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CHAPTER V
Conclusion
Chile‟s Greatest Literary Hope and Glory
I don‟t want to be a
revolutionary in poetry ; I don‟t have a
poetic doctrine; I don‟t have a poetic
ideology. I am a poet by vital, biological
need and that is my whole doctrine ...
And in the marvellousness of the world I
find also cataloged the struggle of
mankind for a future ... to try to find a
contradiction between different senses,
that‟s what I don‟t understand
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No other modern poet received as much international recognition as Pablo
Neruda, for in his poetry he addressed universal concerns, writing passionately about
love, nature, the beauty of his homeland, Chile and the human condition. He was a
great humanitarian and poet. His compassion for the working man and the ordinary
citizen was startling. He believed strongly in the basic goodness of man. He sought to
create a better world for everyone and worked for peace. His work is extensive, more
so than most poets of the modern day and yet each poem is refreshing, compelling and
new.
Neruda was a poet respected throughout the educated population of Chile.
Through his poems Neruda is hoping for social equality and a fractured vision of
democracy. As a poet of the people, he is connecting their plight to the sea and its
power, dwarfing human abilities. As a writer Neruda covered everything from the
Spanish Civil war to artichokes, from the history of America to the vicissitudes of
love. In the latter part of his life, Neruda‟s approach to poetry took a major shift,
focusing on his passion for justice and the social relevance of his poetry, whilst
incorporating the personification and imagery of natural elements.
Pablo Neruda was a very successful figure politically and poetically. He was a
legendary poet and citizen of conscience. He placed poetry as an uncompromising
speaker for the down trodden. This thought provoking summation of the power of
Neruda‟s poetry will account for a hundred years in the life of a restless continent.
Neruda‟s alluring and seductive verses give a glimpse of a poetic tradition, through
translation, it has blend across borders to soak into one‟s own. Pablo Neruda, the
Nobel Prize winning poet of Chile, was much revered in his country, Chile. He was
known not only as a poet of love, but as a poet of the people, speaking for the
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oppressed and against the oppressors. In the Latin American cultures poetry is deeply
intertwined with people‟s lives.
Neruda‟s poems were an attempt to discover and explain truths across separate
themes. Such works tended to combine nature with nation, with history and with
freedom. Neruda‟s credo, is best stated in his Nobel Prize speech:
I believe that poetry is an action, ephemeral or solemn, in which
there enter as equal partner‟s solitude and solidarity, emotion and
action, the nearness to oneself, the nearness to mankind and to the
secret manifestations of nature. And no less strongly I think that all
this is sustained… by an every-wider sense of community, by an
effort which will forever bring together the reality and the dreams
in us because it is precisely in this way that poetry unites and
mingles them.
All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we
are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and
silence in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can
dance our clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song - but in this
dance or in this song there are fulfilled the most ancient rites of our
conscience in the awareness of being human and of believing in a
common destiny.
Neruda 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 fundamental belief was that
the common man, the worker, the poor, deserved a seat at the table as much as
anybody else as expressed in “The Great Table Cloth”:
Let us sit down soon to eat
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with all those who haven‟t eaten;
…For now I ask no more
than the justice of eating. (11-20)
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”
(Eisner). He promised a commitment to humanitarianism, using literature to enrich,
empower and engage in the pursuit of progressive social change. Neruda‟s words
appeal to us not as intellectual feats of intricacy, but as descriptions of the real world,
of our common world. The beauty of his figurative language stems from the unique,
twisted reality it conveys. Neruda recreates and reveals that which we thought we
knew. Neruda‟s poetry is not only rich and moving, evocative and stirring but raised
the public conscience to the realities of the injustices facing not only Latin America,
but the entire world. Neruda‟s new poetic voice, distinctively „Americano‟ rooted in
Latin America‟s native cultures and untamed geography.
From the first decades of the twentieth century, Neruda 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. As intensely
acknowledged as he is, Pablo Neruda led a personal, political and literary life in
extremely controversial, epic proportions. The best of his poetry celebrates love,
nature and human experience: “He was once referred as the Picasso of poetry,
alluding to his protean ability to be always in the vanguard of change. And he himself
has often alluded to his personal struggle with his own tradition, to his constant need
to search for a new system in each book” (Costa). A surrealist, Neruda revitalized
everyday expressions and employed bold metaphors in free verse. His evocative
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poems are filled with grief and despair and bespeak a quest for simplicity. They
celebrate the dramatic Chilean landscape and rage against the exploitation of the
indigenous people. In his writings and during his political career as a leader of the
Chilean Communist party (which he joined in 1945) and as a diplomat, Neruda
exerted a wide influence in Latin America.
Neruda‟s later life oscillates between moments of vulnerable reflection on his
own life and work, bitter condemnation of the violence of the twentieth century and a
prophetic poetic voice. Neruda was ultimately certain that his work as a writer was
vital. Neruda feels winter as a final season, a season of introspection and solitude.
From the centre of his winter garden, Neruda proclaims an irrevocable faith in the
arrival of a new season, a new spring which converts, the residue of the winter into
the roots of new resurrections. “Like nature, the poet recognizes himself as part of the
same regenerative process, in which to die is also to be born, or reborn” (Alazraki 45).
Neruda was such a Chilean, such a Latin American, in how much he cared for
his country, continent and its people. They were his cause, his pride and the most
important audience for his poetry. Though he constantly travelled, he would always
return to Chile. When the Chilean novelist Isable Allende fled her country after
Pinochet‟s coup, she could not take much with her, but an old edition of Pablo
Neruda‟s book of poetry. Isabel opens her narration of the documentary, Pablo
Neruda: The Poet’s Calling: “ Like the bag of earth, with Neruda‟s words I was
taking a part of Chile with me, for Neruda was such a part of my country, such a part
of the political dreams destroyed that day.”
The ace Chilean poet in the poem on “Keeping Quiet,” emphasizes on selfrealization and makes an appeal for peace among mankind. This simple poem is about
the exigency of self analysis and introspection in building up a new world. It is a plea
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for peace from one who has seen the dire consequences of war and violence: “Let‟s
stop for one second / and not move our arms too much (5-6). This poem insists on the
need for quiet introspection and creating feelings of mutual understanding, love and
respect among human beings. In the twelve seconds of silence that the poet wishes to
observe, he wants all the people on earth to not talk in any language, but to speak
through their hearts and understand each other. He feels that it would be an exotic
moment, with silence. To Neruda writing poetry is simply not an action that he
performs but rather poetry is a living thing that overtook him. Neruda in “Poetry”
blatantly states:
… poetry arrived
in search of me. I don‟t know, I don‟t know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don‟t know how or when.” (1-4)
Neruda, one of the twentieth century‟s most celebrated poets was a fresh,
original voice in the world of poetry. Because of his passion for poetry, Neruda was
able to change his society, socially and politically. Essentially, Pablo Neruda‟s poems
contributed to society by focusing and giving importance to the social status of
different sectors of society. The United Fruit Company, one of his poems, shows his
concern for the marginalized sector of society by criticizing and condemning the big
companies who were exploiting his country‟s natural resources. He called the big
companies “flies” (19). Neruda shows concern to the social status of society through
his desire to give justice to the people who are affected by the rude and unjust people
in his social order. Writing poems were in a way to show his concern for his society.
This poem brought about political change in his society by criticizing political and
government leaders through stern words.
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The literary production of Latin is largely influenced by the social conditions
shaped by the region‟s political and economic milieu. Pablo Neruda, impressed
readers because of his dedication to social reform and justice and he was rightly called
“the poet of the enslaved humanity.” Neruda was a comprehensive writer. In essence,
this great Latin American revolutionary poet produced poems that were influenced by
the social and political milieu. Generally, Neruda‟s poems of social criticism were
effective in propaganda and encouraging the people to act and attain social justice and
lasting peace. 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 resembled Whitman.
Towards the close of his career, Neruda‟s poetry became facile and more
personal or perhaps Robert Bly said it better, in his own interview with the poet, when
he referred to the later poems as “more human and affectionate.” Neruda remembered
always to go to poetry for his strength, for the strength of his argument. Poetry was
the ideal place to put the people into the equation. His particular relationship of the
poetry to the people is new, from “Heights of Machu Picchu”:
Shake the hard bread of the wretched poor
Out from the ground, show me the servant‟s
clothes and his window.
Tell me how he slept when he lived. (7-10)
When the new Noble Laureate ascended the podium in Stockholm, Sweden, to
deliver his acceptance speech, he did not forget his country‟s citizens:
… I have preferred to offer my services in all modesty to an
honorable army …. which moves forward unceasingly and
struggles everyday … For I believe that my duties as a poet involve
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friendship not only with the rose and with symmetry, with exalted
love and endless longing, but also with unrelenting human
occupations which I have incorporated into my poetry.
The civil war is what drove Neruda into writing poetry for the people and of the
people. Neruda‟s championing of the common man - had become an integral part of
what writing was all about for him. The world read his poetry for its personal insight,
its beauty and for its love of life as well. Pablo Neruda‟s poetry will always be his
“true resting place, his true stone and epitaph.”
According to Mark Eisner in The Essential Neruda Selected Poems, Neruda
characterized poetry as follows:
On our Earth, before writing was invented, before the printing
press was invented, poetry flourished. That is why we know that
poetry is like bread; it should be shared by all, by scholars and by
peasants, by all our vast, incredible, extraordinary family of
humanity.
Towards the end of the Nobel Prize, acceptance speech Neruda had this to say about
his life and his art: “I come from a dark region, from a land separated from all others
by the steep contours of its geography. There would be no rush and no noise and all
the people in the world would be bonded by this sudden stillness.”
Fishermen in the sea would stop their act of killing and men who gather salt
would stop their work and look at their hands hurt from the burdens of their toil. For
once, they would be able to pay heed to their selves, rather than their work as revealed
in “Keeping Quiet”:
Fishermen in the cold sea,
would not harm whales,
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those who prepare green wars…
would put on clean clothes
And walk about with their brothers…. (11-15)
The world would be calm and soothing if everyone could realize what their actions
lead to, by going in a sudden strangeness of silence, as Neruda clearly expressed in
the Nobel Prize acceptance speech:
People who fight wars would stop and walk about with all others,
like brothers doing nothing. The poet does not talk of total
inactivity or death. He feels that today, all the people are so
engrossed in keeping their lives moving and fulfilling their duties,
that no one has time to think about themselves or others. He
believes that if we observe these few moments of silence, it would
unite us in a strange silence and help us understand ourselves
better. It would foster a sense of brotherhood and unity among us.
For Pablo Neruda, we should all learn a lesson from the earth, which appears
to be dead on the surface, but beneath the surface is amazing life, which proves that
there can be life under apparent stillness. Pablo Neruda states “the poets‟ task,” as he
puts is “to embrace the world around you, to discover the new world.” With Neruda it
is impossible to separate poetry from life. While a single presence expansive,
passionate, directly personal lies behind all his work, his career is marked by distinct
changes, in style and focus. Many stylistic devices and techniques were utilized by
Neruda to bring forth his themes and arguments. An abundance of metaphors, similes,
hyperboles and other figurative language is evident in Neruda‟s poetry. Rhyme
schemes, syntax and diction are some of the literary techniques Neruda uses to further
elaborate upon his central themes. Neruda‟s unique descriptive poetry can be traced
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back to his intricate imagery and lavish details. Rightly speaking, Spanish is the only
language that can hold a candle to Neruda‟s style. Of course, the translations hold
truth to his originality and his translators have well-served him. All these techniques
and devices bring focus to Neruda‟s themes on nature, love, politics and human
condition.
Neruda has swayed and influenced world literature, with his poetry that to
honor Pablo Neruda, a petition has been submitted to the International Astronomical
Union (IAU) to name a specific crater on Mercury after the beloved Chilean poet.
Neruda‟s unique and eloquent techniques inspired and moved a great deal of writers
and musicians. Writers like Martin Espada and Majorie Agosin were both influenced
through Neruda‟s poetry and ideals. The Brazilian Jazz musician, singer and
composer Luciana Souza, has named her album “Neruda.” Neruda was viewed as a
prolific king of poetry. “Neruda once suggested that his words be poured, like wine,
into the glasses of other languages.” Paying homage to the highly creative, ethically
and politically diverse master, Bryce Milligan states. “Neruda loved the idea of
continuance of both love and literature.”
Neruda‟s poems articulated hopes, dreams, desires, histories, protest,
sexuality, beauty and national pride like no one before or since. Because of his poetry
he became an ambassador, a statesman and even his party‟s candidate for President of
Chile. Neruda‟s poetic perspective was important, in influencing poets around the
world. He helped to democratize poetry by making the “poetic” less exclusive.
Neruda believed poetry could change the world and he knew that well-crafted,
passionate poetry could under the right circumstance: create aesthetic, political and
cultural revolutions.
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A good amount of Neruda‟s poetry speaks out against oppression, against the
people and encourages social reform; Neruda‟s rapport with the masses was evident in
every poem he spoke. He was not just a melancholy wanderer, mooning at the
heavens, but an ardent surrealist, anti-war activist and Neruda the fervent nationalist.
In the late 1940s, John Freeman in San Francisco Chronicle says “Neruda the lonely
exile” and finally, towards the end of his long career, there is Neruda the “organic,
earth-toned metaphysical seeker.” Many of Neruda‟s poems were an attempt to
discover and explain truths across separate themes. These works tended to combine
nature with nation, with history and with freedom.
Neruda‟s poetry was progressive as it was prodigious. It moved through
stages, in which he was - a romanticist, a surrealist, an erotic lyricist, a symbolist, a
realist and a political revolutionist. Through all these multitudinous sea changes, the
constant was Neruda himself and in some works he was pointedly autobiographical.
“Everyone has to choose a road,” he said in an interview with Robert Bly, “a refined
and intellectual way, or a more brotherly, general way, trying to embrace the world
around you, to discover the new world.”
No one can capture passion in its primal ecstasy and perfection in quite the
way that Neruda can. Neruda‟s poetry overflows… with joy and sensuality. He
transcends mere literature or poetry and hits the core essence of human experience.
Neruda‟s mid-career retrospect: “I‟ve been a great flowing river,” the poet asserts,
“with hard ringing stones, with clear night-noises, with dark day-songs.” 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 are affected by the rude and unjust people
in his social order. Writing poems was just one of his ways to accomplish it. Towards
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the later period of his life Neruda was fully committed to his new role of truth-teller
and exposer of the world‟s injustices as seen in “I‟m Explaining a few Things”: “you
will ask why his poetry / does not speak to us of / dreams and leaves, / … come and
see the blood in the streets!” (72-74). A new element of earthiness and anger enters
his socially engaged poems. His rage at the world‟s injustices was palpable but
controlled: “I searched the world / for those who lost their country.”(15-16)
Neruda communicated powerfully with the common man and woman. He
writes plainly, in the sense that he appeals to the reader‟s own emotional and personal
connection to ordinary material objects. Neruda was a poet of beauty and sadness, of
dignity and feeling and always a poet in love with the land, with objects and with the
surface of things, in “Too Many Names” he explains:
… No one can claim the name of Pedro
nobody is Rosa or Maria,
all of us are dust or sand,
all of us are rain under rain.
they have spoken to me of Venezuelas,
of Chiles and of Paraguays;
I have no idea what they are saying.
I know only the skin of the earth,
and I know it is without a name. (7-15)
In “Do Not Ask Me,” Neruda frankly acknowledges:
I was the most forlorn of poets and my poetry
was provincial oppressed and rainy.
But always I had put my trust in man. I never lost hope.
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it is perhaps because of this that I have reached
as far as I now have - with my poetry
and also with my banner. (3-8)
Neruda was very concerned about social justice and equality, which is
reflected in many of his poems. Neruda once wrote “I have a pact of love with
beauty: / I have a pact of blood with my people” (37-38). He was a legendary poet
and a citizen of conscience. In Spanish speaking countries he is considered a hero and
is better known than even Whitman in the U.S. Neruda had always been a poet with
great sense of self criticism and self-reflection. He was not hesitant in rejecting his
earlier views on certain issues and presenting a new and revised understanding. This
was what helped in bringing about a fundamental change in Neruda‟s personality and
in his writings. He 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.
Neruda never knew his mother, who died a month after he was born. He says
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” (1-2).
Neruda always linked womanhood to the regeneration of earth and the cyclical
processes of nature. It was one of his most emotionally motivated, earnestly held
associations. The poets work comprises his confessions united by his perennial
passion of life: his love of women and nature, his interest in politics, his affection for
simple things and his devotion to life. In his later poetry, there is humor, nostalgia
and a constant introspection joined to a profound commitment to the world about
him. In various ways, Neruda‟s life exemplifies many aspects of the historical, literary
and cultural process of Latin America in the twentieth century. “In my sky at
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Twilight,” he reflects and reacts to Chilean culture that Pablo Neruda comes from.
Both “… the sour wine is sweeter on your lips” (6) and …” my soul is born on the
shore of your eyes of mourning” (15) reflect aspects of Chile. The first being
popularity of wine in the country and the second a reference to the large amount of
shoreline that Chile owns.
Neruda, the extraordinary verse-maker‟s virtue lies not only in his mastery of
poetic style, but in his profound rendering of the range of human emotions, the
complexity of sociopolitical struggles, the terrible plight of the working class and
more. The more committed Neruda became to politics, the more realistic his poetry
became. Neruda‟s utopia was his desire to conquer and overcome grief, both
individual and collective, as a self-declared “man of the people ” and to conquer
happiness. His universal human dream was to create a perfectly happy space both for
oneself and one‟s fellow citizens.
Neruda‟s work is permanently useful and valuable for the emancipation of the
larger part of humanity from exploitation and alienation of class and race. In one of
his late poems, “El Pueblo,” Neruda revitalized his popular – democratic
inclusiveness, the combination of presence and absence: “So let no one worry when I
seem to be alone and am not alone, I speak for all – someone is listening to me and
although they do not know it, those I sing of, those who know go on being born and
will fill up the world” (453).
In the world of literature there are very few examples of poets or writers who
would have had such a great impact on literature. Pablo Neruda is a multi-faceted
person capable of signaling love, hate, compassion or grief. He 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
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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.
Through his poetry, he shared his love, his life and his unwavering tie to humanity.
The importance of this study perpetuates Neruda‟s ideas of love, hope, dreams and
desires. Throughout his life, though he experienced unprecedented fame as a Latin
American poet, he was continuously thought of as a comrade and poet of the people.
None had the skill with writing as Pablo Neruda, to build a loving and just
society on earth. There is something about Neruda about the way he glorifies
experience, about the spontaneity and directness of his passion - that sets him apart
from other poets. It is hard not to be swept away by the urgency of this language and
that‟s especially so when he seems swept away, as in this passage, describing what he
felt when he wrote his first line of poetry:
And I, tiny being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
felt myself a pure part
of the abyss.
I wheeled with the stars.
My heart broke loose with the wind. (38-46)
Songs of Canto General were composed over twelve years, which are also
considered years of militant Neruda. The new practice of addressing to an audience,
communicating with a group of people becomes more specific in Canto General, a
collection of poems that are often called epic poems of Chile, published in 1950 and
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divided into fifteen sections, these are some of his major poems, which tell the tale of
Latin American people. Many sections of Canto General are dedicated to workers and
peasants whose homes and experiences the poet had shared so many times. While
reading these poems one feels that these are the people who are lending their voice to
his poetry. Through these poems Neruda explains how his people were oppressed and
exploited first by the conquerors and then by the dictators, the collection ends with an
autobiographical account of the poet himself. Poems like “Heights of Macchu
Picchu,” “Discoverers of Chile,” “Magellan‟s Heart,” “The Beast‟s” all represent
Neruda as a poet-visionary for whom poetry was itself the object, independent of a
subject but also a medium to communicate and convey a message.
Neruda‟s messages were not only informed by the worldly realities but he also
talked about how to perceive these realities. He decided to write a chronicle of
America in which he exalted her greatness, condemned her blemishes and wrote the
history of perpetual confrontation between oppressors and liberators. “The Heights of
Macchu Picchu,” an important section of twelve songs of this collection, is a vivid
description of human agony. After Canto General he became more and more
conscious of his language and concerned about the clarity of his communication as he
realised that as a political activist he had to deal with the common man who is
illiterate and uniformed. These efforts resulted in the composition of his Elemental
Odes (1957). He says in his Memoirs:
My poetry and my life have advanced like an American river, a
torrent of Chilean water born in the hidden heart of the southern
mountains, endlessly steering the flow of its currents, towards the
sea. My poetry rejected nothing it could carry along in its course,
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it accepted passion, unraveled mystery and worked its way into the
heart of the people.
I had to suffer and struggle, to love and sing, I drew my
worldly share of triumphs and defeats, I tasted bread and blood.
What more can a poet want? And all the choices, tears or kisses,
loneliness or the fraternity of man, survive in my poetry and are as
essential part of it, because I have lived for my poetry and my
poetry has nourished everything I have striven for (Memoirs).
Many of his poems about Spain are moving, whether they are elegies or fierce
attacks, but many are powerful, propaganda pieces. No living poet is as famous today
as Pablo Neruda was in his lifetime. Neruda is remembered today for the power of his
poetry, for his protest against oppression, for the voice he gave to the people of Chile.
In his last twenty years, he produced an astonishing amount of work, much of it love
poetry inspired by his passion for his third wife, Matilde Urrutia. This collection
allows the readers to follow the evolution of his romantic sensibility over five decades
whereas the young poet described an adolescent, tremulous experience of romance,
the older poet possesses a more mature love. In The Captain’s Verses (1952) One
Hundred Love Sonnets (1959) and Barcarole (1967), happiness is not fleeting, but
sustained. He appreciates, without fear of loss, the shared love and sensuality that
joins him to the earth in “Amor America, 1400”:
and gives meaning to the world:
today the tempestuous sea
lifted us in a kiss
so high that we trembled
in the flash of lightning
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and tied together, descended
and submerged without unraveling. (“Amor America, 1400” 1-6)
The poems from 1950s and 60s, have an atmosphere of stillness and
contemplation, especially in contrast to the turbulence of his youth. It is as if he is
settling into himself as just a man, not a famous poet. Neruda resembled Picasso, in
his willingness to experiment and change styles repeatedly. These changes released a
flood of net work. Neruda believed that the more personal he wrote, the more people
he reached. Garcia Marquez considered Neruda “the greatest poet of the twentieth
century” and in India he is one of the most read and translated poets of any foreign
language. In many stories and novels of Latin American writers Pablo Neruda appears
as a protagonist.
“I sell my dreams” by Marquez, included in his collection entitled Twelve
Pilgrim Stories (1992), poet Neruda appears as a character who with complete
firmness announces 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.
In nearly all of his works, Neruda attests to the simplicity, valor and
importance of love, whether for country, “common things,” or another human being.
The artist Pablo Picasso said of him:
He is not only the greatest poet in his country Chile, but also the
greatest poet in the Spanish language and one of the greatest poets
in the world. Neruda‟s name is now chiseled in the stones and
seashells that surround everyone. Even those who have not heard
his poems know his name. Those who have read his verses cannot
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fail to be moved by his enormous contribution. There is no denying
that there are few poets of his caliber in the modern age.
Neruda‟s poetry was only a part of this enormous man, for he also wrote a
cook book (on Hungarian food) and a Chilean bird book, he translated Romeo and
Juliet into Spanish, he worked off and on for the Chilean Foreign Ministry, he joined
the Communist party and became one of its most important partisans, he won the
Stalin Peace Prize and worked on the committee of the Lenin Peace Prize, when the
Swedish Academy‟s Karl Ragnar Gierow introduced Neruda as he accepted the 1971
Nobel prize in Literature, he said, “ To sum up Neruda is like catching a condor with
a butterfly net. Neruda, in a nutshell, is an unreasonable proposition: the kernel bursts
the shell.”
Neruda produced poems naturally embodying all men within him. He
expressed his own story event by event, train rides, home comings, friendships, and
the marine objects he collected. Neruda was found useful for making sense of
reality - the reality of colonialism, poverty, oppression, injustice and suffering that
Neruda deserted from his early Twenty Love Poems to Extravagaria and the
formidable Memory of Isla Negra. Neruda was of service for making intelligible, even
bearable, that fierce solitude of underground exile, imprisonment and desperate
ostracism for which he instills, the only remedy as fraternity, collective struggle, and
intransigent sacrifice. It was both serendipitous and fortuitous, as made explicit in the
models of perseverance in the three volumes of Residence on Earth.
Neruda was an exemplary writer, more exceptionally lucid and provocative. It
was hailed by Garcia Lorca as “one of the most authentic realities of poetry in the
Spanish language today.” His extraordinary poetic talent and his active social role
made him a legendary and symbolic figure for intellectuals, students and artists from
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all of Latin America.” The tension, the regression, the drama of our position in Latin
America does not permit us the luxury of being uncommitted,” he said.
Neruda was the bard who spoke truth to power, the poet of devotion to the
revolutionary ideals of the oppressed. Poetry became a mode of social action and
communication, achieving Neruda‟s desire. To “write with your life and my own,”
Neruda himself attested to what his engagement in the Spanish civil war contributed
to his growth, it helped him understand more, be more natural and above all “live
more near the people.” When Neruda became a communist senator in the Chilean
parliament, he had to fight for the democratic rights of all the people - not just
workers or peasants. Assuming the office of the people‟s tribune, he stated:
I must be, from time to time, a poet of public use that is to say I
must give the bake man, steward, foreman, farmer, gasfitter or the
simple regimental fool the capability of cutting loose with a clean
punch or shooting flames out of his ears.
Indeed, according to Kowitt, Neruda‟s “desire was to be the bardic witness of the
people, the organic intellectual of the laboring masses.” (5-6)
In February 1948, Neruda escaped from military violence, crossing the Andes
mountains with the manuscript of his masterpiece, Canto General, rescued in his
saddlebag. He had lived an underground life from 1947 to 1949, only to emerge into
exile until 1952. Neruda was admired for the simple art of speaking the truth in
defense of humanity, a calling that Robert Bly (1971), amidst anticommunist hysteria,
regards as Neruda‟s lasting virtue. Neruda was a protagonist in the drama of the
continuing class struggle of the time - he chose life and the creative vitality of the
people, all the subjugated and dispossessed as well as the indigenous survivors of
imperial conquest. We should acknowledge the truth distilled in the homage paid by
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the Nobel Prize committee which, in 1971, singled out Neruda‟s art whose “elemental
force brings alive a continent‟s destiny and dream.” The all-encompassing
mythopoeia reach of Canto General cannot be deflected nor deconstructed as
mystical. Nor can the voice of the 1948 classic ode, “I wish the woodcutter would
wake up” (1982) read by generations of American students - be silenced.
Looking backward and forward, Neruda prophesied at the end of that utopia
but realistic epic, Canto General: “After this word shall be born again, perhaps in
another time without suffering, without the impure offshoots that dark vegetation
adhered to my canto and once again in the heights my impassioned heart will be
burning and starry.”
Neruda‟s Communism, is what underlies his protean, versatile and
metamorphic art. It is identical to his fidelity to the vision of freedom and social
liberation from natural and man-made historical necessity. Neruda‟s fundamental
vocation: “… as revolutionary and as poet – in that, from the publication of his first
word, he is addressing all people in defense of their own highest longings”
(Willmantic 9). In his long life as a poet, Pablo Neruda succeeded in becoming a
public voice, a voice not just for the people of his country but for his entire continent.
In his famous essay, “On Impure Poetry” Neruda calls for: “a poetry as impure as old
clothes as a body with its food stains and its shame, with wrinkles, observations,
dreams, wakefulness, prophesies, declarations of love and hate, stupidities, shocks,
idylls, political beliefs, negations, doubts, affirmations and taxes.”
Neruda provides weapons that enlighten and sustain necessary and pleasurable
instruments for the common good. On the whole Neruda‟s art represents a subtle and
passionate dialectical grappling with the sensuous richness of nature and the built
environment. The power of his poetic intuition derives from his political and civic
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responsibility, not only to Chileans but also to all humans sharing the same
predicament of fighting for justice and popular liberation, with all its attendant danger
and opportunities. As he affirmed in his Nobel Prize speech, “…my duties as a poet
involve friendship not only with the rose and with symmetry, with exalted love and
endless longing, but also with unrelenting human occupations which I have
incorporated into my poetry.”
In one of his later poems, “El Pueblo,” Neruda revitalized his popular
democratic inclusiveness, that combination of presence and absence:
So let no one worry when
I seem to be alone and am not alone,
I am not with nobody and I speak for all someone is listening to me and, although they do not know it,
those I sing of, those who know
go on being born and will fill up the world. (453)
In 1927, Neruda‟s travels began. In the Far East, Neruda got to work on his
cycle of poems Residence on Earth .The three volumes that make up the cycle contain
the poems that he wrote from 1925 to 1945. The first volume, covers a wide range of
subjects, the melancholy of his earlier poetry becomes more assertive, more colorful,
more surreal and finally more anguished. In the poems of the second volume, the
gloom continues, with more charm, as in “walking around,” which begins:
It so happens I am sick of being a man.
And it happens that I walk into tailor shops
and movie houses
dried up, waterproof, like a swan made of felt
steering my way in water of wombs and ashes. (1-5)
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By the third volume Neruda‟s poetry has undergone a profound change. Residence on
Earth is a diffuse and transitional enterprise, a bridge between the precocious and
unprogrammatic early work and the great works of his maturity.
Canto General is a lyrical encyclopedia of the new world, chronologically,
proceeding through three hundred and forty poems and more than five hundred pages.
It begins with the world before man arrived. Here, is a passage from “The Birds
Arrive,‟ a poem in the first section:
… at the end of the enraged
sea, in the ocean rain,
the wings of the albatross rise up
like two systems of salt,
establishing in the silence
with their spacious hierarchy,
amid the torrential squalls,
the order of the wilds. (12-19)
The style in the Canto reaches its limit in the breath-taking section called “The
Heights of Macchu Picchu,” in which the poet invites the continent‟s victimized dead
to express themselves through him. He will be their champion, seeking eloquently not
only for the victims but for the continent itself. Canto General has rarely been
matched in its range of subjects, its energy and its imaginative power.
Extravagaria which followed the “odes” is different from them. Its poems are
directed inward and the voice is more colloquial, more personal, more forgiving of
others and much more relaxed. The long, valedictory “Autumn Testament,” which
concludes:
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From having been born so often
I have salty experience
like creatures of the sea
with a passion for stars
and an earthy destination.
And so I move without knowing,
to which world I‟ll be returning
or if I‟ll go on living. (1-8)
Neruda‟s work has been a sort of seismograph through which one could learn
what was happening not only in the poetry of Latin America but also in contemporary
poetry at large. Neruda‟s poetry was never exquisite. In fact, he himself has coined
the concept of “impure poetry,” which best defines his own poetic credo. Neruda‟s
poetry was open to human experience. It aired much of his own solitude and anguish,
but at the same time it revealed what was throbbing deep in the heart of modern man.
Afterwards, his poetry moved from the emotions of the inner ego to the emotions of
the outer world.
Neruda could no longer see himself detached from the conflicts and problems
of his time. He loved life and life's simplest things that is why he sang to them with
such directness, brio and gusto. When writing about love, he would write about the
thighs and the breasts of his beloved, when about the Americas, about its minerals and
volcanoes, when about politics, he would use names and last names, of countries and
leaders. He did not mince words and did not use euphemisms. No abstract theorizing
for him, no vague metaphysical reflections.
At his best, as in the sublime early poems Residence on Earth, from his epic
Canto General or poems for the sardonic self critique entitled Estravagario, he can be
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a poet who ranges across the page with an astonishing multiplicity of voices, from
that of an anguished pilgrim of the spirit to the benign populist and passionate love
found in the quiet of his later years. Neruda would not be Neruda were he not a
jumble of quality and perversity, all in the service of poetry and love. The vein of
nature was the one that Neruda treated with the greatest mastery, especially when
turning to the primitive aspects of the Chilean landscape. Neruda‟s humanitarian
poetry justifiably defines, the formula which Alfred Nobel insisted: “distinguished
works of idealistic tendency.” (Nobel 51)
Neruda inspired other writers both during and after his lifetime. He brought a
voice for the people who had the most difficulty being heard. Neruda read at two of
the largest poetry gathering in modern history, when he could bring his listeners to
tears. His writing has inspired writers both within South America and the rest of the
world. Neruda‟s poetry is incredible. He overshadows other Chilean poets, he is more
than Chile - he is an important poet for the world. It is difficult to think of a twentieth
century poet, who did more than Neruda. He wrote a huge number of books, he
travelled like a man possessed, he whirled himself round in the life of his times, he
loved and lost a large number of women, he collected a small army of famous friends.
Neruda spent the late 30s and early 40s travelling round South America,
supported by Delia, feted by his home-crowd, increasingly famous on the world stage,
converting his experience of other people‟s suffering into poems, standing as a
senator and defending the new emphasis of his work: “I have a profound sense that I
am fulfilling a duty. I was a nocturnal writer, who spent part of his existence clinging
to the walls on empty nights. Now I am happy. We must walk down the middle of the
street, meeting life head on” (Feinstein 497). Neruda is regarded as the poet who cried
against social injustices and was not afraid to voice his opinions. His poetry presents
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visions and metaphors born of conscientiousness and the reader is made to participate
and see the world and the unexpected in a new way. Neruda is equally capable of
being either totally hermetic or totally transparent, but his voice is always authentic.
Neruda was respected for his expertise and genius, for his command of
verbiage and indisputably brilliant mind and his clarity of his vision about the
juxtaposition of his work and his life. His politics and his poetry were intertwined and
fueled by a flaming passion. Neruda wrote fiercely and freely as he lived and he was.
Neruda refused to acknowledge himself as a political poet. He insisted on telling, Eric
Bockstael in an interview: “My ambition as a writer, is to write about all the things
that I see, that I touch, that I know, that I love or that I hate… I am only the echo in a
certain part of my poetry of the anxieties of the contemporary world, of the anxieties
of the Latin American world. But, I refuse to be classified as a political poet.”
To Neruda, writing about the workers, writing about the masses, was a
consequence of his emotions. It was not a dictum and had nothing to do with an
ideologically committed direction in his poetry. Neruda was aware of the social order
of Latin America and of the world as he became aware of the ocean or of flowers or
of life. Naturally, the social order being more moving, more developed and grand and
as it engages all humanity - it has constituted as committed part in his poetry. Neruda
declares in his Memoirs: “I am the poet of the moon, I am the poet of the flowers, I
am the poet of love. Meaning that he has a very old conception of poetry, which does
not contradict the possibility that he has written and that he will continue to write,
poems that are dedicated to the development of society and to the power of progress
and of peace.”
Neruda writes on everything imaginable. His poetry expresses his need to
sing, his need to express himself and to regard the wonder of the world. His poems are
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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. Pablo Neruda was himself a poem never written. His
poems reflect the enormous hunger he demonstrated throughout his career for new
modes of expression, new adventures and new challenges.
Passions and impressions is both a sequel to and an enlargement of Neruda‟s
Memoirs, recording a lifetime of travel, of friendship and enmities, of exile and home
coming, of loss and discovery and of history both public and personal. Above all, it is
a testament to Neruda‟s love for Chile - for its citizens, its flora and fauna and its
national identity. Neruda‟s abiding devotion pervades these notes on a life fully-lived.
Neruda‟s committed poetry struck a familiar note to the social upheaval of the times.
Neruda spent his final years campaigning to bring socialism to his beloved
Chile. He was a man from Chile who transcended many worlds, a man who took the
struggle and anguish of mankind and let it cry and long through him. He was gifted
and blessed because he knew how to use words. He is so well-loved and read, not
because of his writing but because in his writing is a man not separated but struggling
alongside his words. He also tried to make poems as direct and simple as possible. He
showed a new desire to make art speak for oppressed members of society.
Neruda was the poet, for violated human dignity. His goal was to speak for the
speechless and sing for the mute. He was able to do this so well because, what he
wrote was part of him, as his country and his language and his people were also a part
of him. Neruda was a poet, who did not only write letters on paper, but wrote songs in
the heart. Maybe because of communist influence or maybe because of his passion for
life he wanted to speak for others - be it forest of man and say, not what is in his mind
but what the land and time have given him to tell.
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It was a moment of personal transition. In his poem” I Explain a Few Things,”
he asks a rhetorical question – "Where have all the lilies gone?" His answer is
repeated in mounting anger – "Come and see the blood in the streets!" From that
moment on, Neruda became a witness to history, his art placed at the service of the
struggle for social justice. Neruda‟s poems published as Residence on Earth (1933),
are pessimistic, filled with themes of alienation and isolation, haunted by death. They
contain the nascent existentialism of that era. One can hear the inner dialogue of a
man who is being driven deep within himself by a chaotic and absurd world. Nature is
destructive, sex is depersonalized and futile. The objects of mankind disgust him
desperately, he utters in “Walking Around”: I happen to be tired of being a man. / … I
happen to be tired of my feet and my nails / and my hair and my shadow (9-10).
Canto General is a history of Latin America done in epic poetry, at times
lyrical, at times plain spoken. The poem “Amor America, 1400” has a grand sweep
and a cumulative power that makes it one of his outstanding works: … Man was dust,
earthen vase, an eyelid / of tremulous loam, the shape of clay (8-9). Neruda continued
to publish new volumes of poetry, with extraordinary regularity, producing during his
last years a number of notable works, including Estravagaria. Extravagaria, a word
coined by Neruda to suggest extravagant, even eccentric, poetic moves and modes.
Extravagria is not one that sings the most, but rather the one that speaks about the
best. Feinstein tells that “the work‟s impudence, eclecticism and humor make it his
most individualistic work.”
The Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, a close friend of Neruda wrote his
moving Epistle to Neruda, after Neruda‟s death in 1973:
… today I see Neruda
he‟s always right in the centre and, unfaltering,
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he carries his poetry to the people
as simply and calmly as a loaf of bread. (2)
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. Neruda‟s dramatic times,
dynamic poetry and commitment to social justice makes his life, an iconic life of the
twentieth century.
Neruda the extraordinary verse- maker has survived and the critical production
has not overshadowed him. Garcia Marquez, notes that Neruda‟s virtues lie not only
in his mastery of poetic style, but in his profound rendering of the range of human
emotions, the complexity of socio-political struggles, the terrible plight of the
working class, the great efforts involved in gaining class consciousness and
committing oneself to egalitarianism, the horrors and benefits of capitalist “progress”
and more. In short, Neruda‟s work merits recognition and praise for his prodigious
talent as a crafter of verses and for his ability to make concrete in his poetry the sociohistorical, political circumstances and ethos of his day.
The first two volumes of Residence on the Earth can be said to round out a
youthful poet‟s normal obsession with the themes of love and death. The poems are
much darker often brazenly violent. In the poem “Ode with a Lament,” Neruda
declaringly confesses: “incessantly I survey myself in mirrors and windows” (3).
Neruda left an impressive body of work, often surreal, sometimes melancholy and
often sensual; his poetry covers the spectrum from deeply personal to political and
social. We see with Neruda first of all, a great compassion for other human beings and
secondly, a deep appreciation of the fact of being alive, which we see at every stage
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for Neruda. His poetry reflected his life so closely in so many ways. There is a very
close association between Pablo Neruda‟s poetry and the idea of justice.
Residence on Earth is the three volumes of poems Neruda wrote from 1925 to
1945. The first volume covers a wide range of subjects; the melancholy of his earlier
poetry becomes more assertive, more colorful, more surreal and more anguished. In
the poems of the second volume, the gloom continues, but with less obliquity and
more charm. In the third volume, Neruda‟s poetry has undergone a profound change.
Here, his poems describe the horrors of war. Residence on Earth is a bridge between
the precocious and unprogrammatic early work and the great works of his maturity.
Canto General, written largely while he was a fugitive, charged with treason.
It is an encyclopedia of the new world, proceeding chronologically through three
hundred and forty poems and more than five hundred pages. It begins with the world
before man arrived. Here, is a passage from “The Birds Arrive,” a poem in the first
section:
A marine mountain flies
toward the islands, a moon
of birds winging south,
over the fermented islands
of Peru. (1-5)
In Extravagaria the poems are directed inward and the voice is colloquial, personal
and more forgiving of others and much more relaxed in the claims it makes for itself.
There are many beautiful and moving poems in this book, as the long valedictory
“Autumn Testament,” which concludes:” … that the wind will take me away / and I
won‟t know my own name /and I won‟t be there when I wake” (24-26).
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In his later years Neruda spent campaigning to bring socialism to his beloved
Chile. His mature poems present a fascinating picture of the most prodigiously gifted
literary figure of the twentieth century. The humanity of his work reveals the truthteller and the exposure of the world‟s injustices significantly in his final humanitarian
poems. His writing was initially Eurocentric and concerned with personal emotions
but over time, became focused on Latin American roots and the political, social and
economic issues of the region. Neruda became a leading socialist and after spending
time as a member of the Chilean diplomatic corps, was forced into exile. He was
deeply affected by the Spanish Civil war.
The poem, “Amor America” was included in Neruda‟s poetic epic Canto
General. In this last literary stage, Neruda returned to more mundane and personal
musings. It celebrates Latin America. He wanted to sing about the stars, the moon,
the flowers, about love … he did not want to be a revolutionary in poetry; he did not
have a poetic doctrine; he did not have a poetic ideology. I am a poet by vital,
biological need and that is my whole doctrine: “I don‟t want to be a revolutionary in
poetry,” he stated to Eric Bockstael. The energetic, earthy poetry of Pablo Neruda in
The Captain’s Verses reveals Neruda the intimate and sensitive and Neruda the social
activist, Chilean senator and International diplomat:
But rise up,
you must, rise up,
rise up now with me
and let us go out together
to fight hand to hand
against the cobwebs of the wicked. (5-10)
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Neruda‟s poems speak of Chile‟s flora, its fauna and its history, particularly
the wars of liberation from Spanish rule and the continuing struggle of its people, for
freedom and social justice. Neruda‟s union and love for the oppressed population of
the earth and his solidarity with the victims of genocide in the Spanish civil war in
1936, make him unforgettable in the memory of mankind, an example of commitment
to life, love and poetry. His poetry spoke of all essential human affairs and embraced
the revelations of nature and the elements through song. Neruda‟s life and work have
inspired generations of poets, dreamers and revolutionaries who work daily for a
change in favor of social justice. He reached very important achievements in poetic
expression with key works such as Residence on Earth, Canto General and
Estravagario, in which he renews questions regarding the origin and purpose of man.
The work of Pablo Neruda, struggles for the emancipation of human beings, in
a time beset by the crisis of capitalism. With Pablo Neruda we learn that the poet is an
essential part of human life. With his poetry millions of people have qualified their
sensitivity, culture and spirit. He was a real man who nurtured the growth of
awareness and trust, towards a world reconciled with life. Neruda‟s poems were his
commitment to impure poetry, a poetry committed to reality, with social issues. As he
stated:
A poetry impure as the clothing we wear, on our bodies, soupstained, soiled with our shameful behavior our wrinkles and vigils
and dreams, observations and prophecies, declarations of loathing
and love, idylls and beasts, the shocks of encounter, political
loyalties, denial and doubts affirmations and taxes.
So, there is a telluric Neruda, one of love, one that sings to all that exists and a Neruda
that undertakes poetry with political and social commitment.
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Neruda resigned from diplomatic service in 1943 and returned to Chile where
some two years later he would be elected Senator from a desperately impoverished
mining region. During these years, he wrote a number of scattered poems and
chapbooks that would later be gathered together under the title Third Residence. It is
with this volume that Neruda first comes fully into its own. The four trends of
development in Neruda‟s poetry, speaks about the four aspects of his personality: his
passionate love life, his depression and nightmares, when he served as consul in Asia,
his social commitment and concerns and his attention to everyday details of human
life. Neruda places poetry as an uncompromising speaker for the downtrodden.
Even in times of joy, dark imagery can be found in Neruda‟s work. During his
travels to Europe and Asia Neruda slipped into times of depression, this depression
was caused by his appointed political power in Europe. Because of the importance
and the secrecy of his new life as a politician he was often forced to desert his friends,
his home and even his wives. His constant travel and time alone created an untimely
loneliness in Neruda, visible in Residence on Earth, in which Neruda describes the
malevolent energy from everyday objects. The imagery in these poems reflects
Neruda‟s innermost feelings that represent the rejection of rationality and society. He
achieves these representations by saying things like “They can cut all the flowers, but
they‟ll never stop the spring, ” this small rebellion against the government instigated
an abundance of uprising. Neruda also uses plenty of imagery throughout the most
part of his works. Visual imagery is evident in passages like this one:
the silence of the world is in its long coast
the foam of the world rises from its seaboard
the coal of the world fills it with mysterious kisses.
God burns in its finger like a live coal
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and silver lights up like a green moon
its petrifies shadow that‟s like a gloomy planet. (1-6 )
Neruda sums up his life in poetry and makes clear what he wanted to do. He
did not believe there is any other world, does not believe in unrequited love and
declared several times that the gods are “enemies of man.” Neruda says in his
Memoirs:
I believed my obligation was to sing, to sing as I grew and left my
life behind, out of the pain of the struggle. It was my dedication,
my function, alongside carpenters in the morning, drinking at night,
with horse – men, to pour out my song in writing.
Neruda‟s masterpiece, the Canto General, is an epic poem that encompasses
the sweep of Latin American history, from pre-Columbian times to the mid-twentieth
century. It is a “General Song.” The poetic voice of Neruda is the protagonist of this
vast re-telling of the various atrocities and injustices visited upon the downtrodden in
Latin America. Pablo Neruda said in his September 30, 1969, acceptance speech as
the Chilean communist party candidate for the Presidency:
I am a Chilean who for decades has known the misfortunes and
difficulties of our national existence and who has taken part in each
sorrow and joy of the people. I am not a stranger to them, I come
from them. I am part of the people. I come from a working-class
family… I have never been in with those in power and have always
felt that my vocation and my duty were to serve the Chilean people
in my actions and with my poetry. I have lived singing and
defending them (Guibert).
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Remarking on the stages of his poetry, in an interview with Rita Guibert
Neruda says: “My poetry has the quality of an organism - infantile when I was a boy,
juvenile when I was young, desolate when I suffered, combative when I had to enter
the social struggle.”
Pablo Neruda‟s poetry is the peak of Latin American literature. He has a
legendary experience and his individuality is widely known. He pursues democracy
and stands for human rights. He expresses his ideal and hope passionately through his
poems, by his rich imagination. His poetry vividly records the course of the Latin
American struggle for independence and freedom and also demonstrates Chile‟s
history in the mid twentieth century. Pablo Neruda became a global household name
in the twentieth century, prompting American diplomats to grant him a visa into the
country in 1966 when communists were barred from crossing American borders. His
poems, though it emanated from South America, it spoke about conflict throughout
the world. Pablo Neruda was a multi-faceted poet stylistically, writing unforgettable
love poems and odes to everyday objects as well as poetry dealing with the labors and
struggles of the common man.
Pablo Neruda in Captain’s Verses, powerfully instigates the people to rise up
and fight against injustice:”against the system that doles out hunger, / against the
organization of misery” (11-12). Neruda‟s union and love for the oppressed
population of the earth and his solidarity with the victims of genocide in the Spanish
Civil War in 1936, makes him unforgettable in the memory of mankind, an example
of commitment to life, love and poetry. The humanity of the poet was at the forefront,
defending life through the dignified, universal voice of his poetry, always changing,
always moving and attentive to the vicissitudes of everyday life. His poetry spoke of
all essential human affairs.
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Pablo Neruda is an acting sign of human utopia, sower of spirits in the
struggle for a world free of the oppression and inequality instilled by savage
capitalism. His contact with the humanity of the people turned him into a real man
who nurtured the growth of awareness and trust in the profound transformations
towards a world reconciled with life. Neruda undertook poetry with a social
commitment. Four decades after his death, Neruda, is again heating up the world with
his metaphors. Neruda is beyond trifles. He is the poet of the eternal present. “He
revealed the best antidote to oppression was its most noxious companion, oblivion:
poetry.” (Stavans)
Neruda believed he had been called, to be a spokesperson for what needed to
be said. And that was nothing less than the abundance and wealth of nature and of
life, in which man is both a detracting factor and a representative of the hope for a
better world. Neruda‟s art was part of the struggle for social justice. Neruda‟s famous
epic poem, Canto General expresses this particularly well. The work is not only a
personal history of Chile, but also a plea for social justice, a requiem for his friends
and ancestors and a complaint against the United States. In both Latin America and
the western world, however, he was above all the beloved poet of immediately
appealing and empathetic poetry.
There really is a Neruda for everyone, there‟s Neruda the love poet, Neruda
the surrealist poet, the poet of the historical epic, Neruda the political poet, Neruda the
poet of common things, with the odes, the poet of sea and so on. But throughout it all,
one sees with Neruda first of all, a great compassion for other human beings. There is
a very close association between Pablo Neruda‟s poetry and the idea of justice. And
the people of Chile today, even now, associate Pablo Neruda with the idea of justice.
On its surface, a poem seems incapable of stopping a bullet. Yet Chile‟s transition to
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democracy was facilitated by the poet‟s survival in people‟s minds, his lines repeated
time and again, as a form of subversion. Life cannot be repressed, he whispered in
everyone‟s ears. It was a message for which he may have died, but that lives on in his
verse.
Neruda believed that poetry could find a place in man‟s struggles. He wanted
to give people the need, the hunger, for a single line of poetry. He believed that the
application of poetry could work for the benefit of the majority. His epic range of
poems encompassed his humanity and passionate love for history, his country and its
politics. Neruda‟s poetry was an important component of the revolutionary thought of
the twentieth century. Neruda is a poet of beauty and sadness, of dignity and feeling,
and always a poet in love with the land, with objects and with the surface of things as
revealed in “Too many Names”:
No one can claim the name of Pedro,
nobody is Rosa or Maria,
all of us are dust or sand,
all of us are rain under rain.
They have spoken to me of Venezuelans,
of Chiles and Paraguays;
I have no idea what they are saying.
I know only the skin of the earth
and I know it is without a name. (7-15)
In his later poems Pablo decides to remake the world and promises to
undertake the sorrows of all men. To write simply of simple things was a task the poet
undertook consciously, following his experiences in the Spanish Civil war, the social
conversion that resulted from a visit to Macchu Picchu and the writing of his epic
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Canto General. From Neruda‟s massive output of poetry emerges a fascinating
picture of one of the most prodigiously gifted, one of the most equivocal literary
figures of the twentieth century. In 1971, Neruda became Poet Laureate, “for a poetry
that with action of elemental force brings alive a continent‟s destiny and dreams.”
Neruda‟s love for his country served as an equally powerful contributor to his
poetry. Neruda‟s poetry on the whole Latin American generation was the lyrical plea
and woe of its forgotten people. Pablo Neruda‟s poetry is an uncompromising speaker
for the downtrodden. The power of Neruda‟s poetry lies in his expansive expression
of his passions. He was not only a poet of love, but as a poet of the people, speaking
for the oppressed and against the oppressors. Neruda‟s poems are profoundly original.
His poetry, which developed along the lines of socialist realism, had a significant
influence on the poetry of many countries. Neruda‟s poetic development was based on
Neruda‟s experience as a man. Neruda‟s lasting virtue was his simple art of speaking
in defense of humanity, because he believes the poet should affirm the harmony
between man and the earth. A good amount of Neruda‟s poetry speaks out against
oppression, against the people and encourages social reform.
Neruda revitalized every day expressions and employed bold metaphors in
free verse. His evocative poems are filled with grief and despair and bespeak a quest
for simplicity. They celebrate the dramatic Chilean landscape and rage against the
exploitation of the indigenous people. In his writings and as a diplomat, Neruda
exerted wide influence. In Canto General Neruda chronicles Latin American political
history and social struggle in this epic. Neruda was one of the modern classical poets,
the greatest literary voice of Chile in its entire history. Throughout the 1950s and
1960s, Neruda became a literary torchbearer and he spent his final years campaigning
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to bring socialism to his beloved Chile. The Canto General, Neruda‟s masterpiece, is
the stunning epic of an entire continent and its people.
The takeover of Chile in 1973 by Augusto Pinochet, broke the heart of Pablo
Neruda. The poet who wrote so openly of love and heartache could not bear to see his
country in the hands of a military dictator and died days after Pinochet came to power.
The power of his poetry, his humanism and his sheer pleasure in being alive earned
him the devoted support of not only close friends but also some of his political foes.
He spanned the century and the globe and he was a close friend of some of the most
influential figures of the twentieth century, including Federico Garcia Lorca, Pablo
Picasso and Paul. Neruda was not just a poet, diplomat and politician. He was also an
energetic lover of wine, women and song.
After the end of the Spanish civil war he saved the lives of two thousand
Republicans by shipping them out to Chile in an old fishing boat. He spent a year in
hiding from his own country‟s tyrannical President, Gabriel Gonzalez Videla and
risked death, during his horseback escape across the Andes. His three years of exile in
Europe, included a successful flight from the Italian authorities by gondola in Venice.
Back in Chile, he was nominated as candidate for the Presidency, only to stand down
in favor of Salvador Allende. The variegated role of Neruda was immense, Neruda the
communist, Chilean diplomat and celebrated poet of Latin America.
Neruda‟s life was a long pilgrimage. For most of his life, Neruda wandered the
streets of the world. It was in his first foreign posting in Burma, where he realized
that the streets were the poet‟s religion. In India, he confronted the brooding eyes of
young, freedom-fighters. The theme of Canto General is humankind‟s struggle for
justice in the new world. “The Heights of Machu Picchu” is divided into twelve
sections and it is written in free verse. The poet, adopting the persona of the native
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south American man, walks among the ruins of the great Inca city Machu Picchu,
built high in the mountains near Cuzco in Peru, as a last retreat from the invading
Spanish conquerors. It is a poem of symbolic death and resurrection in which the
speaker begins as a lonely traveler and ends with a full commitment to the American
indigenous people, their Indian roots, their past and their future.
The significance and influence of Neruda is not at all limited to the level of
poetic imagery. His poetry is an important component of the revolutionary thought of
the twentieth century. Neruda cannot be spoken off in the abstract, because he is not a
drawing-room poet, nor is he a Buddha engrossed in the contemplation of his own
novel. He is fundamentally a social poet, a human being who has escaped all danger.
In his, “Welcoming Speech Honoring Pablo Neruda,” Nicanor Parra honors the
impact of Neruda‟s poems as “the burning arrows he shoots into space, pierce deep
into the mind and heart of the reader, no matter how thick the layer of lead which
covers them might be.”
Neruda has influenced many writers throughout the years both personally and
academically. Martin Espada, winner of the “American Book Award” for his
collection Imagine the Angels of Bread was inspired and in a conference of authors he
said “this represents the fulfillment of a dream: to visit Neruda‟s Chile and to pay
homage to the poet who has most deeply influenced me, as a writer and person.” The
poem “The Gift,” is an integration of Neruda‟s social and political values with the
man he is. He shares with those he so admires his hope for the present day and for the
future:
I want all the hands of men
to knead mountains
of bread and to gather
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all the fish from the sea,
all the olives. (8-12)
Neruda, a literary activist, inspired the people, by his use of the pen over the sword to
create social change. Neruda promoted poetry, to inspire and move emotions and to
foster social justice. To his beloved Chilean people, to many Latin Americans, Neruda
is still the source of tremendous pride. And Neruda was such a Chilean such a Latin
American, in how much he cared for his country, continent and its people. They were
his cause, his pride and the most important audience for his poetry.
Giving voice to the people through his poetry, Neruda promised a commitment
to humanitarianism, using literature to enrich, empower and engage in the pursuit of
progressive social change. Neruda was a versatile writer, who covered everything
from Spanish civil war to artichokes, from the history of America to the vicissitudes
of love. Neruda recreates and reveals that which we thought we knew. For Neruda,
poetry was a rallying cry for the social function of art, a way of bearing witness to
suffering and injustice. Unusually, his Nobel Prize for literature in 1971 was
celebrated in every Chilean household. He had broken the silence and Chile's name
was sounded across the world. And his speech, spoke of patience and hope: "I wish
to say to the people of good will, to the workers, to the poets, that the whole future
has been expressed in this line by Rimbaud: only with a burning patience can we
conquer the splendid City which will give light, justice and dignity to all mankind."
Neruda was awestruck from an early age by the injustices of the human world.
Neruda was more than a Noble Prize winning poet. He was an activist who spent life
in public service, fighting for equality and human rights. He was the consciousness of
a culture, a man larger than life. Statesman, ambassador and activist, Pablo Neruda
was a voice for the voiceless. As the people‟s poet, his uncompromising commitment
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to social injustice inspires us to preserve, protect and appreciate our civil liberties.
Neruda is to poetry, an original prolific artist wholly enlisted in his work and
contributing the energy of his own evolution to the society. His vision resonates to all
international populations. As lover, political activist and the voice of the common
man – Pablo Neruda speaks to today‟s concerns and all people. This monumental
figure wrote dozens of poems about the social inequities and plights around him.
Neruda‟s poetry recognizes the powerlessness of the voiceless and oppressed.
The beauty and dignity of Neruda‟s poems evokes the spirit in the compassion it
instills for the weak and suffering of the world. This great revolutionary Latin poet
continues to impress many readers because of his dedication to social reform and
justice. Pablo Neruda in his placement of poetry as uncompromising speaker for the
downtrodden chronicles the deep polarizations of the twentieth century Latin
American poetry, of extraordinary change, through his expansive passion.
Neruda concluded his career with World’s End in 1969. In World’s End,
Neruda seeks to revive hope that a better society will grow from the sacrifices of the
brave ones. It speaks about the pursuit of common cause and brotherhood. Neruda
extends himself beyond Chile, he says to Eric Bockstael, to discuss the entirety of
civilization, or the lack there of: “I am only the echo in a certain part of my poetry of
the anxieties of the contemporary world, of the anxieties of the Latin American
world.”
Neruda is known not only for the power of his works, but for using poetry to
fight for the people of his country and to reach the world‟s conscience. Neruda is
remembered for his struggles against facism and oppression and for the voice that he
gave to the people of Chile. In almost all his poems Chile emerges clearly with lights
and shadows in both substance and form. The destiny of man in this chaotic and
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senseless world is portrayed in poems like “Walking Around,” in which the poet is
weary of existing in a world with which he cannot identify himself:
It happens that I am tired of my feet and my nails
and my hair and my shadow
it happens that I am tired of being a man.
Just the same it would be delicious
to scare a notary with a cut lily
or knock a nun stone dead with one blow of an ear.
It would be beautiful
to go through the streets with a green knife
shouting until I died of cold. (11-19)
For Neruda, poetry was no longer a private statement but an utterance that
belonged to the public domain. His “poems were never intended to be merely script or
signs on a printed page but were to be uttered and declaimed in order to elicit a
response,” says Jean Franco in his “Welcoming speech Honoring Pablo Neruda.”
Karl-Ragnar Gierow, the Nobel Academy secretary remarking on Neruda‟s poetry
said:
From the introspection and despair of his youth to the outraged,
fighting poetry of manhood, with his eyes on a dazzling dream of
the future and from there on bitter disappointment when the dazzle
faded and minor wisdom that comes with perception.
The fellowship of the oppressed exists all over the world. That is what he sought and
it was the poet of violated human dignity that he became.
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Neruda, the titanic literary figure, is celebrated by Chileans, as a poet, to a
degree that is truly rare on this planet. To his beloved Chilean people, to many Latin
Americans, Neruda is still the source of tremendous pride, regardless of one‟s
political orientation. The life of Neruda was completely consecrated to the cause of
humanity. He represents his time with dignity and complete understanding lightening
the shattering vision of the world. He cared for his country, continent and his people.
They were his cause, his pride and the most important audience for his poetry,
creating a revealing record of his life as a poet, a patriot and one of the twentieth
century‟s true men of conscience.
The Chilean Nobel Laureate, served humanity with his poetry. He grabbed
poetry from the shelves of the salons and royal courts and gave it back like bread to
the people, a communal voice, rooted in man‟s raw passions and struggle for justice,
nourishment, dignity and substance. Neruda‟s poetry illuminated the Spanish
language, its lines cited, its sentiments absorbed to a greater extent than Eliot‟s in
English. His passion, his rage, his tenderness, his wit were familiar and beloved to
literate Hispanics as Tagore‟s to Bengalis. Neruda, the poet nonpareil, willingly put
his life and limb at the service of his convictions and his commitment to social and
political justice.
Neruda is politically a fierce and essential critic of twentieth century
international affairs. In “World‟s End,” Neruda seeks to revive hope that a better
society will grow from the sacrifices of the brave ones. Neruda was always concerned
about human beings and human conditions. He says in his Memoirs:
I had to suffer to love and sing; I drew my worldly share of
triumphs and defeats. I tasted bread and blood. What more can a
poet want? And all the choices, tears or kisses, loneliness or the
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fraternity of man, survive in my poetry and are as essential part of
it, because I have lived for my poetry and my poetry has nourished
everything I have striven for.
Neruda‟s life of dramatic times, his human imaginative presence, his dynamic
poetry, commitment to social justice and joie de vivre makes his life an iconic one of
the twentieth century. In the presentation speech of Nobel Prize by Karl Ragnar
Gierow, it was a said: “No great writer gains luster from a Nobel Prize. It is the Nobel
Prize that gains luster from the recipient.” The spirit of Alfred Nobel tells us, that
Pablo Neruda‟s contribution benefits mankind, precisely because of its direction.
Neruda‟s poetry is an important component of the revolutionary thought of the
twentieth century. He is fundamentally, a thorough social poet, in having fulfilled his
obligations as a contemporary man.