by Eliot Weinberger

He died, presumably, at a feast at Peisianax’s farm, for the next morning he could not be found, and the servants reported hearing a loud voice in the night crying “Empedocles” and a strange burst of light in the sky. He died, presumably, in the Peloponnese, where he had gone and never returned. He died when he fell from a wagon at age 71. He died at 60 or 109. He hung himself; he fell into the sea. He died, as dramatized by Hölderlin and Arnold, when he leapt into the crater of Mt. Etna, knowing that, as a prophet, bard, and physician, in his next life his elements would combine in such a way as to make him a god again, and the crater hurled back one of his bronze sandals.

by Peter H. Hare

But I wonder how many readers know the story of how a few years before his death, when Stevens at last was being showered with honors, Paul Weiss, editor of The Review of Metaphysics, rejected a lecture submitted by Stevens on the philosophy of poetry, a paper that Weiss had helped Stevens write and one that Weiss had earlier praised. Stevens refused to consider submitting the paper to a non-philosophical magazine. Sadly, the lecture, “A Collect of Philosophy,” was Stevens’s last attempt to contribute to the philosophy of poetry.

by Simon Critchley

Unbelievably, the word ‘pessoa’ means ‘person’ in Portuguese, and the original meaning of person, of course, is a mask or actor as in the notion of dramatis personae. Those familiar with Fernando Pessoa’s work will know that he wrote using a series of invented personae or heteronyms’ that were not pseudonyms, but fictional voices complete with distinct biographies and dramatically different literary styles. There are least twenty heteronyms, although we do not know for sure. After Pessoa’s death in 1935, 27,500 fragments of writing were found in chests in his workroom in Lisbon, in much confusion and containing a profusion of fictional, aesthetic, philosophical, political, sociological and autobiographical writings, in addition to a large quantity of verse. As only 5,000 of these manuscripts have been published, less than a fifth, there may well be some surprises in store in the future.

Pessoa’s maxim is “Sêr plural como o universo!”, “Be plural as the universe!”, and his work is a galaxy, a vast and decentred plurality of stars. In my view, what is important to grasp with the idea of heteronymic authorship is that this galaxy does not orbit around one creative God-like authorial sun, but is a vast, shifting and interconnected energy field with numerous and conflicting centres that form into distinct personages.2 As Bernardo Soares, whom Pessoa refers to as a ‘semi-heteronym’, writes in The Book of Disquiet, “This book is the autobiography of a man who never existed.” What exists is a multitude irreducible to the authority of any imperial authorship.