Reúnem-se neste terceiro volume os poemas em português, datados entre 1931 e 1935, bem como poemas não datados, não atribuídos por Fernando Pessoa a nenhum dos seus heterónimos ou personalidades literárias. À semelhança do que acontece com os dois anteriores, este volume de poesia ortónima pessoana inclui poemas publicados em vida pelo autor e poemas que foram sendo dados a conhecer postumamente pelos mais diversos editores, para além de 123 poemas inéditos.
Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa was a poet and writer.
It is sometimes said that the four greatest Portuguese poets of modern times are Fernando Pessoa. The statement is possible since Pessoa, whose name means ‘person’ in Portuguese, had three alter egos who wrote in styles completely different from his own. In fact Pessoa wrote under dozens of names, but Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos were – their creator claimed – full-fledged individuals who wrote things that he himself would never or could never write. He dubbed them ‘heteronyms’ rather than pseudonyms, since they were not false names but “other names”, belonging to distinct literary personalities. Not only were their styles different; they thought differently, they had different religious and political views, different aesthetic sensibilities, different social temperaments. And each produced a large body of poetry. Álvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis also signed dozens of pages of prose.
The critic Harold Bloom referred to him in the book The Western Canon as the most representative poet of the twentieth century, along with Pablo Neruda.