[BNP/E3, 143 – 1-4]

Th. Crosse

But Caeiro displaces all our mental habits and puts all our notions out of drowsing.

He does it, first of all, by the philosophy which can hardly be said to be simply “at the bottom” of his poetry, because it is both at the bottom and at the top of it. Whatever a mystic may be, he is certainly a kind of mystic. But he is, not only a materialistic mystic, which is already strange enough, but still can be imagined, for there is some sort of a modern precedent in Nietzsche and of an ancient one in some Greeks, but a non-subjectivistic mystic, which is quite bewildering. Some of those ancient Greeks, already referred to, are something like that, but it is so difficult to conceive a recent “modern” being precisely like a primitive Greek, that we are not at all aided by the very analogy that does at first seem to help us.

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Caeiro puts us out, next, by the secondary aspects of his philosophy. Being a poet of what may be called “the absolute Concrete” he never looks on that concrete otherwise than abstractly. No man is more sure of the absolute, unsubjective reality of a tree, of a stone, of a flower. How it might be thought that he would particularize, that he would say “an oak”, “a round stone”, “a marigold”. But he does not: he keeps on saying “a tree”, “a stone”, “a flower”.

All these observations will be better understood after reading the poems.

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But, if the matter is thus perplexing, the manner is more perplexing still.

The intellectual manner, to begin with. There is nothing less poetic, less lyrical than Caeiro’s philosophical attitude. It is quite devoid of “imagination”, of vagueness, of “sympathy” with things. Far from “feeling” them, his mental process, a hundred times explicitly put, is that he does not feel them, or feel with them.

Again, his simplicity is full of intellectual complexity. He is poet purely of sense, but he seems to have his intellect put into his senses.

Then, again, he is absolutely self-conscious. He knows 

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every possible weakness of his. Where there may be a logical fault, he hastens to the rescue with a simple and direct argument. Where {…}

This man, so purely an ancient – nay, a primitive – Greek that he is bewildering, is quite “modern” at the same time.

It is this man of contradictions, this lucidly muddled personality that gives him his complex and intense originality – an originality, in every way, scarcely ever attained by any poet; certainly never before attained by a poet born in a worn and sophisticated age.

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Dr. António Mora, explaining him on the lines of a similar philosophy – on discipular lines, perhaps – has left this aspect of him out; and that is why I do not feel it supererogatory to call attention to it. Dr. Mora is also a Pagan, in the same complete and Greek sense that Caeiro is a Pagan. So, to Dr. Mora, Caeiro is a great poet, but hardly a strange poet. He is great because he has brought back the Pagan sense of the world; he is not strange because Dr. Mora thinks the Pagan sense of the world a possible sense in our time. Now the great point is that the Pagan sense of the world is impossible; and the formidable (there is no other word) originality of Caeiro lies in that he has 

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realized this impossibility.

No theory of reincarnation can take him in. He is not the soul of a primitive Greek brought into a modern to-day; he is altogether a great Greek, more truly Greek that most Greek poets, and what there is modern in him is only the inscrutable part, as inscrutable as lies nothing in Portugal, being born from a Portuguese.

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He as the Greek sense of proportion without the Greek sense of form. His poems are written on irregular, unrhythmic lines; they are of any length, like Whitman’s, and they are less rhythmic in their paragraphs, being, each of them, fault bad ear. But the poems are faultless as to proportion, not one line is too much, not one word is misplaced, not one interpretation is made.

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The clear {…} thought, the {…} emotion of this poet whose characteristic affirmations are represented by that verse that a stone is more real than an emotion, and that biting a fruit is the only way of thinking it.