Álvaro de Campos

Álvaro de Campos was one of Fernando Pessoa's various heteronyms, widely known by his powerful and wraithful writing style. Campos' works may be split in three phases: the decadentist phase, the futuristic phase and the decadent (sad) phase. He chose Marinetti and Whitman as masters, showing some similitarities with their works, mainly in the second phase: hymns like "Ode Triunfal" and "Ode Marítima" praise the power of the rising technology, the strength of the machines, the dark side of the industrial civilization, and an enigmatic love for the machines. The first phase (marked by the poem Opiário) shared some of its pessimism with Pessoa's friend Mário de Sá-Carneiro, one of his co-workers in "Orpheu" magazine. In the last phase, Pessoa drops the mask, and reveals through Campos all the emptiness and nostalgy that grew during his last years of life. He lived in Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, England for a time where he studied Ship Engineering (of which Pessoa wrote a poem about).

Critical overview

"I'm nothing."
"I'll always be nothing."
"I can't want to be something."
"I have in me all the dreams of the world nevertheless."

'The Tobacco Shop'

Álvaro de Campos is undoubtedly Pessoa's greatest heteronym. 'Campos,' as Zenith notes, 'was the most substantial of Pessoa's heteronyms and the one closest to his true heart and person...he was in many ways a larger-than-life version of his creator.' Of the three heteronyms he is the one who feels the strongest; his motto was 'to feel everything in every way.' 'The best way to travel,' he wrote, 'is to feel.'

Campos manifests two contrary impulses: on the one hand: a feverish desire to be everything and everyone, declaring that 'in every corner of my soul stands an altar to a different god.' The second impulse is toward a state of isolation and a sense of nothingness.

Of the first of these impulses: Campos is possessed of the Whitmanian desire to 'contain multitudes'. Critics have noted how 'Whitman's influence is apparent in part in the sheer vitality of these poems, in the zest for experience which they express.' Indeed Campos has in many respects outdone his precursor in 'containing multitudes': it seems that the entire cosmos is not enough for him to 'contain'. After chanting all the places, all the ports, all the sights he's seen.... 'Of all this,' he remarks, 'which is so much, is nothing next to what I want.'

Campos' poems represent the apotheosis of Pessoan anguish. His poems reflect an existentially anguished search for meaning. His poems are at once nostalgic, self-ironic; here despair, terror, the self questioning of the poet are laid bare. The poems as a critic remarks, evoke an 'atmosphere of unreality' this state is created 'by insistence on denial, negativity, absence, loss.'

One of the poet's constant preoccupations is that of identity: he does not know who he is. The problem, it seems, is not that he doesn't know what to be; on the contrary: he wants to be too much, everything; short of achieving this he despairs. Unlike Caeiro, who asks nothing of life, he asks too much. In his poetic meditation 'Tobacco Shop' he asks:

"How should I know what I'll be, I who don't know what I am?"
"Be what I think? But I think of being so many things!"

Campos can be manic-depressive, exultant, violent, dynamic; he quests for nowhere and everywhere at once. His is an agonized doubt at the wasting of life-- at life, everything. For a critic he is 'par excellence the poet appalled by the emptiness of his own existence, lethargic, lacking in will-power, seeking inspiration, or at all events finding it, in semi-conscious states, in the twilight world between waking and sleeping, in dreams and in drunkenness.'