In a line from “Saudação a Walt Whitman”, Álvaro de Campos defines the desire of making art as the adult equivalent to the childish impulse to play with toys. To define an author like this is something that occurs often in Pessoa’s work. In a letter written in February 1915 to Ronald de Carvalho, for instance, Pessoa suggests that the poetic activity to which both he and the addressee devote themselves is nothing other than the response of the adults they are to the circumstance of being deprived, at a certain point in their lives, of the toys with which they used to play. The detailed analysis of Antinous I propose in this essay aims to defend that the long epicedium published in 1918 is a poetic version of this peculiar thesis concerning authorship, and that the activity of sculptor to which the emperor Adrian promises to dedicate himself after Antinous’ death corresponds, above all, to an adult mode of dealing with the inevitability of having lost the toy with which he played when he was younger.
