 His observation underpins the persona’s oscillation between a sense of unity or completion and dissociated consciousness. The speaker’s estrangement from the holistic unity embodied by the dancer in ‘Among School Children’ ref lects the phenomenon that Remy de Gourmont termed ‘dissociation of personality’, derived from the separation of sensorial experience and thought that Yeats dated back to the late Renaissance.31 Throughout his life, Yeats invested considerable effort in resurrecting holistic harmony of experience and expression in his poetry to counteract the fragmentation of the modern world, even if suspecting that he was pursuing an ideal that could not be fully accomplished. At the same time, he was also aware that self-division is inherent to poetic composition, stating, ‘We are, as seen from life, an artifice, an emphasis, an uncompleted arc perhaps. [...] Because the life man sees is not the final end of things, the moment we attain to greatness of any kind by personal labour and will we become fragmentary’ (Aut, 475). Yeats’s observation that the artist is an ‘uncompleted arc’ can befittingly describe Pessoa’s poetics of dissociation, who also resorts to an architectural metaphor in the ninth lyric of ‘Passos da Cruz’ (1916): ‘Meu coração é um pórtico partido /

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Dando excessivamente sobre o mar’ (OPP, I, 1099) [My heart is a broken portico / Looking out excessively over the sea]. The theme of incompletion recurs in the image of the broken mirror in Campos’s ‘Lisbon Revisited’ (1926): Outra vez te revejo — Lisboa e Tejo e tudo — , [...] Outra vez te revejo! Mas, ai, a mim não me revejo! Partiu-se o espelho mágico em que me revia idêntico, E em cada fragmento fatídico vejo só um bocado de mim — Um bocado de ti e de mim!... (PAC, 195) [Once more I see you — Lisbon, the Tagus and the rest — Once more I see you, But, oh, I cannot see myself! The magic mirror where I always looked the same has shattered, And in each fateful fragment I see only a piece of me — A piece of you and of me!] (Zenith 1, 221–22)

These lines poignantly depict the speaker’s grief and his sense of lost identity as he stands before the shattered mirror of his personality, whose splinters ref lect but a fragmentary image of himself. Although this poem was attributed to Campos it has a clear autobiographical content, evident in the line ‘Cidade da minha infância pavorosamente perdida...’ (PAC, 195) [City of my horrifyingly lost childhood] (Zenith 1, 219), which alludes to traumatic events in Pessoa’s childhood, namely the breakdown of his family caused by the death of his father and brother. The poet’s lack of unity is represented not only through spatial imagery, as seen in the previous poem, but through a metaphor of temporal dissociation in Campos’s ‘Tabacaria’ [The Tobacco Shop] (1933): Fiz de mim o que não soube, E o que podia fazer de mim não o fiz. O dominó que vesti era errado. Conheceram-me logo por quem não era e não desmenti, e perdi-me. Quando quis tirar a máscara, Estava pegada à cara. Quando a tirei e me vi ao espelho, Já tinha envelhecido. Estava bêbado, já não sabia vestir o dominó que não tinha tirado. Deitei fora a máscara e dormi no vestiário Como um cão tolerado pela gerência Por ser inofensivo E vou escrever esta história para provar que sou sublime. (PAC, 199) [I made of myself what I was no good at making, And what I could have made of myself I didn’t. I put on the wrong costume And was immediately taken for someone I wasn’t, and I said nothing and was lost. When I went to take off the mask, It was stuck to my face. When I got it off and saw myself in the mirror, I had already grown old.

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Dramatic Poetics I was drunk and no longer knew how to wear the costume that I hadn’t taken off. I threw out the mask and slept in the closet Like a dog tolerated by the management Because it’s harmless, And I’ll write down this story to prove I’m sublime.] (Zenith 2, 177)

This autobiographical poem conveys the speaker’s dismay in the face of the age discrepancy between his masked and his real self, suggesting that whereas the former is unchanged, the latter is a f luid entity that has undergone the ravages of time. However, this position is ostensibly contradicted by ‘Depus a máscara e vi-me ao espelho’ (1934), in which mask and personality are identified as one and the same: Depuz a máscara e vi-me ao espelho... Era a creança de há quantos anos... Não tinha mudado nada... É essa a vantagem de saber tirar a máscara. É-se sempre a creança, O passado que fica A creança. Depuz a máscara e tornei a pô-la. Assim é melhor, Assim sou a máscara. E volto à normalidade como a um términus de linha. (PAC, 252) [I took off the mask and looked in the mirror. I was the same child I was years ago. I hadn’t changed at all... That’s the advantage of knowing how to remove your mask. You’re still the child, The past that lives on, The child. I took off the mask, and I put it back on. It’s better this way. This way I’m the mask. And I return to normality as to a streetcar terminus.] (Zenith 1, 256)

The syllogistic implication of these stanzas is that the self underneath the mask remains the same, and by removing the mask Campos is able to catch a glimpse of his past self, momentarily recapturing the state of unity traditionally associated with childhood. Recalling ‘Aniversário’, which also displays an idealized representation of childhood evoked through memory, Cleonice Berardineli ventures, ‘A máscara de Álvaro de Campos [...] seria a face da sua idade madura, a disfarçar, talvez, o mais fundo do seu eu, a criança que foi e é’ [Álvaro de Campos’s mask would be the face of his mature age, disguising, perhaps, his deeper self, the child he was and is].32 However, the possibility of recapturing his true face through memory is thwarted by the fact that Campos’s past is inherently fictional, due to his status as a heteronym. Consequently, Campos asserts his actual existence as a mask, which

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he willingly dons, conscious that that is his normal condition. In the closing line, he compares his return to normality (i.e., being a mask), to the end of the line on a train journey, signifying his perennial entrapment in the fictitious web of heteronymy. A different, darker interpretation of the metaphor is that he is drawing near the end of his life, which coincides with the denouement of the poem, thus resuming the defeatist stance of ‘A Tabacaria’. In the latter sense, Campos’s tearing off of mask and costume could symbolically represent Pessoa’s stripping down of the paraphernalia of the dramatis personae as he approached the end of his life (since the autobiographical glimpses in Campos’s poems are oblique projections of Pessoa’s own life) and is therefore comparable to Yeats’s ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’ (1939). In this poem, Yeats looks back on his poetic universe, evoking the parade of personae he created in his poetry, the ‘Players and painted stage [who] took all my love’ (VP, 630), only to put them out mercilessly at the close of the poem: Now that my ladder’s gone, I must lie down and die where all the ladders start, In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart. (VP, 630)

His stripping of the masks he wore to reveal the ‘bone and marrow’ (VP, 630) constitutes a rhetorical gesture of self-revelation, corroborating Roy Foster’s claim that ‘with his last creative writing, he placed the sources of inspiration in personal history and the instinctual self ’.33 However, in ‘Cuchulain Comforted’ (1939), from the same period, Yeats resorts to an alter ego in order to re-enact the unmasking. The relinquishing of Cuchulain’s weapons and shield (the symbols of his mortality) is analogous to the stripping of poetic masks by the dying poet in ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’. In turn, Pessoa delegated the closing scene of his ‘drama in persons’ to the heteronym Campos in ‘Tabacaria’ and ‘Depus a máscara e vi-me ao espelho’. Pessoa’s emphasis on the relativity of point of view led him to adopt the role of invisible puppeteer avoiding a discourse of mastery in relation to the heteronyms. Instead, he favours a strategy of self-effacement, enacting the dissemination of poetic authority through the differentiating temperament and diction of the heteronyms. The subject of Pessoa’s later poetry becomes increasingly self-effacing, retreating into the spaces between the various dialogical selves — ‘No intervalo entre o que sou e estou’ [In the interval between what I am and how I feel myself being] (OPP, I, 339) in ‘Quanto fui jaz. Quanto serei não sou’ (1932). This self-representation embodies more truthfully his conception of poetry as a ‘fiction of the interlude’, or of the interstice.34 With notable modernity, Pessoa accepted that self-division was an intrinsic characteristic of the poet, retrieving Gourmont’s original sense of the phrase ‘dissociation of personality’;35 consequently, he decided to embrace it, investing his genius into depicting the annihilation of the poet. Paradoxically, he also displayed an aspiration to unify his style, as corroborated by the following excerpt from a letter to Cortes-Rodrigues of 19 January 1915: ‘a minha, gradualmente adquirida auto-disciplina, tem conseguido unificar dentro de mim quantos divergentes elementos do meu carácter eram susceptíveis de harmonização’ [my gradually acquired self-discipline has been able to unify inside me all those divergent elements of my character susceptible of being harmonized] (C, I, 139).

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Conclusion The numerous affinities between the poets’ critical texts and poems discussed in this chapter prove that Pessoa’s heteronymy and Yeats’s doctrine of the Mask derive from an analogous goal to increase the expressive potential of lyric poetry through the increment of dramatic principles. On the other hand, the texts reveal some notable differences in their dramatic poetics. Thus, whereas Yeats appears to have regarded the process of poetic ‘dramatization’, as he called it, principally as a strategy of self-representation, Pessoa envisaged it as a self-effacing strategy, as his preferred term ‘depersonalization’ suggests. These differences derive partly from the twenty-three-year age difference between the two poets, which explains why Yeats favoured a subject-centred standpoint reminiscent of the Romantic aesthetic, whereas Pessoa’s outlook and terminology ref lect the modernist crisis of the authorial voice. The fact that by the time Yeats wrote Estrangement (1909), he could conceive of the artist as ‘fragmentary’ (Aut, 475), as well as represent that fragmentation in the style of that section of Autobiographies and of some of his poems, indicates the increasing incorporation of the modernist aesthetic into his work. On the other hand, the differences in the poets’ enactment of their dramatic poetics also signal a divergence in their literary temperaments, which led them to instinctually favour different poles of the dialectic of personalized diction and dramatic impersonality underpinning the modern lyric. Yeats’s propensity for self-projection can be attributed to a predominantly narcissistic temperament, whereas Pessoa’s emphasis on dissociation derives from his tendency towards a schizoid temperament.36 Notwithstanding these disparities, Pessoa’s and Yeats’s methods of poetic composition consist of comparable processes of poetic self-othering, differing mainly in degree. They correspond to what Robert Langbaum calls a ‘poetry of experience’, described as ‘a new genre which abolishes the distinction between subjective and objective poetry and between the lyrical and dramatic or narrative genres’ by deploying the speaker of the poem as a ‘character in a dramatic action’.37 Langbaum’s observation emphasizes issues of genre, signalling the emergence of a new genre — the modern lyric — that collapses generic distinctions. Pessoa describes his understanding of lyric poetry in much the same way in the following excerpt: Os géneros não se separam com tanta facilidade íntima, e se analisarmos bem aquilo de que se compõem, verificamos que da poesia lírica à dramática há uma gradação contínua. Com efeito, e indo às mesmas origens da poesia dramática — Ésquilo por exemplo — será mais certo dizer que encontramos poesia lírica posta na boca de diversos personagens. (OPP, I, 711) [The genres cannot be separated with such familiar ease, and if we examine carefully what they are composed of, we ascertain that from lyrical to dramatic poetry there is a continuous gradation. Indeed, if we return to the origins of dramatic poetry — Aeschylus for instance — it is more correct to say that we find lyric poetry uttered by diverse characters.]

He called the ‘continuous gradation’ between poetic genres mentioned in this passage a ‘escala de despersonalização’ [depersonalization scale] (OPP, I, 711), adopt-

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ing a sophisticated terminology that intimated the formulations of future critics about the modern lyric.38 Pessoa’s scale of progression from lyric to dramatic poetry comprises four degrees, which correspond to four different types of poets, as stated below: O primeiro grau da poesia lírica é aquele em que o poeta, concentrado no seu sentimento, exprime esse sentimento. Se ele, porém for uma criatura de sentimentos variáveis e vários, exprimirá como que uma multiplicidade de personagens, unificadas sòmente pelo temperamento e o estilo. Um passo mais, na escala poética, e temos o poeta que é uma criatura de sentimentos vários e fictícios, mais imaginativo do que sentimental, e vivendo cada estado de alma antes pela inteligência que pela emoção. Este poeta exprimir-se-á como uma multiplicidade de personagens, unificadas, não já pelo temperamento e o estilo, [...] mas tão-sòmente pelo simples estilo. Outro passo na escala de despersonalização, ou seja de imaginação, e temos o poeta que em cada um dos seus estados mentais vários [...] se despersonaliza, de sorte que, vivendo analiticamente esse estado de alma, faz dele como que a expressão de um outro personagem, e, sendo assim, o mesmo estilo tende a variar. Dê-se o passo final, e teremos um poeta que seja vários poetas, um poeta dramático escrevendo em poesia lírica. Cada grupo de estados de alma mais aproximados insensivelmente se tornará uma personagem, com estilo próprio, com sentimentos porventura diferentes, até opostos, aos típicos do poeta na sua pessoa viva. E assim se terá levado a poesia lírica [...] até à poesia dramática, sem, todavia se lhe dar a forma do drama, nem explícita nem implicitamente. (OPP, I, 711–12) [The first degree of lyric poetry is the one where the poet, focused on his sentiment, expresses that sentiment. Should he, though, be a creature of variable and varied sentiments, he will express something like a multiplicity of personages unified only by a temperament and a style. One step farther, up the poetic ladder, and we have the poet [...] living each state of soul through intellect rather than through emotion. This poet will express himself as a multiplicity of personages unified not now by temperament and style [...] but only by style, pure and simple. Another step up the same ladder of depersonalization, or perhaps imagination, and we have the poet who, as each of his various mental states appears, [...] makes of it something like the expression of another person, and, this being so, the style itself tends to vary. Now take the final step, and we shall have a poet who may be various poets — a dramatic poet writing in lyric poetry. Each group of states of soul relatively close to one another will become a personage, with his own style, with sentiments perhaps different from, even opposed to, those typical of the poet in his real-life person. And so lyric poetry [...] will have been raised to dramatic poetry, yet without having been given the form of drama, either explicitly or implicitly.]39

According to this excerpt, progression from the lyrical to the dramatic is based partly on thematic but mainly on stylistic differentiation, recalling Yeats’s argument that ‘[t]he self-conquest of the writer who is not a man of action is style’ (Aut, 515). Pessoa envisaged his poetry at the top of the ‘depersonalization ladder’, as his definition of the fourth degree of depersonalization echoes his own heteronymic process. According to Pessoa’s taxonomy, Yeats f luctuates between the second and the third degrees of depersonalization: although his poetry displays some stylistic variation, which is mainly evident in his deployment of different literary forms

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from poetic tradition appropriate to the persona of the poem, the style of most of his personae does not differ significantly from his own style. Daniel O’Hara argues that ‘from the first in his career Yeats is experimenting [...] with all inherited literary forms, in order to play out the impulse behind such forms in his work rather than to live them out painfully to the bitter end’.40 This observation underscores Yeats’s effort not to be committed to a single style but to constantly change his form of expression in order to convey variegated shades of human emotion and experience. Although, as O’Hara observes, Yeats ‘never succumbs completely to any one of his self-images’,41 the authenticity of his engagement with their specific circumstances cannot be questioned, effectively affording him second-hand experience of ‘even the most dreadful possibilities in the play of existence’.42 These comments are equally applicable to Pessoa. They are matched by those of the Portuguese critic Jacinto do Prado Coelho, who argues that ‘o conjunto do “drama em gente” não consiste apenas em ver-se dividido ou di-verso, mas no facto de os heterónimos serem tentativas de resposta “prática”, não obstante imaginária, ao grave problema do existir’ [the ensemble of the ‘drama in persons’ does not merely consist in seeing oneself divided or diverse, but in the fact that the heteronyms are a ‘practical’, albeit imaginary, response to the serious problem of existing].43 Both critics ascribe an ontological dimension to Yeats’s and Pessoa’s process of stylistic diversification, referring to it as a method of existential inquiry. In ‘Isto’ [This] (1933), Pessoa brilliantly surmises the manner in which his dramatic poetics hinged on overarching aesthetic and metaphysical principles: Dizem que finjo ou minto Tudo o que escrevo. Não. Eu simplesmente sinto Com a imaginação. Não uso o coração. Tudo o que sonho ou passo, O que me falha ou finda, É como que um terraço Sobre outra coisa ainda. Essa coisa é que é linda. Por isso escrevo em meio Do que não está ao pé, Livre do meu enleio, Sério do que não é. Sentir? Sinta quem lê! (OPP, I, 352) [They say I lie or feign In all I write. Not true. It’s simply that I feel Via the imagination. The heart I never use. All I dream or live, Whatever fails or dies, Is no more than a covering

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Over some other thing Where true beauty lies. That’s why I write in between That which is not immediate, Freed from my perplexity, Serious about what isn’t. Feel? That’s up to the reader!] (Zenith 2, 260; my variation)

Pessoa resorts to what Yeats called ‘a traditional stanza’ (E&I, 522) to express the complex subject of dramatic self-othering in this metapoetic poem. Obeying the classical convention of synthesis, it presents the argument succinctly, though in a non-linear fashion. The poem’s choppy syntax deliberately obscures its meaning, deferring its conclusion. The central theme of the poem is encapsulated in the subjective verbs ‘finjo’ [feign], ‘minto’ [lie], ‘escrevo’ [write], ‘sinto’ [feel], ‘sonho’ [dream], all of which refer to the operations involved in writing poetry as a selfothering exercise. Thus, as indicated by the verbs, the poet resorts primarily to the dramatic artifices of pretence and lying as a means of achieving what Wilde called ‘the illusion of actual life’ in ‘The Truth of Masks’.44 Dramatic self-othering offers the poet the means to attain what he is seeking beyond himself, as suggested by the metaphor of the terrace opening onto a new reality. This mysterious reality, a ‘coisa linda’ [the beautiful thing], is analogous to the ‘thing of beauty’ of Keats’s Endymion.45 The adjective used to describe it possesses a subjective abstract quality belonging to the aesthetic realm while the concrete noun gives it an objective anchoring in reality. The poet’s liminal position, conveyed by the line ‘escrevo em meio’ (I write in between), affords him a privileged outlook into the paradoxical realms of the transcendent and the mundane. His detachment from the ‘enleio’ (perplexity) characteristic of reality and of the human condition allows him to pay more attention to the imaginary world. Finally, he claims that his heightened sensibility endows his poetry with such expressiveness that the reader cannot but feel empathetically towards it, which ultimately leads to an enlargement of the reader’s own sensibility. Conversely, the anticipation of the reader’s emotional response to the poem allows the poet to feel the emotions he writes about, as stated in the lines, ‘Se alguém souber sentir meu canto / Meu canto eu saberei sentir’ [If someone can feel my song / I will know how to feel my song] from ‘Meus versos são meu sonho dado’ [My verses are my given dream] (1930) (PFP, 3, 185). Apart from conveying the poetic process of self-othering masterfully, ‘Isto’ introduces aspects of Pessoa’s aesthetics that also inform Yeats’s aesthetic views on poetry. More specifically, the reference to a sublime type of beauty that articulates the secular and spiritual realities embodies the perfection that the poets sought to attain in their poetic oeuvre, providing a glimpse of their theories of poetry, which will be examined in the next chapter. Notes to Chapter 4 1. Robert Langbaum, The Mysteries of Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 216. 2. Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks (London: Penguin, 1987), p. 75.

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3. A Centenary Pessoa, ed. by Eugénio Lisboa and L. C. Taylor (Manchester: Carcanet, 1997), p. 134. 4. Oscar Wilde, The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, intro. by Merlin Holland and others, 5th edn (London: HarperCollins, 2003), p. 107. 5. The edition in Pessoa’s library is Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime: And Other Prose Pieces (Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1909). He also had editions of De Profundis; and the Ballad of Reading Gaol and The Poems of Oscar Wilde, published by Tauchnitz in 1908 and 1911 respectively. 6. Wilde, p. 302. This passage was underlined in Pessoa’s copy of Wilde’s short stories. 7. Ronsley, p. 72 (my emphasis). 8. Arnold Stein, ‘Yeats: A Study in Recklessness’, Sewanee Review, 57 (1949), 603–26 (p. 604): ‘Command of style or command of manners could only be won through stern self-discipline and respect for tradition. But ideally, once the command was won, it should rest lightly and nonchalantly as an effortless grace’. 9. The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. by John Kelly and others (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986–), iv: 1905–1907, ed. by John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard (2005), p. 783. 10. Wilde, p. 1081. 11. Wilde, p. 302. He makes this statement in the opening chapter of The Portrait of Mr. W. H., which Pessoa underlined. 12. Pater, Appreciations, p. 35. 13. Ronsley, p. 77. 14. W. B. Yeats, Memoirs: Autobiography — First Draft, Journal, ed. by Denis Donoghue (London: Macmillan, 1972), p. 138. 15. Hazard Adams, The Book of Yeats’s Poems (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1990), p. 9. 16. Steven Matthews, Yeats as Precursor (London: Macmillan, 2000), p. 37. 17. Michael Sidnell, ‘Mr. Yeats, Michael Robartes and Their Circle’, in Yeats and the Occult, ed. by George Mills Harper (London: Macmillan, 1976), pp. 225–54 (p. 241). 18. Pessoa inédito, ed. by Teresa Rita Lopes (Lisbon: Livros Horizonte, 1993), p. 22. 19. See Dionisio Vila Maior, Fernando Pessoa: heteronímia e dialogismo: o contributo de Mikhail Bakhtin (Coimbra: Almedina, 1994), pp. 160, 164. 20. My reading of heteronymy as stylistic othering has affinities with the position of José Augusto Seabra in O heterotexto Pessoano (São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1988) and Fernando Pessoa ou o poetodrama (São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1974). His notions of ‘poemodrama’ (Fernando Pessoa ou o poetodrama, p. 26) and ‘heterotexto’ (O heterotexto pessoano, p. 29) draw attention to the essentially textual nature of Pessoa’s heteronymy. 21. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets, p. 96. 22. Robert Browning: The Complete Works: With Variant Readings & Annotations, ed. by Roma A. King and others (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1969–), iii, ed. by Morse Peckham, Park Honan, Donald Smalley, and John Hulsman (1971), p. 197. Browning said this in the 1852 ‘Advertisement’ to his Dramatic Lyrics. Pessoa had a volume of Browning’s poetry in his library. 23. Schlegel cited in Frank Kermode, Romantic Image, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 56. 24. Wilde, p. 1091. 25. Gould and Toomey, eds, Mythologies, p. 182. 26. Ibid. 27. Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Major Works, ed. by Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 685. 28. JBY quoted in Kermode, Romantic Image, p. 32. 29. Balachandra Rajan, The Form of the Unfinished (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 27. 30. Lee Zimmerman, ‘Singing Amid Uncertainty: Yeats’s Closing Questions’, Yeats Annual, 2 (1983), 35–45 (p. 44). 31. Kermode, Romantic Image, pp. 178, 172. 32. Berardineli, Cleonice, Fernando Pessoa: outra vez te revejo... (São Paulo: Nova Aguilar, 2004), p. 297. 33. R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997–2003), ii: The Arch-Poet, p. 649. 34. Pessoa intended to publish his complete works with the title of ‘Ficções do Interlúdio’ (OPP,

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II, 1016), encompassing both those in his own name (orthonym) and those in the names of the three main heteronyms. 35. Kermode, Romantic Image, p. 178. 36. I address the links between these personality traits and strategies of self-representation in the poets’ works in depth in ‘Self-Representation in the Works of William Butler Yeats and Fernando Pessoa: A Comparative Study’ (unpublished master’s thesis, University College Dublin, 2002), pp. 26–72. See also my ‘The Aesthetic of Fragmentation and the Use of Personae in the Poetry of Fernando Pessoa and W. B. Yeats’, Portuguese Studies 19, 2003, 110–21. 37. Robert Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition (New York: Random House; London: Chatto & Windus, 1957), pp. 54, 52. 38. The English equivalent of ‘despersonalização’ was subsequently used to characterize Baudelaire’s poetic technique by Hugo Friedrich in Die Struktur der Modernen Lyrik (1956), quoted in Jonathan Culler, ‘The Modern Lyric: Generic Continuity and Critical Practice’, in The Comparative Perspective on Literature: Approaches to Theory and Practice, ed. by Clayton Koelb and Susan Noakes (Ithaca, NY; Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 284–99 (p. 289). 39. Fernando Pessoa: A Galaxy of Poets, ed. and trans. by Maria Helena Rodrigues Carvalho and others (London: Borough of Camden and Portuguese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Culture, 1985), pp. 25–26. 40. Daniel T. O’Hara, Tragic Knowledge: Yeats’s Autobiography and Hermeneutics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), p. 50. 41. O’Hara, p. 51. 42. O’Hara, p. 50. 43. Coelho, Diversidade e unidade em Fernando Pessoa, p. 166. 44. Wilde, p. 1163. 45. Poetical Works of John Keats, ed. by H. W. Garrod (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956; repr. 1970), p. 55.

CHAPTER 5

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The Metaphysical Aesthetic Hieratic Poetry This chapter concentrates on the conf luence of aesthetic and philosophical principles in Pessoa’s and Yeats’s poetics, derived to a great extent from Romantic and Victorian aesthetic theories discussed in Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry and in Matthew Arnold’s and Walter Pater’s critical essays. It argues that the poets’ stylistic diversification hinged on a theory of poetry as a hermeneutic method of ontological, epistemological and metaphysical inquiry, examining the manner in which these issues were articulated in their poetry. Furthermore, it traces the imagery of the circle and of the interval as symbolic of the poets’ pursuit for aesthetic and ontological unity and totality through diversity in their poetry, inspired at once by the Romantic aesthetic of the whole and of the fragment and by Hellenistic aestheticism. Finally, it appraises the poets’ ontological, epistemological and metaphysical quest in their poetic oeuvres. Pessoa and Yeats envisaged writing as a philosophical inquiry into the nature of the Self and its position in the World which ultimately sought some sort of ontological and metaphysical revelation of the true nature of self hood and existence. In doing so, both poets intuited the essence of poetry as a mode of expression of ‘fundamental attitudes of man before reality’,1 and therefore intrinsically endowed with metaphysical and epistemological features. Their understanding of poetry resembles the definition of metaphysics as ‘a philosophy concerned with abstract concepts such as the nature of existence or of truth and knowledge’ (OED). However, they conducted their existential inquiry through the specific medium of poetry. In a passage in English estimated to be from 1910, the young Pessoa describes himself as ‘a poet animated by philosophy, not a philosopher with poetic faculties. I loved to admire the beauty of things, to trace in the imperceptible through the minute the poetic soul of the universe’ (OPP, II, 81). His description of his poetry as the admiration and pursuit of ‘beauty’ in the ‘minute’ aspects of reality endows the philosophical subject matter in his poetry with an aesthetic quality. This was also the case with Yeats, who claimed, ‘I was constantly troubled about philosophical questions. [...] I would have a week’s anxiety over the problem: do the arts make us happier, or more sensitive and therefore more unhappy?’ (Aut, 86). He dates these concerns with artistic value to a young age by including them in the first book of his autobiography, Reveries over Childhood and Youth. Yeats and Pessoa can be considered inheritors of an ancient lineage of ‘poets of

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an ethical-aesthetic sentiment’,2 who attributed a quasi-religious function to poetry. Their mystical conception of poetry was greatly indebted to Shelley, whom they deeply admired as young poets.3 Drawing on an ancient literary tradition dating back to Plato’s The Republic, Shelley regarded poetry as ‘something divine’ and poets as ‘hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration’, as stated in A Defence of Poetry (1845).4 Inspired by Shelley’s views, Yeats approached poetry, and artistic creation in general, with a religious fervour evident in the following excerpt from an early essay, entitled ‘Ireland and the Arts’ (1901): ‘We who care deeply about the arts find ourselves the priesthood of an almost forgotten faith, and we must, I think, if we would win the people again, take upon ourselves the method and the fervour of a priesthood’ (E&I, 203). It is clear from this statement that Yeats regarded art as a mystical experience to be embarked on both by the poet and by the reader alike. In Discoveries (1906), he states, ‘All symbolic art should arise out of a real belief ’ (E&I, 294). Significantly, he makes this claim in a section entitled ‘Religious Belief Necessary to Religious Art’, in which he refers to Shelley as a precursor in the spiritualization of ‘the imaginative arts’ (E&I, 294). Accordingly, Yeats emulates the religious diction of A Defence of Poetry in the titles of some of the short essays in Discoveries, such as ‘Prophet, Priest and King’, ‘Concerning Saints and Artists’, and ‘The Two Kinds of Asceticism’. In turn, Pessoa’s conviction of the sacred role of the poet is evident in a letter to Armando Cortes-Rodrigues from 19 January 1915: De modo que, à minha sensibilidade cada vez mais profunda, e à minha consciência cada vez maior da terrível e religiosa missão que todo o homem de génio recebe de Deus com o seu génio, tudo quanto é futilidade literária, mera arte, vai gradualmente soando cada vez mais a oco e repugnante. Pouco a pouco, mas seguramente, no divino cumprimento íntimo de uma evolução cujos fins me são ocultos, tenho vindo erguendo os meus propósitos e as minhas ambições cada vez mais à altura daquelas qualidades que recebi. (C, I, 140; my emphasis) [Therefore, to my ever deeper sensibility, and to my ever greater conscience of the terrible and religious mission that every man of genius receives from God along with his genius, everything that is literary futility, mere art, sounds gradually more hollow and revolting. Little by little, but undoubtedly in the intimate divine fulfilment of an evolution unknown to me, I have been raising my goals and my ambitions more and more to match the qualities I have received.]

This excerpt shows that, like Yeats, Pessoa regarded poetry as a way of communing with the divine and approached artistic creation with a sense of ‘religious mission’. In accordance with the Romantic equation of poetry with religion, Yeats’s ‘To Ireland in the Coming Times’ (1892) and Pessoa’s ‘O Último Sortilégio’ (1930) depict the persona of the poet as the celebrant of the sacred rite of poetry. The opening lines of ‘To Ireland in the Coming Times’ inscribe the poet persona in an AngloIrish poetic tradition. However, unlike the poetry of Yeats’s immediate precursors — Davis, Mangan and Ferguson — the visionary, evocative quality of his poetry earns it the metaphorical epithet of ‘a druid tune’. Thus, the poem self-ref lexively inscribes Yeats’s poetry in the more ancient secret tradition of the legendary Celtic cast of poet magicians known as druids:

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The Metaphysical Aesthetic My rhymes more than their rhyming tell Of things discovered in the deep, Where only body’s laid asleep. For the elemental creatures go About my table to and fro, That hurry from unmeasured mind To rant and rage in flood and wind; Yet he who treads in measured ways May surely barter gaze for gaze. Man ever journeys on with them After the red-rose-bordered hem. Ah, faeries, dancing under the moon, A Druid land, a Druid tune! (VP, 138–39)

The lines concerning the ‘elemental creatures’ that ‘go about [his] table’ evoke the image of the magician conjuring spirits. The comparison is further reinforced by the implicit suggestion that his ‘measured’ lines are equivalent to the spells and incantations of the magician, constituting the devices through which he conjures up and controls those otherwise unruly entities. Pessoa’s ‘O Último Sortilégio’ [The Last Spell] constitutes the only instance of Pessoa’s depersonalization in the feminine in verse. In this dramatic monologue, the sorceress persona represents the poet and her spell is a metaphor for the poem — ‘Já repeti o antigo encantamento’ [I have already repeated the ancient incantation] (OPP, I, 1109). The reference to an incantation recalls the line ‘And by the incantation of this verse,’ at the close of Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’.5 Unlike his Romantic precedent, though, the sorceress’s invocation in Pessoa’s poem fails — ‘A música partiu-se do meu hino’ [The music of my hymn is wrecked] (OPP, I, 1110) — signifying the apparent failure of the poem. Pessoa’s revisionist recasting of the Romantic approach to poetry derives from the fact that this poem belongs to a late stage of his orthonymous poetry, in which he adopts a predominantly despondent tone. This explains the contrast with Yeats’s reiteration of the romantic myth in ‘To Ireland in the Coming Times’, not yet subject to the self-questioning recurrent in his later poems. However, the depiction of the sorceress’s trade in ‘O Último Sortilégio’ is rather similar to the manner in which Yeats depicts the druid poet’s trade: ‘Outrora meu condão fadava as sarças E a minha evocação do solo erguia Presenças concentradas das que esparsas Dormem nas formas naturais das coisas. Outrora a minha voz acontecia. Fadas e elfos, se eu chamasse, via, E as folhas da f loresta eram lustrosas. (OPP, I, 1109) [‘Of old my wand charmed the brambles And my invocation rose from the earth Concentrated presences of those that Lie dormant in the natural forms of things Of old my voice was commanding. I would see fairies and elves, if I invoked them, And the leaves in the forest were glossy.]

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Like the Yeatsian persona, the sorceress hitherto exercised mastery over the supernatural presences, like fairies, elves and other elemental beings (an equivalent to Yeats’s ‘elemental creatures’) that inhabit the natural forms, similarly to the ‘things discovered in the deep, / Where only body’s laid asleep’ in Yeats’s poem (VP, 139). The poets are therefore referring to the supernatural forces which exist beyond the physical world, according to a magical conception of reality. Some of the supernatural powers invoked by the sorceress in ‘O Último Sortilégio’ possess a clearly malevolent quality, including even associations with Black Magic, as indicated by the reference to ‘as sacras potências infernais’ [the holy infer nal powers] (OPP, I, 1110). Similarly, the ‘elemental creatures’ invoked by the Yeatsian persona in ‘To Ireland in the Coming Times’ have a threatening, violent potential signified by the verbs ‘rant’ and ‘rage’, which intimate a spiritual power at odds with Christian morality. Yeats would later trace the association of poetry with unorthodox religious belief back to Shelley, in the essay ‘Prometheus Unbound’ (1932): The orthodox religion, as our mothers had taught it, was no longer credible; those who could not substitute connoisseurship, or some humanitarian or scientific pursuit, found a substitute in Shelley. [...] he seemed to sum up all that was metaphysical in English poetry. (E&I, 424)

The ambivalent title of his first collection of essays, Ideas of Good and Evil (1903), betrayed his allegiance to an unorthodox religiosity, inherited not only from Shelley but also from Blake, who constituted the other most significant single inf luence on his theory of poetry. This ambivalent aesthetic suited the early post-Symbolist Yeats as much as Pessoa, whose early English poetry betrayed analogous inf luences, discussed in the first chapter. Their religious aestheticism was also subject to the inf luence of a fin-de-siècle aesthetic, encapsulated by what Yeats called a ‘vision of evil’, particularly salient in the apocalyptic lyrics of The Wind Among the Reeds (1899), and in the English poems attributed to Pessoa’s semi-heteronym Alexander Search. In ‘O Último Sortilégio’, the sorceress explicitly refers to the alchemical transmutation of precious metals — ‘Tu, porém, Sol, cujo ouro me foi presa, / Tu, Lua, cuja prata converti’ [You, however, the Sun, whose gold I once controlled / You Moon, whose silver I converted] (OPP, I, 1110) — which symbolize the poetic distillment of human experience. The poem implicitly alludes to Shelley’s claim in A Defence of Poetry that poetry ‘transmutes all that it touches [...]; its secret alchemy turns to potable gold the poisonous waters which f low from death through life’.6 The closing stanza of Pessoa’s poem resumes the alchemical imagery by having the sorceress transform herself into an object d’art, accomplishing through her final act of magic the ultimate victory over time, change and death, and symbolically overturning the poet’s ostensible disbelief in the power of poetry: «Converta-me a minha última magia Numa estátua de mim em corpo vivo! Morra quem sou, mas quem me fiz e havia, Anónima presença que se beija, Carne do meu abstracto amor cativo, Seja a morte de mim em que revivo; E tal qual fui, não sendo nada, eu seja!» (OPP, I, 1110)

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The Metaphysical Aesthetic [May my last spell transform me Into a living body statue of myself! May I die, but may who I made myself into — An anonymous presence that one kisses, Flesh of my abstract captive love — Be my death in which I live again; And such as I was, being nothing, may I become!]

The opening poem of The Tower, entitled ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ (1927) describes an analogous quest for immortality, revisiting the theme of The Island of Statues, one of Yeats’s earliest works. However, there are major differences that ref lect the shift from a ‘concentration in the early poems on natural landscapes to manmade objects’.7 Whereas in the pastoral play immortality was achieved through a legendary f lower, in ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ the alchemical transmutation of the poet persona into an effigy after death is attained by artistic manipulation, for: Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enamelling To keep a drowsy Emperor awake; Or set upon a golden bough to sing To lords and ladies of Byzantium Of what is past, or passing, or to come. (VP, 408)

Ironically, though, the transformation of the poet persona results in an artefact that does not differ substantially from the statues which populated the enchanted island in The Island of Statues. The difference lies in the fact that in the pastoral play the men who had been transformed into statues were the passive victims of a sorcerer’s spell, whereas in this poem the persona has actively sought his transformation into an object d’art to be displayed at the Emperor’s court, as the second half of the stanza suggests. That is not the only difference between The Island of Statues and ‘Sailing to Byzantium’; for, unlike the early poetry, Yeats’s late poems represent earthly paradise as an urban setting and a product of civilization. Hence, his appropriation of the city of Byzantium, which was the cultural centre of the Byzantine Empire of late Antiquity and was regarded by Yeats as the physical embodiment of a Golden Age of the Arts. On the other hand, the fact that this existed only in a distant past ascribes to it an imaginary quality. Thus, Byzantium becomes the symbol in his mature poetry of ‘the artistic imagination, in which, with every passion wrought to perfect beauty by art and poetry, we shall live, when the body has passed away for the last time’ (E&I, 137). Yeats’s paraphrase of Blake in this passage from ‘Blake’s Illustrations to Dante’ (1897) confirms that he shared his belief in the regeneration of the human soul through the creative power of the human imagination, manifested through the Arts. Yeats’s stanza also alludes to the following lines from section VII of Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’:

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Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! No hungry generations tread thee down; The voice I hear this passing night was heard In ancient days by emperor and clown: 8

Significantly, though, unlike the Romantic poet, Yeats does not choose a natural form, but one created through artistic workmanship to represent the poetic voice. The figure of the ‘bird or golden handiwork’ reappears in ‘Byzantium’ (1932) to: [...] scorn aloud In glory of changeless metal Common bird or petal And all complexities of mire or blood. (VP, 498)

In this revisionist rendition of the quintessential Romantic symbol of poetry, the bird (or poet) does not, like Keats’s or Shelley’s nightingale, sing harmoniously ‘to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds’.9 Rather, it dissonantly scorns its own and all earthly forms, now that it has been gathered ‘Into the artifice of eternity’ (VP, 408), as Yeats states in ‘Sailing to Byzantium’. The parallel with the alchemical transmutation of the sorceress into a statue in ‘O Último Sortilégio’ is even more striking in Yeats’s ‘The Statues’ (1939), which evokes the Pythagorean tradition of mystical mathematics: Pythagoras planned it. Why did people stare? His numbers, though they moved or seemed to move In marble or in bronze, lacked character. But boys and girls, pale from the imagined love Of solitary beds, knew what they were, That passion could bring character enough, And pressed at midnight in some public place Live lips upon a plummet-measured face. (VP, 610)

Despite their death-like stasis, the statues in the Yeatsian poem are capable of eliciting amorous reactions of the same nature as that elicited by the sorceress’s statue in Pessoa’s poem, symbolizing in both cases the power of the poem to rouse emotional responses in the readers. Both Yeats’s and Pessoa’s statues are invested with an overf low of passionate energy which emulates Blake’s postulate that ‘Energy [...] is from the body... Energy is eternal delight’.10 They are endowed with a bodily and an ethereal dimension that signals the union of the worldly and the otherworldly. Moral and Aesthetic Ascesis Pessoa’s and Yeats’s conceptions of the priestly, hieratic function of the poet were also fostered by Matthew Arnold. In ‘The Study of Poetry’ Arnold declared that poetry performed the role of religion in the modern world through its ability to ‘interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us’.11 Arnold also regarded poetry as a spiritual discipline or conduct, able to provide a ‘moral interpretation’ of life and to arouse ‘virtuous action’.12 In the case of the poet, ‘virtuous action’ consisted of action of a contemplative cast, ref lected in poetic composition. According to Arnold, the

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degree of achievement of the poet’s virtuous action is ref lected in ‘the matter and substance of the poetry’ and in ‘its manner and style’,13 which he perceived as moral categories. Like Arnold, Pessoa and Yeats regarded poetic composition as a form of spiritual asceticism, although distancing themselves from Arnold’s moral stance. In ‘António Botto e o Ideal Estético em Portugal’ (1922), Pessoa claims that ‘[a] Arte é [...] o aperfeiçoamento subjectivo da vida’ [Art is the subjective improvement of life] (OPP, II, 1243). However, in the preface to Caeiro’s poems, the classicist Reis is careful to distinguish this impulse from a conventional sense of morality, describing it as ‘um ascetismo estético e não moral; à grega antiga, os olhos postos na beleza’ [an aesthetic not a moral asceticism; in the ancient Greek manner, with an eye to beauty] (OPP, II, 1033). Likewise, Yeats had previously argued that ‘All art is [...] an asceticism of the imagination’ (E&I, 18). Yeats’s early essay ‘The Celtic Element in Literature’ (1897) challenged Arnold’s views in The Study of Celtic Literature, denoting different standpoints in this regard. However, Yeats’s claim that he ‘had made a new religion, almost an infallible Church of poetic tradition’ (Aut, 115–16) shows his affinities with Arnold’s religious conception of poetry. He also adopted the Arnoldian definition of poetry as ‘a criticism of life’ capable of conveying ‘the spirit of our race’,14 redressing Arnold’s tenet in an Irish context, as shown in the following excerpt: I deliberately reshaped my style [...]. I cast off traditional metaphors and loosened my rhythm, and recognizing that all the criticism of life known to me was alien and English, became as emotional as possible but with an emotion which I described to myself as cold. (Aut, 74)

On the other hand, this excerpt illustrates Yeats’s conformity with the Arnoldian requirement of ‘absolute sincerity’ in good poetry,15 which, he thought, was better conveyed by a native Irish than an adopted English outlook in his poetry. Additionally, Yeats’s definition of poetic discipline as ‘active virtue’ (Aut, 469) and his emphasis on its laboriousness in poems like ‘Adam’s Curse’ recall Arnold’s conception of form as ‘the product of “steadfastness”, spiritual and emotional stamina, a kind of artistic fortitude’.16 Pessoa felt a strong affinity to Arnold’s views about Hellenistic classicism, voicing similar views through the heteronym Ricardo Reis. Reis’s ‘Ponho na altiva mente o fixo esforço’ (1924) discloses a conception of poetry that emulates classical poetic principles: Ponho na altiva mente o fixo exforço Da altura, e á sorte deixo, E a suas leis, o verso; Que quando é alto e regio o pensamento, Subdita a phrase o busca E o scravo rythmo o serve. (PRR, 67) [I devote my higher mind to the ardent Pursuit of the summit, leaving Verse to chance and its laws, For when the thought is lofty and noble, The sentence will naturally seek it, And rhythm slavishly serve it.] (Zenith 2, 123)

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Reis’s claim that he moulds the stylistic elements of the poem — rhythm and verse — to the seriousness of the content emulates Horace’s notion of the legitimum poema [the poem written according to the laws of the verse].17 His argument also resembles Arnold’s definition of style as a ‘recasting and heightening [...] of what a man has to say, in such a manner as to add dignity and distinction to it’,18 which endows poetry with ‘higher truth and higher seriousness’.19 Additionally, the fact that Pessoa only published Reis’s Odes when he considered them ‘perfectly finished and accomplished as regards their form’20 illustrates the importance that he attributed to formal aspects of the poem, which is in keeping with classical theories of poetry. According to Álvaro de Campos, this poem expresses Reis’s ars poetica, which Campos accepts subject to the following qualifications: ‘Ressalvando que o pensamento deve ser emoção, [...] é certo que, concebida fortemente, a emoção, a frase que a define espontaneiza-se, e o ritmo que a traduz surge pela frase fora’ [Except for the elevated register and for the fact that thought should be emotion, it is true that, if the emotion is intensely conceived, the sentence that defines it becomes spontaneous and the rhythm that conveys it f lows through the sentence] (OPP, II, 1073). However, his argument highlights significant aesthetic differences between the two heteronyms; thus, in contrast with Reis’s poetics of balance, which relies on the intellect, he defends a poetics of intense, overf lowing emotion. Moreover, his criticism of Reis’s set measures and heightened diction betrays his opposing belief in the use of colloquial register and free verse. Campos’s mundane subject matter and colloquial prosaic style constitute Pessoa’s subversion of Arnold’s ‘higher truth and higher seriousness’.21 Yeats’s beggars and ‘wild old’ personae, especially Crazy Jane, display a similar poetic stance, addressing commonplace themes, often of a sexual nature, that subvert the serious subject matter of other poems. Moreover, his use of dialect and a colloquial register in the poems attributed to these personae allowed the sustained intrusion of a subversive, often ironic or comical, discourse which was at variance with the heightened diction of the poems ascribed to Yeats’s aristocratic personae. Arnold’s notion of ‘virtuous action’ intimates the association of poetry with the social sphere of human affairs. Shelley had already suggested in A Defence of Poetry that the aesthetic pleasure derived from the appreciation of poetry produces an ecstatic state of mind, which is conducive to self-realization and consequent self-improvement. However, he was (perhaps deliberately) vague about the matter, merely implying that it affected the poet, himself subject to the moral function of poetry, as well as the reader, over whom the poet exerts a formative role. Pessoa’s and Yeats’s overall understanding of the role of poetry encompassed both the moral and aesthetic education of the reader. In the opening essay of Ideas of Good and Evil (1899) Yeats confessed his ambition to write ‘popular poetry’ (E&I, 4), by which he meant ‘good poetry’, not the self-indulgent type of poetry that, in his opinion, was produced by ‘coteries’ (E&I, 8). This statement shows his aesthetic concern for the quality of the poetry he produced, which also had a moral or social counterpart. In the 1901 essay ‘What is “Popular Poetry”?’ he returns to this topic, claiming to have ‘thoughts of making a whole literature’ (E&I, 4). Finally, in ‘J. M. Synge and the Ireland of his Time’ (1910) he expresses the wish to produce a literature that is ‘the possession of a people’, namely the Irish people (E&I, 318).

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Pessoa also acknowledged his intention of creating a national Weltanschauung in ‘A nova poesia portuguesa sociologicamente considerada’ (1912), which announces not only a new style of poetry but the beginning of a new era marked by the supremacy of Portuguese literature. He also expressed ambitious designs for his poetry, claiming that heteronymy had allowed him to convert his ‘genius’ into ‘a whole literature’, thereby helping to ‘enrich the universe’ (OPP, II, 1022).22 In a letter to CortesRodrigues from 19 January 1915, Pessoa refers to the poetry of the heteronyms as ‘toda uma literatura que eu criei e vivi [...] e que constitui uma corrente com inf luência possível, benéfica incontestavelmente, nas almas dos outros’ [a whole literature that I created and lived and which constitutes a movement with possible and unquestionably benevolent inf luence on the souls of others] (C, I, 142). In this statement, he ascribes a beneficial value to his poetry, which can be interpreted to encompass both its aesthetic value as a consummate literary work and its moral value as contributing to self-improvement. As with Yeats, his lofty aesthetic and ethical concept of poetry led him to condemn ‘tudo quanto é futilidade literária, mera arte’ [all that is literary futility, mere art] (C, I, 140). This included the contemporary poetry of the Orpheu group (to which he belonged at the time), which, like other European avant-garde movements, intended to shock the readers. Regarding the latter, Pessoa states in the same letter ‘Passou de mim a ambição grosseira de brilhar por brilhar, e essa outra, grosseiríssima, e de um plebeísmo artístico insuportável, de querer épater’ [I no longer have the crude ambition to impress, and that other extremely coarse ambition to épater [le bourgeois] which I find of unbearable cheap artistic taste] (C, I, 141). According to Shelley, ‘the poetical faculty’ consists in re-casting the ‘new materials of knowledge’ or truths adumbrated by the poet ‘according to a certain rhythm and order which may be called the beautiful and the good’.23 His views most likely inspired Yeats’s argument, in ‘Ireland and the Arts’, that the ‘search for perfection [...] sometimes has the form of the religious life and sometimes of the artistic life’, and that the artist ‘must make his work a part of his own journey towards beauty and truth’ (E&I, 207). Yeats’s substitution of Shelley’s term ‘good’ with the term ‘truth’ introduces an epistemological dimension. Not only that, but truth also constitutes an inherent characteristic of poetry, according to Matthew Arnold. The seriousness with which Yeats envisaged poetry, derived from his conviction in the high aesthetic value of art, also invites comparison with Arnold’s emphasis on the ‘high seriousness’ of poetry.24 The latter term also describes aptly Pessoa’s attitude to artistic praxis and his views about the value of art, as stated in the aforesaid letter to Cortes-Rodrigues: Fazer arte parece-me cada vez mais importante cousa, mais terrível missão — dever a cumprir arduamente, monasticamente, sem desviar os olhos do fim criador de civilização de toda a obra artística. E por isso o meu próprio conceito puramente estético da arte subiu e dificultou-se; exijo agora de mim muita mais perfeição e elaboração cuidada. [...] Devo à missão que me sinto uma perfeição absoluta no realizado, uma seriedade integral no escrito. (C, I, 141) [To make art increasingly seems to me the most important thing, the most terrible mission — a duty to fulfil arduously, monastically, without losing sight of the goal of creating civilization of every work of art. For that reason

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my purely aesthetic concept of art has become higher and more difficult; I now demand much more perfection and careful execution from myself. [...] I owe the mission which I feel in me an absolute perfection in what I create, an integral seriousness in what I write.]

The seriousness with which Pessoa approached his poetic craft resembles a religious calling, as suggested by the words ‘mission’ and ‘monastically’. Moreover, he acknowledges that his conviction in the absolute importance of art makes him apply the strictest discipline to poetic composition. The stylistic feature of that discipline is highlighted by Reis, who claims, ‘Como o estado mental, em que se a poesia forma, é, deveras, mais emotivo [...] há mister que ao estado poético se aplique uma disciplina mais dura [...]. E esses artifícios — o ritmo, a rima, a estrofe — são instrumentos de tal disciplina’ [As the mental state in which poetry is formed is doubtless more emotive there is a need to apply a stricter discipline to writing poetry. And the artifices of rhythm, rhyme, and strophe are the instruments of such a discipline] (OPP, I, 868). These views evoke Pater’s definition of ‘Style’ in the homonymous essay as ‘self-restraint, a skilful economy of means, ascesis, [...]; aesthetic satisfaction [...] in the exaction from every sentence of a precise relief [...] in the logically filled space connected always with the delightful sense of difficulty overcome’.25 Yeats was also heavily inspired by the Paterian notion of ascesis. In ‘Adam’s Curse’, he equates the refinement of the poem with stylistic discipline in the lines ‘It’s certain there is no fine thing / Since Adam’s fall but needs much labouring’ (VP, 204). Yeats describes this type of asceticism as a form of dramatization: If we cannot imagine ourselves as different from what we are and assume that second self, we cannot impose a discipline upon ourselves [...]. Active virtue as distinguished from the passive acceptance of a current code is therefore theatrical, consciously dramatic, the wearing of a mask. (Aut, 469)

The deliberate discipline of poetic dramatization gains a moral connotation in this statement. By using the expression ‘active virtue’, Yeats combines a word with moral connotations with another that belongs to the aesthetic field to signify the ascetic process whereby the poet can transcend mediocrity and aspire to artistic perfection. He makes numerous references in his autobiography to the ‘intolerable toil’ of composition (Aut, 485), undoubtedly incurred in his effort to conceal ‘the artist’s handiwork’ (Aut, 150) in the creation of beauty. Yeats’s aesthetic morality ref lects the view, presented by Pater in Marius the Epicurean, that art is ‘the only true morality’ because ‘the products of the [artistic] imagination must themselves be held to present the most perfect forms of life’.26 Pessoa expresses a similar ideal in ‘António Botto e o Ideal Estético em Portugal’ (1922), stating, ‘fazer arte é querer tornar o mundo mais belo, porque a obra de arte, uma vez feita, constitui beleza objectiva, beleza acrescentada à que há no mundo’ [to create art is to want to make the world more beautiful, because the work of art, once created, constitutes objective beauty, added to the beauty in the world] (OPP, II, 1241). Pater’s inf luence on Pessoa is corroborated by the profuse marginalia in his edition of The Renaissance, a book which had a strong impact on Pessoa. He translated the passage on ‘La Gioconda’ from the essay ‘Leonardo da Vinci’,

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which was published in Athena (1924), a short-lived little magazine edited by Pessoa and inspired by Pater’s Hellenic aestheticism.27 Pater’s inf luence is also manifest in Pessoa’s essay ‘António Botto e o Ideal Estético em Portugal’, published in the third issue of the magazine Contemporânea (1922), in which Pessoa alludes directly to Pater and to Winckelmann, stating, ‘O esteta substitui a ideia de beleza à ideia de bem, porém dá, por isso mesmo, a essa ideia de beleza um alcance metafísico e moral. A célebre ‘Conclusão’ da Renascença de Pater, o maior dos estetas europeus, é exemplo culminante desta atitude’ [The aesthete substitutes the idea of beauty for the idea of good; however, for that reason, he gives that idea of beauty a metaphysical and moral meaning. The famous ‘conclusion’ of The Renaissance by Pater, the greatest of the European aesthetes, is a culminating example of this attitude] (OPP, II, 1245). Pater’s aestheticism inspired Pessoa’s and Yeats’s attempts to fashion a poetics of perfection that was at once aesthetic and moral or ethical.28 Their views also ref lected the following claim by Pater in ‘Winckelmann’: Certainly, for us of the modern world, with its conf licting claims, its entangled interests, distracted by so many sorrows, with many preoccupations, so bewildering an experience, the problem of unity with ourselves, in blitheness and repose, is far harder than it was for the Greek within the simple terms of antique life. Yet, not less than ever, the intellect demands completeness, centrality.29

The impact of these lines on Yeats is evident in his notion of Unity of Being, which underpins his revision of past works in an effort to create stylistic continuity. The principles highlighted in the passage quoted above emerge as recurrent preoccupations when appraising his works in the self-ref lexive later poems, encapsulated in lines such as ‘Something to perfection brought’ (VP, 577) in ‘What Then?’ and ‘Those masterful images [...] complete’ (VP, 630) in ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’. Similarly, Yeats’s exhortation to the Irish people to ‘Climb to our proper dark, that we may trace / The lineaments of a plummet-measured face’ (VP, 611) in ‘The Statues’ mirrors Pater’s ideal of ‘balance, unity with one’s self, consummate Greek modelling’,30 adapted to the Yeatsian ideal of Unity of Culture. In his later poetry, Yeats predominantly assumed the role of the modern poet ‘separated from nature by culture and society [who] experiences an aggravated sense of loss and psychic fragmentation’.31 The incidence of the themes of regret and remorse in The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933), reinforced by images of self-division patent in such poems as ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’ (1929) and ‘Vacillation’ (1931), corroborate this claim. Paradoxically, these two poems celebrate a momentary unity of being in a manner that evokes the blissful peacefulness which Pater describes in the passage above. The self-enclosed, poised manner in which this emotional state is depicted in part IV of ‘Vacillation’ recalls the Paterian ideal of balance, completeness and centrality outlined in the passage quoted above: My fiftieth year had come and gone, I sat, a solitary man, In a crowded London shop, An open book and empty cup On the marble table-top.

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While on the shop and street I gazed My body of a sudden blazed; And twenty minutes more or less It seemed, so great my happiness, That I was blessèd and could bless. (VP, 501)

Yeats provides a context to the experience depicted in this poem in ‘Anima Mundi’: At certain moments, always unforeseen, I become happy, most commonly when at hazard I have opened some book of verse. [...] Perhaps I am sitting in some crowded restaurant, the open book beside me, or closed, my excitement having over-brimmed the page. I look at the strangers near as if I had known them all my life, and it seems strange that I cannot speak to them: everything fills me with affection, [...] I do not even remember that this happy mood must come to an end.32

This passage reveals that the source of the epiphany described in the poem was a poetic work, ascribing a spiritual quality to the artistic experience, corroborated by the adjective ‘blessed’ and the verb ‘bless’. Therefore, in direct contrast to the pastoral mode discussed in the second chapter, the persona in this poem experiences happiness not through a natural but through an artistic medium. This allows him to experience a sense of communion with the rest of mankind in an urban, cosmopolitan setting of equal standing to that experienced for instance in ‘Stream and Sun at Glendalough’ (1932). The impact of Pater’s aestheticism on Pessoa likely contributed to the increment of his neoclassical bias and in particular to the Neo-Paganism that pervaded his orthonymous English and Portuguese poetry as well as that of the heteronyms.33 Reis’s Epicureanism, in particular, sanctions the ‘repose’ that Pater associated with ‘unity with one’s self ’ in the earlier passage, echoed in ‘Mestre, são plácidas’ (1914): Mestre, são placidas Todas as horas Que nós perdemos. Se no perdel-as, Qual numa jarra, Nós pômos f lores. Não ha tristezas Nem alegrias Na nossa vida. Assim saibamos, Sabios incautos, Não a viver, Mas decorrel-a, Tranquillos, placidos, Tendo as creanças Por nossas mestras, E os olhos cheios De Natureza.... (PRR, 87) [Peaceful, Master, Are all the hours

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Reis claims to derive this existential positioning from his ‘master’, Alberto Caeiro, to whom this poem pays homage and whose poetry embodies the ‘blitheness’ associated with the Paterian sense of unity. Physical and Metaphysical Aesthetics Shelley was convinced that poetry, by embodying ideal aesthetic perfection, ‘makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world’.34 Imbued with the same Platonic conviction, Pessoa and Yeats invested a great deal of effort in erecting an ordered poetic universe which transcended the chaotic accidence of the world. Pessoa’s and Yeats’s imagery of the garden symbolizes a poetics of perfection. In ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’, the garden offers the poet a place of refuge ‘Where the symbolic rose can break into f lower’ (VP, 419), representing both material fertility and poetic creativity. The first meditation presents the ordered world of the landscaped garden in ancestral houses, where human artistry and organic growth harmoniously combine to produce sheltered and beautiful surroundings: Surely among a rich man’s f lowering lawns, Amid the rustle of his planted hills, Life overf lows without ambitious pains; And rains down life until the basin spills, And mounts more dizzy high the more it rains As though to choose whatever shape it wills And never stoop to a mechanical Or servile shape, at other’s beck and call. (VP, 417)

In this excerpt, the ‘artist’ is equated with the landscaper and the ‘architect’, who attempts to ‘rear in stone / The sweetness that all longed for night and day, / The gentleness that none there had ever known’ (VP, 418). The simile implies that the poet’s internal garden, like the sheltered garden in ancestral houses, contrasts with the ‘violence’ and ‘bitterness’ (VP, 418) of the outside world. However, that violence and bitterness are also the products of man’s actions as is the landscaped garden:

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O what if the levelled lawns and gravelled ways Where slippered Contemplation finds his ease And Childhood a delight for every sense But take our greatness with our violence? (VP, 418)

Thus, the poet persona is forced to concede, in the form of a rhetorical question, to the unavoidable intrusion of the disruptive forces of the modern world, vividly illustrated by the civil war, which surrounded the poet’s house at the time of the composition of this poem and prompted these meditations. Pessoa’s ‘Conselho’ [Advice] (1935), written in the last year of the poet’s life and therefore displaying a quality of poetic legacy similar to ‘The Tower’ and ‘Under Ben Bulben’, examines poetic self-representation through the metaphor of the garden: Cerca de grandes muros quem te sonhas. Depois, onde é visível o jardim Através do portão de grade dada, Põe quantas f lores são as mais risonhas, Para que te conheçam só assim. Onde ninguém o vir não ponhas nada. Faze canteiros como os que os outros têm, Onde os olhares possam entrever O teu jardim como lho vais mostrar. Mas onde és teu, e nunca o vê ninguém Deixa as f lores que vêm do chão crescer E deixa as ervas naturais medrar. Faze de ti um duplo ser guardado; E que ninguém, que veja e fite, possa Saber mais que um jardim de quem tu és — Um jardim ostensivo e reservado, Por trás do qual a f lor nativa roça A erva tão pobre que nem tu a vês... (OPP, I, 424) [Surround who you dream you are with high walls. Then, wherever the garden can be seen Through the iron bars of the gate, Plant only the most cheerful f lowers, So that you’ll be known as a cheerful sort. Where it can’t be seen, don’t plant anything. Lay f lower beds, like other people have, So that passing gazes can look in At your garden as you’re going to show it. But where you’re all your own and no one Ever sees you, let wild f lowers spring up Spontaneously, and let the grass grow naturally. Make yourself into a well-guarded Double self, letting no one who looks in See more than a garden of who you are — A showy but private garden, behind which The native f lowers brush against grass So straggly that not even you see it...] (Zenith 1, 361)

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The type of garden depicted in this poem resembles the landscaped garden of Yeats’s poem, laboriously devised by the artist to harmonize different styles of gardening: the formal garden, with its f lawlessly pruned shrubbery perfectly aligned in manmade f lower beds, and the wild garden (also called the nineteenth-century ‘English garden’), which attempts to recreate the organic natural setting of the original Garden of Eden. If interpreted metonymically as distinct types of poetry, these varieties of gardens can be taken to represent the diametrically opposed styles of the heteronyms Reis and Campos, ref lecting the impact of the concomitant neoclassical and neo-Romantic strands of modernism on Pessoa’s poetry. However, as in Yeats’s poem, the precarious balance of Pessoa’s garden is threatened by the disruptive forces of nature in the form of weeds, which symbolize the disarray of chaos intruding from the external world and threatening to disrupt the order of his internal garden. Despite an apparent desire for the recovery of order in his garden, the speaker of Pessoa’s ‘Conselho’ is aware that he is merely trying to keep up appearances, suggesting that the holistic perfection of the Garden of Eden is only retrievable through artistic pretence. Pessoa’s and Yeats’s concern with maintaining order in their poetic gardens is akin to Eliot’s call for a poetics of order as ‘a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history’.35 In ‘Blood and the Moon’ (1928), Yeats defiantly states, Blessed be this place, More blessed still this tower; A bloody, arrogant power Rose out of the race Uttering, mastering it, Rose like these walls from these Storm-beaten cottages — In mockery I have set A powerful emblem up, And sing it rhyme upon rhyme In mockery of a time Half dead at the top. (VP, 480)

This poem can be understood in different ways. If interpreted from a historical perspective, the tower functions as an emblem of a romantic age of chivalry, which the poet persona has ‘set’ as a model against modern Irish society. On the other hand, the ability of the tower to withstand the test of time symbolizes the endurance of the Irish race throughout centuries of colonial occupation. From an aesthetic viewpoint, these lines describe the tower as a finished structure that will withstand the test of time, symbolizing the self-sufficing quality of Yeats’s poetry. The rhetorical assertiveness of this stanza is corroborated by the verbs ‘uttering’ and ‘mastering’ and the adjective ‘arrogant’, which strengthen the assertion that the poet persona has raised a ‘powerful emblem’ through the medium of his verse. In accordance with the poetics of order, Yeats resorts to rhetoric consciously as a way of counteracting the fate of poets, who ‘sing amid uncertainty’ (Myth, 331). Conversely, the pursuit of immortality through rhyme and consequent retrieval to a prelapsarian condition of unity and perfection are undermined in other Yeatsian

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poems, which celebrate the concrete world, thus introducing a prosaic dimension into his metaphysical poetics and a profane counterpart to his religion of poetry. The last stanza of ‘The Circus Animal’s Desertion’ adopts this de-sacralizing stance by attributing the source of his imaginative creations, which he belittlingly calls his ‘circus animals’, to common objects of everyday day life: Those masterful images because complete Grew in pure mind, but out of what began? A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street, Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can, Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut Who keeps the till. [...] (VP, 630)

Like a master puppeteer he allows the ‘masterful images’, willed to life by his poetic imagination, to revert to a ‘mound of refuse’, deconstructing the metaphor of the tower. Likewise, the human emotions are harboured not ‘in pure mind’, but ‘[i]n the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart’ (VP, 630). In later poems such as ‘Are you Content?’ (1938), Yeats expresses his dissatisfaction with his works in the lines ‘Have I, that put it into words, / Spoilt what old loins have sent?’ and the responding refrain ‘I am not content’ (VP, 604). This questioning attitude ref lects the modern condition of singing amid uncertainty and imperfection that he sought to counter through his art but could not ultimately avoid, as signalled by his continuous revision of his poems in early and late poetry collections. Shelley preceded Yeats in attributing a material quality to the moral function of poetry, claiming that ‘[p]oetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world’.36 Yeats’s later works chief ly illustrate this claim, displaying a growing appreciation and celebration of life as he felt his own life was nearing the end. A case in point is the opening section of ‘The Tower’ (1925): What shall I do with this absurdity — O heart, O troubled heart — this caricature, Decrepit old age that has been tied to me As to a dog’s tail? Never had I more Excited, passionate, fantastical Imagination, nor an ear and eye That more expected the impossible — No, not in boyhood when with rod and f ly, Or the humbler worm, I climbed Ben Bulben’s back And had the livelong summer day to spend. (VP, 409)

Fausto, one of Pessoa’s most metaphysically driven works, features a similar celebration of life. Despite being aware of the illusory nature of earthly reality, the eponymous protagonist of Pessoa’s play has difficulty renouncing the world due to his overwhelming love of life, which intersperses the sacred with the profane: Sim, este mundo com seu céu e terra, Com seus mares e rios e montanhas, Com seus arbustos, aves, bichos, homens, Com o que o homem, com translata arte De qualquer outra, divina, faz —

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Fausto’s claim that what is manmade partakes of the divine quality of God’s creation resembles the argument in the following lines from part III of ‘The Tower’: Death and life were not Till man made up the whole, Made lock, stock and barrel Out of his bitter soul, Aye, sun, moon and star, all, And further add to that That being dead, we rise, Dream and so create Translunar Paradise. (VP, 414)

This excerpt sacralizes the world further than Pessoa’s, venturing that man created life and death, and effectively attributing divine powers to the human imagi nation. Yeats’s religious hubris is complete in ‘Supernatural Songs’, wherein Ribh resorts to profane imagery of human conception to illustrate divine creation, stating in ‘Ribh denounces Patrick’ (1934): ‘Natural and supernatural with the self-same ring are wed / As man, as beast, as an ephemeral f ly begets, Godhead begets Godhead’ (VP, 556). The same mixture of profane and divine categories pervades the Crazy Jane poems, which argue in turn the earthly and the spiritual dimensions of human love. The opening stanza of ‘Crazy Jane on the Day of Judgement’ (1932) underlines the interdependency of the physical and the metaphysical spheres: ‘Love is all Unsatisfied That cannot take the whole Body and soul’; And that is what Jane said. (VP, 510)38

Similarly, these two dimensions of human existence are also addressed in Campos’s ‘Tabacaria’ (1933), which combines metaphysical and concrete subject matter and imagery: (Come chocolates, pequena; Come chocolates! Olha que não há mais metafísica no mundo senão chocolates. Olha que as religiões todas não ensinam mais que a confeitaria.

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Come pequena suja, come! Pudesse eu comer chocolates com a mesma verdade com que comes! Mas eu penso e, ao tirar o papel de prata, que é de folhas de estanho, Deito tudo para o chão, como tenho deitado a vida.) (PAC, 198) [(Eat your chocolates, little girl, Eat your chocolates! Believe me, there’s no metaphysics on earth like chocolates, And all religions put together teach no more than the candy shop. Eat, dirty little girl, eat! If only I could eat chocolates with the same truth as you! But I think and, removing the silver paper that’s tinfoil, I throw it all on the ground, as I’ve thrown out life.)] (Zenith 2, 175)

Álvaro de Campos and Crazy Jane performed a similar role as masks, allowing Pessoa and Yeats to incorporate concrete and colloquial imagery into their poetic diction, while sustaining its metaphysical content. Their profound insights, irreverent language and uncompromising stances re-enact the Shakespearean fool who matches his wisdom with his folly. Apollonian and Dionysian Principles In A Defence of Poetry Shelley stated that in order ‘to be greatly good, [man] must put himself in the place of another and of many others’.39 He believed that the poet is in a better position than anyone else to convey ‘the pains and pleasures of his species’ because he is endowed with a powerful imagination.40 His correlation of moral excellence with the ability to ‘imagine intensely and comprehensively’ encapsulates the aesthetic paradigm underpinning Pessoa’s and Yeats’s poetry.41 In his early essay ‘The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry’ (1900), Yeats adopts Shelley’s tenets to classify poets according to their propensity for intensity or comprehensiveness. His taxonomy is composed of the ‘poet of essences and pure ideas’ (an epithet that he attributed to Shelley) and the epic and the dramatic poets, whose subject matter consists of ‘the accidental circumstances of life’ (E&I, 87). In ‘The Happiest of Poets’ (1902), another essay on the same subject from Ideas of Good and Evil (1903), while focusing on William Morris, Yeats evokes Shelley’s observation that ‘Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds’.42 In this essay, he elaborates on the differences between the ‘poet of essences’ and the ‘happy poet’, superseding the generic classification of the earlier essay. Accordingly, he associates the ‘poet of essences’ with ‘the rejection of Nature’ and stylistic ‘intensity’, whereas the ‘happy poet’, ‘like Nature [delights] in mere profusion, in mere abundance’ (E&I, 53–54; my emphasis). By the time he wrote the latter essay, Yeats had encountered an aesthetic in which these two types of poetic expression were not mutually exclusive but rather complementary — namely the Apollonian and Dionysian principles of Greek art as delineated in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy. Yeats’s use of the word ‘abundance’ in the passage from ‘The Happiest of Poets’ quoted above indicates his awareness of the connotations of the term ‘Dionysian’, namely the god’s association with the pagan cults of fertility in Antiquity, which he undoubtedly encountered in Nietzsche’s

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book.43 Referring to Ideas of Good and Evil in a letter from 14 May 1903, to A. E., to whom he had dedicated the book, he states, The book is only one half of the orange for I only got a grip of the other half very lately. [...] The close of the last century was full of a strange desire to get out of form to get to some kind of disembodied beauty and now it seems to me the contrary impulse has come. I feel about me and in me an impulse to create form, to carry the realisation of beauty as far as possible. The Greeks said that the Dionysisic [sic] enthusiasm preceded the Apollonic [sic] and that the Dionysisic was sad and desirious [sic], but that the Apollonic was joyful and selfsufficient.44

On the one hand, the desire to ‘create form’, which he alludes to in this passage, denotes a greater preoccupation with a more realistic treatment of the human experience. Although this positioning became more prominent in Yeats’s poetry at the beginning of the twentieth century, the dilemma between the two approaches to composition had already been intimated in lyrics from the nineties, as illustrated by the following stanza from ‘To the Rose Upon the Rood of Time’ (1892): Come near, come near, come near — Ah, leave me still A little space for the rose-breath to fill! Lest I no more hear common things that crave; The weak worm hiding down in its small cave, The field-mouse running by me in the grass, And heavy mortal hopes that toil and pass; But seek alone to hear the strange things said By God to the bright hearts of those long dead, And learn to chaunt a tongue men do not know. (VP, 101)

On the other hand, Yeats’s concern with form also betrays the inf luence of the Apollonian aesthetic ideal of self-contained, harmonious expression that replaced the Dionysian principle of disembodied beauty dominant in much of his Yeats’s early poetry. Lionel Johnson — to whom Yeats dedicated The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics (1892), among which ‘To the Rose Upon the Rood of Time’ was included — praised the collection’s ‘classical virtues of intelligence and organization’ while acknowledging its Irishness and ‘Celtic qualities of style and feeling’ (CL, IV, 936, n. 2). His review highlights intrinsic affinities between aspects of Yeats’s style and what Pater termed ‘the constructive intelligence’ of Greek art, derived largely from an Apollonian lineage.45 Yeats’s dual aesthetic was also inf luenced by Pater’s concurring dichotomy of ‘style’ as either the articulation of ‘mind’, which ‘secures form’ and is ‘essentially finite’, or of ‘soul’, described as ‘vague or infinite’.46 That duality is the source of the following lines in ‘The Statues’ (1939): No! Greater than Pythagoras, for the men That with a mallet or a chisel modelled these Calculations that look but casual f lesh, put down All Asiatic vague immensities, (VP, 610)

These lines corroborate Pater’s stylistic imperative of ‘the necessity of mind in style’,47 revealing Yeats’s bias for the Apollonian principle in his later poetry. Nonetheless,

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he continuously tried to reconcile the ‘disembodied’ and embodied styles. In the essay ‘Personality and the Intellectual Essences’ (1906) he states, There are two ways before literature — upward into ever-growing subtlety, with Verhaeren, with Mallarmé, with Maeterlinck, until at last, it may be, a new agreement among refined and studious men gives birth to a new passion, and what seems literature becomes religion; or downward, taking the soul with us until all is simplified and solidified again. That is the choice of choices — the way of the bird until common eyes have lost us, or to the market carts [...]. (E&I, 266–67)

He eventually attained a relative balance between the two attitudes by devising a type of poetry that thrives on ‘contraries’, allowing him to express contrasting aesthetic models. In doing so, he incorporated both Blake’s aesthetic and the principles of the dramatic genre that Shelley delineated in A Defence of Poetry — namely its capacity to expand the imagination of both poet and reader through sympathetic identification with the dramatis personae.48 Pessoa arrived at a similar conclusion at an earlier stage of his career, as his 1914 heteronymic breakthrough testifies. The dramatic creation of distinct fictional poets afforded him the opportunity to rehearse antithetical existential standpoints, ranging from the spiritual to the materialistic. Reis’s polytheism and the ‘pantheistic transcendentalism’ of the orthonym represent the former positioning, whereas Caeiro’s and Campos’s Sensationism embodies the latter. The antithetical relationship of the heteronyms ref lects Pessoa’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s Apollonian and Dionysian principles of the Greek aesthetic ideal, which he identified respectively with ‘balance, harmony and rationalism’ and with ‘intense vitality’.49 Pessoa presented these views in the essay ‘António Botto e o Ideal Estético em Portugal’, where he identifies the Apollonian element as the highest form of expression of the Greek aesthetic ideal: Na primeira, e mais alta, dessas formas, o heleno, vendo que a vida é imperfeita, busca criar, ele, a perfeição, substituindo a arte à vida; e busca incluir em cada obra, para que a substituição seja perfeita, ou toda a vida ou um aspecto supremo da vida. É esta a forma intelectual e construtiva do ideal estético absoluto; Homero e Vergílio dos antigos, Dante e Milton dos modernos, são os representantes máximos dela. As obras destes poetas mostram a preocupação severa da perfeição absoluta, revelada tanto na estruturação harmónica de um conjunto pleno de significação, quanto na execução escrupulosa de todos os elementos seus componentes. (OPP, II, 1243) [In the first, and the highest, of those forms, realizing that life is imperfect, the Hellene tries to create perfection, substituting art for life; and, so that the substitution is perfect, he tries to include in each work either the whole of life or a supreme aspect of it. This is the intellectual and constructive form of the absolute aesthetic ideal; Homer and Virgil of the ancients, Dante and Milton of the moderns, are the maximum representatives of that form. These poets’ works show a strict concern with absolute perfection, both in the harmonious structuring of a meaningful whole and in the scrupulous execution of all the elements and their components.]

Conversely, the Dionysian element is associated with what he regards as a lower

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form of expression of that same ideal of perfection — namely the embodiment of life as part of the process of self-betterment: ‘o heleno, sentindo que a vida é imperfeita, busca aperfeiçoá-la em si próprio, vivendo-a com uma compreensão intensa, vivendo de dentro, com o espírito, a essência do transitório e do imperfeito’ [feeling that his life is imperfect, the Hellene tries to perfect it in himself, living it internally, with his soul and with an intense understanding of the essence of the transitory and the imperfect] (OPP, II, 1244; my emphasis). Thus, whereas the Apollonian principle is embodied in Pessoa’s poetry by Reis’s classical odes, the ‘intense vitality’ of the Dionysian principle is encapsulated by Campos’s futuristic odes, which rely on the principles of ‘strength’ and ‘intensity’ of his ‘non-Aristotelian aesthetic’ (OPP, II, 1089). As was the case with Yeats, Pessoa’s remarks about the Apollonian element in the excerpt quoted above echo Pater’s definition of the principle of the mind in style as ‘the architectural design, of a single, almost visual, image, vigorously informing an entire, perhaps very intricate, composition’, as well as his notion of ‘constructive intelligence’.50 Similarly, Pessoa’s terms are also reminiscent of Shelley’s theory of poetry. For instance, in a prose fragment entitled ‘A poesia nova em Portugal’ (1935) he argues that one of modern poetry’s processes ‘consiste em exprimir intensa e extensamente a alma a si mesma’ [consists in expressing the soul to itself both intensely and extensively] (OPP, III, 205; my emphasis). Pessoa’s description of how poetry expresses the soul of man echoes Shelley, revealing an affinity of thought. Moreover, his postulates are not limited to subject matter but also focus on formal issues in a similar way to Yeats’s interpretation of Shelley. He argues that whereas the one style of poetry requires concision, unity of image and form (OPP, III, 203–04), which correspond to Shelley’s and Yeats’s analogous concept of ‘intensity’, the other style entails the diverse imagery and prolix form he calls extensiveness, Shelley calls comprehensiveness, and Yeats calls ‘multitude’ (E&I, 215–16). In accordance with these traits, the principle of intensity is ref lec ted in the short, highly suggestive lyric in ‘traditional stanza’ predominant in Yeats’s early poetry and exemplarily accomplished in The Wind Among the Reeds (1899), which finds a parallel in the concise, formally elaborate poems of the orthonym and of Reis. By contrast, the principle of comprehensiveness encompasses both the colloquial register of Yeats’s middle style, particularly in Responsibilities (1914), and a strand of his later style, which display certain stylistic affinities with Caeiro’s and Campos’s concrete, prolix and prosaic diction. The extensive imagination is epitomized by the motto of Campos’s Sensationist aesthetic — ‘sentir tudo de todas as maneiras’ [to feel everything in every way] (PAC, 263) — which also underpins Caeiro’s effort to partake of the ‘profusion’ of Nature that Yeats spoke of in ‘The Happiest of Poets’. The alternation of the poetic styles of intensity and comprehensiveness, whether over time (as was predominantly the case with Yeats), or synchronically, in Pessoa’s case, both intensifies and expands the emotional depth and breadth of their poetry, improving its ability to elicit the strongest empathetic response from the greatest number of readers. Shelley’s moral aesthetic paradigm of all-embracing empathy with humankind features in the following excerpt from Pessoa’s Fausto:

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Beber a vida num trago, e nesse trago Todas as sensações que a vida dá Em todas as suas formas, boas, más, Trabalhos e prazeres, e ofícios, Todos lugares, viagens, explorações Crimes, lascívias, decadências todas. D’antes eu queria Embeber-me nas árvores, nas f lores, Sonhar nas rochas, mares, solidões. Hoje não, fujo dessa ideia louca: [...] Quero hoje apenas Sensações, muitas, muitas sensações, De tudo, de todos neste mundo — humanas Não outras de delírios panteistas Mas sim perpétuos choques de prazer51 [Ah to drink life in one gulp, a gulp Containing all of life’s sensations In all their forms, good and bad, Troubles, pleasures and occupations, All places, journeys, explorations, All crimes, lusts, and forms of decadence! In the past I wanted To revel in trees and f lowers, To dream of cliffs, seas and solitude, But today I shun that crazy idea: [...] Today I want only Sensations, lots and lots of sensations, Of everything and everyone in the world — Not the sensations of pantheist deliriums But perpetual shocks of human pleasure,] (Zenith 1, 401–02)

The first section quoted above features the speaker’s declaration of intent to absorb all the facets and sensations that are part of human existence, both good and bad, in a rather Nietzschean bypass of the principles of good and evil of Christian morality. However, as the speaker clarifies in the second section, he rejects a pantheistic association of the divine in the world, such as the one proposed in The Mad Fiddler or embodied by Reis’s polytheism. Instead, he proposes a profane, humancentred identification with all living things that resembles Caeiro’s and Campos’s Sensationism. The philosophical positioning conveyed in Fausto evokes Pater’s characterization of ‘the centrifugal’ tendency of the Greek mind in the following passage: There is the centrifugal, the Ionian, the Asiatic tendency, f lying from the centre [...]; throwing itself forth in endless play of undirected imagination; delighting [...] in changeful form everywhere, in poetry, in philosophy, even in architecture and its subordinate crafts. [...] It is this centrifugal tendency which Plato is desirous to cure, by maintaining, over against it, the Dorian inf luence of a severe simplification everywhere [...]. An enemy everywhere to variegation, to what is cunning or ‘myriad-minded’, he sets himself, in mythology, in music,

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Yeats revisits Pater’s argument in ‘Pages from a Diary in 1930’, arguing that two conceptions, that of reality as a congeries of beings, that of reality as a single being, alternate in our emotion and in history, and must always remain something that human reason, because subject always to one or the other, cannot reconcile. [...] Could those two impulses, one as much a part of truth as the other, be reconciled, or if one or the other could prevail, all life would cease. (Exp, 305)

Despite acknowledging that the two conceptions cannot be reconciled in life, he believes that art should strive to attain a ‘balance between “f lux” and conscious limitation’.53 This goal forms the basis of his dialectical aesthetic positioning, which resembles Coleridge’s ‘reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities’.54 He found a model for this ideal in late Antiquity, more specifically in the city of Byzantium, which according to him, embodies the ideal of Unity of Culture historically as a society where ‘religious, aesthetic and practical life were one’.55 He argues that Byzantine artists could ‘weave all into a vast design, the work of many that seemed the work of one’ and combine diverse materials into ‘a single image’ (AV, 280). Yeats did not always succeed in producing poetry that displayed a balance between the centripetal and centrifugal tendencies, often leaning either towards one or the other. Thus, his attempts to exercise formal mastery over his material often afforded a precarious balance, as illustrated by the rhetorical closing statements of many of his poems. Although intended to lend an authoritative tone to the poem, they are often unconvincing, thus setting the scene for subsequent challenges: ‘Vehement finalities can conclude a poem by subjecting it to a boundary; but their vehemence may summon into existence another poem with a contrary field of force’.56 On the other hand, the poems that defer completion of thought and expression constitute some of his most compelling and moving poetry, conveying more truthfully the existential dilemmas of the poet and the complexity of his thought. This is the case with his closing questions, which, whether constituting honest enquiries or mere rhetorical stances, ‘provide the thematic irresolution that is a “characteristic closural mode of Yeats” ’, conveying ‘his sense of singing amid uncertainty’.57 This centrifugal tendency is also present in Yeats’s deployment of personae, which, like Pessoa’s heteronymy, underpins a modern poetic voice, celebrating the plurality of fragmentary discourses that derive from the loss of a unified centre of consciousness. Conversely, this strategy also functions as a structuring device, an intermittent line of a circumference that contains the centrifugal aspects of his poetic personality. For, as Yeats states in ‘The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry’, ‘We have “a soul within our soul that describes a circle around its proper paradise which pain and sorrow and evil dare not overleap,” and we labour to see this soul in many mirrors, that we may possess it more abundantly’ (E&I, 69). He quotes Shelley in order to endorse his claim that the artist can only attain a refracted image of the human soul and its vision of the world, endorsing an aesthetic of diversification. Pessoa displayed a similar vacillation between an underlying aesthetic ideal of formal perfection of the artistic work, likewise inspired by Greek principles, and

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poetic practices that privileged the form of the unfinished. The latter is evident in an early passage of Pessoa’s in English: ‘My writings were none of them finished; new thoughts intruded ever, extraordinary, inexcludable associations of ideas bearing infinity for term. I cannot prevent my thought’s hatred of finish [sic] [...]’ (EA, 100). He sustained this attitude throughout his life, publishing only fragments in literary magazines and continuously reworking the entirety of his works. Indeed, it was not until three years before he died that he began assembling his complete works for publication, as the following letter from 28 July 1932, to João Gaspar Simões, confirms: ‘Estou começando — lentamente [...] — a classificar e a rever os meus papéis; isto com o fim de publicar, para os fins do ano em que estamos, um ou dois livros’ [I’m slowly beginning to classify and review my papers, with a view to publishing one or two books towards the end of this year] (C, II, 269). However, this did not materialize and at the time of his death, in 1935, the bulk of his oeuvre remained unpublished, consisting, for the most part, of fragments. According to Dionisio Vila Maior, Pessoa encapsulates the posture of the ‘sujeito de excepção’ [exceptional subject], who knows that ‘a verdade, não se conseguindo apreender no registo monológico, existirá na pluralidade de pespectivas’ [the truth cannot be apprehended in the monologic register and therefore exists in the plurality of perspectives].58 Therefore, his writings conveyed, to a greater extent than Yeats’s, the fragmentary nature of the Self and of reality. Conclusion As stated at the start of this chapter, Pessoa and Yeats envisaged writing both as an ontological process of inquiry into the nature of the Self and its place in the World, and as an epistemological search for knowledge, or the truth. Although their ultimate goal was to attain Wisdom (the condition of the ‘sage’ in Yeatsian terms, inspired to a great extent by Blake), they were well aware that this state was not achievable within the confines of a human life. Therefore, the two poets nurtured a long-lasting tolerance of the unknown alongside an intense desire to know the truth, displaying a viewpoint comparable to Keats’s ‘Negative Capability’.59 Yeats’s remark in ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’, that ‘Those men that in their writings are most wise / Own nothing but their blind stupefied hearts’ (VP, 370), finds an equivalent in Pessoa’s ‘pasmo essencial’ [fundamental astonishment] uttered by Caeiro, the embodiment of Wisdom (PCAC, 44). Their ability to sustain the balance between their metaphysical inquisitiveness and their mistrust of absolutes was the source of their prolific literary production and their innovative strategies of stylistic diversification. Despite the obvious similarities between the poets’ processes of ontological, epistemological and metaphysical inquiry, the conclusions they arrived at differed substantially. From the time he began writing poetry, Yeats followed Blake’s ideal of ‘laborious rediscovery of the Golden Age, of the primeval simplicity’, through what he called a ‘cultivated life’ (E&I, 137). The latter term ascribes both a moral and an aesthetic dimension to Yeats’s ‘quest for Eden’, which, as George Mills Harper observes, ‘is mental and personal, and achieved only through discipline’.60 This quest was also

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aesthetic, for, as Harper claims, ‘the development of style itself was a symbolic equivalent of the poet’s search for radical innocence’.61 In ‘A Prayer for my Daughter’ (1919), Yeats delineates a moral and aesthetic discipline whereby The soul recovers radical innocence And learns at last that it is self-delighting, Self-appeasing, self-affrighting, And that its own sweet will is Heaven’s will; (VP, 405)

His lifelong commitment to the Blakean ideal mentioned above allowed him to overcome his innate self-questioning and to envisage his life with a conciliatory sense of completion in his late poetry, as stated at the end of ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’: I am content to follow to its source Every event in action or in thought; Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot! When such as I cast out remorse So great a sweetness f lows into the breast We must laugh and we must sing, We are blest by everything, Everything we look upon is blest. (VP, 479)

Yeats’s acceptance of his personal fate transfigures reality, bestowing a hallowed quality to his perception of himself and of the world. The composure of these lines is echoed by his last sentence in a letter to Elizabeth Pelham from 4 January 1939 — ‘Man can embody truth but he cannot know it. I must embody it in the completion of my life.’62 Like Yeats, Pessoa also undertook a lifelong quest for knowledge through his poetry. Stylistic diversification was his way of attempting to re-construct his soul, which he deemed to be overly heterogeneous, and thereby attaining selfknowledge. His ontological quest is symbolized by the metaphor of the journey, which intertextually underpins Pessoa’s orthonymous and heteronymous poetry. In ‘Episódios — A Múmia’ (1917) the orthonym describes himself as an itinerant subject, travelling through his own internal landscape — ‘Andei léguas de sombra / Dentro do meu pensamento’ (OPP, I, 1103) [I walked through miles of shadow / Within me, via the mind.] (Zenith 2, 226). This poem re-enacts a descent to the depths of the Self, evoking the image of Aeneas’s catabasis, or descent into hell, in the Aeneid, with the variation that in Pessoa’s poem hell is no longer a communal concept of the race but a subjective concept of the individual mind. Caeiro describes himself as ‘o Descobridor da Natureza / [...] o Argonauta das sensações verdadeiras’ (PCAC, 96) [the Discoverer of Nature / the Argonaut of true sensations] (Zenith 1, 43), deliberately using terms associated with the travel and the epic genres. In emulation of Ulysses, his poems constitute wanderings through the natural world in order to experience sensations, but this too is an internalized quest, for the sheep he grazes in his imaginary countryside are his thoughts. Campos uses the metaphor of the journey in ‘Opiário’ (1913), ‘Ode Marítima’ (1915) and ‘Afinal a melhor maneira de viajar é sentir’ [After all, the best way to travel is to feel], to describe the wanderings of the Whitmanesque modern subject, whose all-embracing syncretism

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seeks to experience and give expression to all facets of existence, encapsulated by the line, ‘sentir tudo de todas as maneiras’ [to feel everything in every way] (PAC, 263). Pessoa also explores the collective potential of this metaphor in Mensagem, which signifies the diachronic journey of the nation. However, unlike Yeats, Pessoa did not express a sense of completion at the end of his life. His last sentence was, ‘I know not what tomorrow will bring’, which asserts the elusiveness of truth and the impossibility of knowledge. This sentence sums up the ‘Negative Capability’ that Pessoa rehearsed continuously throughout his life, encapsulated in the following fragment of the (significantly) unfinished Fausto: O segredo da Busca é que não se acha. Eternos mundos infinitamente, Uns dentro dos outros, sem cessar decorrem Inúteis. Nós, Deuses, Deuses de Deuses, Neles intercalados e perdidos Nem a nós encontramos no infinito. Tudo é sempre diverso e sempre adiante De homens e deuses vai a luz incerta Da suprema verdade.63 [The secret of Seeking is that nothing’s found. Eternal worlds endlessly and unceasingly Keep spinning in vain, one inside another. There’s us, and the Gods, and the Gods of Gods, And we’re so interspersed and lost in them That we can’t even find ourselves in infinity. Nothing’s ever the same, and the uncertain Light of supreme truth is always ahead Of where men and gods go.] (Zenith 1, 399–400)

The ontological disquietude conveyed in these lines, which became pervasive in Pessoa’s late poetry, could have derived from the fact that his life was interrupted in mezzo del cammin, when his work as ‘experience in living’ (to borrow Yeats’s expression) had not yet been completed. Given the fact that Pessoa died at the age of forty-seven, it is impossible to know which aesthetic or philosophical paths he would have followed, and whether he would have eventually expressed an analogous sense of completion to Yeats’s, perhaps through the auspices of a heteronym. Unlike Yeats, who at the end of his life dismissed his ‘Circus Animals’ with a grand rhetorical gesture (even though he borrowed the mask of his alter ego, Cuchulain, to face death, as depicted in ‘Cuchulain Comforted’), Pessoa was unable to cast out the heteronyms, in whose guises he continued to write until the end of his life, and who offered the only solace to his existencial solitude. This is corroborated by he fact that he borrowed Ricardo Reis’s distinctly Horatian diction for his last words.64

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Notes to Chapter 5 1. Karl Viëtor, ‘L’Histoire des genres littéraires’, in Théorie des genres, ed. by Gerard Genette and others, Points Littérature, 181 (Paris: Seuil, 1986), pp. 9–35 (p. 11). Viëtor claims that the three traditional genres of poetry, epic, lyric and dramatic, are based on three fundamental attitudes of man before reality, which ensure his mastery over it. 2. Vincent Buckley, Poetry and Morality: Studies on the Criticism of Matthew Arnold, T. S. Eliot, and F. R. Leavis (London: Chatto & Windus, 1959), pp. 29, 37. 3. Shelley exercised a long-lasting inf luence on Yeats, who acknowledged this in his Reveries over Childhood and Youth (Aut, 66), and in the essays ‘The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry’ (1903) and ‘Prometheus Unbound’ (1932), arguing in the latter, ‘When in middle life I looked back I found that he [Shelley] [...] had shaped my life...’ (E&I, 424). Shelley’s inf luence on Pessoa is particularly evident in a poem from the collection of English poems The Mad Fiddler (1917), entitled ‘Elevation’, which evokes the mood and makes direct allusions to Shelley’s ‘Ode to a Skylark’. See chapter on Shelley in George Monteiro, Fernando Pessoa and Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Literature for a detailed study of his inf luence on Pessoa. 4. Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Major Works, pp. 696, 701. 5. Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Major Works, p. 414. 6. Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Major Works, p. 698. 7. Garratt, p. 177. 8. The Poetical Works of John Keats, p. 208. 9. Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Major Works, p. 680. 10. Poems of William Blake, p. 178. 11. Matthew Arnold, Essays in Criticism, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1888; repr. 1925–27), ii, 2–3. This was the edition in Pessoa’s library. 12. Matthew Arnold, The Study of Celtic Literature (London: Smith & Elder, 1867), p. 170. 13. Arnold, Essays in Criticism, ii, 20–21. 14. Arnold, Essays in Criticism, ii, 5. 15. Arnold, Essays in Criticism, ii, 48. 16. Arnold, quoted in Buckley, pp. 84–85. 17. Silva Belkior, Fontes latinas de Fernando Pessoa (Rio de Janeiro: CBAG, 1983), p. 68. 18. Arnold, The Study of Celtic Literature; quoted in Buckley, p. 82. 19. Arnold, Essays in Criticism, ii, 21. 20. Quoted in Belkior, Fontes latinas de Fernando Pessoa, p. 18. 21. Arnold, Essays in Criticism, ii, 21. 22. ‘Tornando-me, assim, [...] não um só escritor, mas toda uma literatura, quando não contribuísse para me divertir, o que para mim já era bastante, contribuo talvez para engrandecer o universo [...]’ (OPP, II, 1022). 23. Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Major Works, p. 696. 24. Arnold, Essays in Criticism, ii, 21. 25. Pater, Appreciations, p. 14. 26. Pater, cited in Kermode, Romantic Image, p. 26. 27. Maria Teresa Malafaia and Jorge Miguel Bastos da Silva, ‘Fernando Pessoa and the Reception of Pater in Portugal’, in The Reception of Walter Pater in Europe, ed. by Stephen Bann, The Reception of British Authors in Europe (London: Thoemmes Continuum, 2004), pp. 216–27 (pp. 217–18). 28. See Alfred Gell, ‘The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology’, in Anthropology, Art, and Aesthetics, ed. by Jeremy Coote and Anthony Shelton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 40–63 (p. 41): ‘It is widely agreed that ethics and aesthetics belong in the same category. [...] That is to say, aesthetics is a branch of moral discourse which depends on the acceptance [... of the notion] that in the aesthetically valued object there resides the principle of the True and Good, and that the study of aesthetically valued objects constitutes a path towards transcendence’. 29. Pater, The Renaissance, p. 240 (my emphasis). 30. Pater, The Renaissance, p. 241.

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31. Garratt, p. 174. 32. Yeats’s Poems, p. 603. 33. Pessoa’s edition of The Renaissance dated from 1915, making it contemporary with the emergence of the heteronyms, the first essays about Neo-Paganism, and Pessoa’s revision of The Mad Fiddler before sending it for publication in Britain. 34. Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Major Works, p. 697. 35. Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. by Frank Kermode (London: Faber & Faber, 1975), p. 177. This statement features in an essay entitled ‘Ulysses, Order, and Myth’. 36. Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Major Works, p. 681. 37. Fausto: tragédia subjectiva, ed. by Teresa Sobral Cunha (Lisbon: Presença, 1988), p. 19. 38. The italicized refrain constitutes an ironic allusion to the manner in which the gospels refer to Jesus — for example, ‘These things said he’ ( John 6. 59) — further confirming the subversion of the Christian paradigm. 39. Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Major Works, p. 682. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid. 42. Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Major Works, p. 697. 43. Edward Engelberg, The Vast Design: Patterns in W. B. Yeats’s Aesthetic (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1988), p. 119. 44. The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. by John Kelly and others (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986–), iii: 1901–1904, ed. by John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard (1994), p. 370 (my emphasis). 45. Pater, Appreciations, p. 21. 46. Pater, Appreciations, p. 23. 47. Pater, Appreciations, p. 18. 48. Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Major Works, p. 685. 49. Georg Rudolf Lind, Teoria poética de Fernando Pessoa (Porto: Inova, 1971), p. 149. 50. Pater, Appreciations, pp. 20–21. 51. Fausto, pp. 137–38. 52. Pater, Greek Studies, pp. 264–65. 53. Engelberg, p. 7. 54. The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Biographia Literaria; or, Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, ed. by James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, Bollingen Series, 75 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 76. 55. W. B. Yeats, A Vision (London: Macmillan, 1937), p. 279 (hereafter quoted in the text as AV, followed by page number). 56. Rajan, pp. 26–27. 57. Zimmerman, p. 36. 58. Dionisio Vila Maior, O sujeito modernista: Fernando Pessoa, Mário de Sá-Carneiro, Almada Negreiros e António Ferro: crise e superação do sujeito (Lisbon: Universidade Aberta, 2003), pp. 593–94. 59. The Letters of John Keats: 1814–1821, p. 193. In a letter to George and Thomas Keats from 21 December 1817, he states, ‘...Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason’. 60. George Mills Harper, Yeats’s Quest for Eden, Yeats Centenary Papers, 9 (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1966), p. 317. 61. Harper, p. 312. 62. R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life, ii, 649–50. 63. Fausto, p. 170. 64. See António M. Feijó, ‘“Alberto Caeiro” e as últimas palavras de Fernando Pessoa’, ColóquioLetras ( January 2000), 181–90 (p. 189). Feijó remarks that ‘I know now what tomorrow will bring’ paraphrases Horaces’s line ‘Quid sit futurum cras fuge quaerere’ [Do not ask what tomorrow will bring] from the Soracte Ode (Carmina, l. 9). However, Pessoas’s choice of the phrase ‘I know not’ also deliberately echoes, in my view, the diction of many poems by Keats, alluding to his notion of Negative Capability and making an analogy with the poet who died before his work was completed.

CONCLUSION ❖

The comparative examination of the poetic works of W. B. Yeats and of Fernando Pessoa undertaken in this study has demonstrated that their deployment of parallel strategies of stylistic diversification accounts for the numerous affinities between their poetic works. This monograph has traced the development of these strategies for writing poetry in the works of the two poets throughout their careers, revealing their recurrent need to express different, often opposing existential and aesthetic viewpoints through their engagement with different poetic styles and genres. Romantic and Symbolist imagery and diction inf luenced Yeats’s and Pessoa’s early English poetry, which hinged on an idealised representation of nature and experience. The first chapter of this monograph focuses on the affinities between Yeats’s early poems and Pessoa’s English collection, The Mad Fiddler, showing how Yeats’s poems from the late 1880s and throughout the 1890s were a possible source of inspiration for certain lyrics in The Mad Fiddler. The analysis of selected poems from the Tauchnitz anthology of Yeats’s poetry alongside others from The Mad Fiddler indicates that Pessoa could have imitated certain aspects of the Yeatsian postSymbolist diction and imagery, particularly in the first section of his collection. However, as the documentary evidence regarding Yeats in Pessoa’s writings and epistolary is not only limited but also contradictory, ranging from praise (in the drafted letter) to disapproval (in the fragment of a Sensationist manifesto and in ‘Ultimatum’), it is difficult to determine with certainty the extent of his inf luence on Pessoa. Irrespective of the degree of inf luence that Yeats’s poetry might have had on Pessoa, the poems in The Mad Fiddler display striking parallels with Yeats’s early poetry. This partly derives from the fact that both poets adopted themes, imagery and diction of nineteenth-century Romantic and Symbolist poetry, rehearsing a method of stylistic diversification that they would develop fully in their maturity. Therefore, their post-Symbolist style can be regarded as an incipient stylistic mask. In response to their post-Symbolist masks, the poets developed an antithetical pastoral style that became another distinct poetic mask. By incorporating principles from classical pastoral in their works the poets effected the transition from the escapist stance dominant in their post-Symbolist style to a more naturalistic representation of experience. Spatial representation in their poetry became more concrete, in contrast to the imaginary fairylands, islands and otherworldly places of their post-Symbolist poetry. This is most salient in Yeats’s poetry of the local familiar place and in the Sensationist poems of Alberto Caeiro, which ostensibly convey the experience of Nature as it really is, emulating the Greek worldview. Additionally, their re-enactments of the convention of the pastoral mask introduced the innovative technique of the persona as a consistent poetic practice in their poetry.

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Yeats’s fisherman mask and Pessoa’s shepherd–poet were the most inspirational personae for the two poets. These pastoral masks endowed their poetry with a modernity that countered the more conventional treatment of pastoral in other poems, denoting a development in their re-enactment of this poetic mode, which went as far as to question and subvert it, particularly in the case of Caeiro’s adverse pastoral. The poets further strove to incorporate reality into their poetry through stylistic diversification by deploying the epic genre as a stylistic mask. The epic style provided an antithetical counterpart to their versions of pastoral, resuming the original tonal opposition between these two modes of enunciation in classical poetry, specifically between the mundane subject matter and prosaic manner of pastoral poetry and the heroic content and elevated diction of epic poetry. Chapter 3 also addressed the relationship between Yeats’s and Pessoa’s epic styles and their literary nationalism. The affinity between the poets’ nationalistic goals (of which Pessoa was aware) also explains the numerous analogies between their epic-heroic poetry. Their re-enactments of heroic and epic poetry allowed them to engage both with their native literary traditions, drawing inspiration from racial foundational myths, and with the current political reality of their time in their respective countries. However, their poetic treatment of the present was mediated through their re-interpretation of the national past, ascribing to it a symbolic quality that was enhanced by their mystical strand of literary nationalism. Subsequently, their disenchantment with the state of affairs of their nations was responsible for the introduction of an elegiac stance into their poetry, which distanced it from other poems with an explicit epic and heroic ethos. Although the elegiac mode was present in classical epics (such as Virgil’s Aeneid), Pessoa’s and Yeats’s deployment of it denotes an anti-epic impulse, which is particularly salient in their late poems. As is evident in their antithetical pastoral and epic styles, the poets adopted principles from drama in their poetry. These principles were ref lected in their theorization of poetry, engendering comparable poetics and the appearance of a sub-genre of metapoetic poems. The inf lux of dramatic principles in their poetics was responsible for the antithetical nature of their poetic practices, which derived from the original sense of drama as the conf lict of adverse principles. The antithetical imperative was ref lected microscopically in individual poems and macroscopically in entire collections of poetry (or in Pessoa’s case the poetic oeuvre of each heteronym), as well as in the thematically and generically different styles of poetry. Their dramatic poetics also played a pivotal role in their use of personae. Chapter 4 traced the origins of the poets’ dramatic poetics and the development of their methods of stylistic diversification through personae, highlighting the dialogic relationship of the personae (including intertextual links between the works of the heteronyms in Pessoa’s case). Pessoa was the younger of the two poets and more deeply inf luenced by the modernist authorial crisis than Yeats. Therefore, he was able to develop depersonalization to a more autonomous level through heteronymy, which became a distinguishing feature of his poetry. The fifth chapter undertook an exploration of the underlying aesthetic and philosophical concerns behind the poets’ parallel strategies of stylistic

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diversification. From an early stage in their development, both poets were inspired by the aesthetic theories of Shelley, Pater, and, to a lesser extent, Matthew Arnold. These theories were instrumental in the development of a poetics which regarded style as a hermeneutic discipline to attain both formal perfection and metaphysical enlightenment. The poets also drew inspiration from Nietzsche’s aesthetic philosophy, in particular regarding the Greek Apollonian and Dionysian principles. These concepts provided a philosophical framework for the poets’ stylistic diversification, allowing them to negotiate the solipsist and ‘multilateral’ (Pessoa’s term, C, I, 142) impulses of their poetic temperaments. Moreover, they help to explain the poets’ continuous oscillation between a poetics of the whole — which aspires to unity, perfection and completion — and of the interstice — which defers completion, emphasizing ontological and epistemological fragmentation. The examination of these issues revealed striking affinities, but also significant contrasts in Yeats’s and Pessoa’s aesthetic thought: namely Yeats’s predilection for an aesthetic of unity and mastery of the poetic voice and Pessoa’s fostering of a disseminated poetic voice (despite the presence of both tendencies in their poetry). Ontological and epistemological concerns featured prominently alongside aesthetic issues in a category of meditative poems that make up the poets’ metaphysical style. The importance of these issues for both poets explains why they engaged in a lifelong pursuit of appropriate forms of expression to convey the multifaceted quality of the human personality and of modern human experience. The trope of the quest is particularly suited to describe Pessoa’s and Yeats’s methods of stylistic diversification, which consisted in the assumption of stylistic masks straddling different genres and modes throughout their writing careers. To say that Yeats experimented ‘with all inherited literary forms’ is quite a generalization.1 Nor could that be claimed of Pessoa, who, despite having conceived nearly a hundred literary personalities, only wrote consistently in a handful of different styles throughout his life. Therefore, it would be more accurate to say that Yeats and Pessoa adopted a select number of styles, genres and forms that they deemed best suited to express the aesthetic, ontological, and metaphysical concerns of poets of their temperament in their day and age. In doing so, they intuited an essential characteristic of generic poetics — namely the fact that certain forms associated with specific poetic genres are particularly appropriate to depict certain types of attitudes.2 As these attitudes are intrinsic to man and therefore universal, they can be re-enacted in a different historical and literary context from the original (subject to modifications). The poets’ association of certain genres, modes or styles with specific philosophical stances, as is the case with their shared Neo-Paganism, ref lects such an understanding of the nature of literary genres. Furthermore, Pessoa’s and Yeats’s re-enactments of the pastoral, the elegy, the epic–heroic poem and dramatic poetry reveal an understanding of poetic genres and modes that is akin to that of Plato (in Book III of The Republic) and Aristotle (in The Poetics). According to the latter, the distinction between poetic genres derived from variations in the mode of enunciation, thereby relying on stylistic principles which in classical antiquity were essentially linked to prosody. Pessoa’s and Yeats’s adoption of the formal category of style as a process of generic differentiation

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reprises this original conceptualization of poetry. In turn, the poets’ reworking of classical genres and modes subjected them to tonal and formal variations, endowing their poetry with an originality that evades conventional generic categorization. The combination of the lyrical with the dramatic and epic genres in their poetry subverts the traditional separation of the three genres, enhancing the expressive potential of the modern lyric to convey a wider range of plausible poetic stances through thematic and formal diversity. Pessoa’s and Yeats’s concern with style is partly derived from a sense of ‘cultural belatedness’ in relation to past literary tradition.3 O’Hara raises this issue concerning Yeats, arguing that his experimentation with inherited literary forms resulted from ‘tragic knowledge gained from the ironic situation of writing at the end of an entire cultural tradition, as a self-conscious “last Romantic” ’.4 O’Hara is to a certain extent correct in his statement, as corroborated by the fact that he borrows Yeats’s own words from ‘Coole Park and Ballylee 1931’. However, Yeats was notably also one of the first modernists, which for him posed the troubling question of how to (re)position himself before past poetic tradition. Due to the belated reception of international literary movements in Portugal during the nineteenth century, Pessoa faced a similar dilemma. His situation was further complicated by the fact that he was drawing on more than one poetic tradition: the English Romantic tradition he shared with Yeats by virtue of his Victorian education in South Africa; French Symbolism with which, like Yeats, he felt a close affinity; and his native Portuguese tradition, which carried neo-Romanticism and post-Symbolism well into the first decade of the twentieth century. Additionally, as he had a close interest in contemporaneous international literary movements, Pessoa was also one of the first Portuguese poets to engage with modernism. He therefore experienced the same sort of anxiety as Yeats. The poets’ sense of belatedness was exacerbated by the thematic and formal exhaustion evident in fin-de-siècle poetry. Yeats’s and Pessoa’s response to this state of affairs involved recovering ancient poetic genres of the Western poetic tradition, which had been neglected by the Romantic convention of lyrical and meditative poetry. The idiosyncratic mixture of traditionalism and experimentalism in their poetry earns them the designation of High Modernists, alongside poets like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, rather than lagging behind as ‘last Romantics’. By comprehensively comparing the affinities between the two poets, such as their diverse interests and themes, their methods of stylistic diversification, their deployment of personae, and the analogous aesthetic and metaphysical values underpinning their poetic praxis, this monograph has demonstrated how the two poets constructed parallel multifaceted poetics. It has argued that Yeats’s deployment of poetic personae and of stylistic masks played an important role in his poetic development, which consisted in a slow but increasingly assured departure from the Romantic single lyrical voice to multi-vocal modern expression. The result was a versatile poetic style that sustained a vigorous personal voice alongside those of his other stylistic masks, weaving an intricate web of dialogical relationships between them. The same dialogism underpins the relationship between Pessoa’s orthonym and the heteronyms, although, in his case the lyrical subject has become self-effacing, which is not surprising considering the twenty-three-year age gap between the two

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poets. As with Yeats, this monograph has demonstrated that Pessoa’s heteronymy derived primarily from stylistic experimentation with poetic stances and forms, and that the heteronyms constituted primarily stylistic masks. Moreover, this study has shed light on the intertextual contiguity that informs Pessoa’s poetic production as a whole. In particular, it has underscored the English poetic and critical heritage that informs Pessoa’s poetry not only in English but in Portuguese as well. It has emphasized the significant impact that poets such as Blake and Shelley and critics such as Pater and Arnold had on Pessoa in the formative stage of his development as a poet, and how that informed his understanding of poetry and his deployment of heteronymy. The powerful and long-lasting inf luence that these same authors had on Yeats, at an equally formative stage of his poetic career, justifies (perhaps better than any other factor) the extent of the affinities between him and Pessoa. The comparative examination of their poetry has also determined that Yeats’s theory of the Mask and Pessoa’s heteronymy are analogous strategies of ‘depersonalization’ (to borrow Pessoa’s term), differing mainly in degree. The shared aesthetic and philosophical interests of the two poets, particularly their avowed Neo-Paganist and classicist tendencies, are also responsible for substantial correspondences between certain Yeatsian masks and some of Pessoa’s heteronyms. Yeats’s most significant mask, the fisherman, has a counterpart in Alberto Caeiro, Pessoa’s metaphorical shepherd, who is the embodiment of Pessoa’s ‘anti-self ’ (to borrow Yeats’s term) as much as the fisherman is Yeats’s. Similarly, Yeats’s sprezzatura poems and the neoclassical odes of Ricardo Reis share a lofty diction and the celebration of the virtues of the classical age. The affinity of subject, tone and register between Yeats’s wild or lunatic masks (in particular Crazy Jane) and Álvaro de Campos are noteworthy. This is especially true of the similar way in which they address the mundane aspects of reality, while simultaneously displaying a keen metaphysical and philosophical insight. Finally, the striking analogies between Yeats’s and Pessoa’s epic masks are not surprising, bearing in mind the close affinities between their strands of literary nationalism. Undoubtedly, some of the parallels between Yeats and Pessoa identified in this study derive from the specific historical and cultural contexts in which they were writing, ref lecting a modernist search for Self through style. However, the majority of them derive from intrinsic similarities in the poets’ literary temperaments that, in turn, engendered comparable conceptions of poetry. Both regarded themselves as essentially dramatic poets and took great care to align themselves with a poetic tradition that harked back to Shakespearean verse drama and, in a more modern context, to Browning’s use of the dramatic monologue. On the other hand, their aesthetic and philosophical positioning also explains their preference for a style of writing that relied more on imaginative than mimetic principles, privileging the transcendental (as heirs of a lineage which they traced back to Shelley and Blake) and yet being unable to avoid addressing contemporary or mundane issues, denoting a contrasting materialistic stance. Consequently, thematic and stylistic diversification offered a solution for this impasse, allowing them to address these dichotomies without incurring the risk of being accused of superficiality or a lack of coherence in their treatment of those subjects.

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Finally, and perhaps more importantly, their adoption of various styles which reworked or redressed poetic genres or modes steeped in literary tradition (as their re-enactments of the pastoral and the epic demonstrate) is directly, though perhaps less obviously, related to their literary nationalism. Yeats and Pessoa both intended to reinvigorate the national literary production of Ireland and Portugal respectively by introducing new poetic styles suited to express the specific worldviews of their cultures. By doing so, it was their shared belief that they would usher in a period of great creativity in their respective countries at that historical moment, which would be sustained by literary movements which they undertook to found. This explains the poets’ concerns with how their work would be received by posterity and their myth-making efforts, effectively laying the ground for the reception of their works by subsequent writers and critics. In this regard the two poets succeeded in their goals, gaining the status of national poets in their respective countries and therefore becoming necessary points of reference with which poets of successive generations would need to engage. Moreover, they also engendered a rich critical heritage, as their works have elicited numerous responses from both national and international critics and have continued to inspire interest among researchers over seventy years after their deaths. Notes to the Conclusion 1. O’Hara, p. 50. 2. Viëtor, p. 18: ‘une forme prosodique déterminée [...] possède une caractéristique d’expression, une valeur d’expression determinée, un ‘ton’ determiné qui doivent obligatoirement répondre a ce qui doit être exprimé, a ce qui est le contenu de l’œuvre’. 3. See Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. xxv (preface to 2nd edition). 4. O’Hara, p. 51.

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W. B. Yeats Albright, Daniel, ed., W. B. Yeats: The Poems (London: Dent, 1994) Allt, Peter, and Russell K. Alspach, eds., The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats (New York: Macmillan, 1957) Donoghue, Denis, ed., Memoirs: Autobiography — First Draft, Journal (London: Macmillan, 1972) Frayne, John P., and Colton Johnson, eds., Uncollected Prose by W. B. Yeats, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1970–75) Gould, Warwick, and Deirdre Toomey, eds., Mythologies (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2005) Hood, Walter Kelly, ed., ‘Michael Robartes: Two Occult Manuscripts’, in Yeats and the Occult, ed. by George Mills Harper (London: Macmillan, 1976), pp. 204–24 Jeffares, A. Norman, ed., Yeats’s Poems, 3rd edn (London: Macmillan, 1996) Johnson, Colton, ed., Later Articles and Reviews: Uncollected Articles, Reviews, and Radio Broadcasts Written after 1900, 3rd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002) Kelly, John, and others, eds., The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats (Oxford: Clarendon Press; Oxford University Press, 1986–) Wade, Allen, ed., The Letters of W. B. Yeats (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954) Yeats, W. B., Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1955) —— Essays and Introductions (New York: Macmillan, 1961) —— Explorations, sel. by Mrs. W. B. Yeats (New York: Macmillan, 1962) —— ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, in The Poetry Archive, read by W. B. Yeats [accessed 24 April 2007] —— Mythologies (New York: Macmillan, 1959) —— A Selection from the Poetry of W. B. Yeats (Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1913) —— The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (London: Kegan Paul, 1889) —— A Vision (London: Macmillan, 1937)

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INDEX ❖

A Águia 7 n. 7, 75, 78, 102 Acção 95, 105 n. 93 active vs. contemplative life 26 Adams, Hazard 111–12 aesthete(s), aestheticism 3, 107, 134, 137, 144–45 aesthetic vs. moral asceticism 140 aesthetic thought, theory 29, 39, 164 alchemical transmutation 137–39 Albright, Daniel 17–18 Aldington, Richard 10 Images: 1910–1915: 10 Alexandrian poets 54, 73 n. 23 Alexandrine line 20 animism, animist, animistic 13, 60, 64, 66 Arcadia, Arcady, arcadian 17, 41, 42, 44, 47 Argonaut(s) 84, 158 Aristotle 7 n. 16, 82, 116, 164 Poetics 116, 164 Arnold, Matthew 8, 16, 24, 40, 72 n. 3, 74 n. 49, 79, 82, 134, 139–42, 164, 166 ‘The Forsaken Merman’ 16, 24, 37 n. 27 The Study of Celtic Literature 40, 140 ‘The Study of Poetry’ 139 Athena 40, 144 Bakhtin, Mikhail 115 Balakian, Anna 8 ballad 25, 76, 113 Barrow, Geoffrey 83 Baudelaire, Charles 16, 28–29, 133 n. 38 ‘là-bas’ 16 ‘L’Invitation au voyage’ 16 ‘Correspondances’ 29 Les Fleurs du mal 29 ‘Spleen’ 28 Berardineli, Cleonice 126 Blake, William 3, 11–12, 19, 26–29, 34, 62, 66, 74 n. 40, 92, 137–39, 153, 157–58, 166 ‘Mad Song’ 27, 38 n. 49 ‘Song’ 27 Songs of Experience 74 n. 40 Songs of Innocence 62, 74 n. 40 The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 19, 29 Blavatsky, Helena 85 The Voice of Silence 85 Blessed Isles 17, 86 Bloom, Harold, 34, 45, 77, 81

Browning, Robert 8, 11, 110, 116, 132 n. 22, 166 Dramatic Lyrics 132 n. 22 Bruno, Sampaio 79, 93 O Encoberto 79 bucolic poetry 47, 59, 63, 66, 72, 75 Cabbalah, cabbalists 94 Camões, Luis Vaz de 79, 84 Os Lusíadas 79, 84 Campbell, Joseph 81, 83–84 Carlyle, Thomas 77–78, 88, 90, 92–93, 103 nn. 6 & 12, 105 n. 86 Past and Present 77, 90, 103 n. 12 Sartor Resartus 90, 103 n. 6, 105 n. 75 Castiglione, Baldassare 88, 109 sprezzatura 109, 166 Celtic: immrama 81 lamentation genre 13 legends 39–40, 75, 78–79, 94 magic naturalism 40 paradise (Tir nà nOge, land of the Young) 17 Centeno, Yvette K. 32 Christian morality vs. unorthodox religious belief 137 Coelho, Jacinto do Prado 130 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 12, 15, 26, 76, 156 Ancient Mariner 12, 15 Biographia Literaria 76 Kubla Khan 12, 15–16 Comyn, Michael 81, 104 n. 30 ‘The Lay of Oisin on the land of Youth’ 81 Contemporânea 144 Cousins, James H. 2 Dante 153 Dom Sebastião 79, 86–88 Dowden, Edward 36 n. 16 dramatic 3, 6, 22, 26, 46, 51, 76, 80, 82–83, 102, 107–11, 113–17, 120, 128–31, 136, 143, 151, 153, 160 n. 1, 163–66 monologue 22, 82–83, 109, 116, 136, 166 poetics 6, 102, 107–10, 114, 128, 130, 163 École Romane 40 elegy, elegiac 6, 9, 27–28, 35, 46, 82–83, 87, 99, 163–64 Eliot, T. S. 8, 71, 83, 89, 116, 148, 165 ‘poetics of order’ 148

178

Index

‘The Three Voices of Poetry’ 83, 116 ‘Ulysses, Order, and Myth’ 161 n. 35 untutored savage 71 Ellmann, Richard 107 epic genre 5, 75–76, 79, 95, 102, 158, 163, 165 anti-epic 99, 101–02, 163 epic-heroic style 6 epic-heroic poetry 79–80, 99, 163 epic discourse-type 80, 100 Epicureanism, epicurean 56–59, 143, 145 Feijó, António M. 161 n. 64 Ferguson, Samuel 39, 135 fin de siècle 72 n. 2, 107, 137, 165 Fiore, Joachim of, Joachimism, Joachimist 91 Fleming, Deborah 71 Flint, F. S. 10 Cadences 10 Foster, Roy 36 n. 16, 127 Frazer, James 66, 79, 88 The Golden Bough 66, 88 Freire, Luísa 10 Genette, Gerard 72 Gnostic 94 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 4 God 15, 29, 49–50, 84, 98, 107, 116, 118, 120–21, 135, 150, 152 Golden Age 20, 42, 65–66, 80, 138, 157 Gospel of St John 90, 118 Gould, Warwick 28, 88, 91 Gourmont, Remy de 124, 127 Greaves, Richard 88 Gregory, Lady Augusta 43, 46, 78, 80 Cuchulain of Muirthemne 78, 80 Guillén, Claudio 24 Harper, George Mills 157–58 Hellenism, hellenistic 3, 40, 134, 140 heroic epos 5, 102 Hesiod 58 Theogony 58 Homer, Homeric 39, 44, 78–81, 83–84, 97–98, 102, 153 Iliad 83 Odyssey 81, 84 Hone, Joseph 123 Horace 54, 141, 161 n. 64 idylls 17, 62, 73 n. 23 islands 17–18, 80–81, 85, 104 n. 57, 162 Imagism, imagists 10, 38 n. 62 Irish National Theatre 75 Irish Revival 1–2, 8, 40, 75–79 Jackson, David 70 Jennings, Hargrave 104 n. 51 The Rosicrucians: Their Rites and Mysteries 104 n. 51

Johnson, Lionel 152 Jones, James Land 82 Jubainville, Arbois de 79 Keats, John 8, 17–18, 41, 82–84, 131, 138–39, 157, 161 nn. 59 & 64 Endymion 17, 41, 82, 131 Hyperion 82–84 Negative Capability 157, 159, 161 nn. 59 & 64 ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ 138 Kelly, John 110 Keyserling, Count Hermann 94, 105 n. 90 Kinahan, Frank 85 Langbaum, Robert 128 literary nationalism 5, 75–76, 78, 102, 163, 166–67 Locke, John 63 materialist phenomenology 63 locus amoenus 16, 43, 72 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth 10, 36 n.10 Lopes, Teresa Rita 6 n. 1, 114 Macedo, Helder 44, 54, 91 Maeterlinck, Maurice 153 Maior, Dionisio Vila 157 Mallarmé, Stéphane 8, 16, 21, 107, 153 ‘Brise Marine’ 16 Mangan, James Clarence 135 Martins, Oliveira 77 Marvell, Andrew 70, 73 n. 28 ‘Thoughts in a Garden’ 70 Maurras, Charles 40 mask(s): epic 163, 166 pastoral 47, 59, 61, 66–67, 69–71, 113, 162–63 poetic 1, 108, 115, 127, 162 stylistic 3, 5, 8, 116, 162–66 McKinsey, Martin 82 mediated reception 27 metaphysics, metaphysical 4–6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 30, 39, 52, 61, 70, 115, 130, 134, 137, 144, 149–51, 157, 164–66 metapoetic 49, 84, 131, 163 millenarianism, millenarian 80, 90 Milton, John 9, 53, 73 n. 28, 112, 153 ‘L’Allégro’ 53 ‘Il Penseroso’ 53 modern lyric 5, 128–29, 133 n. 38, 165 modernism, modernity, modernist 12, 32, 34, 43, 54, 71, 98, 107, 127–28, 148, 163, 165–66 High Modernism, High Modernists 39, 165 Monotheism 55 Monteiro, George 45, 120 moods 11, 27–28 Moréas, Jean 40 Morodo, Raul 96, 105 n. 93 Morris, William 151

Index mysticism 30, 86, 92, 96–97 of Nature 15 mystical mathematics 139 mythopoeic 84, 95, 97, 99–100, 107 National Literary Society 76 nationalism: authoritarian nationalism 87–88 mystical nationalism 87, 91–92, 94 neoclassicism, neoclassical 5, 40–41, 72, 113, 145, 148, 166 Neo-Paganism, neo-paganist 5, 29–30, 39–41, 53, 66, 72 n. 3, 78, 145, 161 n. 33, 164, 166 Neopaganismo Português 40 neo-Romanticism, neo-Romantic 5, 79, 148, 165 Nietzsche 155, 164 Apollonian 6, 58, 65, 151–54, 164 Dionysian 6, 58, 65, 151–54, 164 The Birth of Tragedy 151 O’Hara, Daniel 130, 165 object d’art 137–38 occultism 1, 80 Olympian(s) 82 organicism, organicist 76–77 Orpheu 142 paganism, pagan 18, 20, 29–30, 39–41, 53, 55–58, 65, 72, 80–81, 88, 151 Pais, Sidónio 83, 87–88, 93, 97, 104 n. 59, 105 n. 93 palingenesia 92–93 pan-Celticism 39 Pantheism, pantheist, pantheistic 10–15, 28–32, 34, 39, 53–55, 65–66, 153, 155 animistic pantheism 66 Romantic pantheism 11–12 spiritualistic pantheism 11–12, 32 Parmenides 156 Pascoaes, Teixeira de 2–3, 7 n. 8, 64, 79 pastoral 5–6, 35, 41–44, 46–47, 51–52, 54–55, 58–63, 66–67, 69–72, 75, 78, 102, 113, 121, 138, 145, 162–64, 167 adverse 5, 70, 163 Classical 5, 41, 44, 47, 55, 70, 162 Renaissance 72 Romantic 41, 43–44, 46, 71–72 Pater, Walter 3–5, 16, 18, 21, 28, 34, 40, 63, 72 n. 3, 74 n. 49, 107, 111, 134, 143–46, 152, 154–56, 164, 166 ascesis 4, 139, 143 ‘Leonardo da Vinci’ 143 Marius the Epicurean 143 ‘Style’143 The Renaissance 3, 16, 28, 40, 74 n. 49, 143–44, 161 n. 33 ‘The School of Giorgioni’ 21 ‘Winckelmann’ 4, 144

179

personality 4, 67, 88, 107–08, 110–11, 113–14, 118, 120, 124–27, 133 n. 36, 153, 156, 164 dissociation of 124, 127 Pessanha, Camilo 36 n. 7 Pessoa, Fernando: for works by Pessoa, see separate index ars poetica 118, 120, 141 classical ode 55, 100–01, 116, 154, 166 colonial education 8 depersonalization 6, 70, 107, 113–16, 118, 120, 128–29, 136, 163, 166 ‘drama in persons’ 127, 130 ‘fiction(s) of the interlude’ 127 free verse 62, 115–16, 141 futurist, futuristic 34, 154 heteronymy, heteronym(s), heteronymous 4, 11, 29, 34, 40, 52, 59, 62, 70–71, 88, 100, 102, 113, 115–16, 118, 120, 123, 126–30, 132 n. 20, 133 n. 34, 137, 140–42, 145, 148, 153, 156, 158–59, 161 n. 33, 163, 165–66 intersectionist 116 letter to Yeats 1–2, 6 n. 1 literary personalities 108, 113–14, 164 Anon, Charles Robert 113 Search, Alexander 9, 113–14, 137 marginalia 7 n. 9, 36 n. 13, 74 n. 40, 143 non-Aristotelian aesthetic 154 objectivism 64, 67–68 orthonym, orthonymous 51, 59–60, 64, 70, 72, 83, 99, 115–16, 118–19, 123, 133 n. 34, 136, 145, 153–54, 158, 165 personae: fisherman 49–51, 54, 63, 70 historical dramatis personae 83 Mad Fiddler 25–27 reaper 44–46, 63, 70–71 shepherd mask 60, 68–70 reading diaries 36 n. 3 rhythm (s) 16, 21–22, 60, 62, 140–41, 143 schizoid temperament 128 schooling 2, 8 Sebastianism, sebastianic myth 79, 88, 93 self-effacement, self-effacing 127–28, 165 Sensacionismo, Sensationism, sensationist 30, 63, 66–67, 69–70, 77–78, 153–55, 162 Pindar, heroic ode 102 Plato, Platonism, Platonists 94, 112, 146, 155, 164 The Republic 84, 88, 135, 164 Poe, Edgar Allan 9–10, 18–19, 21, 36 n. 10, 37 n. 35 ‘Dream-Land’ 19 ‘The City in the Sea’ 18 ‘The Philosophy of Composition’ 21 ‘The Poetic Principle’ 21 poetic(s): metaphysical 149 multifaceted 4, 165 of order 148

180

Index

of perfection 144, 146 of the whole vs the interstice 164 styles of intensity and comprehensiveness 151, 154 poetry: as ‘a criticism of life’ 140 as hermeneutic method 6, 134, 164 metaphysical 6 theory of 110, 134, 137, 154 polytheism 55, 65, 153, 155 Pound, Ezra 103 n. 17, 165 Portugal Futurista 34 post-Symbolism 5, 165 post-Symbolist(s) 5, 8–9, 34–35, 36 n. 7, 39–40, 64, 70, 77, 82, 137, 162 post-Symbolist style 5, 39, 162 Pre-Raphaelite 9, 35, 70, 82 primitivism, primitivist 39–40, 64, 66, 70, 72, 76, 78–79 Public Opinion 2 Pythagoras 139, 152 Rapid Review 2 Renan, Ernest 40, 79 The Poetry of the Celtic Races 40 Renascença Portuguesa 2, 7 n. 7, 76, 78–79, 102 n. 2 revivalism, revivalist 2, 77, 92 Rhymers’ Club 109 Romanticism, romantic(s) 5, 8–13, 15–16, 19, 26–27, 31, 34–35, 36 n. 21, 39–41, 43–44, 46, 71–72, 76, 78, 81, 84, 92, 114, 116, 120, 128, 134–36, 139, 148, 162, 165 meditative poem(s) 12–13, 164 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, raison sensitive 63 Russell, George 107 Sadlier, Darlene 78 Santos, Irene Ramalho 83–84, 99 Saudosismo, saudosista(s) 36 n. 7 Seabra, José Augusto 132 n. 20 self: -dramatization 34, 108 -othering 3, 6, 47, 60, 107–08, 110, 112–13, 119–21, 128, 131 -reflexive poetry / poem 46–47, 62, 113, 121, 135, 144 -representation 3, 108, 110, 127–28, 133 n. 36, 147 Severino, Alexandrino 53 Schiller, Friedrich 61 Schlegel, August Wilhem 116 Sharp, William (‘Fiona Macleod’) 107 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 8, 10–12, 21, 26, 33–34, 36 nn. 13 & 16, 81, 112, 117, 134–37, 139, 141–42, 146, 149, 151, 153–54, 156, 160 n. 3, 164, 166 Alastor 11, 36 n. 13, 82 A Defence of Poetry 117, 134–35, 137, 141, 151, 153 ‘Ode to a Skylark’ 160 n. 3 ‘Ode to the West Wind’ 136 Sidnell, Michael 112 Silva, Luís de Oliveira 63

Sinnett, A. P. 85, 104 n. 57 Esoteric Buddhism 85, 104 n. 57 The Occult World 85 Socrates 63 soul: ‘Portuguese Soul’ 79, 92, 94 ‘Hellenic soul’ 94 Sousa, Ronald 85, 104 nn. 51 & 52 spatial representation 12, 162 Spender, Stephen 54 ‘non-recognizer’ 54, 72 Spenser, Edmund 17, 41, 46, 88 ‘Astrophel’ 46 The Shepheardes Calender 41 Stevenson, Robert Louis Treasure Island 106 n. 101 Stoicism, stoic 56, 58, 63, 65 stylistic variation / diversification 3–6, 11, 34, 102, 107, 112, 115, 129, 130, 134, 157–58, 162–66 subjectivism 64 Symbolism, symbolist 5, 8–10, 12, 16, 20–22, 27, 34–35, 36 n. 7, 39, 85, 97, 162 French Symbolists 8–9, 34, 36 n. 7, 165 Swedenborg, Emanuel 28 Swinburne, Algernon Charles 10, 36 n. 10 Symons, Arthur 8 T. P.’s Weekly 2, 6 n. 5 Tagore, Rabindranath 3, 92 Tennyson, Alfred Lord 8, 11, 16, 18, 22, 27, 79, 81, 103, n. 30 ‘Maud’ 18 ‘The Lotos-Eaters’ 104 n. 30 ‘The Voyage of Maeldune’ 81, 104 n. 30 ‘Tithonus’ 27–28 Terlinden, Anne 29 The Poetry Review 2, 6 n. 5 The Review of Reviews 2 Theocritus 46, 54, 67, 70–71, 73 n. 23, 102 n.1 ‘Goatherd and Shepherd’ 46 Theosophy, theosophical 85, 104 n. 52 Thoreau, Henry David 19 Walden 19 Titans, titanic 58, 82, 84 Toomey, Deirdre 28 Transcendentalism, transcendentalist 11, 14–15, 21, 29–30, 55, 58, 64, 153 pantheistic transcendentalism 14–15, 153 German transcendentalists 15 Portuguese transcendentalists 64 uncanny 22 unity of image 98, 154 Valéry, Paul 8, 107 Verde, Cesário 44, 53 ‘De Verão’ 44

Index Verhaeren, Emile 153 Verlaine, Paul 21 Vico, Giovanni Battista 85 Victorians 8, 78, 95 Viëtor, Karl 160 n. 1, 167 n. 2 Virgil 41, 43, 46, 60, 80–81, 84, 153 Aeneas’s catabasis 158 Aeneid 84–85, 158, 163 Eclogues 41, 43, 60 fifth Eclogue 46 sixth messianic Eclogue 80 Weltanschauung 30, 95, 142 Wilde, Oscar 3, 34, 40, 72 n. 3, 107–08, 110, 113, 116, 131, 132 n. 6 Intentions 108 ‘The Critic as Artist’, 108 ‘The Decay of Lying’ 108, 110, 113, 116 The Picture of Dorian Gray 108 ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.’ 108, 132 n. 11 ‘The Truth of Masks’ 108, 131 Whitman, Walt 62, 158 Wordsworth, William 8, 13–14, 26, 31, 42, 44–46, 51, 71 ‘Daffodils’ 13, 51 ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’ 13 The Prelude 42 ‘The Solitary Reaper’ 44, 73 n. 16 Yeats, John Butler 121 Yeats, W. B.: for works by Yeats, see separate index active virtue 140, 143 Anima Mundi 94, 145 anti-self 70, 111, 166 antithetical style 124 Byzantium, byzantine 138, 156 Celtic Twilight 3, 35, 66 daemons 28, 78 doctrine / theory of the Mask 108, 110–11, 116, 128, 166

181

dramatization 109–10, 112, 116, 128, 143 early poems 3, 8, 12, 110, 138, 162 free verse 112 Great Memory 94 late poems 99, 138, 163 middle style 44, 72, 154 narcissistic temperament 128 odic form 41 Ossianic cycle 80 personae: aristocratic 141 beggars 67, 141 Crazy Jane 6, 67, 112, 141, 150–51, 166 Cuchulain 76, 82, 96, 127, 159 fisherman 13, 47–49, 67, 70–71, 163, 166 Hanrahan 109, 122 heroic Celtic figures 41 King Goll 25–27 Michael Robartes 109, 112, 121 Owen Aherne 112, 121 Ribh 6, 150 shepherd mask 46 Tom the Lunatic 67 The Wild Old Wicked Man 67 phantasmagoria 111–12 prosaic style 5 rhythm(s) 19–22, 112, 140, 142 secondary personality 111, 114 Sligo 12–13, 19, 22, 36 n. 21, 39, 47 style as personality 110 super-sensory beauty 21 Tauchnitz anthology/edition 3, 9, 17, 19, 24, 26, 35, 162 Thoor Ballyllee 122 Tuatha Dé Danaan 16 Unity of Being 144 Unity of Culture 94, 144, 156 education 8, 165 Zenith, Richard 73 n. 15, 115 Zimmerman, Lee 124

WORKS BY PESSOA ❖

Caeiro, Alberto 29, 34, 40, 52, 59–72, 74 nn. 40 & 41, 114–15, 119–21, 123, 140, 146, 153–55, 157–58, 161 n. 64, 162–63, 166 O Guardador de Rebanhos 59, 61, 63, 65, 67, 69, 120 ‘Bendito seja o mesmo sol de outras terras’ 65–66 ‘Eu nunca guardei rebanhos’ 59, 62, 69, 119 ‘Li hoje quase duas páginas’ 64 ‘O meu olhar é nitido como um girassol’ 61–63 poem XXVI (‘Às vezes, em dias de luz perfeita e exacta’) 67 ‘Sou um guardador de rebanhos’ 62–63 O Pastor Amoroso 67 ‘O pastor amoroso perdeu o cajado’ 68 ‘Quando eu não te tinha’ 67 Poemas Inconjuntos 63–64, 69, 74 n. 40 ‘A espantosa realidade das coisas’ 63 ‘Pastor do monte, tão longe de mim com as tuas ovelhas’ 69 ‘Também sei fazer conjecturas’ 64 Campos, Álvaro de 6, 29–30, 34–35, 40, 52–54, 58, 62, 65, 72, 74 n. 41, 88, 100–02, 114–16, 118–19, 125–27, 141, 148, 150–51, 153–55, 158, 166 ‘Afinal, a melhor maneira de viajar é sentir’ 30, 118, 158 ‘Aniversário’ 126 ‘Depus a máscara e vi-me ao espelho’ 126–27 ‘Dois Excertos de Odes’ 52, 58, 65, 101 ‘Lisbon Revisited’ 125 ‘Ode Marítima’ 100, 158 ‘Opiário’ 158 ‘Tabacaria’ 125, 127, 150 ‘Ultimatum’ 34–35, 88, 162 English Poetry 2–3, 9–11, 13–14, 24, 31, 34–35, 137, 162 Antinuous 9 Epithalamium 9 Inscriptions 9 35 Sonnets 9 The Mad Fiddler 5, 9–11, 13–16, 18, 21, 24, 28–32, 35, 36 nn. 7, 9 & 13, 155, 160 n. 3, 161 n. 33, 162 ‘A Summer Ecstasy’ 15 ‘Elevation’ 36 n. 13, 160 n. 3 ‘Elf Dance’ 22–24 ‘Elsewhere’ 15–17, 19, 24 ‘Fierce dreams of something else!’ 15

‘Her Fingers Toyed Absently with her Rings’ 15 ‘Inversion’ 15 ‘Mood’ 28 ‘Summer Moments’ 31–32 ‘The Foreself ’ 15 ‘The Island’ 18–19 ‘The Labyrinth’ 29 ‘The Lost Key’ 15 ‘The Mad Fiddler’ 25, 27 ‘The Shining Pool’ 13, 30 Portuguese poetry 5, 21–22, 29–31, 34, 38 n. 62, 50, 77, 145 ‘A luz do sol affaga o immenso dia’ 52 ‘À Memória do Presidente-Rei Sidónio Pais’ 83, 97, 105 n. 93 ‘Autopsicografia’ 113 ‘Chuva Oblíqua’ 30–32 ‘Conselho’ 147–48 ‘Deixo ao cego e ao surdo’ 117–18 ‘Ela canta, pobre ceifeira’ 44, 50 ‘Elegia na Sombra’ 83, 99 ‘Episódios — A Múmia’ 158 ‘Hora Absurda’ 30 ‘Impressões do Crepúsculo’ 30 ‘Isto’ 130–31 Mensagem 77, 79–80, 82–86, 89–91, 93, 96–100, 102, 103 n. 7, 159 ‘Antemanhã’ 90 ‘As Ilhas Afortunadas’ 86 ‘Mar Português’ 86, 91 ‘Nevoeiro’ 89–90 ‘O Conde D. Henrique’ 84 ‘O Desejado’ 86 ‘O Encoberto’ 86, 91 ‘O Mostrengo’ 84, 86 ‘Ascensão de Vasco da Gama’ 84 ‘Meus versos são meu sonho dado’ 131 ‘O Andaime’ 122–23 ‘O Último Sortilégio’ 135–37, 139 ‘Passos da Cruz’ 121, 124 ‘Pescador do mar alto’ 49 Quadras ao Gosto Popular 79 ‘Quanto fui jaz. Quanto serei não sou’ 127 ‘Quinto Império’ 83, 93–94 ‘Talhei, artífice de um morto rito’ 121

Index Prose, drama: ‘A nova poesia portuguesa sociologicamente considerada’ 76, 95, 142 ‘A poesia nova em Portugal’ 154 ‘António Botto e o Ideal Estético em Portugal’ 140, 143–44, 153 Fausto 149, 154–55, 159 ‘Manifesto sobre o Atlantismo’ 93 O Marinheiro 97

183

Reis, Ricardo 29, 34, 40, 52, 54–58, 60–61, 64–65, 72, 72 n. 3, 74 n. 40, 114–16, 119, 140–41, 143, 145–46, 148, 153–55, 159, 166 Odes 72, 141 ‘Mestre, são plácidas’ 145 ‘Não canto a noite porque no meu canto’ 58 ‘Os deuses desterrados’ 57 ‘Ponho na altiva mente o fixo esforço’ 140 ‘Sabio é o que se contenta com o espectaculo do mundo’ 56 ‘Vivem em nós inúmeros’119 ‘Vós que, crentes em Cristos e Marias’ 54, 65

WORKS BY YEATS ❖

Poems ‘A Coat’ 35 ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’ 80, 144, 158 ‘A Prayer for my Daughter’ 70, 111, 158 ‘A Prayer for My Son’ 111 ‘A Woman Homer Sung’ 44 ‘Adam’s Curse’ 70, 109, 140, 143 ‘Among School Children’ 124 ‘Are You Content?’ 99, 149 ‘Beggar to Beggar Cried’ 67 ‘Blood and the Moon’ 148 ‘Byzantium’ 139 ‘Crazy Jane on the Day of Judgement’ 150 ‘Come Gather Round me Parnellites’ 87 ‘Coole and Ballylee, 1931’ 8 ‘Cuchulain Comforted’ 127, 159 ‘Easter 1916’ 95 ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’ 157 ‘He Remembers Forgotten Beauty’ 19 ‘He Tells of the Perfect Beauty’ 121 ‘High Talk’ 99 ‘Hound Voice’ 99 ‘In the Seven Woods’ 43–44 ‘Into the Twilight’ 14–15, 66 ‘Ireland After Parnell’ 91 ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’ 95–96, 123, 146 ‘Men Improve with the Years’ 66 ‘Meru’ 81 ‘Michael Robartes and the Dancer’ 121 ‘No Second Troy’ 44 ‘Owen Aherne and his Dancers’ 121 ‘Parnell’s Funeral’ 87–88 ‘Peace’ 44 ‘Ribh denounces Patrick’ 150

‘Running to Paradise’ 67 ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ 138–39 ‘Shepherd and Goatherd’ 46, 69 ‘Stream and Sun at Glendalough’ 51, 61–62, 145 ‘Supernatural Songs’ 150 ‘The Circus Animal’s Desertion’ 99, 149 ‘The Fiddler of Dooney’ 25 ‘The Fisherman’ 47, 49, 70, 95 ‘The Hour before Dawn’ 67 ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ 19–20 ‘The Madness of King Goll’ 25–26 ‘The Man and the Echo’ 99 ‘The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland’ 16–17 ‘The Meditation of the Old Fisherman’ 12 ‘The Moods’ 27–28 ‘The Municipal Gallery Revisited’ 111 ‘The Phases of the Moon’ 121 ‘The Rose of Battle’ 82 ‘The Sad Shepherd’ 42–43, 46–47, 58 ‘The Second Coming’ 89–91 ‘The Song of the Happy Shepherd’ 41–42, 44, 47, 58, 66 ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’ 82 ‘The Statues’ 96, 117, 139, 144, 152 ‘The Stolen Child’ 22–24 ‘The Three Beggars’ 67 ‘The Three Hermits’ 67 ‘The Tower’ 71, 122–23, 147, 149–50 ‘The Two Trees’ 24 ‘The Valley of the Black Pig’ 82 ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ 3 ‘The Wild Old Wicked Man’ 67 ‘The Withering of the Boughs’ 24, 33 ‘To a Shade’ 87

184

Index

‘To Ireland in the Coming Times’ 24, 135–37 ‘To the Rose Upon the Rood of Time’ 152 ‘Tom the Lunatic’ 67 ‘Under Ben Bulben’ 95, 111, 147 ‘Under the Moon’ 33 ‘Vacillation’ 144 ‘What Then?’ 99, 144 Volumes and longer poems: A Selection from the Poetry of W. B. Yeats 37 n.29 A Woman Young and Old 112 Collected Poems 41, 111–12 Last Poems and Plays 99 Michael Robartes and the Dancer 112 Responsibilities 34, 46, 48, 67, 154 The Cat and the Moon 85 The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics 9, 152 The Green Helmet and Other Poems 3, 34, 44 The Shadowy Waters 8, 26 The Tower 112, 123, 138 The Wanderings of Oisin 3, 17–19, 80–82, 85–86, 96 The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems 9, 22, 25, 36 n. 21 The Wild Swans at Coole 46 The Wind Among the Reeds 8–9, 14, 27, 44, 109, 137, 154 The Winding Stair and Other Poems 51, 144 Words for Music Perhaps 112 Prose, drama, fiction: A Book of Irish Verse 75 ‘A General Introduction for my Work’ 41, 112 ‘A People’s Theatre’ 21 A Vision 91, 121 ‘Anima Mundi’ 145 At The Hawk’s Well 82 Autobiographies 91, 128 ‘Blake’s Illustrations to Dante’ 138 Cathleen Ni Houlihan 95, 99 Discoveries 135 ‘Edmund Spenser’ 88

Estrangement 111, 128 Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry 39 ‘First Principles’ 66, 92, 94 ‘Four Years: 1887–1891’ 104 n. 52, 108 ‘Friends of My Youth’ 109 ‘Hopes and Fears for Irish Literature’ 92 Ideas of Good and Evil 12, 137, 141, 151–52 ‘Ireland and the Arts’ 33, 40, 78, 135, 142 ‘J. M. Synge and the Ireland of his Time’ 141 ‘Michael Robartes Foretells’ 105 n. 70 ‘My Own Poetry Again’ 20 ‘Nationality and Literature’ 76 On Baile’s Strand 3, 82 ‘Pages from a Diary in 1930’ 156 ‘Personality and the Intellectual Essences’ 153 ‘Prometheus Unbound’ 137, 160 n. 3 Representative Irish Tales 39, 75, 91 Reveries over Childhood and Youth 19, 82, 108, 111, 134, 160 n. 3 Rosa Alchemica 28, 91, 109, 116, 121 Stories of Red Hanrahan 109 ‘The Bounty of Sweden’ 110 ‘The Celtic Element in Literature’ 39, 66, 94, 140 The Countess Cathleen 3, 95 ‘The Death of Synge’ 107 The Green Helmet 82 ‘The Growth of a Poet’ 47 ‘The Happiest of Poets’ 151, 154 ‘The Holy Places’ 14 The Island of Statues 41, 73 n. 8, 138 ‘The Literary Movement in Ireland’ 78 The Only Jealousy of Emer 82 ‘The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry’ 12, 151, 156, 160 n. 3 ‘The Poetry of Sir Samuel Ferguson’ 39 ‘The Symbolism of Poetry’ 21–22 The Tables of the Law 91, 111, 121 The Tragic Generation 8, 17 The Trembling of the Veil 8, 108 ‘What is “Popular Poetry”?’ 141