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Journal of Undergraduate Research

Keywords

poems, Fernando Pessoa, authorship, heteronymic voices

College

Humanities

Department

Comparative Arts and Letters

Abstract

The poetry of Fernando Pessoa contributes in a highly original way to a significant twentieth-century aesthetic development: the attempt to overthrow Romantic conceptions of authorship. Through the creation of his “heteronyms”—invented poets with a large degree of independence in style, form, imagery, and thought to whom he attributes his poetry—Pessoa’s poetry fragments into many distinct voices and thus challenges the notion of coherent authorial identity. Fernando Pessoa’s heteronymic structure itself is thus a quintessentially modern voice. The heteronyms challenge, as critic Darlene J. Sadlier writes, “the notion of coherent identity” (118).1 With the fragmentation of the poetic voice, the romantic notion of “author”—a coherent, unified, a priori “master planner” behind a body of writings—begins to lose its explanatory power. The creation of the heteronyms thus helps overcome, along with the works of such figures as Mallarmé and Joyce, what theorist Roland Barthes has called “the sway of the Author” (143).2 The “Author” that Pessoa helps to overcome is in effect the Cartesian Subject: the heteronymic structure powerfully embodies the fragmentation not only of the Author but of the Self.

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