The desacralization of the world in the poetry of Fernando Pessoa

Abstract

According the Mircea Eliade the «sole» most «important religious creation of the modern Western world» is the «ultimate stage of desacralization». Pessoa not only understands this fact as evidenced in the poems «O último Sortilégio», «Símbolos» and «As Musas», he also understands that this desacralization ultimately leads to the existential anguish. While in the writings of Alberto Caeiro and Ricardo Reis he suggests that man could escape the existential anguish through a return to Paganism, in the poem «Apontamento» he suggests a solution far more acceptable to the modern Western man, and that is the apprehension and preservation of the sacred essence in the aesthetic creation.