ABSTRACT
Any thorough investigation of W. B. Yeats's and Fernando Pessoa's use of stylistic masks as a process of ontological, metaphysical and aesthetic inquiry must begin by examining their early poetry. The confluence of Romantic, Victorian and Symbolist influences is most salient in one of Pessoa's works in English entitled The Mad Fiddler, which constitutes the main focus of this chapter. The Mad Fiddler provides an exemplary illustration of the depiction of landscape in Pessoa's English poetry. The poems in this collection, written between 1910 and 1918, were contemporary with Pessoa's reading of Symbolist and post-Symbolist poets, including Yeats. The poems from The Mad Fiddler analysed throught this chapter 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.
