Fernando Ant贸nio 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 鈥榩erson鈥� 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 脕lvaro de Campos were 鈥� their creator claimed 鈥� full-fledged individuals who wrote things that he himself would never or could never write. He dubbed them 鈥榟eteronyms鈥� rather than pseudonyms, since they were not false names but 鈥渙ther names鈥�, 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. 脕lvaro 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.