ABSTRACT
During Fernando Pessoa’s lifetime, an estimated 72 literary personae would come to life,1 some of them intended authors of works that never gained form, while others signed one or two poems or articles, or some other ephemeral contribution, and finally there were the extremely prolific ones, a group fully active for extended periods of Pessoa’s life. His early production and the creation of the heteronyms span a turbulent period in the political life of Portugal. In 1908, the Regicide dictated the end of the Monarchy, which would be overthrown by the 1910 Republican revolution; the subsequent political, economic, and social changes led to widespread unrest, and the Portuguese artists engaged in the avant-garde movements characteristic of the pre-World War I period reflected this turmoil. This explains why most studies of the period focus primarily on the role of political agents and the sociological impact of such changes, and less on their collateral effects on the cultural sphere.2 Although there has been scholarly research on perceived affinities between Pessoa and Kierkegaard, the end result is to see both figures as examples of the Romantic endeavor to build a composite figure of poet-philosopher-artist, rather than, as one might expect, consider the issue of a possible influence of Kierkegaard on Pessoa. Nonetheless, the absence of an explicit reference to Kierkegaard in Pessoa’s corpus ought not to serve as negative evidence of any knowledge of the Danish philosopher-poet by the Portuguese poet-philosopher, as any influence would likely address issues such as modes of communication and the operational effectiveness of the multiple authorship-a domain in which poets are prone to conceal their sources.
