"Fernando Pessoa is the extreme example of what may be the essentially modern kind of poet: the objective introvert. None has more consistently tried to find his real self with its multiplicity intact and to keep his poems impersonal. He accepted the dividedness of a human self so completely that he did something unique: wrote poetry under four names – his own and three 'heteronyms'. Not pseudonyms: they are imaginary poets with real poems in them. Fernando Pessoa was four poets in one: Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, Alvaro de Campos and himself; each strongly distinct from the others. One is soon struck by an external difference between their poems..."
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Original Language: English
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Sources
Jonathan Griffin, Introduction to Fernando Pessoa, Selected Poems (Penguin Books, 1982), quoted in Fernando Pessoa: a Galaxy of Poets (1985) by José Blanco, p. 41
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Fernando_Pessoa
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