By no means a naive master

realism and satire in Alberto Caeiro

Abstract

This paper presents the work of Alberto Caeiro, Fernando Pessoa's Naive Master, through a dialogue between his poems and the philosophical ideas of authors such as Feuerbach, Hegel e Marx. Thus, we present an analysis of poem VIII of The Keeper of Sheep, a text in which the use of the satirical method of artistic composition is evident. We analyse the question of satire, based on the theory of György Lukács, and its occurrence in the work of Alberto Caeiro — a poet who immediately embodies the contradiction between “the poet as he should be”, the ideal poet, and “the poet as he is”, the dissimulated poet — in addition to the farcical architecture of Pessoa's heteronymy. Fernando Pessoa's heteronyms are presented as actors in a satirical dramatization in which decadent bourgeois thinking and the dilettante tendency of the modern intellectual are mimetized. We argue that the satirical representation created in Pessoa's literary project is the realist achievement of his poetic work.