SOURCE: "Masked Rhetoric: Contextuality in Fernando Pessoa's Poems," in Romance Notes, Vol. XXIX, No. 1, Fall, 1988, pp. 55-60.

In the following excerpt, Cruz explores the rhetorical implications of Pessoa's use of heteronyms.

Fernando Pessoa has made an art form of psychic fragmentation. In his poems, mask (un)covers mask in order to expound, explicate, and contradict the multifacetic poet. The creation of heterónimos, as he calls his poetic avatars, presupposes an interest in the ludic: unlike Antonio Machado's pseudonyms, which clearly reveal the poet's persona to the reader, Pessoa's masks contribute to his duplicity as poet. As Octavio Paz has perceptively pointed out in his introduction to Pessoa's poems, "Reis and Campos told what he [Pessoa] would never tell. In contradicting him, they expressed him, in expressing him, they made him invent himself." Pessoa's creations are motivated dramatically; by acting out his many roles, he creates himself. What...