Metrical complexity in Pessoa's 35 Sonnets

Abstract

Though obviously inspired by Shakespeare's sonnets, Pessoa's English sonnets employ metrical patterns, enjambments, and grammatical constructions not used by Shakespeare. This mixture of effects has been criticized as somewhat awkward or even incompetent. The assumption seems to be that Pessoa tried, and failed, to create an authentic Shakespearean masquerade. Here I argue that Pessoa's sonnets re modernist poems that appropriate the past in the manner of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Like Pessoa, Hopkins was intensely interested in metrical variety, write innovative sonnets, and appropriated complex rhythms from English poets other than Shakespeare, notably Milton. Like Pessoa, Hopkins used archaic English and modernist grammatical constructions as well. Aspects of Pessoa's verse sometimes criticized as excessive are carried even farther by Hopkins, whose verse is now widely admired. The assumption that Pessoa is a modernist of a particular kind brings into focus his strengths as a scholarly poet.

Keywords

• Pessoa, Fernando
• 35 Sonnets
• Shakespeare, William
• Kiparsky, Valentin
• Hopkins, Gerard Manley
• Milton, John
• Versification
• Poetry
• Métrica
• Prosódia
• Ritmo