• Chamberlain, Kitchener, Kropotkine—and the political Pessoa

    Author(s):
    Carlos Pittella (see profile)
    Date:
    2018
    Group(s):
    Archives, Poetics and Poetry
    Subject(s):
    Pessoa, Fernando, 1888-1935, Sonnets, Archives
    Item Type:
    Book chapter
    Tag(s):
    Joseph Chamberlain, Horatio Herbert Kitchener, Piotr Kropotkine, Emily Hobhouse, Second Anglo-Boer War, Political poetry, South African history, Fernando Pessoa
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/t4za-tw81
    Abstract:
    Though Fernando Pessoa is not widely known as a political poet, we may be familiar with the political commentary explicit in some of his works. In four political sonnets dating from 1905 (but only fully published in 1995), the poet criticizes the mockery of Russia by British journalists, calls the colonization of Ireland and the Transvaal “a shame on England,” and lays a curse upon Joseph Chamberlain’s head for his involvement in the Anglo-Boer wars. Among Pessoa’s unpublished English poetry, there are drafts (in various stages of completion) of other political poems, written between 1905 and 1907, featuring Chamberlain and two other historical figures of the beginning of the 20th century: Kitchener and Kropotkine. By presenting the early political poems by Pessoa—both published and unpublished—this book chapter argues that they form a coherent corpus, which may be defined by the relationship between a political event and Pessoa’s reaction to it through a poem.
    Notes:
    PITTELLA, C. (2018). Chamberlain, Kitchener, Kropotkine—and the political Pessoa. In P. Ferrari (Ed.), Inside the Mask: The English Poetry of Fernando Pessoa (pp. 42-69, biblio. 326-337). Gávea-Brown.
    Metadata:
    Published as:
    Book chapter    
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    4 years ago
    License:
    Attribution-ShareAlike
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