It is well known that in Eduardo Lourenço’s view the existence of Pessoa’s heteronyms is the outcome of a shock resulting from reading Walt Whitman. Such an idea relies however on another theory in Fernando Pessoa Revisitado. That essential and absolutely not negotiable theory consists in assuming that Pessoa suffered from a certain “creative impotence”. The argument is that Pessoa was unable to create, was not truly inspired, and that after he had made contact with Whitman he discovered a poet that was everything he could not be. That essential theory, which Lourenço repeats in several other essays, is borrowed from the three main critics of presença (João Gaspar Simões, Adolfo Casais Monteiro e José Régio), who take the same position. In this essay, I will try to show how Eduardo Lourenço makes use of an old prejudice regarding Fernando Pessoa, which is the idea that he was more of a thinker than a poet, and how Lourenço’s main ideas about Pessoa’s work are contaminated by that specific prejudice.
