espero que não me aborreçam com os direitos da cópia (1)

From the excelent must-buy-and-cherish Harold Bloom's The Western Canon, if for nothing else to quarrel endlessly with Bloom in the comfort of your own brain. The part of the chapter "Borges, Neruda and Pessoa: Hispanic-Portuguese Whitman" that refers to Pessoa. A very, very irritanting chapter's name.

As a foil to the latin American poets I offer the amazing Portuguese poet, Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), who as a fantastic invention surpasses any invention by Borges. Pessoa, born in Lisbon and descended on the paternal side from Jewish conversos, was educated in South Africa and, like Borges, grew up bilingual. Indeed, until he was twenty-one, he wrote poetry only in English. In poetic eminence Pessoa matches Hart Crane, whom he precisely resembles, particularly in Mensagem ("message" or "summons"), a poetic sequence on Portuguese history that is akin to Crane's Bridge [apologizing for the interruption: and I, who studied the Bridge in Lisbon was never told this]. But powerful as many of Pessoa's lyrics are, they are only one part of his work; he also invented a series of alternative poets - Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis among them - and proceeded to write entire volumes of poems for them, or rather as them. Two of them - Caeiro and Campos - are great poets, wholly different from each other and from Pessoa, not to mentin Reis, who is an interesting minor poet.

Pessoa was neither mad nor a mere ironist; he is a Whitman reborn, but a Whitman who gives separate names to "my self", "the real me" or "me myself", and "my soul", and writes wonderful books of poems for all three of them as well as a separate book under the name of Walt Whitman. The parallels are close enough not to be coincidences, particularly since the invention of the "heteronyms" (Pessoa's term) followed an immersion in Leaves of Grass. Walt Whitman, one of the roughs, an American, the "myself" of Song of Myself, becomes Álvaro de Campos, a Portuguese Jewish ship's engineer. The "real me" or "me myself" becomes the "keeper of the sheep", the pastoral Alberto Caeiro, while the Whitmanian soul transmutes into Ricardo Reis, an Epicurean materialist who writes Horatian odes.

Pessoa provided all three poets with biographies and physiognomies and allowed them to become independent in regard to him, so much so that he joined Campos and Reis in proclaiming Caeiro as his "master" or poetic precursor. Pessoa, Campos and Reis were all influenced by Caeiro, not by Whitman, and Caeiro was influenced by no one, being a "pure" or natural poet with almost no education who died at the High Romantic age of twenty-six. Octavio Paz, one of Pessoa's champion's, summoned up this fourfold poet with a fine economy: "Caeiro is the sun in whose orbit Reis, Campos and Pessoa himself rotate. In each are particles of negation or unreality. Reis believes in form, Campos in sensation, Pessoa in symbols. Caeiro doesn't believe in anything. He exists."

The Portuguese scholar Maria Irene Ramalho de Sousa Santos, who has emerged as Pessoa's canonical critic, interprets the heteronyms as his "reading, half in complicity, half in disgust with Whitman, not only of Whitman's poetry, but also of Whitman's sexuality and politics." Pessoa's barely repressed homoeroticism emerges in Campos' furious masochism, which is hardly Whitmanian; and the democratic ideology of Leaves of Grass was unacceptable to a Portuguese visionary monarchist.

Although Ramalho de Sousa Santos attempts to evade Pessoa's anguish of contamination in regard to Whitman, influence anxieties are not easily mocked. Like D. H. Lawrence in Studies in Classic American Literature, Pessoa-Campos manifests an enormous ambivalence towards Whtiman's ambitious embraces of the cosmos and everyone in it; and yet Pessoa seems to know, far better than his idealizing critics, how impossible is to sever his poetic selves from Whitman's, despite the marvelous fiction of the heteronyms. Even Ramalho de Sousa Santos, after attempting a Feminist evasion of the burdens of influence, brilliantly returns to the harsh realities of temporal filiation, of the poetic family romance:

From the implicit dialogue in Whitman between me and the Me Myself, Pessoa carved two explicit distinct images of voice. Whitman, earlier, by the virtue of a connective, organic consciusness, was able to weave these two voices together into one dynamic whole.

(...)