W. B. Yeats and Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) regarded style as a tool for metaphysical inquiry and, consequently, they adopted distinct poetic styles to convey different attitudes towards experience. Silva-McNeill's study examines how the poets' stylistic diversification was a means of rehearsing different existential and aesthetic stances. It identifies parallels between their styles from a comparative case studies approach. Their stylistic masks allowed them to maintain the subjectivity and authenticity associated with the lyrical genre, while simultaneously attaining greater objectivity and conveying multiple perspectives. The poets continuously transformed the fond and form of their verse, creating a protean lyrical voice that expressed their multilateral poetic temperament and reflected the depersonalisation and formal experimentalism of the modern lyric.

W. B. Yeats and Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) regarded style as a tool for metaphysical inquiry and, consequently, they adopted distinct poetic styles to convey different attitudes towards experience. Silva-McNeill's study examines how the poets' stylistic diversification was a means of rehearsing different existential and aesthetic stances. It identifies parallels between their styles from a comparative case studies approach. Their stylistic masks allowed them to maintain the subjectivity and authenticity associated with the lyrical genre, while simultaneously attaining greater objectivity and conveying multiple perspectives. The poets continuously transformed the fond and form of their verse, creating a protean lyrical voice that expressed their multilateral poetic temperament and reflected the depersonalisation and formal experimentalism of the modern lyric.

Fernando Pessoa is Portugal's most important contemporary poet. He wrote under several identities, which he called heteronyms: Albet Caeiro, Alvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis, and Bernardo Soares. He wrote fine poetry under his own name as well, and each of his "voices" is completely different in subject, temperament, and style. This volume brings back into print the comprehensive collection of his work published by Ecco Press in 1986.

The largest and richest English-language volume of poetry from “the greatest twentieth-century writer you have never heard of” (Los Angeles Times) Edited, Translated, and with an Introduction by Richard Zenith, the author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Pessoa: A Biography A Penguin Classic Writing obsessively in French, English, and Portuguese, poet Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) left a prodigious body of work, much of it credited to three “heteronyms”―Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Alvaro de Campos―alter egos with startlingly different styles, points of view, and biographies. Offering a unique sampling of his most famous voices, this collection features Pessoa’s major, best-known works and several stunning poems that have come to light only in this century, including his long, highly autobiographical swan song. Featuring a rich body of work that has never before been translated into English, this is the finest introduction available to the stunning breadth of Pessoa’s genius.

The intellectual and cultural impact of British and Irish writers cannot be assessed without reference to their reception in European countries. These essays, prepared by an international team of scholars, critics and translators, record the ways in which W. B. Yeats has been translated, evaluated and emulated in different national and linguistic areas of continental Europe. There is a remarkable split between the often politicized reception in Eastern European countries but also Spain on the one hand, and the more sober scholarly response in Western Europe on the other. Yeats's Irishness and the pre-eminence of his lyrical work have posed continuous challenges. Three further essays describe the widely divergent reactions to Yeats in his native Ireland, during his lifetime and up to the most recent years.

Like Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce, Richard Zenith’s Pessoa immortalizes the life of one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers. Nearly a century after his wrenching death, the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) remains one of our most enigmatic writers. Believing he could do “more in dreams than Napoleon,” yet haunted by the specter of hereditary madness, Pessoa invented dozens of alter egos, or “heteronyms,” under whose names he wrote in Portuguese, English, and French. Unsurprisingly, this “most multifarious of writers” (Guardian) has long eluded a definitive biographer—but in renowned translator and Pessoa scholar Richard Zenith, he has met his match. Relatively unknown in his lifetime, Pessoa was all but destined for literary oblivion when the arc of his afterlife bent, suddenly and improbably, toward greatness, with the discovery of some 25,000 unpublished papers left in a large, wooden trunk. Drawing on this vast archive of sources as well as on unpublished family letters, and skillfully setting the poet’s life against the nationalist currents of twentieth-century European history, Zenith at last reveals the true depths of Pessoa’s teeming imagination and literary genius. Much as Nobel laureate José Saramago brought a single heteronym to life in The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, Zenith traces the backstories of virtually all of Pessoa’s imagined personalities, demonstrating how they were projections, spin-offs, or metamorphoses of Pessoa himself. A solitary man who had only one, ultimately platonic love affair, Pessoa used his and his heteronyms’ writings to explore questions of sexuality, to obsessively search after spiritual truth, and to try to chart a way forward for a benighted and politically agitated Portugal. Although he preferred the world of his mind, Pessoa was nonetheless a man of the places he inhabited, including not only Lisbon but also turn-of-the-century Durban, South Africa, where he spent nine years as a child. Zenith re-creates the drama of Pessoa’s adolescence—when the first heteronyms emerged—and his bumbling attempts to survive as a translator and publisher. Zenith introduces us, too, to Pessoa’s bohemian circle of friends, and to Ophelia Quieroz, with whom he exchanged numerous love letters. Pessoa reveals in equal force the poet’s unwavering commitment to defending homosexual writers whose books had been banned, as well as his courageous opposition to Salazar, the Portuguese dictator, toward the end of his life. In stunning, magisterial prose, Zenith contextualizes Pessoa’s posthumous literary achievements—especially his most renowned work, The Book of Disquiet. A modern literary masterpiece, Pessoa simultaneously immortalizes the life of a literary maestro and confirms the enduring power of Pessoa’s work to speak prophetically to the disconnectedness of our modern world.

Eighteen short essays by the most distinguished international scholars examine Pessoa's influences, his dialogues with other writers and artistic movements, and the responses his work has generated worldwide. Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa claimed that he did not evolve, but rather travelled. This book provides a state of the art panorama of Pessoa's literary travels, particularly in the English-speaking world. Its eighteen short, jargon-free essays were written by the most distinguished Pessoa scholars across the globe. They explore the influence on Pessoa's thinking of such writers as Whitman and Shakespeare, as well as his creative dialogues with figuresranging from decadent poets to the dark magician Aleister Crowley, and, finally, some of the ways in which he in turn has influenced others. They examine many different aspects of Pessoa's work, ranging from the poetry of the heteronyms to the haunting prose of The Book of Disquiet, from esoteric writings to personal letters, from reading notes to unpublished texts. Fernando Pessoa's Modernity Without Frontiers is a valuable introduction to this multifaceted modern master, intended for both students of modern literature and general readers interested in one of its major figures.