These heteronyms-as Pessoa called them-were masks of Pessoa himself, although it would probably be more accurate to say that they were no one’s masks, as Pessoa often described himself as “no one.” In this respect he personifies poetic existence par excellence because he has transformed an esthetic idea-that of the author as a mask-into a way of being. Show More creation with that of several dozen personas, each with a different name and biography.

But it is a frigid beauty all the same dip into this book, and keep a warmer and more human one beside it to bring you back to earth. He failed beauty, even elegiac beauty, is too beguiling. In a letter quoted in the book, Pessoa wrote that if he was successful, one passage in particular would be felt as 'a dreamed confession of the painful, sterile rage and utter uselessness of dreaming'. A book for the meditative, the introspective, the not-quite-successfully escapist, the restless, the regretful, the incurably poetic, and the estranged and lost. A book bound to be best comprehended by persons melancholic as well as dreamy, for whom it will be no tonic, but perhaps also no poison.

A book which demands a ready sensitivity to form and a tolerance for hearing the same notes struck again and again in various combinations a friend of mine grew tired of all this talk of dreaming in which few passages actually describe these fantastic dreams. A book which requires a stomach for the richest expressiveness (and mercifully lends itself to being read in short sessions), though it almost completely avoids overwritten expressions.

The book of disquiet penguin classics