Fernando Pessoa · Letter to Adolfo Casais Monteiro, 13 January 1935

a)

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In 1912, if I remember correctly (and I canʾt be far off), I got the idea to write some poetry from a pagan perspective. I sketched out a few poems with irregular verse patterns (not in the style of Álvaro de Campos but in a semiregular style) and then forgot about them. But a hazy, shadowy portrait of the person who wrote those verses took shape in me. (Unbeknownst to me, Ricardo Reis had been born.)

A year and a half or two years later, it one day occurred to me to play a joke on Sá-Carneiro – to invent a rather complicated bucolic poet whom I would present in some guise of reality that Iʾve since forgotten. I spent a few days trying in vain to envision this poet. One day when Iʾd finally given up-it was March 8th, 1914 – I walked over to a high chest of drawers, took a sheet of paper, and began to write standing up, as I do whenever I can. And I wrote thirty-some poems at once, in a kind of ecstasy Iʾm unable to describe. It was the triumphal day of my life, and I can never have another one like it. I began with a title, The Keeper of Sheep. This was followed by the appearance  in me of someone whom I instantly named Alberto Caeiro. Excuse the absurdity of this statement: my master had appeared in me. That was what I immediately felt, and so strong was the feeling that, as soon as those thirty-odd poems were written, I grabbed a fresh sheet of paper and wrote, again all at once, the six poems that constitute “Slanting Rain,” by Fernando Pessoa. All at once and with total concentration … It was the return of Fernando Pessoa as Alberto Caeiro to Fernando Pessoa against his nonexistence as Alberto Caeiro.

Once Alberto Caeiro had appeared, I instinctively and subconsciously tried to find disciples for him. From Caeiroʾs false paganism I extracted the latent Ricardo Reis, at last discovering his name and adjusting him to his true self, for now I actually saw him. And then a new individual, quite the opposite of Ricardo Reis, suddenly and impetuously came to me. In an unbroken stream, without interruptions or corrections, the ode whose name is “Triumphal Ode,” by the man whose name is none other than Álvaro de Campos, issued from my typewriter.  

And so I created a nonexistent coterie, placing it all in a framework of reality. I ascertained the influences at work and the friendships between them, I listened in myself to their discussions and divergent points of view, and in all of this it seems that I, who created them all, was the one who was least there. It seems that it all went on without me. And thus it seems to go on still.  

[…]

PESSOA, Fernando, The Selected Prose, Edited and translated by Richard Zenith. New York: Grove Press, 2001, pp.256-257