Fernando pessoa: The literary construction of a Portuguese modernity

Because at times Fernando Pessoa’ poetry sings the emergency of a new era and at others expresses the frustration that emerges from the impossibility of capturing the past into the present an incautious reader may consider it as one marked by an inner divide. This dual direction, contradictory only in appearance, holds the very notion of Modernity that can be found in the work of this poet, which is also precisely the specific element of a Modernity thought in Portuguese terms. Thus, the formulated poetry presented by Pessoa is able to unite the presence of a past that cannot be uprooted from the Portuguese cultural life and a literary renovation project that considers it the vanguard literature at the moment. Correlate to this literary formulation,  the work of this poet reveals a notion of Modernity that turns both to the past as a symbolic dimension to be reaffirmed in a Modernity project, and to the future as a moment when a renovated Portugal can be crystallized. However, this Modernity project is not divided by an inner tension between its different temporal fragments. At stake is the improvement of a specific notion of Modernity that needs the fabric of a lost time to affirm the urgency of the new in such a way that is only by rearticulating the past that the future can be reached.  Therefore, this communication aims to present the intricate aspects of this specific formulation of Modernity.