Um Poema Inglês de Fernando Pessoa/Alexander Search

Fernando Pessoa began his literary activity thinking of himself as a group of heteronyms endowed with different minds and tasks. With two exceptions, the first poets he created were English, which was undoubtedly due to this education in Dublin. Alexander Search was the poet who survived the longest and reveals the strongest influence of English literature. Amongst his texts there is the poem “Fragments of a poem called The Old Castle”, unfinished and fragmentary like many of his works, one which seems not to have attracted any attention. However, it is perhaps the one that has the clearest roots in English literature. For Portuguese readers it has further interest, because it takes the most tragic battle in Portuguese history, to which it owes its title, as the central element of the story, giving it a place in the area of Anglo-Portuguese Studies, all the more important as it is the work of one of our greatest poets.