Ricardo Reis (heteronym)

Ricardo Reis (European Portuguese: [ʁiˈkaɾðu ˈʁɐjʃ]) is a heteronym of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. In his fictional biography, Reis was born in Porto in 1887, one year older than Fernando Pessoa, who describes him as very little shorter and stronger, but slim and a vague matte brown. Reis was educated at a Jesuit boarding school becoming a Latinist by education and a semi-Hellenist by his own, thus writing better than Pessoa, but with a purism that his author considered exaggerated. He was a doctor and Neoclassical poet who wrote neopagan, epicurist and stoicist odes. Politically a monarchist, he went into exile to Brazil after the defeat of a monarchical rebellion in Porto against the Portuguese Republic in 1919.