In the poem “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” W.H. Auden (1907–1973) famously writes:

Let us isolate each of the claims Auden is here making about poetry: first, poetry makes nothing happen, second, it survives in the valley of its saying (or, according to a later version of the poem, its making ([2], p. 246)), and, third, it is, in this regard—that is, in its surviving—a way of happening, a mouth. Poetry, then, makes nothing happen but is a saying/making and this saying/making is a way of happening. This might prompt us to ask: what is a making which does not make anything happen but is a way of happening? Given poetry’s etymological root in poiesis—or making/bringing-forth—this question, and, indeed, Auden’s view of poetry, become even more pointed and intriguing. As he has The Counsel for the Defense put it in “The Public v. the late Mr William Butler Yeats,” “art is a product of history, not a cause” ([3], p. 393).

I would like to suggest that this shift in emphasis away from poetry as a making happen to a way of happening indicates an increased accentuation on the understanding of poetry as poiesis that might be understood as a constitutive difference between Romanticism and what I will call post-Romanticism. Moreover, I will argue that this shift in emphasis—and thus the transition from Romanticism to post-Romanticism—is brought into focus by Yeats’s own poetic development, which can perhaps be read as representative of a more general trend in British and European poetry during the twentieth century. I will conclude with an attempt to instantiate this post-Romanticism more fully with reference to the work of Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935), which I argue is exemplary in this regard.

Yeats (1865–1939), of course, was, for much of his life, convinced of poetry’s effective power—poetry does make something happen. This belief was the main force driving some of his most powerful middle period poetry. But what, for the Yeats of this period, does poetry make happen? What, in other words, does poetry do? For the Yeats of The Tower [4], the highest achievement of poetry is to render present in verse that which is antithetical to the self, momentarily utterly disrupting the subjectivity and control of the poet and thereby revealing the incomprehensible absolute that lies beyond his conceptualizing grasp. The incorporation of these disruptive visionary passages of poetry developed slowly over time but comes to full fruition in apocalyptic sequence poems such as “Meditations in Time of Civil War” and “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” where, in the seventh and sixth sections respectively, the order and calm that on the whole characterize the poems are violently overturned, giving way instead to strange visionary writing until calm and order just as suddenly return. In this regard, Yeats’s conviction about what poetry does—namely, that it gestures beyond to a realm which is not accessible to nor compatible with ordinary reflective consciousness—positions his middle period poetry, I would suggest, as a late (though by no means uncommon) manifestation of a particular form of Romantic aesthetics [5]. Though echoes of this form of Romanticism are heard in English poetry—quite clearly so in the cases of Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode” [6] and Wordsworth’s “Ode (‘There was a time’)” [7]—its true home is European Romanticism, particularly that which found expression in Germany at the end of the eighteenth century.

German Romanticism emerged out of a crisis in philosophy. Since Descartes’s thought-experiment of radical skepticism and the consequent positioning of a reflective, self-certain subject at the heart of thought, questions of epistemology became increasingly entangled with questions of subjectivity [8,9,10,11,12,13]. If the self is in a constant, reflective relationship with itself in all its cognitive operations, it can seemingly never, as it were, free itself from itself in order to know either itself in its totality or things as they are in themselves. Thus, because thought cannot, without remainder, think its own reflective ground, an apparent split arises between the thinking subject and the thought object—a split out of which the threat of skepticism and, indeed, nihilism, can emerge. In Germany, toward the end of the eighteenth century, these limitations of reflective thought led J.G. Fichte (1762–1814)—who supported Kant’s critical endeavors, while judging them inadequately expressed—to posit something underlying and making possible all thought [14]. However these same limitations prevented him from ever giving a full and adequate account of what that something is. In reacting to the work of Fichte, the early German Romantics took as their starting point this conflict between the realization that reflective consciousness is inherently limited and therefore taints all putatively objective knowledge, on the one hand, and the continuing desire to know the unifying absolute beyond these limitations, on the other. Feeling torn between what Fichte calls “the incapacity and the demand” ([14], p. 201) (“dem Unvermögen und der Forderung” ([15], p. 225)), they cultivated the belief that although this “beyond” apparently cannot be accessed by philosophy, by artistically performing the failure of reflective thought and thereby rupturing the subjectivism of thought’s finite, conceptualizing grasp, a space might be created in the artwork in which that which exceeds ordinary consciousness—variously referred to as the absolute, being, or the unconditioned—may come forth and show itself in all of its strangeness and ungraspability. Of course, this rupture would provide no substantive alternative to the rational, reflective and everyday, and it risks being immediately co-opted by one’s subjective, conceptualizing grasp.1 Thus, in the wake of philosophy’s seemingly futile endeavors, the most that can be achieved for Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) (and, to some degree, for Novalis (1772–1801) and perhaps even for Hölderlin (1770–1843)), using terminology influenced by Fichte even as he rebels against him, is an alternating proof (Wechselerweis), a wavering (Schweben) between the world we know and the pure world beyond, a wavering between our subjectivism and a pure objectivity, between determinacy and indeterminacy, between the I and the not-I (in Yeatsian language, the self and the anti-self) or, to put it in more metaphorical, Blanchotian language,2 between the day and a night that is completely other, between life and a visionary, Orpheus-like death ([14], pp. 193–195; [16], pp. 175–176; [17]; [4], pp. 264-266; [18], pp. 163–170). Unable to get beyond one’s subject/object perspective in order to grasp the world as it is in itself, this sense of something beyond, something utterly different—for Yeats the antithetical self—is perhaps as close as one can get to the absolute, which, as Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy point out, should in this context be understood as the unconditioned self-making (that is, autopoietic) whole from which reflection seems to alienate us [19]. And it is this context, and these ideas, that form the basis of what might be called Romanticism’s aesthetics of failure. This widely influential understanding and configuration of art emerged in the belief that in response to the apparent limitations of philosophical investigation, a sort of heightened experience or apophatic insight might be achieved by means of artworks that somehow perform artistically and productively the failure of reflective consciousness.

For Schlegel, perhaps the most important theorist of early German Romanticism, the moment of indeterminate otherness in the artwork constitutes the “real” in contrast to the idealism of one’s subjective perspective ([20], p. 83).3 It is the task of poetry—since poetry is capable of this, unlike philosophy—to hover, alternating between the real and the ideal. In the Athenaeum fragments he calls this “transcendental poetry” ([16], p. 195) (“Transzendentalpoesie” [21], p. 204). To achieve this, Schlegel believes that an absolute indeterminacy must be built into an otherwise determinate artwork so that the work alternates undecidedly between the two, teetering on the verge of collapse. This is the moment of the work’s self-critique: the dynamic between determinacy and dissolution is the critical unworking that is the work of the Romantic work ([22], p. 357). In this critical moment the work ruptures its (that is to say, our) subjective, conceptualizing grip on the world. Ironically, therefore, it is precisely this rupture, this dissolution in indeterminacy of the seemingly objective, that constitutes an objective moment in the Romantic artwork. As such, in the apparent breakdown of the artwork, we are momentarily carried (by the work) beyond ourselves and our perspectival finitude. In that brief moment the self-critical work opens us to what we are not by performing its own failure, which is also our own failure. Failure, then—and this is perhaps the central paradox undergirding early German Romanticism—is something to be achieved. In this sense, the Romantic artwork should be both complete and incomplete—indeed, incompletable—where “it is everywhere sharply delimited, but within those limits limitless and inexhaustible” ([16], p. 204) (“es überall scharf begrenzt, innerhalb der Grenzen aber grenzenlos und unerschöpflich ist” [21], p. 215). The fragmentary ideal of the Romantic work is to be endlessly becoming in self-critical dissolution. This is what Schlegel means when he argues that Romantic irony should be employed to bring the artwork “to the point of continuously fluctuating between self-creation and self-destruction” ([16], p. 167) (“zum steten Wechsel von Selbstschöpfung und Selbstvernichtung” [21], p. 172). Similarly, Schlegel also writes: “An idea is a concept perfected to the point of irony, an absolute synthesis of absolute antitheses, the continual self-creating interchange of two conflicting thoughts” ([16], p. 176) (“Eine Idee ist ein bis zur Ironie vollendeter Begriff, eine absolute Synthesis absoluter Antithesen, der stete sich selbst erzeugende Wechsel zwei streitender Gedanken” ([21], p. 184)). As Blanchot makes clear, the point of the self-critical Romantic fragment is not to realize the whole but to signal it by suspending it ([22], p. 353). “Only what is incomplete … can take us further”, as Novalis says ([23], p. 65). It is to this tradition that much Romantic and so-called Modernist literature belongs and to which, I think, Yeats’s vision poems are best understood as belonging. For Yeats, this is what poetry makes happen.

It might be argued that Yeats’s attachment to this Romantic aesthetics of failure is anachronistic. Indeed, after Hegel’s trenchant critique of this view of what art—and particularly poetry—does, in his lectures on aesthetics (about which more will be said later), it is extremely difficult to see how it can be regarded as anything other than metaphysically mistaken. Interestingly, Yeats himself comes to share the view that the Romantic belief in what it is that poetry is capable of doing is exaggerated and unjustifiable, and he becomes disenchanted with his own Romantic visionary poetry. However, this loss of faith in what poetry can make happen does not lead him to stop writing poetry. On the contrary, Yeats rejects the Romantic aesthetics of failure poetically. This is significant because it suggests that whereas for Hegel the failure of Romanticism marked a more general decline or end of art, for Yeats poetry’s loss of effectiveness—the collapse of the claim that it makes something happen—might not necessarily signal an end of art. It might instead open up the possibility of a transformed understanding of poetic efficacy—a transformation, in other words, of how poetry as poiesis is understood.

Yeats’s late poems give an indication of what such distinctly post-Romantic poetry might look like. His mounting disillusionment is evident in his 1936 poem, “An Acre of Grass.” He still hopes for visionary inspiration (“Grant me an old man’s frenzy, / Myself must I remake…”) but, like Hegel, for him such poetry, poetry of frenzied imagination and extravagant metaphors, no longer reveals the truth:

“Now strength of body goes,” he says, his requirements are modest:

In the past his mind had consumed “rag and bone,” the base ingredients of everyday life, and produced from them “high talk,” inflated metaphors which he likens to poetic images parading, perhaps somewhat ostentatiously, on stilts (in “High Talk,” he professes that “Processions that lack high stilts have nothing that catches the eye” ([4], p. 467)). However, in “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”—one of his last poems—“Those stilted boys,” his “circus animals,” have deserted him and he can do nothing but “enumerate old themes.” But, in recounting the poetry of his youth and middle age, Yeats feels a certain detachment and comes to see that his art had been something of a pretence:

Yeats is, in a sense, rejecting the high talk of his Romantic visionary poems. What endures is not the grand poetic endeavors or the clever, elaborate metaphors, but instead the ordinary, everyday rag and bone consumed in their production. Yeats must climb down from his stilts because his stilts no longer adequately represent the truth. The desertion, then, is very much mutual. The masterful final stanza is as close to a rejection of poetry in poetry as can be imagined:

At the end of his career—indeed, at the end of his life—Yeats seems to be coming to the conclusion (ahead of Auden) that poetry makes nothing happen. There is a sense that, to use Wallace Stevens’s phrase, “A fantastic effort has failed” ([24], p. 502). But it is wrong to see this as a rejection of poetry. It is more accurate, I would suggest, to see it as a rejection of Romanticism. The question then is: what sort of poetry is this poetry that is left in its wake?

Clearly, for this poet, the poet of rags and bones, poetry which aspires to the absolute through some grand gesture of failure is no longer viable. In its place, if we are to follow Yeats through the failure of that aesthetics of failure, comes, it seems, a poetry of the everyday, modest in its aim, spare in its execution. This would certainly fit with other notable critiques of Romanticism and other accounts of what follows Romanticism. One may, for instance, think of T.E. Hulme (1883–1917), who vehemently rejected Romanticism, calling it “spilt religion” ([25], p. 71), and whose numerous prescriptions “[a]lways [to] seek the hard, definite, personal word” ([25], p. 27) and reject Romantic vagueness and “sentimental escapes to the infinite” ([25], p. 28) position him as the key theorist of a particular, so-called neo-classical, strain of Modernism.4 As his “Lecture on Modern Poetry” attests, Hulme despaired at the “tremendous amount of hocus-pocus” spoken in regard to poetry and would aggressively chastise literary critics who “mumble of the infinite”:

Unsurprisingly, he rejected Yeats’s Romantic work years before Yeats himself did:

Hulme based his rejection of Romanticism and his endorsement of a poetry of the everyday on what he called a “New Weltanschauung” which held “there is no such thing as an absolute truth to be discovered” ([25], p. 18), “no ultimate principles, upon which the whole of knowledge can be built once and for ever as upon a rock” ([25], p. 29), and that man, a finite being in the midst of infinite plurality—“essentially limited and incapable of anything extraordinary” ([25], p. 160)—is “only an animal, who came late” ([25], p. 19). Hulme thought that the “flat thin voice of the metaphysician” should be rejected in favor of the solidity of “clay” ([25], p. 36), “dirt” and “mud” ([25], p. 35). Transferred to poetry, this became an imprecation to try “to see things as they really are” ([25], p. 79), while understanding that “man is always man and never a god” ([25], p. 76). Hence, poetry should have “nothing to do with infinity, with mystery or with emotions,” but should, instead, be “dry” and “hard” ([25], p. 79) and concern itself only with describing “solid, definite things” ([25], p. 39). “The great aim is accurate, precise and definite description,” writes Hulme ([25], p. 78). Unlike the romantic poet, whom he positions as a promethean figure (“the romantic imagines everything is accomplished by the breaking of rules” [(25), p. 161]), the poet should, Hulme thought, learn to accept the ordinary world and stop striving for some sort of beyond. Behind his anti-Romantic bluster, then, is a rather modest recommendation: namely, that poetry should embody what he calls a “tentative and half-shy manner of looking at things” ([25], p. 64).

What I want to suggest is that Hulme’s and the later Yeats’s rejection of Romanticism and their various gestures toward an alternative understanding of poetry signify not merely a stylistic change but a deep aesthetic and metaphysical shift. Insofar as Romanticism, understood as an aesthetics of failure, arose in response to the limitations of reflective consciousness, it might be expected that the rejection of Romanticism would serve implicitly to acknowledge the intractability of the epistemological problem it was trying to overcome. However, the post-Romantic attitude that Hulme and the later Yeats assume seems to dispel or disregard this problem. Both seem to have arrived at the same outlook: namely, that there is no absolute truth or ultimate principle to be discovered and that man is inherently limited and finite and that this is not a tragedy, it is simply the way things are and we should not waste time trying to look beyond how things are for some way of gilding the ordinary with the infinite. The type of poetry to which both seem drawn, with its emphasis on phenomenological description and its terse economical style, serves to underline further this rejection of metaphysics in favor of an acceptance of the limitations of knowledge and of the apparent truth that man is a finite being in a plurally-constituted world and that what he knows is merely what is around him, and that that is all he can know.

Poetry, then, makes nothing happen—the reconfigured philosophical landscape of which post-Romanticism is an expression removes the very motivation of the Romantic idea that there is “something” to “make happen.” Indeed, it might be said that the aesthetic and metaphysical shift represented by the move from Romanticism to post-Romanticism hinges precisely on the concept of “making,” or, poiesis. As Heidegger (1889–1976) frequently reminds us, poiesis, for the Greeks, meant a bringing forth, a pro-duction to presence, and covered not only that which is brought forth by the artist and craftsman but also by nature. Poiesis, then, is very much an act of disclosure and drawing forth rather than a willful “making.” However, this notion of poiesis seems to become distorted by the Romantic aesthetics of failure, which attempts to make pure poiesis, or autopoiesis, somehow accessible through the artwork. For Hegel, an arch-critic of Romanticism and of Schlegel’s notion of Romantic irony in particular, the fatal flaw of Romanticism is that in trying to present a subjectivity-rupturing moment of pure objectivity, the artist is in fact merely demonstrating his mastery and thus the inescapability of subjectivism.5 In other words, the quest for pure autopoiesis appears to render Romantic art indifferent to the external world which threatens to be made merely a provision of opportunities for the demonstration of the Romantic aesthetics of failure. Hegel writes:

Art, Hegel says, has “become a free instrument which the artist can wield in proportion to his subjective skill in relation to any material of whatever kind” ([27], p. 605).6 He calls this art’s “self-transcendence” ([27], p. 607) (“das Hinausgehen der Kunst über sich selbst” ([28], p. 235)). Insofar as the artist’s subjective skill surmounts his material and its production in an attempt to render pure production in the artwork, the artist is in fact stifling pro-duction—poiesis—in favor of praxis. In this respect, as in many others, Romanticism has had a lasting effect. As Giorgio Agamben writes:

This convergence of praxis and poiesis marks the loss of the clear distinction between the two concepts held by the Greeks and signals a move away from art as a way in which something comes forth into being (poiesis, or a way of happening) and focuses instead upon the artist’s creative genius (praxis, or ability to make something happen). This move reduces artistic engagements with the external world to being merely occasions where the determinate might be dissolved in a gesture toward the infinite. In Heideggerian terms, the implicit attitude of Romanticism to its materials is one of enframing (Gestell)—a challenging or calling-forth that reduces everything to the status of “stock” or “standing-reserve” (Bestand) ([30], p. 17). Such an approach to the world (i.e., to everything that is) suppresses, conceals, the bringing forth of things from concealment that is poiesis ([30], p. 27)—quite ironic given that pure poiesis or autopoiesis is precisely what the Romantic aesthetics of failure hopes to bring forth from concealment in the artwork.

Insofar as post-Romanticism, in its turn to the ordinary and everyday, is a rejection of Romantic aesthetics and of the notion that poetry makes something happen in the Romantic sense, it marks a move away from praxis back to poiesis and thus away from the view of things as “standing-reserve,” as mere resources which are to be used in some great poetico-philosophical vault into the beyond, and instead approaches the apparent, external world in the belief that that is the only world we can know and does so in a respectful manner that allows it and the things that constitute it to come forth. Art, poetry, in this sense, would not be a making happen but a way of happening—a letting “what is not yet present arrive in its presencing” ([30], p. 8), as Heidegger puts it. But how can art approach things—if mere things are all we have in the post-Romantic world—in this way? A further, though related question, one that we have already begun to touch upon, is in what way does this approach dispel the epistemological problem of reflection that provided the underlying motivation of Romanticism?

For Heidegger, the conditions for the development of the problem of reflection are put into place at the outset of Western metaphysics when the notion of “being” is distorted through an emphasis on Platonic forms which, in focusing attention upon that which is enduring and changeless, foregrounds the presence of beings while, simultaneously, casting letheward into oblivion the process of disclosure and emergence by means of which beings can appear to us at all. The legacy of this founding error is an emphasis on being as presence (the logos that makes things happen) at the expense of being as phusis (understood as “emerging-abiding sway” ([31], pp. 15, 106)) or An-wesen (“coming-to-presence” ([31], p. 64))—being which comes to be in a play of disclosure and concealment. Being, that is, understood as a way of happening. Heidegger characterizes this forgetting as a loss of truth, understood as aletheia, or disclosure—only to be replaced by an understanding of truth based on presence—that is, the correspondence model of adaequatio intellectus et rei. It is precisely such an outlook that allows a skilled skeptic like Descartes to conclude that without being able to think something in its full presence—as it is in itself—we have only an imperfect knowledge of it which leaves it open to doubt. This, in turn, leads to the formulation of the subject—that which, in order to maintain coherence, cannot be doubted—and the instantiation of the reflective model of consciousness. Kant’s definitive limit-setting on the cognitive capacity of the reflective subject, coupled with the continuing, very un-Kantian, desire to know things as they are in themselves, results in the collapse of the Enlightenment project, the introduction of the term nihilism into philosophy for the first time [32], and sparks the development of Romanticism. Hegel, of course, saw that the overinvestment in the reflection model was a mistake but, from Heidegger’s perspective, Hegel compounded earlier errors through a desire for full presence manifested in an absolute coincidence of thought and being. It was Heidegger in the twentieth century who argued that the metaphysical quest for presence was in fact irrational and based on a distorted understanding both of the Greek concept of being and of the way we engage with the world, which in its emphasis on reflection tends to sideline the pre-reflexive and physically embodied aspects of man’s—or Dasein’s—opening onto the world.

Of course, this distortion of being and forgetting of aletheia closely correspond to the suppression of the disclosive, drawing-forth character of poiesis that, I have argued, took place with the development of Romanticism. It should now be clear that this was simply the inevitable aligning of poiesis with the metaphysics of presence. But what part does the post-Romantic revival of poiesis play in relation to this turn away from traditional metaphysics?

Romanticism aimed to overcome the limitations of metaphysics but tried to do so in a way that merely reaffirmed and further entrenched the system it was attempting to pass beyond—thereby suppressing the “truth” of things (where truth is understood as aletheia) through a gesture toward the “truth” of things (where truth is understood as presence). Post-Romanticism, in contrast, aims at drawing attention to the play of disclosure and concealment involved in a thing’s coming to presence, allowing things which would usually pass unnoticed to stand forth in their own right so that one lingers over them, seeing them afresh—not in isolation but as a part of an interconnected web of relations, a world. This, clearly, would not be a practical “making happen” but a poietical “way of happening”—the opening of a space in which something comes to be in its truth, a space of disclosure—a cave in the case of Plato, a mouth in the case of Auden.

At this point I would like to turn to Heidegger’s highly influential and controversial essay, “The Origin of the Work of Art” [33]. Here, Heidegger suggests that in opening a space in which the play of revealing and concealing can come forth, there is “a happening of truth at work” in the artwork ([33], p. 35). Heidegger argues that this play, the work’s disclosure, sets up a “world” and sets forth the “earth.” The world is the perspective and set of relations opened by the work.

In contrast to this, but fundamentally connected to it, the earth is the stubborn, inexhaustible materiality of the work—it is that which resists disclosure and in so doing is brought forth as such, unconcealed as a concealing:

The earth is the impenetrable that is brought out as such into the clearing of the work; it is that of the artwork which is inexhaustible. The work of art works by setting forth materiality in a certain unsubsumability, thereby making evident the resistance that the thingly element of the thing must offer if it is to emerge in its own aspect, disclosed in its coming to presence. Thus, for Heidegger—and, I am suggesting, possibly for post-Romanticism too—the work of art is a setting forth of materiality in its self-concealing unsubsumability: the earth is brought forth from the oblivion of the everyday into the open space of the work, not to be subsumed by another form but to disclose its impenetrability. As such, the earth of the artwork is never “used up,” no single understanding, view or interpretation is completely adequate to it and so as long as the work works it can never simply be fixed in a particular understanding. Heidegger makes this point thus:

This notion that “earth” comes forth unfolded in an inexhaustible number of ways, and so can never be finally pinned down by a single interpretation or understanding, has received attention from a number of commentators on Heidegger. J.M. Bernstein, for instance, remarks: “[A]lthough capable of being set forth in an endless variety of ways, the earth itself cannot be finally, once and for all, revealed” ([34], p. 119); similarly, Kai Hammermeister writes: “Because all art contains this moment of earth, no one will ever come to terms with the work; no single interpretation will ever suffice” ([35], p. 182). For Heidegger, then, the more a work withstands interpretation, the more the earth asserts itself (“juts through the world” ([33], pp. 54, 61, 67)), as Heidegger is wont to put it) as impenetrable and self-closing. Of course, at the same time, the more the earthly aspect of the work resists any single interpretation, the more open the work becomes. That is to say, the more the self-closing earthly characteristic of the work asserts itself, the more the world of the work is exercised in striving to open the work altogether (the paradox being that if it were to succeed the work would cease to work and so would be finally closed and altogether without a world). In Heidegger’s words, “The world, in resting upon the earth, strives to surmount it. As self-opening it cannot endure anything closed. The earth, however, as sheltering and concealing, tends always to draw the world into itself and keep it there” ([33], p. 47). So the two parts of the work strive against one another forming the work-being of the work: the world moves to open the work up whilst the earth strives to close it. The more the world strives, opening up various relations and perspectives, the more open the work appears and, yet, the more it actually resists opening, resists any final interpretation or understanding; thus, it can be said, the more the earth is set forth, the more the world worlds, and vice versa. Heidegger places considerable emphasis on this mutual intensification and interdependence:

Later in the essay, he writes: “[A]s a world opens itself the earth comes to rise up. It stands forth as that which bears all, as that which is sheltered in its own law and always wrapped up in itself” ([33], p. 61); and, again: “The nature of the earth, in its free and unhurried bearing and self-closure, reveals itself […] only in the earth’s jutting into a world, in the opposition of the two” ([33], p. 67). The importance, for Heidegger, of this interplay of revealing and concealing—that is, the operation of disclosure—is affirmed by Gadamer who suggests that the “universal thesis of Heidegger’s philosophy” is that “beings hold themselves back by coming forward into the openness of presence” ([36], p. 227). For Heidegger, the great artwork is the “figure” (Gestalt) ([33], p. 62) which fixes in place this open, dynamic striving of world and earth at its most intense. Heidegger writes: “In the earth, […] as essentially self-closing, the openness of the Open finds the greatest resistance (to the Open) and thereby the site of the Open’s constant stand, where the figure must be fixed in place”; and, again: “This conflict is fixed in place in the figure of the work and becomes manifest by it” ([33], p. 67). It is as such a striving, by opening a world and by maintaining that world in the self-concealing resistance of earth, Heidegger claims, that the great artwork “first gives to things their look and to men their outlook on themselves” ([33], p. 42).

This agonistic performance of concealing and revealing that constitutes the work-being of the work is, Heidegger argues, the happening of aletheia or truth. As Heidegger puts it, “Setting up a world and setting forth the earth, the work is the fighting of the battle in which the unconcealedness of beings as a whole, or truth, is won” ([33], p. 54); and, “Truth establishes itself in the work. Truth is present only as the conflict between lighting and concealing in the opposition of world and earth” ([33], p. 60). Art projects the opening in which beings show themselves in their coming to presence. Art, in other words, is the clearing in which disclosure—aletheia—happens. As such, Heidegger suggests, all art is “essentially poetry” ([33], p. 70)—that is, poiesis—insofar as poetry is the projective “saying of the unconcealedness of what is” ([33], p. 71). It is on these grounds that Heidegger can state: “Art then is the becoming and happening of truth” ([33], p. 69), or “Art is the setting-into-work of truth” ([33], p. 74).

Post-Romanticism, I am suggesting, would follow this Heideggerian attention to poiesis as world-disclosure—not reaching beyond to some imagined absolute out of a sense of the incompleteness of our knowledge of the world around us but attending to the ordinary and the everyday in the realization that any perceived lack of presence is part of the play of concealment and disclosure at work in a thing’s coming to presence, its coming forth or poiesis (whether that be the poiesis of the artist, craftsman, or nature).

What would post-Romantic poetry look like? To try to answer this question we now turn to the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. What is most remarkable about Pessoa—whose name means “person” in Portuguese—is that he divided himself up into a number of literary alter egos which he referred to as “heteronyms.” Besides himself, Fernando Pessoa (who remained a distinct figure included in the imaginary world of the heteronyms), there is Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos, each of whom can be regarded as an important “poet” in his own right. Richard Zenith gives an idea of the power and scope of Pessoa’s world-creating imagination:

Indeed, a trunk containing 27,500 manuscripts and fragments was discovered following Pessoa’s death—only 5,000 of these have so far been published ([38], pp. 109–110). Commenting on the main heteronyms, Harold Bloom writes: “Two of them—Caeiro and Campos—are great poets, wholly different from each other and from Pessoa, not to mention Reis, who is an interesting minor poet” ([39], p. 485). It is to these two poets that we shall now turn to try to understand further what post-Romanticism might be.