Alberto Caeiro was born in 1889 and died in 1915. He was born in Lisbon, but lived almost all his life in the country. He had neither profession nor any sort of education. ... Caeiro was of medium height and, though really delicate (he died consumptive), didn't seem as delicate as he was.

... all (the Heteronyms)* are cleanshave - Caeiro pale without color, blue eyes. ... Caeiro, as I said, hadn't any education to speak of - only primary school; his father and mother died early and he remained at home, where he lived on the income of a few small properties. He lived with an old aunt, on his mother's side.

What the other Heretonyms and Fernando Pessoa himself think about Alberto Caeiro:

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One day... March 8, 1914... It was the triumphant day of my life:... What followed was the appearence of someone in me... Alberto Caeiro. Forgive the absurdity of the sentence: In me there appeared my Master.

(Fernando Pessoa, in a letter to Adolfo Casais Monteiro)

 

My Master Caeiro wasn't a Pagan: He was paganism. Ricardo Reis is a pagan, António Mora is a pagan, I am a pagan, Fernando Pessoa himself would be a pagan in character, António Mora is a pagan intelectually, I am a pagan by virtue

of my rebelliousness, that is, my temperament. In Caeiro, there is no explanation for his paganism: there's consubstantiaton...

 

(Álvaro de Campos, from «Notes on the Memory of My Master Caeiro»)

 

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Caeiro, like Whitman, leaves me perplexe. We are thrown off our critical attitude by so extraordinary a phenomenon. We have never seen anything like it. Even after Whitman, Caeiro is strange terribly, appallingly new. Even in our age, when we believe nothing can astonish us or shout novelty at us, Caeiro does astonish and does breath novelty. To be able to do this in an age like ours is the definitive and final proof of his genius...Alberto Caeiro is reported to have regretted the name of 'sensationism' which a disciple of his - a rather queer disciple, it is true - Mr. Álvaro de Campos gave to his attitude and to the attitude he created. If Caeiro protested against the word as possibly something to indicate a "school", like futurism, for instance, he was right...

 

(Ricardo Reis, in a English preface to Alberto's Caeiro poems)

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from the book «Poems of Fernando Pessoa», translated and edited by Edwin Honig and Susan M. Brown, City Lights

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