Pessoa Plural (Oct 2016)
Fernando Pessoa's The Mad Fiddler: Sensationism in English
Abstract
Emphasizing Pessoa's dual cultural heritage, this essay traces the poet's exposure to English literature and culture from a young age, notably through schooling and directed readings during his formative years. Particular attention is paid to the impact of romantic poets from the pantheist lineage of Shelley and Blake on Pessoa's emergent poetics and poetry, as well as to the hitherto little-known details of his reception of Blake's poetry mediated through Yeats. These facets of their works surface in the transcendental pantheism expressed in the poems collected in The Mad Fiddler, and unpublished collection of English poems written between 1910 and 1917. A laboratory of the maturing process in Pessoa's poetry, I content that this collection rehearses analogous aesthetic and philosophical ideas in his poetry in English to those he was developing in Portuguese, namely Sensationism and the Portuguese Neopaganism with which the heteronyms were associated, arguing through close readings of illustrative poems.
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