Fernando Pessoa and the Lyric

Irene Ramalho-Santos is Professor Emerita of English and Feminist Studies of the Faculty of Letters and Senior Researcher of the Center for Social Studies, University of Coimbra.

In this collection of ten essays, two of them original to this volume, Ramalho-Santos returns to the work she did in Atlantic Poets (2003) by connecting Pessoa to American poets—Whitman, Stevens, Crane, and Dickinson. Each essay takes on one of the themes in the subtitle, with attention to Pessoa's Book of Disquietude and the heteronyms. To read these essays is to participate in an illuminating conversation and adventure, a broad consideration of Pessoa and his work across literatures and theories by an experienced scholar. Concepts of rumination and interruption are brought to Pessoa’s fragmented corpus. This book is for Pessoa scholars and advanced students of literature. Highly recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction. The Truth of Fiction Chapter One. The “Great Book,” Caeiro, and Pessoa’s Theory of Poetry Chapter Two. The Tail of the Lizard: Pessoan Disquietude and the Subject of Modernity Chapter Three. The Art of Rumination: Pessoa’s Heteronyms RevisitedChapter Four. Poetic Interruption: A Pessoan Concept for Reading the Lyric Chapter Five. ‘The God That Was Missing’: Poetry, Divinity, Everydayness Chapter Six. Modernist Muses That Matter. Inspiration in Pessoa and StevensChapter Seven. The Truant Muse and the Poet’s Body Chapter Eight. Orpheu et al. Modernism, Women and the War Chapter Nine. The Accidental Bridge: Hart Crane’s Theory of PoetryChapter Ten. Being Blind . Being Nobody . Being a Poet: Emily Dickinson “Reads” Fernando Pessoa BibliographySource of TextsIndexAbout the Author