This article is focused on some aspects of the notion of literary fame Fernando Pessoa held taking into consideration the way he used the lexical field of dimension and an alternative field including seemingly heterogeneous tags (“genius”, “talent” and “journalism”). Whereas the first lexical field is associated with a somewhat passive reception of literary history, the second field is activated in a more critical and individual way by Pessoa. The corpus for this article is composed of the essays the author published during his lifetime, as well as of a number of documents available at the Pessoa Archive at the National Library of Portugal (the latter serve to strengthen or weaken the impression obtained from the former). In the last part of the article, I seek to reflect on editing manners as a means to assure textual circulation in space and time and thus as a tool to acknowledge the prominence of a given literary work.
