“The Complete Works of Alvaro de Campos” by Fernando Pessoa (translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari)

Pessoa wrote under many heteronyms. Campos was a poet and a sensualist. He did not intellectualize, but felt. “May God either change my life or end it.” In another poem, Campos again pontificates on death, “Once the session is over and we leave,/ There’s no house to go home to, no car to take us anywhere,/ but only Absolute Night and God perhaps like a Vast Moon/ signifying”

Campos was also a subjectivist, “Everything we’ve ever seen is us, we alone experience the world./ We have only ourselves inside and outside,/ We have nothing, we have nothing, we have nothing…” He was a dreamer, not a doer, “No, I don’t believe in me./ The lunatic asylums are full of madmen brimming with certainties!/ And since I have no certainty, am I more right than them or less?/ No, I don’t even believe in me… The world is for those born to conquer it/ And not for those who dream they might conquer it, even if they’re right./ I’ve dreamed far more than Napoleon ever did./ I’ve clutched to my hypothetical bosom more humanities than Christ ever did./ I’ve secretly written philosophies that no Kant ever wrote./ But I am, and perhaps always will be, a tenant in one of those garrets,/ even if I don’t live in one;/ I will always be one of those not born to do this.”

In his poetry, Campos also stressed the reality of the mind, “We all have two lives:/ The real one, which is the one we dreamed when we were children,/ And which we continue to dream as adults, in a substratum of mist;/ The false one is the life we live in the company of others,/ Which is the practical, the useful life,/ The one where they end up, putting us in a coffin./ In the other life there are no coffins, no deaths./ There are only illustrations from childhood:/ Big colored books, to look at rather than read;/ Big colorful pages to remember later on./ In that other life, we are us,/ In that other life, we live;/ In this one we die, which is what living means.”

Finally, Campos also wrote prose, which justified and explained both his poetry and the differences between himself and Pessoa, along with the other heteronyms. Campos expressed his own philosophy to life, “No age can pass its sensibility on to another age; it can only pass on the intelligence implicit in that sensibility. It is through emotion that we become ourselves, whereas through intelligence we become other…. Each age gives to subsequent ages only what it was not.” In prose, Campos also gave his literary opinions, “The superior poet says what he actually feels. The average poet says what he decides to feel. The inferior poet says what he thinks he should feel…. Most people feel conventionally, albeit with great human sincerity, not, however, with any kind or degree of intellectual sincerity, that is what matters to the poet.”