possessed of the Whitmanian desire to 'contain multitudes'. Critics have noted how 'Whitman's influence is apparent in part in the sheer vitality of these poems, in the zest for experience which they express.' Indeed Campos has in many respects outdone his precursor in 'containing multitudes': it seems that the entire cosmos is not enough for him to 'contain'. After chanting all the places, all the ports, all the sights he's seen... 'Of all this,' he remarks, 'which is so much, is nothing next to what I want.' Campos' poems represent the apotheosis of Pessoan anguish. His poems reflect an existentially anguished search for meaning. His poems are at once nostalgic, self-ironic; here despair, terror, the self questioning of the poet are laid bare. The poems as critic remarks, evoke an 'atmosphere of unreality'; this state is created 'by insistence on denial, negativity, absence, loss.' One of the poet's constant preoccupations is that of identity: he does not know who he is. The problem, it seems, is not that he doesn't know what to be; on the contrary: he wants to be too much, everything; short of achieving this he despairs. Unlike Caeiro, who asks nothing of life, he asks too much. In his poetic meditation 'Tobacco Shop' he asks: "How should I know what I'll be, I who don't know what I am? Be what I think? But I think of being so many things!" Campos can be manic-depressive, exultant, violent, dynamic; he quests for nowhere and everywhere at once. His is an agonized doubt at the wasting of life—at life, everything. For a critic he is 'par excellence the poet appalled by the emptiness of his own existence, lethargic, lacking in will-power, seeking inspiration, or at all events finding it, in semi-conscious states, in the twilight world between waking and sleeping, in dreams and in drunkenness'. See also Fernando Pessoa Heteronym Orpheu Mário de Sá-Carneiro The Book Of Disquiet'' The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis Portuguese Poetry References External links Fernando Pessoa: Collected Poems of Álvaro de Campos, at Shearsman Books Álvaro de Campos at MultiPessoa 20th-century Portuguese poets Portuguese male poets Portuguese essayists 1890 births People from Tavira 1935 deaths Fictional poets Fernando Pessoa 20th-century essayists