Fernando Pessoa is the most universal among the Portuguese poets and is considered by most critics one of the greatest poets of all time, and perhaps the greatest poet of the 20th century. It’s curious that, having been raised in South Africa, three of the four works he has published in his lifetime were in English. As a poet, he wrote through multiple personalities – heteronyms as Ricardo Reis, Álvaro de Campos and Alberto Caeiro. Robert Hass, American poet, says, “other modernists like Yeats, Pound and Elliot invented masks through which they spoke occasionally… Pessoa invented whole poets.” By his heteronym Ricardo Reis, here are these astonishing verses:
“Put all you are into the smallest thing you do. In each lake the moon shines, for it blooms up above.”
