The most celebrated Portuguese poet, who had a major role in the development of modernism in his country. Pessoa was a member of the Modernist group Orpheu; he was its greatest representative. Pessoa's use of "heteronyms", literary alter egos, who support and criticize each other's works was also unconventional. During his career as a writer Pessoa was virtually unknown and he published little of his vast body of work. Most of his life Pessoa lived in a furnished room in Lisbon, where he died in obscurity.

I never kept sheep,
But it's as if I'd done so.
My soul is like a shepherd.
It knows wind and sun
Walking hand in hand with the Seasons
Observing, and following along.
(from 'I never kept sheep', The Keeper of Sheep, 1914)

Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa was born in Lisbon. His father, Joaquim de Seabra Pessoa, died of tuberculosis when Pessoa was young. Maria Madalena Nogueira Pessoa, his mother, married the Portuguese consul in Durban in South Africa, where the family lived from 1896. During these years Pessoa became fluent in English and developed an early love for such authors as William Shakespeare and John Milton. He also wrote his poems in English.

Pessoa was educated in Cape Town. At the age of seventeen he returned to Lisbon to continue his studies at the university. When a student strike interrupted classes, he gave up his studies, and got employment as a business correspondent. In 1919 Pessoa met Ophelia Queiroz, a nineteen years old secretary; they exchanged letters but in November 1920 Pessoa broke off with her. With his mother, and his half sister Henriquetta, he rented an apartment on the Rua Coelho de Rocha, 16, where he lived until his death. Pessoa never married. In a letter in the 1930s, he stated that sexual desires are "a hindrance to superior mental processes". However, his own sexual orientation obsessed him.

Pessoa earned a modest living as a commercial translator, and wrote avant-garde reviews, especially for Orpheu, which was a forum for new aesthetic views. His articles in praise of the saudosismo (nostalgia) movement provoked polemics because of their extravagant language. Pessoa's first book, ANTINOUS, appeared in 1918, and was followed by two other collection of poems, all written in English. It was not until 1933 that he published his first book, the slim, prize-winning MENSAGEM, in Portuguese. However, it did not attract much attention.

The bulk of Pessoa's work appeared in literary magazines, especially in his own Athena. Before creating his literary personalities from his inner discordant voices, Pessoa had long had doubts about his own sanity. Under his own name Pessoa wrote poems that are marked by their innovative language, although he used traditional stanza and metric patterns. The poetical technique for which Pessoa has become especially noted is the use of heteronyms, or alternative literary personae, resembling the verse personae of Ezra Pound. or Søren Kierkegaard's "characters" who actually "authored" some of his books. Pessoa's own name means both person and persona. At the age of five or six the poet had began to address letters to an imaginary companion, named Le Chevalier de Pas.

Much of his best work Pessoa attributed later to his heteronyms, de Campos, Reis, and Caeiro, who were partly born as a prank on Mário Sá-Carneiro (1890-1916), an avant-garde poet from Orpheu. Álvaro de Campos, an engineer, represents in the spirit of Walt Whitman the ecstasy of experience; he writes in free verse. Ricardo Reis is an epicurean doctor with a classical education; he writes in meters and stanzas that recall Horace. (See also Jose Saramago's novel The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, 1984.) Alberto Caeiro, who called himself a shepherd, is against all sentimentality, and writes in colloquial free verse. Caeiro had two disciples, Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos, who says melancholically in 'The Tobacconist's' (1928): "I am nothing. / I shall always be nothing." According to Reis, "The life of Caeiro cannot be told for there is nothing in it to tell." Pessoa once informed that Caeiro died from tuberculosis in 1915. After meeting him on March 8, 1914, Pessoa began to write poetry. In 'I never kept sheep' Caeiro said: "I've no ambitions or desires. / My being a poet isn't an ambition. / It's my way of being alone." Each persona has a distinct philosophy of life. Pessoa even created literary discussions among them.

In 'Toward Explaining Heteronomity' Pessoa criticized the distinction made between three generic types or classes of poetry – epic or narrative, in which the narrator speaks in the first person, drama, in which the characters do all the talking, and lyric, uttered through the first person. "Like all well conceived classifications, this one is useful and clear; like all classifications, it is false. The genres do not separate out with essential facility, and, if we closely analyze what they are made of, we shall find that from lyric poetry to dramatic there is one continuous gradation. In effect, and going right to the origins of dramatic poetry – Aeschylus, for instance – it will be nearer the truth to say that what we encounter is lyric poetry put into the mouths of different characters."

Pessoa died on November 30, 1935, in Lisbon. Throughout his life, Pessoa kept himself aloof from the literary world, but he followed keenly foreign literary movements. One of his pen friends was the English writer and occult figure Aleister Crowley, known as "the Great Beast"; their correspondence began in 1930. Crowley signed his letters "666". In the 1910s Pessoa had practiced mediumistic writing, claiming once that his uncle, Manuel Gualdino da Cunha, had used his hand to make a signature. Many of Pessoa's questions to the spirits dealt with his own sex life. One of them mocked him, "You masturbator! You masochist! You man without manhood!" In his library Pessoa had E.G. Stanley's book Amativeness: The Master Passion of Life, which warned about the effects of masturbation. Although Pessoa later came into the conclusion, that his method of communication with spirits was self-deceptive, he continued to experiment with automatic writing, which was in France an important part of the Surrealist techniques.

Pessoa left behind some 25,000 unpublished text and fragments. From the 1940s, his poetry started to gain a wider audience in Portugal and later Brazil. Several of his collections have been published posthumously and translated in Spanish, French, English, German, Swedish, Finnish, and other languages. Among the most important works are POESIAS DE FERNANDO PESSOA (1942), POESIAS DE ÁLVARO DE CAMPOS (1944), POEMAS DE ALBERTO CAEIRO (1946), and ODES DE RICARDO REIS (1946).

"Quando vim a ter espenranças, já não sabia ter esperanças.
Quando vim a olhar para a vida, perdera o sentido da vida."
(from 'Aniveresario')

Known above all as a poet, Pessoa also wrote short essays, several of which were briefly sketched or unfinished. His LIVRO DO DESSOSSOGEGO (The Book of Disquiet), the "factless autobiography", written under the name Bernardo Soares, appeared for the first time in 1982, almost 50 years after the author's death. The Book of Disquiet is a collection of prose manuscripts, written in the style of an intimate diary. Bernardo Soares is troubled by alienation and experiences of drowning: "And I, truly, I am the center that doesn't exist except as a convention in the geometry of the abyss; I am the nothingness around which this movement spins..." Soares praises the literary magazine to which Pessoa contributes, he loves and hates his city, but cannot break out of his monotonous life.

For further reading: Vida e obra de Fernando Pessoa by Gaspar Simõnes (1950, 2 vols.); Estudos sobre Fernando Pessoa by A. Casais Monteiro (1958); O poeta é um fingidor by J. de Sena (1961); Diversidade e unidade em Fernando Pessoa by J. do Prado Coelho (1973); Pessoa revisitado by E. Lourenço (1973); Man Who Never Was by George Monteiro (1982); Poesia e matafísica by Eduardo Lourenço (1983); The Presence of Pessoa by George Monteiro (1998); Modern Art in Portugal 1910-1940, ed by Joao B. Serra (1998); Fernando Pessoa: Self-Analysis and Thirty Other Poems, ed. by George Monteiro (1989); Fernando Pessoa: Voices of Nomadic Soul by Zbigniew Kotowich (1996); An Introduction to Fernando Pessoa by Darlene J. Sadlier (1998); The Presence of Pessoa: English, American, and Southern African Literary Responses by George Monteiro (1998); Fernando Pessoa and 19th Century Anglo-American Literature by George Monteiro (2000); Embodying Pessoa: Corporeality, Gender, Sexuality by Anna Klobucka and Mark Sabine (2007) - Note: Pessoa's statue is in front of the café Brasileira in Lisbon. - In Finnish: Suomeksi julkaistu myös valikoima Hetkien valellus (1974), suom. Pentti Saaritsa. Antologiassa Salaperäinen seurue (1997) oli mukana Pessoan runoja. Sanna Pernu suomensi satiirisen keskustelunovellin Anarkistipankkiiri (1992).

Selected works:

• O GUARDADOR DE REBANHOS (written in 1914 under the name Alberto Caeiro) - The Keeper of Flocks (translated by J. C. R. Green) / The Keeper of Sheep (translated by Edwin Honig and Susan M. Brown)
• 35 SONNETS, 1917
• ANTINOUS, 35 SONNETS, 1918 (2 vols.)
• SONNETS, 1918
• ENGLISH POEMS: ANTINOUS, 35 SONNETS, EPITHALAMIUM, 1921 (3 vols.)
• MENSAGEM, 1933 - Message (transl. by Jonathan Griffin)
• A MEMÕRIA DO PRESIDENTE REI SIDÕNIO PAIS, 1940
• POESIAS DE FERNANDO PESSOA, 1942
• OBRAS COMPLETAS, 1942-56
• CARTAS, 1944
• POESIAS DE ÁLVARO DE CAMPOS, 1944
• A NOVA POESIA PORTUGUESA, 1944
• CARTAS A ARMANDO CÔRTEZ-RODRIGUES, 1945 (ed. by Joel Serrão, rev. ed. 1959)
• POEMAS DE ALBERTO CAEIRO, 1946
• ODES DE RICARDO REIS, 1946
• PÁGINAS DE DOUTRINA ESTÉTICA, 1946 (ed. by Jorge de Sena)
• OBRAS COMPLETAS, 1952-
• POEMAS DRAMÁTICOS, 1952
• QUADRAS AO GASTO POPULAR, 1955 - Quadras ao gosta popular = Quatrains in the Popular Style (translated, with introduction and notes by Philip Krummrich)
• POESIAS INÉDITAS: 1919-1930, 1956
• CARTAS A JOÃO GASPAR SINÕES, 1957 (ed. by Simões)
• CARTAS A FERNANDO PESSOA, 1958-1959 (2 vols., by Mário Sá-Carneiro, ed. by Helena Cidade Moura)
• OBRA POÉTICA, 1960 (ed. by Maria Aliete Galhoz)
• PÁGINAS DE ESTÉTICA E DE TEORIA E CRÍTICA LITERÁRIA, 1966
• PÁGINAS ÍNTIMAS E DE AUTO-INTERPRETACÃO, 1966 (ed. by J. do Prado Coelho and G.R. Lind)
• TEXTOS FILOSÓFICOS, 1968 (2 vols., ed. by A. de Pina Coelho)
• Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, Álvaro de Campos, Fernando Pessoa, 1971 (4 vols., ed. and tr. by Jonathan Griffin)
• Selected Poems by Fernendo Pessoa, 1971 (transl. by Edwin Honig)
• Selected Poems, 1971 (transl. by Peter Rickard)
• Sixty Portuguese Poems, 1971 (translated by F.E.G.Q.)
• NOVAS POESIAS INÉDITAS, 1973
• CARTAS DE AMOR DE FERNANDO PESSOA, 1978
• SOBRE PORTUGAL, 1979
• OBRA POÉTICA, 1981 (includes the poem Tabacaria, written under the name Álvaro de Campos, 1928) - The Tobacconist's = Tabacaria (translated by Suzette Macedo)
• LIVRO DO DESSASSOGEGO POR BERNARDO SOARES, 1982 - The Book of Disquiet (tr. by Alfred Mac Adam) / The Book of Disquiet (transl. by Margaret Jull Costa) / The Book of Disquiet (edited and translated by Richard Zenith) - Levottomuuden kirja (suom. Sanna Pernu)
• POEMAS COMPLETOS DE ALBERTO CAEIRO, 1994
• Always Astonished: Selected Prose, 1988 (transl. by Edwin Honig)
• Fernando Pessoa & Co: Selected Poems, 1998 (ed. by Richard Zenith)
• Poems of Fernando Pessoa, 1998 (translated and edited by Edwin Honig and Susan M. Brown)
• The Education of the Stoic: The Only Manuscript of the Baron of Teive, 2002
• The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa, 2002 (ed. by Richard Zenith)
• A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems, 2006 (translated by Richard Zenith)