This article begins by tracing the contours of Orpheu’s cosmopolitan cultural politics, considered in the context of the dialectics of nationalism and cosmopolitanism that shaped European early modernism. Following this reconsideration of Orpheu’s place in modernist culture, I move on to contend, based on Pessoa’s writings about the magazine and the cultural and aesthetic dimensions of Álvaro de Campos’s sensasionist poetics, that the peripheral model of cosmopolitanism that shaped Orpheu had crucial poetic consequences. These consequences, I claim, reach well beyond the boarders of its editorial and cultural politics, emerging in Pessoa’s artistic production, particularly in the cosmopolitan imagination of Campos’s poetry. More precisely, I argue that the space/time of Lisbon’s harbor, along with the embodied performance of Campos in “Maritime Ode” — published in the second number of the magazine — do not only reflect Orpheu and sensationism’s cosmopolitan impulse, but they are also privileged loci for a materialization of a modernist poetics that is simultaneously cosmopolitan and localized/territorialized in Europe’s margins. In this poetics, desire, embodiment, and cosmopolitanism intersect for the constitution of what I define, borrowing the term from Michel Foucault, as a peripheral cosmopolitan heterotopia.
