Chamberlain, Kitchener, Kropotkine—and the political Pessoa

Though Fernando Pessoa is not widely known as a political poet, we may be familiar with the political commentary explicit in some of his works. In four political sonnets dating from 1905 (but only fully published in 1995), the poet criticizes the mockery of Russia by British journalists, calls the colonization of Ireland the the Transvaal "a shame on England," and lays a curse upon Joseph Chamberlain's head for his involvement in the Anglo-Boer wars. Among Pessoa's unpublished English poetry, there are drafts (in various stages of completion) of other political poems, written between 1905 and 1907, featuring Chamberlain and two other historical figures of the beginning of the 20th century: Kitchener and Kropotkine. By presenting the early political poems by Pessoa--both published and unpublished--this essays argues that they form a coherent corpus, which may be defined by the relationship between a political even and Pessoa's reaction to it through a poem