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The amazing Portuguese poet...surpasses any creation by Borges...Pessoa was neither mad nor a mere ironist;he is Whitman reborn, but a Whitman who gives separate names to "my self," "the real me" or "me myself," and "my soul," and writes wonderful books of poetry for all of them.
~ Harold Bloom, The Western Canon (1994)
“He [Fernando Pessoa] 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...”
~ Jonathan Griffin
~ Jonathan Griffin
“Almost any commentary of any length on Pessoa's writings, sensibility, and imagination is bound to convey a glimpse, at least, of its intensity and elusiveness, its apparently endlessly unfolding hall of mirrors.”
~ W. S. Merwin
~ W. S. Merwin
Nada en su vida es sorprendente — nada, excepto sus poemas.
Nothing in his life is surprising – nothing, except his poems.
~ Octavio Paz, "Unknown to Himself"
Nothing in his life is surprising – nothing, except his poems.
~ Octavio Paz, "Unknown to Himself"
The man who never was.
~ Jorge de Sena
~ Jorge de Sena
“Pessoa would be Shakespeare if all that we had of Shakespeare were the soliloquies of Hamlet, Falstaff, Othello and Lear and the sonnets. His legacy is a set of explorations, in poetic form, of what it means to inhabit a human consciousness...
What makes Pessoa's thought and poetry compelling is not that he picks up and develops the forms and themes of Whitman and Emerson...but because in the poems and prose he has passed a judgment upon the 20th century rejection of individualism.”
~ Lindsay Waters
~ Lindsay Waters
The most profound poet of the twentieth century.
~ Gao Xingjian
~ Gao Xingjian
[Pessoa was]…one of the most appealing European modernists, equal in command and range to his contemporaries Rilke and Mandelstam.
~ The Washington Post Book World
~ The Washington Post Book World
Eloquent, volatile and obsessed with life – and death – [his] poems place [him] among the modernist giants in whose shadow we live and who made our century one of extraordinary poetic richness.
~ New York Times, as quoted in Always Astonished: Selected Prose (1988)
![Eloquent, volatile and obsessed with life – and death – [his] poems place [him] among the modernist giants in whose shadow we live and who made our century one of extraordinary poetic richness. ~ New York Times, as quoted in Always Astonished: Selected Prose (1988)](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EfSk5kBWkAAk83W.jpg "Eloquent, volatile and obsessed with life – and death – [his] poems place [him] among the modernist giants in whose shadow we live and who made our century one of extraordinary poetic richness. ~ New York Times, as quoted in Always Astonished: Selected Prose (1988)")
~ New York Times, as quoted in Always Astonished: Selected Prose (1988)
