Álvaro de Campos, um destino à Ilíada

Abstract

The thesis examines the dialogues between Portuguese modernist poetry and Archaic Greek poetry, represented respectively by the poetic works of Álvaro de Campos and Homer’s Iliad. Referring to Fernando Pessoa’s (1888–1935) interest in Archaic Greek literary productions, particularly Homer’s position in the poetic tradition, we aim to investigate the extent to which Pessoa’s heteronymy inherits and engages with artistic issues embedded in Homeric epics. Based on the premise that Álvaro de Campos, often regarded as a Sensationist poet, integrates into his poetic paradigm the entirety of human misery resulting from the transformations of his historical time—the 20th century—we posit that the interventions and propositions in his poetry are extensions of what is found in the Trojan War depicted in the aforementioned epic. Specifically, regarding the place of the human in an environment of extreme violence – physical, moral, human, divine, social, and institutional – Álvaro de Campos, the signature of all his verses, emerges as a destiny of the Iliad. This interpretive hypothesis is articulated through the lenses of methodology, allegory, and legibility, drawing upon intellectual frameworks provided by thinkers such as Paul de Man, Maurice Blanchot, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich Schiller, Novalis, Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin. To support this assertion, we employ the figuration of the Moirai – Clotho, Lachesis, Atropos – the mythical entities who weave the fates of men and gods. Through these figures, we analyze how Campos’s poems, including “Ode Triunfal”, “Demogorgon”, “Magnificat”, “A Partida”, “Ode Marcial”, “Adiamento”, “Episódios”, “Apontamento”, “Bicarbonato de Soda”, “Realidade”, and “Ode Mortal” establish, inflect and conclude human destinies within a belligerent atmosphere, as circumscribed in Books 1, 3, 5, 7, 8, 13, 16, 20, and 24 of the Iliad. Throughout the research, we reaffirm that both Homeric and Camposian verses, as poetic-speculative activities addressing the human condition, operate in a mode of combat, in rivalry with prevailing barbarism. They reveal that it is through poetry and art at large that one may glimpse the transcendence of injustices legitimized within a world governed by rationality and technical progress