The art of rumination: Pessoa's heteronyms revisited

Abstract

The concept of rumination was first used in literary theory by Friedrich Schlegel, who once defined literary critics pejoratively as ruminating readers. Later, Nietzsche gave the concept a semi-humorous twist by stating that a good reader in modernity must be a cow. In this article, I adduce the concept of rumination to explore its potential for understanding poetry and poetics. Presenting rumination as one of the many faces of memory and relating it to Kierkegaard’s notion of repetition, I use the concept to reflect on poetry and the poetic as rewriting, focusing mainly on the Portuguese modernist poet Fernando Pessoa.