Notes on natural exile in Álvaro de Campos

Abstract

The aim of this text is to try to understand the notion of exile present in the verses of the book Vida e obras do Engenheiro (1990) by Alvaro de Campos. The poet's use of the word exile is actually closer to the idea of a wandering soul (as Teresa Rita Lopes says) than to the ordinary notion of exile – understood as ‘one who is distant from the place of belonging’.  Considering this, we will study the way in which the poet articulates the images evoked by this particular type of exile, which appears in the guise of natural exile (in a poem written in 06/01/1930) and then explore a series of other terms that echo throughout the book, such as: abandonment, exclusion, tourist, foreigner, stranger, forgetting and remembering. Although the focus of the analysis is the aforementioned book, we will also make use of other poems and notes from the Alvaro de Campos and passages from Fernando Pessoa's work. The idea is to establish possible connections between sociology and literature, using the discussion of the poet's writings as a main methodological approach.