“By links of being past imagining”: Fernando Pessoa’s The Mad Fiddler and Sensationism

Abstract

Fernando Pessoa writes The Mad Fiddler according to the three principles of Sensationism he delineates in a letter to an unnamed British editor: Sensation, Suggestion, and Construction. This article examines the aesthetic reach of Pessoa’s threefold process to understand how the poet’s early work in English conceptualizes the abstract feelings and expressions that would eventually allow his heteronyms “to feel everything in all possible ways.” Analyzing the collection through each of these parameters reveals the breadth of Pessoa’s aspirations for sensationism as a literary movement. Grounded in new traditions within French symbolism and conceptualized in the English language, both The Mad Fiddler and Sensationism depart from the perceived insularity of Portuguese expression to affirm a more expansive artistic philosophy.

Keywords

• pessoa, fernando
• literature
• modernism (literature)