The hand of the poet: signs, symbols and lexicon

Abstract

This paper aims to reflect upon the lexical circumstance of the poet’s hand in two poems by “Fernando Pessoa” – one comes from the work Fausto and the other from his heteronym Álvaro de Campos. The idea of a lexicon proper to the symbolic act of a poetic hand is here countersigned by the notion of a dictionary that comprehends the passage from nature to the culture that is waiting for it. In this way, the poet’s hand’s lexicon witnesses, by illusion and irony, poetry’s nonacquaintance, configuring it as a singular address: to the other, the language. Thus, poems, being the creatures that they are, reveal the “unconditional lexicology” from that hand.