Nowadays we all know that the story of the Triumphal Day of Alberto Caeiro’s emergence is a myth with an underlying truth. Less known is that Pessoa, in the same letter from 1935 in which he tells how the keeper of sheeper appeared to him, also created a “triumphal” myth about Álvaro de Campos. Like so: “All at once, without interruptions or corrections, the ode whose name is ‘Triumphal Ode,’ by the man whose name is none other than Alvaro de Campos, issued from my typewriter.” The said ode, in fact, was not written at the typewriter but by hand, and it was much corrected.
Álvaro de Campos’s exuberant audacity was also a construction, used to deconstruct the prevailing literary models. Campos embodied the spirit and ambition of the magazine Orpheu, which served, in turn, as a context for defining and highlighting his “non-Aristotelian” genius. The heteronym was a liberating shout for Pessoa, for Portuguese poetry, and for the reader with ears to hear. But how exactly did he come into being? What was his relationship, genetically speaking, to Alberto Caeiro and Ricardo Reis? What made his inaugural ode and the rest of his poetic career and “life” triumphal?
This paper tries to answer these questions through a close reading of: 1) letters Sá-Carneiro sent Pessoa in the summer of 1914, 2) several Álvaro de Campos poems (two of which are juxtaposed with poems by Carlos Drummond de Andrade), 3) some unfinished poems attributable to Campos or Caeiro, and 4) prose texts signed by Pessoa and by various heteronyms.
