Fernando Pessoa: A Little Larger than the Entire Universe (Selected Poems)

 I suppose one can trace the evolution of my thinking about literature by observing the trajectory of my favorite poet.  When she was Elizabeth Barrett Browning, I was clearly obsessed with perfection of form.  When I moved on to Shelley, it was a result of my focus on Truth.  Now I have moved on again, my tastes somewhat lagging behind my perspective.  I desire in what I read and otherwise consume not only perfection of craft, not even meaningful expression of human truths.  I desire, before it is too late, to see the expression of the craft and the art used to tell me something about myself. How narcissistic to desire my own visage in what I read.

And now I have.  Not only does Pessoa's conceit of multiplicity accurately reflect my own internal omnilectic (proud of coining that word), but each of his personae captures one of my faces and pins it to the page.  Alberto Caeiro knows, as I do, that all of this is an illusion, that what is simply is, and nothing more.  But Ricardo Reis fights back, as I do, that there must be more, there must be gods and worlds and lives beyond this, and it is our job to find them.  Alvaro de Campos wails annoyingly, as I do, longing for something that is beyond grasp.  And Pessoa himself, in his own voice, returns to the only voice that can quiet the others: the simple joys of form, symmetry, and rhythm.   

It is this last voice that I relate with the least.  It is no surprise that Pessoa in his own voice is merely a mask, and a relatively unconvincing one,  over the multitudes he contains.  Perhaps I would have related more to him if I were still a Browningite.  What is surprising is how the truth peeks out from behind that mask when,in the name of Alexander Search, he writes in English instead of his native language.  Language is, after all, a veil over our reality, and sometimes relocating to a new lexicon jars the soul enough to give up its secrets.  It is only here that he reveals the core of himself, especially in "King of the Gaps".  Pessoa himself is this eponymous king, "[the] lord of what is twixt thing and thing. / Of interbeings . . ." No matter then name, the voice, that he uses, Pessoa seeks to bridge gaps: "Between our waking and our sleep, / Between our silence and our speech, between / Us and the consciousness of us." Perhaps he even succeeded, for a bridge has definitely been built: one between the poet and this reader.