Poems by Alberto Caeiro

Poems by Alberto Caeiro

Fernando Pessoa

Human Sciences

Alberto Caeiro was, as Fernando Pessoa often admitted, one of his most cherished and admired heteronyms. Caeiro was created when Pessoa decided to play a prank on his friend, writer Mário de Sá-Carneiro, by sending him a poem and claiming it was from a supposed acquaintance. When he finally revealed the ruse, he wrote to Sá-Carneiro:

“I wanted to invent a bucolic poet of a complicated kind and present him to you, I no longer remember how, in some form of reality. I spent a few days developing the poet but achieved nothing. On a day when I finally gave up—March 8, 1914—I approached a tall dresser and, taking a piece of paper, began to write while standing, as I always do when I can. I wrote over thirty poems in a row in a kind of ecstasy whose nature I cannot define. It was the most triumphant day of my life, and I will never have another like it. I opened with a title, "The Keeper of Sheep". What followed was the emergence of someone within me, to whom I immediately gave the name Alberto Caeiro. Forgive me the absurdity of the phrase: ‘my master had appeared in me,’ but that was the immediate sensation I had.”

In more detail, Pessoa imagined Caeiro as having been born in Lisbon in 1889 and having died in 1915, though he lived most of his life in the countryside with an elderly great-aunt after becoming orphaned at an early age. He was described as fair-haired with blue eyes. His education was limited to primary schooling, and he had no profession.

Pessoa also stated that when he wrote in Caeiro's name, he did so “out of pure and unexpected inspiration, without knowing or even calculating that he was going to write.”

As a poet, Alberto Caeiro presents himself as a simple “keeper of sheep” who writes about nature and only cares to see reality objectively and naturally. He simultaneously despises and reprimands any form of philosophical thought, asserting that thinking obstructs vision (“to think is to be ill of the eyes”).

Thus, he is a poet of extreme simplicity who believes that sensation is the only reality, and that reflecting on how things are leads to a complex, unnecessary, and problematic world where everything is uncertain and obscure.

Fernando Pessoa referred to him as “Naive Master” and considered him the greatest of his heteronyms.

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