Walt Whitman in Fernando Pessoa

This volume explores the dynamics that connect two of the most celebrated poets and intriguing literary figures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Walt Whitman and Fernando Pessoa. It focuses in particular on the role of the Portuguese Pessoa as reader of the North American writer, on the lessons he took from Leaves of Grass and, finally, on the reworking that he performed on Whitman’s legacy. Whether characterized by a metaphor from chemistry (catalyst) or psychology (liberator), what is certain is that Whitman represented for the Portuguese poet a breach in his own writing practice, opening up a further plurality and an extended performance of the textual expression of the Real. Pessoa found in the verses of Leaves of Grass an encouragement to transcend his own limits and to embark upon a dramatic poetics, the most notable feature of which is perhaps heteronymy - his so-called drama em gente. It is legitimate, therefore, to think of the experimental dramatization in poetry undertaken by Pessoa as a challenging multiplicity of voicings and, as a consequence, for the reader, a reminder of the unrealizability of any critical synthesis. The refusal of linear conceptions (derivative, filial) of his writing and the elaboration of a literary project that might proceed by irradiating in multiple directions at one and the same time is, without doubt, one of the most important features of Pessoa’s modernity. The gesture of writing thus ever differently may be viewed through a prism of contiguous accumulation, as a taking up again of the basic conception that the singer of Leaves of Grass had of poetry. Such a notion was for Pessoa an irresistible invitation to the infinite amplification of discontinuity.