Inferior people cannot have a master, since they have nothing for a master to be a master of. That is why strong personalities can be hypnotized very easily, normal people less easily, and idiots, imbeciles, feeble or incoherent people not at all. To be strong is to be capable of feeling.
There were, as the reader will have gleaned from these pages, three main people around my master Caeiro: Ricardo Reis, Antonio Mora, and myself. Without inflating myself or anyone else, I can say that all three of us were and are radically different—at least intellectually speaking—from the common, animal lot of humanity. And all three of us owe whatever is best in our souls to the contact we had with my master Caeiro. All of us became others—became our true selves, that is—after passing through the sieve of that fleshly intervention of the Gods.
Ricardo Reis was a latent pagan, unable to grasp modern life and unable to grasp that ancient life into which he should have been born—unable to grasp modern life because his intelligence was of a different species, and unable to grasp ancient life because he couldn’t feel it, for you cannot feel what isn’t there to feel. Caeiro, the reconstructor of Paganism, and from the eternal point of view its founder, brought Ricardo Reis the tangible substance that he was lacking. And so he found himself as a pagan—the pagan he already was before finding himself. Before meeting Caeiro, Ricardo Reis hadn’t written a single verse, and he was already twenty-five years old. After meeting Caeiro and hearing him recite The Keeper of Sheep, Ricardo Reis began to realize that he was organically a poet. Some physiologists say that it’s possible to change sex. I don’t know if it’s true, because I don’t know if anything is “true,” but I know that Ricardo Reis stopped being a woman and became a man, or stopped being a man and became a woman—as you like—when he met Caeiro.
António Mora was a shadow with philosophical pretensions. He spent his time mulling over Kant and trying to figure out if life had any meaning. Indecisive, like all strong minds, he hadn’t discovered the truth, or what he felt was the truth, which as far as I’m concerned is the same thing. He discovered it when he discovered Caeiro. My master Caeiro gave him the soul he’d never had; inside the outer Mora, which is all there had ever been, he placed a central Mora. This led to the triumphal reduction of Caeiro’s instinctive thoughts into a philosophical system of logical truth, as set forth in Mora’s two treatises, marvels of originality and speculative thought: The Return of the Gods and the Prolegomena to a Reformation of Paganism.
As for myself, before meeting Caeiro I was a nervous machine that busily did nothing. I met my master Caeiro after Reis and Mora, who met him in 1912 and 1913, respectively. I met him in 1914. I had already written verses—three sonnets and two poems (“Carnival” and “Opiary”).* These sonnets and poems reveal my emotional state when I was helplessly adrift. As soon as I met Caeiro, I found my true self. I went to London and immediately wrote the “Triumphal Ode.”* And from then on, for better or worse, I have been I.
The strangest case is that of Fernando Pessoa, who doesn’t exist, strictly speaking. He met Caeiro a little before I did—on March 8th, 1914, according to what he told me. Caeiro had come to spend a week in Lisbon, and it was then that Pessoa met him. After hearing him recite The Keeper of Sheep, he went home in a fever (the one he was born with) and wrote the six poems of “Slanting Rain”* in one go.
“Slanting Rain” doesn’t resemble any of my master Caeiro’s poems, except perhaps in the rectilinear movement of its rhythm. But Fernando Pessoa would never have been able to extract those extraordinary poems from his inner world without having met Caeiro. They were a direct result of the spiritual shock he experienced mere moments after that meeting occurred. It was instantaneous. Because of his overwrought sensibility, accompanied by an overwrought intelligence, Fernando reacted immediately to the Great Vaccine—the vaccine against the stupidity of the intelligent. And there is nothing more admirable in the work of Fernando Pessoa than this group of six poems, this “Slanting Rain.” Perhaps there are, or will be, greater things produced by his pen, but never anything fresher, never anything more original, and so I rather doubt there will ever be anything greater. Not only that, he will never produce anything that’s more genuinely Fernando Pessoa, more intimately Fernando Pessoa. What could better express his relentlessly in-tellectualized sensibility, his inattentively keen attention, and the ardent subtlety of his cold self-analysis than these poetic intersections in which the narrator’s state of mind is simultaneously two states, in which the subjective and objective join together while remaining separate, and in which the real and the unreal merge in order to remain distinct? In these poems Fernando Pessoa made a veritable photograph of his soul. In that one, unique moment he succeeded in having his own individuality, such as he had never had before and can never have again, because he has no individuality.
Long live my master Caeiro!
from Translator’s Preface to the Poems of Alberto Caeiro
Thomas Crosse
In placing before the English-reading public my translation of these poems, I do so with the full confidence that I am making a revelation. I claim, in all confidence, that I am putting before Englishmen the most original poetry that our young century has as yet produced—a poetry so fresh, so new, untainted to such a degree by any kind of conventional attitude, that the words a Portuguese friend said to me, when speaking of these very poems, are more than justified. “Every time I read them,” he said, “I cannot bring myself to believe that they have been written. It is so impossible an achievement!” And so much more impossible, that it is of the simplest, most natural and most spontaneous kind.
...
Caeiro, like Whitman, leaves us perplexed. We are thrown off our critical attitude by so extraordinary a phenomenon. We have never seen anything like it. Even after Whitman, Caeiro is strange and terribly, appallingly new. Even in our age, when we believe nothing can astonish us or shout novelty at us, Caeiro does astonish and does breathe absolute novelty. To be able to do this in an age like ours is the definite and final proof of his genius.
He is so novel that it is sometimes hard to conceive clearly of all his novelty. He is too new, and his excessive novelty troubles our vision of him, as all excessive things trouble vision, though it is quite a novelty for novelty itself to be the thing that is* excessive and vision-troubling. But that is the remarkable thing. Even novelty and the way of being new are novelties in Caeiro. He is different from all poets in another way than all great poets are different from other great poets. He has his individuality in another way of having it than all poets preceding him. Whitman is quite inferior in this respect. To explain Whitman, even on a basis of admitting him all conceivable originality, we need but think of him as an intense liver of life, and his poems come out of that like flowers from a shrub. But the same method does not hold for Caeiro. Even if we think of him as a man who lives outside civilization (an impossible hypothesis, of course), as a man with an exceptionally clear vision of things, that does not logically produce in our minds a result resembling The Keeper of Sheep. The very tenderness for things as mere things which characterizes the type of man we have posited does not characterize Caeiro. He sometimes speaks tenderly of things, but he asks our pardon for doing so, explaining that he only speaks so in consideration of our “stupidity of senses,” to make us feel “the absolutely real existence” of things. Left to himself, he has no tenderness for things, he has hardly any tenderness even for his sensations. Here we touch his great originality, his almost inconceivable objectivity. He sees things with the eyes only, not with the mind. He does not let any thoughts arise when he looks at a flower. Far from seeing sermons in stones, he never even lets himself conceive of a stone as beginning a sermon. The only sermon a stone contains for him is that it exists. The only thing a stone tells him is that it has nothing at all to tell him. A state of mind may be conceived resembling this. But it cannot be conceived in a poet. This way of looking at a stone may be described as the totally unpoetic way of looki
ng at it. The stupendous fact about Caeiro is that out of this sentiment, or rather, absence of sentiment, he makes poetry. He feels positively what hitherto could not be conceived of except as a negative sentiment. Put it to yourselves: What do you think of a stone when you look at it without thinking about it? Or in other words:* What do you think of a stone when you don’t think about it at all? The question is quite absurd, of course. The strange point about it is that all Caeiro’s poetry is based upon that sentiment that you find impossible to represent to yourself as able to exist. Perhaps I have not been unsuccessful in pointing out the extraordinary nature of Caeiro’s inspiration, the phenomenal novelty of his poetry, the astonishing unprecedentedness of his genius, of his whole attitude.
Alberto Caeiro is reported to have regretted the name of “Sensa-tionism” which a disciple of his (a rather queer disciple, it is true), Mr. Álvaro de Campos, gave to his attitude, and to the attitude he created. If Caeiro protested against the word as possibly seeming to indicate a “school,” like Futurism, for instance, he was right, and for two reasons. For the very suggestion of schools and literary movements sounds bad when applied to so uncivilized and natural a kind of poetry. And besides, though he has at least two “disciples,” the fact is that he has had on them an influence equal to that which some poet—Cesário Verde,* perhaps—had on him; neither resembles him at all, though indeed, far more clearly than Cesario Verde’s influence on him, his influence may be seen all over their work.
But the fact is—these considerations once put aside—that no name could describe his attitude better. His poetry is “Sensationist.” Its basis is the substitution of sensation for thought, not only as a basis of inspiration—which is comprehensible—but as a means of expression, if we may so speak. And, be it added, those two disciples of his, different as they are from him and from each other—are also indeed Sensationists. For Dr. Ricardo Reis, with his neoclassicism, his actual and real belief in the existence of the pagan deities, is a pure Sensationist, though a different kind of Sensationist. His attitude toward nature is as aggressive to thought as Caeiro’s; he reads no meanings into things. He sees them only, and if he seems to see them differently from Caeiro it is because, though seeing them as unintellectually and unpoetically as Caeiro, he sees them through a definite religious concept of the universe—paganism, pure paganism, and this necessarily alters his very direct way of feeling. But he is a pagan, because paganism is the Sensationist religion. Of course, a pure and integral Sensationist like Caeiro has, logically enough, no religion at all, religion not being among the immediate data of pure and direct sensation. But Ricardo Reis has put the logic of his attitude as purely Sensationist very clearly. According to him, we not only should bow down to the pure objectivity of things (hence his Sensationism proper, and his neoclassicism, for the classic poets were those who commented least, at least directly, upon things) but bow down to the equal objectivity, reality, naturalness of the necessities of our nature, of which the religious sentiment is one. Caeiro is the pure and absolute Sensationist who bows down to sensations qua exterior and admits no more. Ricardo Reis is less absolute; he bows down also to the primitive elements of our own nature, our primitive feelings being as real and natural to him as flowers and trees. He is therefore religious. And, seeing that he is a Sensationist, he is a pagan in his religion, which is due not only to the nature of sensation once conceived of as admitting a religion of some kind, but also to the influence of those classical readings to which his Sensationism had inclined him.
Álvaro de Campos—curiously enough—is on the opposite point, entirely opposed to Ricardo Reis. Yet he is not less than the latter a disciple of Caeiro and a Sensationist proper. He has accepted from Caeiro, not the essential and objective, but the deducible and subjective part of his attitude. Sensation is all, Caeiro holds, and thought is a disease. By sensation Caeiro means the sensation of things as they are, without adding to it any elements from personal thought, convention, sentiment or any other soul-place. For Campos, sensation is indeed all, though* not necessarily sensation of things as they are, but of things as they are felt. So that he takes sensation subjectively and applies all his efforts, once so thinking, not to develop in himself the sensation of things as they are, but all sorts of sensations of things, even of the same thing. To feel is all; it is logical to conclude that the best is to feel all sorts of things in all sorts of ways, or, as Álvaro de Campos says himself, “to feel everything in every way.” So he applies himself to feeling the town as much as he feels the country, the normal as he feels the abnormal, the bad as he feels the good, the morbid as the healthy. He never questions, he feels. He is the undisciplined child of sensation. Caeiro has one discipline: things must be felt as they are. Ricardo Reis has another kind of discipline: things must be felt, not only as they are, but also so as to fall in with a certain ideal of classic measure and rule. In Álvaro de Campos things must simply be felt.
But the common origin of these three widely different aspects of the same theory is patent and manifest.
Caeiro has no ethics except simplicity. Ricardo Reis has a pagan ethics, half Epicurean and half Stoic, but a very definite ethics, which gives his poetry an elevation that Caeiro himself, though the greater genius (mastership apart),* cannot attain. Álvaro de Campos has no shadow of an ethics; he is nonmoral, if not positively immoral, for of course, according to his theory, it is natural that he should love the stronger better than the weak sensations, and the strong sensations are at least all selfish, and [are] occasionally the sensations of cruelty and lust. Thus Álvaro de Campos resembles Whitman most of the three. But he has nothing of Whitman’s camaraderie; he is always apart from the crowd, and when feeling with them it is very clearly and very confessedly to please himself and give himself brutal sensations. The idea that a child of eight is demoralized (Ode II, ad finem)* is positively pleasant to him, for it* satisfies two very strong sensations—cruelty and lust. The most Caeiro says that may be called immoral is that he cares nothing for what men suffer, and that the existence of sick people is interesting because it is a fact. Ricardo Reis has nothing of this. He lives in himself, with his pagan faith and his sad Epicureanism, but one of his attitudes is precisely not to hurt anyone. He cares absolutely nothing for others, not even enough to be interested in their suffering or in their existence. He is moral because he is self-sufficient.
It may be said, comparing these three poets with the three orders of religious spirits, and comparing Sensationism for the moment (perhaps improperly) with a religion, that Ricardo Reis is the normal religious spirit of that faith; Caeiro the pure mystic; Alvaro de Campos the ritualist in excess. For Caeiro loses sight of Nature in nature, loses sight of sensation in sensation, loses sight of things in things. And Campos loses sight of sensation in sensations.
[On Álvaro de Campos]
I. I. Crosse
Álvaro de Campos is one of the very greatest rhythmists that there has ever been. Every metric paragraph of his is a finished work of art. He makes definite, perfectly “curved” stanzas of these irregular “meters.”
He is the most violent of all writers. His master Whitman is mild and calm compared to him. Yet the more turbulent of the two poets is the most self-controlled. He is so violent that enough of the energy of his violence remains for him to use it in disciplining his violence.
The violence of the “Naval Ode”* is perfectly insane. Yet it is unparalleled in art, and because its violence is such.
His volcanic emotion, his violence of sensation, his formidable shifting from violence to tenderness, from a passion for great and loud things to a love of humble and quiet ones, his unparalleled transitions, his sudden silences, sudden pauses, his change from unstable to equable states of mind—none has ever approached him in the [expression] of this hysteria of our age.
The classic training of his early years that never deserts him (for he is one of the most unified of poets, and ever a builder and a fitter-together of parts into an organic whol
e); his individual stability, his mathematical training and scientific training adding another stabilizing influence (never too much for such a volcanic temperament).
His large-minded contempt of small things, of small people, of all our age, because it is composed of small things and of small people.
This quasi-Futurist who loves the great classic poets because they were great and despises the literary men of his time because they are all small.
His art of conveying sensations by a single stroke:
The pink ribbon left on top of the dresser ...
The broken toy (but still with the dirty string used to pull it)
Of the child who had to die, O mother dressed in black, folding up
his suit ... *
His terrible self-analysis, making suddenly cold all his emotion, as in the “Salutation to Walt Whitman.”*
[On the Work of Ricardo Reis]
Frederico Reis
The philosophy of the work of Ricardo Reis basically amounts to a sad Epicureanism, which we will try to characterize.
Each of us (contends the Poet) should live his own life, isolating himself from others and seeking, in an attitude of sober individualism, only what pleases and delights him. He should not seek violent pleasures nor flee from moderately painful sensations.
Avoiding unnecessary suffering or grief, man should seek peace and tranquillity above all else, abstaining from effort and useful activity.
The poet adheres to this as a temporary doctrine, as the right attitude for pagans as long as the barbarians (the Christians) reign supreme. If and when the barbarian empire crumbles, then this attitude may change, but for now it’s the only one possible.
The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa Page 8
