2 - Pessoa and Walt Whitman Revisited

Summary

As a revisitor to the encounter between Fernando Pessoa and Walt Whitman, my modest aims in the following pages are: 1) to summarise the valuable observations and insights set forth by the first in-depth visitor to that encounter, Eduardo Lourenço, 2) to add some new information on how Pessoa viewed Whitman's influence on his work (this by way of a still unpublished text from Pessoa's archive), 3) to show that the most obviously Whitmanesque portions of Pessoa's oeuvre – the poetry of Alberto Caeiro and Álvaro de Campos – were instances of conscious, wilful appropriation and even distortion (more than ‘misreading’), and 4) to argue that Whitman's influence on Pessoa was holistic, affecting his literary oeuvre broadly.

I will begin by pointing out that the heteronym Álvaro de Campos's ‘Saudação a Walt Whitman’ [Salutation to Walt Whitman] does not sound like any poem produced by the American poet. It makes a number of allusions to Whitman's poetry (beginning with the title), it contains some of the same, voluntarily appropriated themes, it makes a similar use of repeating syntactical structures, it also resorts to lists of objects or concepts, and its free verse style is reminiscent of Whitman, but the tone is different and it all plays, or screams, at a different speed – faster than Whitman's. Campos is restless, frenetic, at times hysterical. Not so Whitman, notwithstanding his ‘barbaric yawp’. Left as over twenty unarticulated pieces, the poem in homage to Whitman also parodies and belittles him.