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Chapter I

Introduction

Pablo Neruda‟s Beginnings

I have often maintained that the best poet is he who prepares our daily bread: the

nearest baker who does not imagine him to be a god. He does his majestic and

unpretentious work of kneading the dough, consigning it to the oven, baking it in

golden colors and handing us our daily bread as a duty of fellowship. And, if the poet

succeeds in achieving this simple consciousness, this too will be transformed into an

element in an immense activity, in a simple or complicated structure which constitutes

the building of a community, the changing of the conditions which surround mankind.

The handing over of mankind‟s products: bread, truth, wine, dreams

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Latin American Literature is the national literature of the Spanish speaking

countries of the Western Hemisphere. It also includes the literary expression of the

highly developed American Indian civilizations conquered by the Spaniards. Latin

American literature, over the years has developed a rich and complex diversity of

themes, forms, creative idioms and styles.

In language, Latin America, that part of the world which stretches from the

Rio Grande to Cape Horn, is not a single entity and never has been. This fact is

important for understanding the poetry written by Latin Americans. It is best to

consider giving some account of the nature, history and main works of Lain American

poetry. The term „Latin American‟ owes its origin to the designs of French foreign

policy in the late nineteenth century. Latin American poetry is a description of poetry

from Brazil and the Spanish American Republics written in Spanish or Portuguese.

Most people of the sub-continent have accepted, the metrics, prosody and

much of the literary vocabulary and rhetoric traditionally associated with the Spanish

or the Portuguese languages and through them with Latin and the classical world.

Partly due to the influence of the church, Latin remained an important literary

language. The Jesuit Rafael Landivar (1731-93) is recognized as one of the greatest

modern Latin poets.

Latin has been considered something prior and superior to the romance

languages like Spanish and Portuguese, which are derived from it. In both Saxon and

Latin America there is undoubtedly such a thing as a tradition of poets obsessed with

writing the song of their place. A poet defining his place and identifying himself `

within it, tells a good deal about the nature of Latin American poetry. To say when, in

time Latin American poetry became independent, one must first of all distinguish

between Spanish American and Brazil. Spanish American poetry has at most periods

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closely resembled Brazilian. Historically, they are considered to have „come of age‟ at

different moments. In both cases, however the phenomenon was called by the same

name: modernism.

Latino poetry has generally come to identify writing by different groups of

Latino heritage with the United States including Chicanos, Puerto Ricans and Cuban-

Americans. Latino poetry is best characterized by the works of Lorna Dee Cervantes,

Gianina Braschi, Pedro Pietri, Martin Espada and Alurista. It is written in English,

Spanish or any combination (including Spanglish). It is poetry written by poets in

South America and Central America. Latin Americans have written some of the

world‟s finest poetry in the twentieth century, as the Nobel Prizes awarded to Gabriela

Mistral, Pablo Neruda and Octavio Paz affirm.

A new literary movement swept through Latin America - modernism. Its

leader was the Nicaraguan Ruben Dario, the first great poet in the Spanish language.

Dario‟s poetic prose and poetry, “Blue,” 1888 is a watershed for both Latin American

and Spanish literature. Dario read Rimbaud‟s French symbolist poetry that one must

be absolutely modern. In that spirit Dario chose “modernism” as the name of his

movement. This meant writing poetry of uncompromising aesthetic beauty and

discarding the sentimentality and rhetoric of romanticism.

Dario experimented with metrics, with the accentuation of verse, with the

inner rhythm of prose, with rhyme and with asymmetrical stanzas to create a sonorous

musical language. His themes were often erotic in daring, decadent fashion. “Lay

Prose,” 1896 was scandalous. Dario‟s fellow modernistas, include the Cubans Jose

Marti and Julian del Casal, the Colombian Jose, Auscion Silva and the Mexican

Amado Nervo. All died relatively young, which curtailed the reach and duration of

the movement. “Simple Verses” (1891) of Marti were innovative, subtle and

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powerful. His essay “Once America” (1891) is a manifesto in favor of Latin American

cultural and political independence.

The next important artistic movement in Latin America was the avant-guarde

or the vanguardia. This movement reflected several European movements, especially

surrealism. The Latin American variants were distinctive and rich and produced

several masterworks in literature. Modernism had been a renovation of poetic form

and techniques, extending to the use of free verse. But, on the whole, the experiments

remained within accepted and traditional prosodic moulds. The vanguardia, on the

other hand, instituted a radical search for new, daring confrontational themes and

shockingly novel forms. These changes occurred at different pace in the various

genres.

The most daring and quick to adapt was poetry, clearly because it was aimed

at a smaller, more sophisticated and receptive audience. During the first half of the

twentieth century, Latin American literature was blessed with many fine poets:

Chileans Gabriela Mistral, Vicente Huidobro, Nicanor Parra, and Pablo Neruda,

Mexican Octavio Paz, Cuban Nicola‟s Guillen and Jose Lezama Lima, Puerto Rican

Luis Pales Matos, Argentines Jorge Luis Borges and Oliverio Girondo and

Nicaraguan Ernesto Cardenal. In the wake of modernism and against its own

innovations and aspirations, vanguardista poetry freed itself from prosodic constraints

and the pursuit of sublime beauty, choosing instead to seek the poetic in the prosaic

and to delve into the inner recesses of the self, no matter how dark. The premier poets

of the whole group were Neruda and Paz, Jorge Luis Borges and Jose Lizama Lima.

Latin America has a complex and prolific poetic tradition that is little known

outside its geographic and linguistic boundaries. Pablo Neruda has been translated

more than any other Latin American poet of the last decade. The poems are rendered

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into English in an inspired fashion by first-rate translators such as Elizabeth Bishop,

Galway Kinnell, W.S. Merwin, Alastair Reid, Mark Strand and Richard Wilbur. The

other all-star lineup of translators are Lysander Kemp, James Merrill, Robert Bly,

Samuel Beckett and Ursula K.K. Guin. Widely translated, he probably reached more

readers than any poet in history as he often said, his poet‟s obligation was to become a

voice for all those who had no voice. Poetry in Latin America is still serious business,

a valued sustenance.

A historical study of Latin American poetry explores the way Spanish and

Portuguese became the main language of aesthetic expression. In the Latin American

cultures poetry is deeply intertwined with people‟s lives:

From introspect to protest, spirituality to eroticism, the poets

illuminate first cultures, colonialism, tyranny, war, liberation and

love over the course of the cataclysmic twentieth century, praising

the beauty of the land and lamenting the elusiveness of justice.

(Tapscott)

The multilingual poetries from Latin America, are varied, robust and vividly

imaginative as any in the world. Starting from an expansive Latin American poetry of

the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century modernism and vanguardia

movements. Later revolutionary and liberation poetry of the 1960s, right up to the

experimental, visual and oral poetries are being written and performed today.

Several types of poetry thrived such as works written or chanted in their native

languages, the vibrant mixed creations derived from the rich matrix of spoken

language in Latin America and even the mysterious verses written in made-up

languages. The giants of Latin American poetry encompassed poets such as Caesar

Vallejo, Vincente Huidobro, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Haroldo and Augusto de

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Campos and Gabriela Mistral and lesser known poets such as Pablo de Rohka, Blanca

Varela and Cecilia Meireles. Their poetry was as diverse and complex as Latin

America itself.

Poetry was the soul of Latin America. Pablo Neruda was the most important

Latin-American poet of the twentieth century. Neruda‟s body of poetry is so rich and

varied that it defies classification or easy summary. Neruda has focused his poetry in

four different directions which are his love poetry, such as the youthful Twenty Love

Poems,(1924) his material poetry such as Residence on Earth,(1933) there is Neruda‟s

common poetry and finally his epic poetry represented by Canto General(1950).“I

confess, I have lived.” Pablo Neruda‟s biography is a testament of someone who

loved life, lived it and through this love he learned to understand that silence of

people is like a river which takes the poet down streams.

Neruda‟s poetic output is staggering: thousands of poems, some epic, some

short. Neruda‟s work moves briskly from style to style, mood to mood. There is no

one Neruda - he can be equally found in a love poem, in an ode to nature, in a

spacious historical sweep in a self-deprecating dig at his own profession or his body

and of course, in the great political poems of indignation, struggle and hope. If there is

anything that unites his massive oeuvre it is his love for the world, his passion for

small things such as seashells and for significant historical developments such as the

Spanish civil war.

Neruda was a poet so popular, so beloved because he has done everything

poetically. He has authored the most popular love poems of the Americas Twenty

Love Poems and a Song of Despair, he wrote some of the most imaginative and

influential surrealist poetry Residence on Earth. He has published some of the best

odes in poetic history Elemental Odes. Neruda has written an epic Canto General, he

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has penned love sonnets that rival Shakespeare One Hundred Love Sonnets(1952). He

has composed some of the most biting and most effective political poetry and he

wrote an achingly beautiful book of poems comprised entirely of questions. In Latin

America, Neruda was and is poetry.

Neruda‟s theme of love was the most written about and is evident in his One

Hundred Love Sonnets. His Residence on Earth, includes themes of societal decay

and personal seclusion, it is one of his more macabre political poems. Canto General

is a poem about north and South America that includes themes such as politics and

individual beliefs as was influenced by Walt Whitman. His surrealistic poems are

reflected by his quest for simplicity and the grief and despair he was experiencing at

the time.

Neruda‟s poetry was filled with both harmony and anguish, his poetry raged

with political energy and exploded with love for everything. Neruda‟s pursuit of

simplicity is evident in his poetry of everyday objects, such as his Elemental Odes.

His poetry reflects his life, his fervent love affairs, the nightmares and misery whilst

appointed with political power. The thematic essence of his poems is usually derived

from nature, whether it is nature and state, or nature and past, or even nature and

sovereignty. Poetry poured out of him energetically, Neruda had a passionate life

lived through poetry. The name‟ Neruda,‟ makes one think of the sea and South

America. He wrote odes to lemons and artichokes, elephants and socks. Nothing

escaped his rapturous attention. Of the love of women… there was no end. Night,

earth, stars, rain, sun … One can feel the heat in one‟s hand, coming off the pages.

Pablo Neruda, poet, political activist and a simple human being was

considered a legend in his lifetime and many think that after his death he got

resurrected more like a living heroic figure that inspired one and all. Neruda

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announces with complete firmness that nothing but poetry is gifted with intuition and

far sight. Neruda had tremendous faith in the power of poetry. He wrote thousands of

verses which were appreciated and memorized by the most common and ordinary

people of the Latin American continent. He says in his Memoirs:

When I wrote my first lonely books, it never entered my mind that

with the passing years I would find myself in squares, streets,

factories, lecture halls, theatres and gardens reading my poems. I

have gone into practically every corner of Chile, scattering my

poetry like seeds among the people of my own country (72).

Neruda has written about war and about machines, about cities and about

rooms about love and wine, about death and about freedom. Therefore to separate his

ethics from his aesthetics will mean distancing the man from his poetry. The power,

the passion and the soul of the man shines through his poems. Lover, political activist,

the voice of the common man - all this and more is with Pablo Neruda. Neruda‟s

writing was influenced by French, Russian and Latin American writers. However, he

declared that the writer who inspired him the most was the American poet Walt

Whitman. His life was full of adventure and intrigue and all these aspects are detailed

throughout his poems. Neruda the Chilean diplomat and celebrated poet of Latin

America, had his poems grounded in his romantic thinking, sensibility and sincerity.

Pablo wrote poems about the things he loved - things made by his friends in

the cafe, things found at the market place and things he saw in nature. He wrote about

the people of Chile and their stories of struggle, because above all things and above

all words, Pablo Neruda loved people. The emotional highs and lows of Neruda‟s life,

is clearly reflected in his poetry. Pablo Neruda was one of the greatest poets of the

twentieth century. Neruda created his poetic persona within his poems, by seeing his

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early work as self-exploration through metaphor and sound as well as through

varieties of love and direct experience. Quality and representation is grounded in his

romantic thinking, sensibility and sincerity. Neruda distilled all his experiences into

his poems, which remain his true biography. Neruda wrote poems on subjects ranging

from rain to feet. By examining common, ordinary, everyday things very closely

Neruda gives the reader time to examine a particular plant, a stone, a flower, a bird, an

aspect of modern life, at leisure.

Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), an esteemed craftsman, one of the most renowned

poets of the twentieth century was born in Parral, Chile. His mother died just weeks

later and his father discouraged his affinity for poetry, which he had displayed since

the age of ten. His father was a railroad worker, his mother a primary school teacher.

The first heartbreak of his life was that he never knew his mother, who died less than

two months after he was born. As he wrote in “The Birth”:

and that‟s where I‟m from, that

Parral of the trembling earth,

a land laden with grapes

which came to life

out of my dead mother. (2-6)

Neruda began writing poetry when he was fourteen years old and did not stop

until his death in 1973. Neruda spent a significant part of his life as an expatriate and

because of that he came to value his Latin American roots and to see Latin America as

a nation. Neruda benefited from a tradition among Latin American governments of

subsidizing authors through appointments to Foreign Service. He served in cities

around the world, an experience that profoundly shaped his vision, but he always

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returned to Chile with a renewed sense of wonder and called himself “a Chilean ever

and always.”

Neruda‟s real name was Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto and he took the pen

name of Pablo Neruda in memory of the Czech poet Jan Neruda, which he officially

adopted in 1946. „Pablo‟ is thought to be from Paul Verlaine. Born in Parral, in

central Chile‟s wine country, “where the vines curled their green heads of hair.” His

was a childhood of “wet shoes, broken tree trunks in the forest, devoured by lianas

and beetles” and his father‟s “golden beard ” (Feinstein). He was a literary prodigy,

first published at thirteen, translating Baudelaire before he attended university.

Neruda studied poetry with Gabriela Mistral, Chile‟s first Noble Laureate before he

became increasingly popular throughout Latin America for his own work. Although

his published poetry was widely respected by the time he reached twenty, Neruda

found it necessary to follow his budding political career to Asia in order to make a

living.

In Europe in the 1930s he became involved in communism, which influenced

his later poetry. In1946 he successfully campaigned in Chile for the regime of Gabriel

Gonzalez Videla, but he soon publicly expressed displeasure with Videla‟s Presidency

and was forced to flee his homeland for several years. Neruda was able to return to

Chile in 1952, finally both wealthy and widely respected. In 1971 he was awarded the

Nobel Prize for Literature. He died of cancer at the age of 69 on September 23, 1973.

By that time he was recognized as a national hero and the greatest Latin American

poet of the twentieth century. On December 13, 1971, the Nobel Prize committee

honored Pablo Neruda with its Prize in Literature, citing his “poetry that with the

action of an elemental force brings alive a continent‟s destiny and dreams.”

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The family moved to the frontier town of Temuco in Southern Chile, where

Neruda was raised in a land of powerful solitude, luxuriant nature and endless rain.

He adored his stepmother, whom he called „la mamadre‟ (The more-mother). Neruda

moved to the capital city of Santiago and published his first collection, Book of

Twilight or Crepusculario in 1923. Neruda‟s first collection of poem, is full of

feelings of emptiness and loneliness:

I like the love of sailors

who kiss and go their own way.

They leave behind a promise.

And never come back.

In every port a woman waits:

the sailors kiss and go their own way.

One day they sleep with death

on the sea bed. (16-23)

Such a restless seaman‟s life seems to prefigure Neruda‟s own urge to leave Santiago

and Chile, to explore other lands. He appears to find a sense of harmony in the sunset

which gives the book its title. He followed it a year later with the astounding Twenty

Love Poems and a Song of Despair, which instantly catapulted him to fame and is still

loved throughout Latin America. It is the first poetry in Spanish that unabashedly

celebrates erotic love in sensuous, earthly terms.

Neruda shared the World Peace prize with Paul Robeson and Pablo Picasso in

1950. Federico Garcia Lorca illuminates Neruda‟s commitment to using the pen as a

calibrator of his age. He rightly states “You are about to hear the authentic poet, one

who has forged himself in a world that‟s not ours, that few people perceive.” Among

the lasting voices of the most tumultuous century, a witness and a chronicler of its

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most decisive events, Pablo Neruda is world literature‟s most beloved poet and one of

Latin America‟s most revered writer - the emblem of the engaged poet, an artist

whose heart, always with the people is consumed by passion. His work, oscillating

from epic meditations on politics and history to intimate reflections on animals, food

and everyday objects, is filled with humor and affection.

Neruda was such a fresh, original voice in the world of poetry. His major

works include Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair a collection of poems

describing a lost love, Residence on Earth, a book of surrealist poetry inspired by

Neruda‟s travels in Southeast Asia and Canto General the ambitious fifteen part poem

cycle that tells the history of Latin America. “In his work a continent awakens to

consciousness,” so wrote the Swedish Academy in awarding the Noble Prize to him.

He is the author of more than thirty-five books of poetry, lionized during his lifetime

as “the people‟s poet.”

Pablo Neruda is regarded as the greatest Spanish-language poet of the

twentieth century. He was a very prolific and creative writer. His poems range from

erotically charged love poems, historical epics and overtly political poems, to poems

on common things like nature and the sea. Besides, he is the most widely read of the

Spanish American poets. Neruda was an international diplomat and a political activist,

because his life combined his passion for politics and poetry, enabling him to change

his society, socially and politically.

Neruda has been fortunate in his translators. His chief translator has been Ben

Belitt, whose anthology Five Decades: A Selection of Poems (1925-1970) provides an

excellent introduction to the range of Neruda‟s achievement. Belitt talks about the

problems and pleasures of translating Neruda in Adam’s Dream (1978). An

outstanding translation of “The Heights of Macchu Picchu” was made by Nicholas

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Tarn (1966). Excellent translations of various works have been made by Robert Bly,

Angel Flores, Alastair Reid, Donald Walsh and many others. Neruda has been the

subject of a vast amount of critical work, but most of it is available only in Spanish.

English readers begin with Rene de Costa‟s The Poetry of Pablo Neruda (1979), but

Robert Pring-Mill‟s introduction to his Pablo Neruda: a Basic Anthology (1975) also

provides a concise and valuable survey of Neruda‟s life and work. Valuable insights

into the poetry are provided by Neruda himself in his Memoirs, translated by Hardie

St. Martin (1976).

Neruda‟s body of poetry is rich and varied and defies classification. His love

poetry, such as the youthful Twenty Love Poems and the mature, The Captain’s

Verses are tender, sensuous, passionate and melancholic. In his material poetry,

Residence on Earth loneliness and depression immerse the author in a subterranean

world of dark and demonic forces. His epic poetry, Canto General is a Whitmanesque

attempt at reinterpreting the past and present of Latin America and the struggle of its

oppressed and downtrodden masses towards freedom. Finally, there is Neruda‟s

poetry of common, everyday objects, animals and plants, as in the odes. Many of his

poems reflect the shifting conditions under which he lived and have at heart a longing

for fixity, whether of place or of idea.

Neruda‟s love poetry can be described as being tender, melancholy, sensuous

and passionate, while his material poetry clearly talks about loneliness and

depression, showing that the author was coming out of a world of darkness and

unknown forces. With his epic poetry Neruda attempted to reinterpret the past and

present of many Latin American countries. His poems showed the struggle that the

individual of these countries had to go through in order to find his freedom. In his

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common poetry Neruda expressed his feelings and narrated about common events that

took place on daily basis. He described objects, animals and plants.

To read the poetry of Pablo Neruda is to feel the pulse and beat of life so

strongly, that his poems are living breathing beings. His language is that of the land

and of the body combined - love, death, life, the land, the world and Chile are his

subjects. “There is the texture of stone, the violence of water, the swiftness of wind,

the color of blood and the splinters of bone. It is poetry of fire and intensity that once

read will never be forgotten” (Ortiz). Neruda not only explains his views on poetry

and describes the circumstances that inspired many of his poems, but he creates a

revealing record of his life as a poet, a patriot and one of the twentieth century‟s true

men of conscience.

The four trends of Neruda‟s poetry correspond to four aspects of Neruda‟s

personality: his passionate love life, the nightmares and depression he experienced

while serving as a consul in Asia, his commitment to a political cause and his ever-

present attention to details of daily life, his love of things made or grown by human

hands. Many of his other books, such as Book of Questions, reflect philosophical and

whimsical questions about the present and future of humanity. Neruda was one of the

most original and prolific poets to write in Spanish in the twentieth century. But,

despite the variety of his output as a whole, each of his books has unity of style and

purpose.

Nobel Laureate Pablo Neruda explored many schools of thought, poetic styles

and voices, but his passion lay in finding and improvising upon basic rhythms of

perception to reveal unspoken and unspeakable truths. His poems reveal his love for

Chile - for its citizens, its flora and fauna and its national identity. His sincere poems

on love, anguish, nature, everyday experience, hopes for man and a vast repertory of

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themes, have garnered wider acclaim. He wrote about Latin American history and

landscapes, the simple beauty and depth of ordinary objects, but most memorably,

about love. In his lifetime, Neruda‟s works inspired lovers, politicians, the working

class and revolutionaries. Pablo once confessed that writing clearly had been one of

his most difficult poetic achievements.

Describing South America in an interview published in Robert Bly‟s Neruda

and Vallejo: Selected Poems, Pablo Neruda noted “rivers which have no names, trees

which nobody knows and birds which nobody has described... Everything we know is

new.” The poet‟s task as he puts it: “is to embrace the world around you, to discover

the new world.” To Pablo Neruda, “A poet can survive anything but a misprint” (Bly).

A poet who was able to tell it like it was and with the highest of touches, to stir the

hearts and minds of many who heard or read his poetry was the great Pablo Neruda. It

has been years and years since the world has seen a poet like Neruda, who ventured

out of his beloved homeland, “out of that landscape, that mind, that silence, to roam,

to go singing through the world” (Doshi).

For Neruda, poetry was a deep inner calling in man. It was a fight against

mystery, realism and absorption. Neruda‟s friend, the Spanish poet, Federico Garcia

Lorca‟s assassination in Granada, moved Neruda‟s poetry from out of the realms of

love into politics. Lorca called Neruda “closer to blood than ink.” But to classify

Neruda as a “political poet” is to take the aroma of wood out of him, to drain the

ocean out of his body. “I believe I was born not to pass judgement but to love,” he

writes in his Memoirs: “Besides me, everything that existed and continued always to

exist in my poetry : the distant sound of the sea, the cries of the wild birds and love

burning, without consuming itself, like an immortal bush.”

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Neruda travelled along the length and breadth of the earth scattering his poems

to men, only to return again and again to the colossal trees of his Andean forest where

“leaves have been falling for centuries” and where the roots are like “overturned

cathedrals.” For Neruda, the forced exile imposed upon him because of his political

leanings (he was an ardent communist) was difficult. He believed that everyman‟s

journey should always be homeward. He frankly explains in his Memoirs: “I believe a

man should live in his own country ... I cannot live without having my feet and my

hands on it and my ear against it … My life is a long pilgrimage that is always turning

on itself.” Neruda served in cities around the world an experience that profoundly

shaped his vision, but he always returned to Chile with a renewed sense of wonder

and called himself “a Chilean ever and always.” As intricate and intense as Neruda‟s

relationship to nature was his connection to people was equally magnetic. In his

Memoirs, he recalls special moments with each of them and with the ordinary people

he encountered on the streets. He did not want an isolated poetry that dealt with

sublime things while the earth around was shattering like broken glass. Pablo

Neruda‟s poems contributed to society by focusing and giving importance to the

social status of different sectors of society, in the chaotic political matters and the

passion he puts into writing.

Neruda, called as “Chile‟s wandering bard,” (Teitelboim 470) served

humanity with his poetry. Neruda remained an international figure throughout his life,

as well as an important force in Chilean politics. His extraordinary poetic talent and

his active social role made him a legendary and symbolic figure for intellectuals,

students and artists from all of Latin America. “The tension, the repression, the drama

of our position in Latin America doesn‟t permit us the luxury of being uncommitted,”

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he said. Accordingly, Neruda sparkled with a brilliance that was both fierce and

memorable.

Neruda sometimes tried to give political speeches during his many travels, but

the poor people he encountered would sometimes drown him out by shouting his

poetry at him. Isabel Allende, the Latin American novelist explained, “he was not a

political animal, he was a poet. His mind turned in poetry ... He was a man who spoke

in verse.” The famed poet Gabriela Mistral, told Neruda: “I was sick but I began to

read your poems and I‟ve gotten better, because I am sure that here there is indeed a

true poet.” Often called the “poet of enslaved humanity,” he was committed to politics

and social reform. His work includes sensuous love poems, dark, mysterious verses

about personal despair, epic poems about social injustice and direct humorous odes to

everyday objects.

Neruda remains an immense presence in poetry. His work contained

multitudes. He was a poet of freedom and the sea, a wondrous love poet, the singer of

an endlessly proliferating nature, a necessary voice of social consciousness. His work

is radiantly impure and obstinately humane. In his Memoirs, Neruda asserts:

Poetry is a deep inner calling in man; from it came liturgy, the

psalms and also the content of religions. The poet confronted

nature‟s phenomena and in the early ages called himself a priest, to

safeguard his vocation ... Today‟s social poet is still a member of

the earliest order of priests. In the old days he made his pact with

the darkness and now he must interpret the light. (Hirsch)

Neruda‟s poetic career was distinguished. His work, was at once personal,

national and universal. His poetry has been translated into more than twenty

languages including Esperanto. “One day ... Pablo‟s people ... will find in every stone,

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in every leaf, in every seagull‟s cry, the always living poetry of that man who loved

them so much” (Cortazar). The importance of this study lies in what it reveals about

Neruda‟s ideas of love, hope, dreams and desires. One can feel and agree that Neruda

has become much more than a legacy of poetry. Neruda‟s everyday life was imbued

with poetry. Even in his dreams, he is constantly inventing. Fuelled by an infectious

enthusiasm for Neruda‟s powerful poems, this thesis aims to bring together the study

of poetry and looking into Neruda‟s sumptuous love lyrics and examine his ability to

express this complex human emotion under a new light.

Why the choice of poetry? Poetry is a living thing. Poetry is a blessing to

those who appreciate it. It travels, affects and moves one beyond spiritless times and

Pablo Neruda‟s poems are sincere, uninvented and realistic. What better lens to

approach a civilization than through its poetry. Journalists offer firsthand account of

events and historians render pondered explanations of the forces behind the events.

But, it is left to poets to tackle the unexplainable, to survey the heart itself. Talking of

Latin America in the twentieth century, as it was a region in constant upheaval,

contrasting between an embrace of modernity and the downright rejection of it. The

only belief was that democracy and neo-liberalism could serve as panacea to cure the

deep rooted social, economic and political inequalities. The poets of the period were

also prophets, to see what was hidden and what has not happened. Yet, Latin

America without poetry is Latin America without a soul. After all, this is a region

where people see themselves as poets.

Poetry has always been a critical element of civilization, speaking to the great

themes of one‟s life - love, loss, the scourge of war and a sustained hope for peace.

Poetry puts one in touch with oneself, by its nature, addressing every human emotion.

The poet‟s universe is a densely populated universe. The space within his self is an

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open space where all forms of reality, dream and imagination, come and go and often

melt into the crucible of his self. A poem becomes an active meditation, a meditation

for the true nature of our being and becoming. Thoreau, the great thinker said that the

mass of men live lives of quiet desperation. Poetry seeks to invest the self, one‟s

activity of living, with gratitude and strip it of desperation so that the various aspects

of reality emerge clearly and language finds the ability to bring their multiple aspects

together into his imagination.

Speaking of poetry and its transformational role, St. John Perse a French poet

at the Nobel Banquet in Stockholm, in December 10, 1960 said: “It is action, it is

passion, it is power and always the innovation which extend borders. Love is its

hearth-fire, insurrection its law, its place is everywhere, in anticipation.” The times

are spiritless and darkening but man can go ahead with the humble courage to sing, to

write with the world and not to separate from it. Victoriano Huerta Marquez

President of Mexico (1850-1916) says: “for me, poetry is a spark in the nervous

system that can unfold through words.” Why Neruda? Well, he has done everything

poetically. Neruda‟s poems had so thoroughly saturated, captured and shared the

mystery and promise of poetry, inspiration, belonging and the cosmos. The attempt of

poetry is not only to discover the connection between the multiple hidden forms of

reality, but also to bring them within the fold of language. This is possible because a

poet is basically not one person but as Picasso said of himself: “a multitude.”

Pablo Neruda is a writer of many styles and many voices, his vast and varied

work, spanning more than half a century, is central to every major development in

Spanish and Spanish American poetry between 1920s and 1970s. Neruda was Nobel

Laureate, international diplomat and political activist all in one. To read Neruda is

above all a sensual experience, a contact with the humidity of wood and rain and a

20

vision of the wild landscapes of his beloved country. In reading Neruda the reader

enters the world of a poet who from the beginning has tried to liberate himself from

the too rational control of premeditated words and to create a kind of non-literary

literature where intuition and instinct are allowed to survive. Neruda used his pen to

denote, to denounce, to decry.

“Poetry must be useful, it must change the world,” says Neruda. The poet is a

singer who does not come to solve anything but to express … that which cannot

express itself ... Because he believes the poet should affirm the harmony between man

and the earth. “What Picasso is to paintings Neruda is to poetry, an original, prolific

artist wholly enlisted in his work and contributing the energy of his own evolution to

society‟s (Young 675). My purpose is to introduce Neruda to readers who have never

before read his poems. If they have read Neruda‟s work in the past, now may be a

good time to do so again. Neruda essentially remarked in his Memoirs: “Poetry is like

bread. It should be shared by all, by scholars and peasants, by all our vast, incredible,

extraordinary family of humanity.”

Neruda‟s poems make one feel like there is music and drama and poetry in

living. Every time I read it, I catch my breath; I am swept by it all over again. My

thesis, plumbs the earthly depth and social breadth of the poetry of Neruda, the most

ambitious and epic-minded poet. His poems tap the foundational powers of language

before a natural world deeply imbued with the traces of human time. Neruda could

find a poem in anything and everything from scissors to joy, to sadness to the sea. The

great Chilean poet Neruda once wrote in The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, “poetry is song

and fertility.” Greg Haymes, writes “one could get lost in Neruda‟s poetry and live

among the emotions and thoughts shared. Neruda seems to relate poetry, or art, as

being one with the universe.” To Neruda: “poetry is an act of peace. Peace goes into

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the making of a poet as flour goes into the making of bread.” Neruda produces poems

as “internally and necessarily as exhaling” (Felstiner 251). Neruda‟s poetry is

enjoyable and his ideals admirable. Neruda writes fluently, easily, abundantly poetry

of enthusiasms and attitudes that are ready at hand in the world, not poetry of facts,

perceptions and difficult knowledge. “Neruda works in the middle style, with a

middle consciousness and what he writes belongs to literature” (Christ 198).

I agree, as Stephen Mitchell says, making a selection from Neruda‟s

abundance was like standing in some treasure cave from, The Thousand and One

Nights: “coffer and urns over-brimming with jewels lay all around me, but my

companion Genie said I was only allowed to fill my own pockets…I just took what I

loved most.”And here, I offer the most loved of Neruda‟s verses. Neruda left

thousands of poems, a handful of which are of such inspired beauty as to justify the

very existence of the Spanish language. Adolescents routinely give his Twenty Love

Poems and a Song of Despair, to their sweethearts. His ideological verses have been

read aloud, often from memory, in one revolution after another, from the fall of the

Berlin Wall to the embers of the Arab Spring. Some of Neruda‟s poems, “I Ask for

Silence,” “Walking Around,” “Ode to the Artichoke” have been rendered into English

repeatedly, each version is another effort to make him current and vital to a new

generation.

Although Neruda may be most strongly remembered in the popular

imagination for his romantic poetry, he is much more than just a poet of love. His

oeuvre was varied and plentiful – from the yearning cosmic love poetry of Twenty

Love Poems and a Song of Despair to the visceral and politically charged Residence

on Earth or the delectably simple Elemental Odes – he was a poet of constant self-

awareness and redefinition. The persistent themes of Latin American poetry were

22

social protest and exploitation, the migratory experience, self-exploration or self-

definition. Latin American poetry is as diverse and complex as Latin America itself.

Neruda has made its world laugh, cry and even despair with his poetry. He was a man

of countless words and adoration of life, love and land. He was such a fresh, original

voice in the world of poetry.

“I confess, I have lived,” Pablo Neruda‟s biography is a testament of someone

who loved life, lived it and through this love he learned to understand that silence of

people is like a river which takes the poet down streams. On receiving the Nobel

Prize, Neruda had said that the poet must achieve a balance “between solitude and

solidarity, between feeling and action, between the intimacy of one‟s self, the

intimacy of mankind and the revelation of nature.”

Canto General was published in Mexico in 1950. It consists of approximately

two hundred and fifty poems brought together into fifteen literary cycles and

constitutes the central part of Neruda‟s production. Shortly after its publication, Canto

General was translated into some ten languages. Nearly all of these poems were

created in a difficult situation, when Neruda was living abroad. “No poet has more

passionately and thoroughly spoken for his people than Neruda.” Dean Rader an

English Professor at the University of San Francisco wrote, citing Canto General,

tracing the history of Latin America: “It is an insanely ambitious project that seemed

to unify a country.”

Canto General, is the greatest expression of all that Neruda stood for, both in

terms of his ideological commitment and artistic mastery. Pablo Neruda was

renowned for his vast literary output and categorizing his work as love poetry only,

does not do justice to his epic range which encompassed his humanity and passionate

love for history, his country and politics. Neruda himself once wrote: “I have a pact of

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love with beauty: / I have a pact of blood with my people.” Neruda‟s poems consisted

of many different themes from „erotically charged‟ love poems, surrealist poems,

historical epics and overtly political manifestos to more common poems more about

nature and the sea. The theme of love is evident in Neruda‟s One Hundred Love

Sonnets. His poetry was filled with both harmony and anguish his poetry raged with

political energy and exploded with love for everything.

Neruda‟s pursuit of simplicity is evident in his poetry of everyday objects such

as his Elemental odes. His poetry reflects his life, his fervent love affairs, the

nightmares and misery when appointed with political power. The thematic essence of

his poems usually derived from nature, whether it is nature and state or nature and

past, or even nature and sovereignty. His Elemental Odes was heralded for their

insightful brand of simplicity. Neruda‟s greatest literary success was his ability to

approach the grandoise and the minute, the tragic and the joyous, with equal patience

and reverence. Neruda‟s poetry is enjoyable and his ideals admirable. His poetry

reflects his principles through his close relationship with nature and strongly

expressed ideas of communism. Neruda Willard in his Radiant Bread for the Sun of

Man, remarks perfectly: “He is a phantom, a man invaded by stones, wool, elevators,

gardens and eyeglasses. Everything that strikes his senses penetrates to his heart.”

Neruda‟s literary development received assistance from unexpected sources.

Among his teachers “was the poet Gabriela Mistral, who would be a Nobel Laureate

years before Neruda,” reported Manual Duran and Margery Safir in Earth Tones: The

poetry of Pablo Neruda: “It is almost inconceivable that two such gifted poets should

find each other in such an unlikely spot. Mistral recognized the young Neftali‟s talent

and encouraged it by giving the boy books and the support he lacked at home.”

Neruda‟s influence on twentieth century poetry worldwide and his experimentation

24

with poetic forms have given him the name of the Picasso of poetry. Humor,

surrealism, political invective, tenderness, rhapsodic celebration of human existence

in all its diverse particulars – such are the elements out of which Neruda‟s poetry

emerges. His poetry also comes from a life and an era of history that were dramatic in

their dangers and their choices. If Neruda resembles any other poet it is probably most

of all Whitman in the sense of his openness, his embracing of everything and

everybody. What enabled Neruda to make poems of everything from salt and

tomatoes to a movie theatre in winter or a train in the rain was a passionate instinct for

beauty and an inexhaustible curiosity before things.

Neruda‟s poems are full of life and energy, focused towards life. Words,

objects and poetic structures generate his poems reflecting simultaneously his

personality and concerns. Neruda‟s poems have beauty, originality and freshness,

leaving the reader with the sense of a certain way of seeing the world, with a flavor of

reality. Neruda‟s poetry is a momentary thought, a short instant of excess, with

dynamics and intentions. As a poet, Neruda identified with the magical sound of

words. The sound of a word is part of its reality and voicing words in rhythmic

poems was Neruda‟s gift to the reader. In 1963 Neruda called himself an “essential

poet of our extensive America.”

In some of the poems Neruda goes below the surface of life, with its poisoned

flowers, snakes and waterfalls that he loves to describe. Neruda knows that his life as

a poet is associated with the jungle and that his growth resembled a jungle‟s: “when I

picked out the jungle to learn how to be, leaf by leaf, I went on with lessons and

learned to be root, deep clay, voiceless earth, transparent night and beyond that, bit by

bit, the whole jungle” (Memoirs). Neruda‟s growth was amazing, he does find, the

secret route that allows him to leaf out, exfoliate, become more and more moist and

25

massive, until his work includes the poor, wristwatches, rabbits and the history of

South America.

During his long literary career, Neruda produced more than forty volumes of

poetry, translations and verse drama. “He was once referred to as the Picasso of

poetry, alluding to his protean ability to be always in the vanguard of change” (Costa).

In Chile, everybody knew Neruda and everybody had read Neruda: miners,

housewives, bakers, maids and school children. To his beloved Chilean people, to so

many Latin Americans, Neruda is still the source of tremendous pride. Even as a

teenager, witnessing the injustices against the indigenous and working class to which

he was exposed, Neruda felt the poet‟s calling: an obligation, a duty, a debt he owed

to give voice to the people through his poetry. He promised a commitment to

humanitarianism , using literature to enrich, empower and engage in the pursuit of

progressive social change.

Neruda invented a new poetic voice, distinctively Americano, rooted in Latin

America‟s native cultures and untamed geography. From the first decades of the

twentieth century, he wrestled poetry down from the rarified atmosphere of the salon

and gave it to the people, a communal voice rooted in oral tradition, fired, by raw

passion and the struggle for justice. He is one of history‟s greatest examples of a

soul-rebel who used his pen as his sword in his constant fight for a better world. His

poems range from painfully intense introspection to fiery political rhetoric, yet a

clarity of poetic vision and emotional conviction is found throughout his work.

Neruda understood the necessity of writing poetry to be accessible,

particularly to the lower class and for this reason he wrote in the language of everyday

life. Neruda‟s voice is the voice of the working class, the voice of peasants and

factory workers, ordinary people whose perspectives were often ignored. This

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expression and use of language was highly influential in spreading his views on social

justice and equality. Neruda adopted green ink as his trademark, he allowed, the green

vibration to nurture his writing. The ups and downs in Neruda‟s personal life led him

to seek out and attempt to describe the essence of life. It was in this quest for

understanding and oneness that he most closely resembled and sometimes mimicked

Whitman. John Leonard declared in the New York Times, Neruda was, “I think, one of

the great ones, a Whitman of the South.”

Neruda is everywhere. Neruda‟s “poetry like bread” legacy became popular in

literary reviews and anthologies, on compact discs and prime time TV. The message

is simple. Poetry is like bread and when it is shared, the nation will be whole.

Neruda‟s poetry promotes a vision of communion, community, hope and wonder.

His hopeful inspiration has brought together the diverse voices of celebrities as Julia

Roberts, Wesley Snipes, Madonna and Andy Garcia, with a strong passion for

Neruda‟s poetry. Their distinct perspectives and range of emotions, in their poetry-

reading will pause the listeners to reflect, enjoy and be inspired by Neruda‟s

inspiration.

Neruda‟s periods of happiness were interspersed with times of extreme

depression, which often resurfaced during his travels in Europe and Asia. He was

often forced by politics or financial troubles to abandon his friends, his country and

even his wives: in such times the passion he had reserved for these loves often turned

inward and resulted in a gnawing loneliness. The ups and downs in Neruda‟s personal

life led him to seek out and attempt to describe the essence of life

Neruda wrote in a variety of styles including surrealist poems, historical epics,

overtly political manifestos, a prose autobiography and love poems such as the ones in

his 1924 collection Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. Colombian novelist

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Gabriel Garcia Marquez once called him “the greatest poet of the twentieth century -

in any language.” During the late 1960s, Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges was

asked for his opinion of Pablo Neruda. Borges stated, “I think of him as a very fine

poet, a very fine poet ...” “A poet,” Neruda stated in his Stockholm speech of

acceptance of the Nobel Prize, “is at the same time a force for solidarity and for

solitude.”

Neruda‟s Residence on Earth contains some of Neruda‟s most extraordinary

and powerful poetry. The Spanish poet Garcia Lorca called Neruda “a poet closer to

death than to philosophy, closer to pain than to insight, closer to blood than to ink. A

poet filled with mysterious voices that fortunately he himself does not know how to

decipher.” Reflecting on the life and work of Neruda in the New Yorker, Mark Strand

commented, “there is something about Neruda - about the way he glorifies

experience, about the spontaneity and directness of his passion - that sets him from

other poets. It is hard not to be swept away by the urgency of his language and that‟s

especially so when he seems swept away.” The earlier stylistic experimentation of

Residence on Earth gave way to the later ideological dissent of Songs of Protest and

Neruda became an adamant, self-styled champion of the dignity of ordinary men and

women.

Neruda has an extraordinary command over words and a talent for a powerful

and expressive use of language. Neruda‟s poetry covers a wide range of topics, love,

nature, introspection, history, society, politics and exhibits a wide range of different

modes of composition. Predmore writes: “The tones of Pablo Neruda‟s poems are a

river of red poppies, the earth, red wine, horses‟ breaths, rain and silver stones.”

The purpose of my thesis, is to study Neruda‟s poems, particularly his poetic

love metaphors and his conceptualization of emotion, by various love scenarios

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throughout the poet‟s select love lyrics. It is the aim of this thesis to put forward an

original interpretation of the poet‟s love language, breath-taking odes, his love

sonnets, his celebrated poems of the sea and his poems of social consciousness. The

thesis will explore the magical world of the Nobel Prize winner, everything he loved

and wrote of nature as well as objects of all descriptions and ultimately, the man

himself.

My thesis is divided into five chapters. The Introduction, Chapter I reviews a

series of central points concerning the origins of Latin American literature and poetry

in particular, up to the first half of the twentieth century. The premier poets of the

whole group are discussed along with the diverse and complex giants of Latin

American poetry. The lasting voices, of this tumultuous century are ultimately

distilled in Neruda‟s voice and fascination in the world of poetry. Attention is focused

in Chapter II on the phenomenological implications, such as the entrenchment of the

emotion of love and its embodiment in Neruda‟s sumptuous love lyrics. Neruda‟s

capacity for joy and reverence toward life is evident in works such as Twenty Love

Poems and a Song of Despair. Neruda writes about love‟s longing and despair, as

synthesized in his staple phrase: “Love is so short, forgetting is so long.” The way

Neruda glorifies experience, the spontaneity and directness of his passion, sets him

apart from other poets. The power of poetry, the passion and the soul of the man,

shines through these poems. This collection of love poems was controversial for its

eroticism. The book catapulted Neruda to glory. Chapter III presents the functioning

and characteristics of Neruda‟s select fanciful odes. The odes, with their simple

language and celebration of ordinary life, are indeed poetry for the people, a

reconciliation of art and ideas with the concreteness of life. Neruda writes plainly in a

sense that appeals to the reader‟s own emotional, personal connection to ordinary

29

material objects. He is a writer who communicates powerfully with the common man

and woman.

The Ode to Common Things was written towards the end of Neruda‟s life in a

voice steeped in the wisdom of a life experienced in the greatest joys and sorrows of

the twentieth century. The odes convey the poet‟s vision of the realities of day-to-day

life. Neruda's odes inspires the celebration of common things, leads one through

colorful descriptions, captivating scenes, surprising realizations and peaceful

transformative conclusions. Pablo Neruda's odes remain among his most beloved

poems. Written during his middle life, they examine ordinary things, nouns, both

concrete and abstract. Their common link is appreciation. The odes are funny, fiery

and exultant, savagely new and profoundly ancient.

Chapter IV highlights and designs Neruda‟s love sonnets and his poems about

the sea. These sonnets are the love poetry inspired, in his mature years by his muse

and wife, Matilde Urrutia, showcasing a mature shared love. The thesis includes a few

chosen sonnets on the basis of diversity and representation . Pablo in his odes is

hoping for social equality and his own fractured vision of democracy. As a poet of the

people, he is connecting the plight of the people to the sea and its power, dwarfing

human abilities. Pablo loved the playful anarchy of the sea - creative, destructive and

ceaselessly moving. He loved the marriage of wind, water and sand and found

inspiration in the crashing fury and freedom of the waves, the seabirds on the coast,

the endlessness of the blue sky: “I need the sea because it teaches me,” he wrote.

Chapter V is a summation of this greatest Latin American poet of the

twentieth century. The final chapter distills, weighing his poetry, his poetic method

and his social consciousness. Neruda‟s essential voice as a social poet, with dizzying

details of his life, the humanity of his work, the nobility of his spirit has established

30

him as a powerful Chilean poet. This chapter further, describes and details his voice

of social consciousness and his meteoric success in world poetry. Pablo Neruda states

“the poets‟ task,” as he puts is “to embrace the world around you, to discover the new

world.” Neruda believed poetry could change the world and he knew that well-

crafted, passionate poetry could under the right circumstances create aesthetic,

political and cultural revolutions. A good amount of Neruda‟s poetry speaks out

against oppression, against the people and encourages social reforms. Neruda‟s

rapport with the masses was evident in every poem he spoke. In his frenzied yet

wonderful life, Pablo Neruda gave a great deal of importance to the social status of

different sectors of society. He shows concern to the social status, through his desire

to give justice to the people who were affected by the rude and unjust people in his

social order.

Pablo Neruda possessed an extraordinary connection to his surroundings and

was able to transpose that connection through his poetry. It is an incredible testimony

to his life and work that his poetry and image continues to be appropriated in the

twenty first century. From humble beginnings, Neruda rose to become much more

than a legacy of poetry. He brought a voice to the people who had the most difficulty

being heard. He overshadows other Chilean poets. He is more than Chile - he is an

important poet for the world. To Neruda, writing about the workers, writing about the

masses, was a consequence of his emotions. His poems are the expression of an

absolute sincerity. Neruda wrote about his love of the world around him: sometimes

about love, other times about curiosity, and eventually about human injustice and

protest. Neruda was the poet, for violated human dignity. His goal was to speak for

the speechless and sing for the mute.

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More than forty years after Pablo Neruda‟s death, his poetry continues to be

read all over the world. His range is vast, from the lyricism of Twenty Love Poems

and a Song of Despair and the melancholy of Residence on Earth to the direct

simplicity of the Elemental Odes and the epic grandeur of the Canto General. Pablo

Neruda is one of the most widely read poets in the world. He was a man with legions

of friends, he loved and wrote about everything in nature as well as objects of all

descriptions. He was a man of great warmth and complex thought. His poems haunt

and inspire. Much of Neruda‟s formative reading was from French literature, part of

his Latin American generation‟s inheritance of French as the language of culture”: If

you ask me what poetry is, I must answer: I don‟t know. / But if you ask my poetry

it‟ll tell you who I am” (Santi 13).

My research shares the belief that poetry is vital to language and living. This

study exposes my love and gratitude to Neruda‟s belief and counsel which form the

bread of each day and which gave me the impetus to research Neruda. The list of his

poems is dizzying. Neruda writes with passion - but not only about love - he writes

about himself, his feelings, his political view, his surroundings and he writes about the

common things that he sees and he believes that they are special enough to write

about them. Each poem is a self contained anecdote enlisting object, emotion or

location to convey a story beneath a story. Some moments touch upon the political

while others are personal. Neruda‟s work reflects in many ways the twentieth century

history of poetry in the Spanish language.

Dominic Moran in his Concise Biography of Neruda shows how rarely the life

and work of the poet was intimately and dramatically bound up. He discusses

Neruda‟s lyrics written during his early years in his native Chile and the hypnotic

verses he composed during his later solitary years as a diplomat based in the Far East.

32

Moran shows in this absorbing study, Neruda‟s real poetry, classified among the

greatest of the age. There really is a Neruda for everyone, there is Neruda the love

poet, Neruda the surrealist poet, the poet of historical epic, Neruda the political poet,

Neruda the poet of common things, with the odes, the poet of love sonnets, the poet of

the sea. But, throughout it all, Neruda had first of all, “a great compassion for other

human beings, no matter whichever phase of his career we are talking about. And

secondly, a deep appreciation of the fact of being alive, which again we see at every

stage for Neruda” (Brown).

Neruda‟s poems embody what T.S.Eliot, in 1933, articulated as the „auditory

imagination,‟ in terms of how a poet penetrates far below the „conscious levels of

thought and feeling‟ and sinks to the „most primitive and forgotten, returning to the

original and bringing something back‟ (Eliot 118-19). Neruda deliberately wanted his

poems to mimic popular songs (like tango): “my old desire, to make a poetry of the

heart, that consoles afflictions like popular songs and tunes, like the music of cities”

(Olivares 305). Neruda convinced his reader that he became a poet before he could

write poems: that he was a natural poet. This organic, romantic notion of the birth of a

poet could be derived from Neruda‟s isolation in Temuco. It clearly ties in with the

omnipresence of nature, the wind, and the rain drops from leaking roofs, the waves

and forest of this frontier region. But, more crucially, it evokes the „auditory

imagination.‟ “Neruda has tried to think the unthinkable, to find a language to evoke

experiences” (Corriente).

The objective, of my thesis is to offer an image of Neruda‟s poetic arc, only a

selected few significant poems, have been chosen from his astonishing oeuvre. It

consists of only a little of Neruda‟s abundance, in every period of his career. Greg

Dawes in his Verses against the Darkness: Pablo Neruda’s Poetry and Politics was

33

committed to understanding Neruda as a poet and illustrating how Neruda‟s

dialectical poetry gradually emerged out of the horrors of the Spanish Civil War and

World War II. As Dawes writes: “Neruda became a communist without surrendering

the quality of his poetry” (85). He speaks on Neruda‟s politically committed poetry.

But my focus and insights are more on Neruda‟s role as Latin America‟s bard of love

and a forceful propagandist, rather than a politically committed poet.

Feinstein‟s biography Pablo Neruda: A Passion for Life is fuelled by

enthusiasm for the poems of Neruda. Neruda was an immensely complex man.

Neruda felt that man and writers, above all had a duty to embrace life and

commitment to seeking social justice. Chouinard says in The Poetry of Pablo Neruda:

“Neruda‟s call for human solidarity had real potency.” Neruda‟s poetry exerted an

enormous influence throughout Latin America and he remains beloved in his native

Chile. “Neruda is famous today as in his lifetime, for his sensuous songs of love, his

tender odes to the sea, his melancholy lyrics of loss and his fiery political statements”

(Moran).

Pablo Neruda, Latin America‟s best known poets, is adored by readers for the

passionate love lyrics written during his early years in his native Chile and respected

by critics for the dark, hypnotic verses he composed during his later, solitary years as

a diplomat based in the Far East. As Dominic Moran shows in his Concise Biography

of Neruda, rarely have the life and works of a writer been so intimately and

dramatically bound up as they are in Neruda. Moran takes a detailed and critical look

at this relationship, focusing as much on what the poetry sometimes strategically hide

about Neruda the poet, the lover and the political activist, as what it reveals. Jason

Wilson‟s a companion to Pablo Neruda: Evaluating Neruda’s Poetry paints a

34

fascinating picture of one of the most prodigiously gifted literary figures of the

twentieth century.

This Companion tries to establish by looking closely at how Neruda created

his poetic persona within his poems. The Companion outlines a unity behind all the

work, based on voice and a public self, by seeing his early work as self exploration

through metaphor and sound, as well as through varieties of love and direct

experience. Neruda‟s debt to reading is studied in depth. Debate about quality and

representation is grounded in his romantic thinking, sensibility and sincerity. And

Neruda‟s true biography, is all his experiences, distilled into his poems.

Jason Wilson‟s Companion to Pablo Neruda, is an inevitable biographic

approach and follows Neruda‟s „main collections,‟ to enable the reader to „grasp the

outline of his output.‟ Wilson discuses Neruda as a reader, the influence other literary

figures had on his works and Neruda‟s poetic change from a romantic love poet to a

socially committed one. Twenty Love Poems are analyzed and critically appraised in

great depth. Margaret Sayers Peden‟s Selection of Odes is the most extensive review

to appear in English. She vividly conveys the poet‟s vision of the realities of day-to-

day life in her translations. In the introduction she describes the genesis of the poems.

The odes reflect what Neruda saw as both “an obligation and a privilege - the naming

and defining of his world” (Peden).

Neruda held positions of high power. Some of the positions he held were

consul of Spanish immigration, Consul General in Mexico, Senator of Chile‟s

Republic, Chilean Ambassador to France and a nomination for Chile‟s President.

Neruda received numerous prestigious awards, including the International Peace prize

in 1950, the Lenin Peace prize and the Stalin Peace prize in 1953 and the Nobel prize

for Literature in 1971.

35

Neruda‟s first post, which he chose at random, was in Rangoon, Burma, where

he was cut off from his language, his culture and his history. Profoundly estranged

from everything around him: “Surrounded by destructions, deaths, ruined things…

blocked by difficulties and impossibilities he wrote to a friend, he began to write the

harsh, ferociously surreal poems that would bloom into Residence on Earth”. These

poems reflect ancient terrors and modern anxieties, his near-religious desolation, “It

so happens I am sick of being a man,” he confesses in “Walking Around”:

I don‟t want so much misery.

I don‟t want to go on as a root and a

tomb,

alone under the ground, a warehouse with

corpses,

half frozen, dying of grief. (22-27)

Neruda had slowly developed a vision of un-alienated man, of justice and equality.

“The world has changed and my poetry has changed,” he said in 1939. He left behind

a vast legacy of poems and narrative drama, each of which reflect a period in his life.

From his love for communism, to his later coming to question it and himself - to his

love for his native land, as well as south America as a whole - to his love of his wife

and of the beauty and grace of women, Neruda was well-rounded, well-versed and

well-respected.

My thesis contains selected poems which reflect Neruda‟s resonant,

exploratory, intensely individualistic verse, rooted in the physical landscape and

people of Chile. This selection includes sensuous songs of love, tender odes to the

sea, melancholy lyrics of heartache, fiery social concern and a frank celebration of

sex. My study fathoms and engages with Neruda‟s enticing, distinctive collection of

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poetry, where his love encompasses every other aspect of life. His „love‟ for Chile,

nature, sea, common things of life and ultimately his „love‟ for love.

Pablo Neruda has long been celebrated as a poet of love and of the sea, of the

people, of the rain, the stones and the birds always keeping his formidable centre

through his transmigrations from one book to the next. Neruda grows even stronger as

a poet of the hand, the hand that joins the hammer and the nail, the minerals and the

grinder, the threads of the fresh shirt and the bread of the street. Pablo‟s hands

integrate experience, intellect, intuition and feeling into a poetry that unites people of

different languages and cultures by giving voice to his longing and to theirs. His

poems are extensive, exciting and vibrant and yet each poem is refreshing, compelling

and new.

Even though Neruda was a happy poet, from time to time he used to let his

imagination fly and explored the dark sides of the world. Neruda is politically, a fierce

and essential critic of the twentieth century international affairs. In his poems one

finds a balance of romance, genuine human experience and more mind-altering

simplicities than most poets conceive in a lifetime. He was once noted by the

NewYork Times as “the most influential and inventive poet of the Spanish Language.”

Neruda served humanity with his poetry, which was fresh and original. He spanned

the century and the globe with the power of his poetry, his humanism, his sheer

pleasure in being alive clearly committed to social and political justice.