As editor Ivo Castro stated: “There is no evidence to indicate that the title of the cycle of poems, or Caeiro’s name, or, indeed, the idea behind the cycle, still less its architecture, had been thought of before the poems were written It could be said that Caeiro came into being along with The Keeper of Sheep but those poems weren’t written in a single day, nor did the cycle as a whole initially have a shape, title or even an apparent author. However, in order to write that biography, we must consider not just those two dates, but what came after, because some Caeiro poems were written after 1915, and, like all Masters, Caeiro continues to exist, to be perpetuated, in the words of his disciples. There are only two dates-that of my birth and that of my death.īetween one and the other all the days were mine. If, after I die, someone should choose to write my biography, Perhaps Caeiro was right when he wrote, in a poem dated November 8th, 1915: The Keeper of Sheep was completed in the first week of March 1914, and although it was never published in Orpheu, the literary magazine of which Pessoa was co-founder, this second “posthumous” Caeiro was not only discussed by Pessoa’s fictitious authors, António Mora, Ricardo Reis, and Álvaro de Campos, he was also published in the art and literary magazines Athena (in 1925) and Presença (in 1931). At that point, the creation of a “second” Caeiro was already underway, as the young Master whose memory would be kept alive by a group of disciples. As Pessoa wrote in 1924, “Those whom the gods love die young.” By that time, he had written the poems which Caeiro would be remembered for- The Keeper of Sheep. Caeiro’s “death” seems to have been influenced, in retrospect, by Sá-Carneiro’s suicide in Paris on April 26th,1916. The poet and novelist Mário de Sá-Carneiro was one of Pessoa’s closest friends, and Caeiro (perhaps a pun on Caeiro’s name) seems to have come into being as a joke: “I thought I would play a trick on Sá-Carneiro and invent a bucolic poet of a rather complicated kind,” wrote Pessoa in the same letter. Pessoa himself gave March 8th, 1914, as the date of Caeiro’s poetic arrival in life, describing it as a “triumphal day,” in a letter to Portuguese literary critic Adolfo Casais Monteiro. Born in Lisbon on April 16th 1889, Caeiro died of tuberculosis in 1915. Fernando Pessoa’s heteronym Alberto Caeiro lies at the very core of Pessoa’s fiction.
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