Alberto Caeiro

Alberto José Caeiro (European Portuguese pronunciation: [alˈβɛɾtu ʒuˈsɛ kɐˈɐjɾu]) is a heteronym of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, first used in 1914 and introduced in print in 1925. In his fictional biography, Caeiro was born in Lisbon on 16 April 1889, lived most of his life in a village in Ribatejo and died in 1915. He was the leader and teacher of a group of neopagan poets and intellectuals that included Pessoa's other heteronyms António Mora, Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos. Caeiro was the first of Pessoa's major heteronyms. The first and most famous work Pessoa composed under this name was The Keeper of Sheep, a series of 49 poems he began in 1914 and continued to edit until his death in 1935. The rest of Caeiro's poems are grouped under the headings The Shepherd in Love and Uncollected Poems. Like Pessoa's works in general, the Caeiro poems began to receive high critical acclaim decades after the writer's death. The first collection of them was published in Portugal in 1946.