The stupidity of the intelligent

Forester McClatchey in the Washington Examiner:

The Complete Works of Alberto Caeiro, translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari, presents the work of a complicated man. Caeiro was born in Lisbon in 1889, but he spent most of his life in the countryside. He received almost no formal education, but he was a passionate poet. At 25, he died of tuberculosis. Looking back, we can only be sure of one fact regarding Caeiro: He did not exist.

Or, more accurately, he was a fiction. A Portuguese poet named Fernando Pessoa made him up. Pessoa was an odd bird, a flaneur who haunted the cafes of early 20th-century Lisbon, sipping wine, scribbling poems on napkins, and leading dozens of lives between his ears. If his literature has a central precept, it is that there is no such thing as a stable, central self.

More here.