paganism) being admitted as one more god, but not more than that—an idea in accord with paganism and perhaps partly inspired by Alberto Caeiro’s idea (a purely poetic idea) that the Christ Child was “the god who was missing.”*
SENSATIONISM AND OTHER ISMS
Besides generating a diversified trio of heteronymic poets, a team of subheteronymic translators and publicists to promote them, and a “Neo-paganist” ideology (see pp. 147–57) to give philosophical weight to their literary works and psychological weight to their invented personalities, Pessoa also invented literary movements for them to spearhead and promulgate. But far from being limited to Pessoa’s notebooks and papers, these movements infiltrated the Portuguese intellectual milieu of the
1910s,
and one could argue that
they
were the raison d’être of Caeiro, Reis, and Campos, and the reason the heteronyms evolved the way they did. Both points of view may be valid, for in that period of Pessoa’s life there was a startling symbiosis between the written world of his fancy and the literary world at large. IfVertiginism, Abstractionism, Dynamism, and Fusionism weren’t much more than evocative names on one or another statement of artistic principles that perhaps no one but Pessoa ever saw, the movements called
Paulismo,
Sensationism, and Intersectionism were enthusiastically taken up by his writer friends. And even if Pessoa, as we know from his notes and from several letters, sometimes saw these movements as expendable gimmicks, the fact is that they helped transform Portuguese literature. None of them endured long, but they were the instruments by which Pessoa and his compeers brought Modernism to Portugal, whose literature had perhaps been suffering from too much high seriousness. Some playfulness, even in the form of gimmicks, was bound to have a salutary effect
.
The name
Paulismo
comes from the Portuguese word for swamp
, paul,
which was the first word (but in the plural
, pauis)
of one ofPessoa’s first two poems to be published, in February of
1914.
He actually wrote
the poem a year earlier, and like
The Mariner,
also written in 1913, it hangs in suspension, with more three-dot ellipses than there are verses. Both works are rarefied products of post-Symbolism, but Pessoa’s one-act play, for all its somewhat unreal, sometimes illogical dialogue, isn’t hard to follow, whereas the poem can’t possibly be followed, since it leads nowhere; we simply have to enter it and float among the words and images, which are often striking. It was published (with another poem) under the title “Twilight Impressions,” and these include a “distant tolling of Other Bells,” the “thin autumn of a vague bird’s song,” and “opium fanfares of future silences.” In one of his notebooks, Pessoa cited this poem as an example of
Paulismo
by virtue of its “strangeness,” a second poem as an example by virtue of its rhythm, and a third poem by virtue of its “metaphysical uneasiness.” The preceding page in the same notebook characterizes
Paulismo
as the ultrarefinement of sensation, thought, and expression, while a page from another notebook defines it as “the sincere cultivation of artificiality.” Though it owed most of its genetic endowment to post-Symbolism
, Paulismo
can be distinguished from its predecessor by its greater self-consciousness, or artificiality, by the deliberateness of its creative process
.
Paulismo
had no noticeable impact on the poetry of the heteronyms, and in the poetry signed by Pessoa himself it quickly evolved into a less “swampy” style that employed a simpler language. But the orthodox, ultrarefined variety continued to be practiced by Mario de Sá-Carneiro (1890–1916), who was in fact its greatest exponent. Pessoa and Sá-Carneiro met in 1912 and immediately realized that they’d found, in each other, their kindred spirit. The existential dichotomy ofl-who-am-I
versus
I-who-am-another was, if possible,
SENSATIONISM AND OTHER ISMS
Besides generating a diversified trio of heteronymic poets, a team of subheteronymic translators and publicists to promote them, and a “Neo-paganist” ideology (see pp. 147–57) to give philosophical weight to their literary works and psychological weight to their invented personalities, Pessoa also invented literary movements for them to spearhead and promulgate. But far from being limited to Pessoa’s notebooks and papers, these movements infiltrated the Portuguese intellectual milieu of the
1910s,
and one could argue that
they
were the raison d’être of Caeiro, Reis, and Campos, and the reason the heteronyms evolved the way they did. Both points of view may be valid, for in that period of Pessoa’s life there was a startling symbiosis between the written world of his fancy and the literary world at large. IfVertiginism, Abstractionism, Dynamism, and Fusionism weren’t much more than evocative names on one or another statement of artistic principles that perhaps no one but Pessoa ever saw, the movements called
Paulismo,
Sensationism, and Intersectionism were enthusiastically taken up by his writer friends. And even if Pessoa, as we know from his notes and from several letters, sometimes saw these movements as expendable gimmicks, the fact is that they helped transform Portuguese literature. None of them endured long, but they were the instruments by which Pessoa and his compeers brought Modernism to Portugal, whose literature had perhaps been suffering from too much high seriousness. Some playfulness, even in the form of gimmicks, was bound to have a salutary effect
.
The name
Paulismo
comes from the Portuguese word for swamp
, paul,
which was the first word (but in the plural
, pauis)
of one ofPessoa’s first two poems to be published, in February of
1914.
He actually wrote
the poem a year earlier, and like
The Mariner,
also written in 1913, it hangs in suspension, with more three-dot ellipses than there are verses. Both works are rarefied products of post-Symbolism, but Pessoa’s one-act play, for all its somewhat unreal, sometimes illogical dialogue, isn’t hard to follow, whereas the poem can’t possibly be followed, since it leads nowhere; we simply have to enter it and float among the words and images, which are often striking. It was published (with another poem) under the title “Twilight Impressions,” and these include a “distant tolling of Other Bells,” the “thin autumn of a vague bird’s song,” and “opium fanfares of future silences.” In one of his notebooks, Pessoa cited this poem as an example of
Paulismo
by virtue of its “strangeness,” a second poem as an example by virtue of its rhythm, and a third poem by virtue of its “metaphysical uneasiness.” The preceding page in the same notebook characterizes
Paulismo
as the ultrarefinement of sensation, thought, and expression, while a page from another notebook defines it as “the sincere cultivation of artificiality.” Though it owed most of its genetic endowment to post-Symbolism
, Paulismo
can be distinguished from its predecessor by its greater self-consciousness, or artificiality, by the deliberateness of its creative process
.
Paulismo
had no noticeable impact on the poetry of the heteronyms, and in the poetry signed by Pessoa himself it quickly evolved into a less “swampy” style that employed a simpler language. But the orthodox, ultrarefined variety continued to be practiced by Mario de Sá-Carneiro (1890–1916), who was in fact its greatest exponent. Pessoa and Sá-Carneiro met in 1912 and immediately realized that they’d found, in each other, their kindred spirit. The existential dichotomy ofl-who-am-I
versus
I-who-am-another was, if possible,
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