Esta é a única antologia a recolher o grosso da poesia de amor do maior poeta português da modernidade e um dos maiores do mundo no século XX. A edição foi preparada por Vasco Silva, considerado por muitos o maior editor de Pessoa das últimas décadas e um dos mais profundos conhecedores do autor e da obra. A antologia recolhe poemas de Pessoa ortónimo e dos principais heterónimos: Álvaro de Campos, Alberto Caeiro e Ricardo Reis. Já foram publicadas antologias que incluíam poemas de amor, cartas e outros textos em prosa do autor mas esta é a primeira antologia exclusiva da poesia do autor.
Author
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.
