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The Portuguese author Fernando Pessoa has been called ‘the greatest twentieth-century writer you have never heard of’ (Zenith, 2006, outside back cover). Remarkably, he published poetry under three major pseudonyms (and had some 70 others). Pessoa was deeply influenced by Walt Whitman, who once wrote,
Do I contradict myself?Very well then I contradict myself,I am large, I contain a multitude.
Pessoa called his alter egos ‘heteronyms.’ He considered them full-fledged individual writers, whose work he sometimes strongly disliked, and who interacted (and conflicted) with one another. He believed that ‘the mental origin of my heteronyms lies in my … constant propensity to depersonalization and simulation … This tendency to create another world within me, identical to this one but with different people,