“Walt Whitman and Pessoa.” In Chaos and Splendor by Eduardo Lourenço. (Translator). Dartmouth: University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. 2002.

[Excerpt]

What pacifies and makes Caeiro happy are not things but the affirmation of their real existence, the only answer to the game of infinite mirrors in which he would and does fix his radical feeling of the unreality of the Self, as if this reiterated affirmation (which is the very essence of Caeiro) would remove him from that perpetual and vain game of mirrors. In no dominion is the difference more profound between the vision of Walt Whitman and that of Pessoa than of erotic sensibility, in the broad meaning that sexuality and sensuality encompass. A difference all the more interesting since it is certain that Whitman was for Pessoa, without any doubt, the poet of anomalous eroticism, whose manifestation he comprehended and with which he had a translucid affinity. (from p. 59)