This year the literary world celebrates the centennial anniversary of the great South American poet Pablo Neruda. Called “the greatest poet of the 20th century — in any language,” Neruda’s poetry has influenced generations of poets in the Americas. His mix of raw, earthy and sensuous love verses and harsh, often abrasive, political epics greatly appealed to a wide range of people. Often called a people’s poet for his mass appeal, Neruda’s works were grounded in the soil of his native Chile and found fruit in his unique ability to touch the most essential aspects of the human condition.
As a teenager, Neruda showed his work to the legendary poet Gabriel Mistral, who at the time was a principal at a nearby girls’ school. Mistral’s response, “I was sick, but I began to read your poems and I was better, because I am sure that here there is indeed a true poet,” served to inspire the young poet.
At the age of 19 he moved to Santiago and the following year found critical acclaim and popular fame with his second book, “Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair.” The first work in modern Spanish to celebrate the erotic, it chronicles the poet’s feelings from love to loss: “Drunk as drunk on turpentine / From your open kisses, / Your wet body wedged / Between my wet body and the strake / Of our boat that is made of flowers, / Feasted, we guide it — our fingers / Like tallows adorned with yellow metal — / Over the sky’s hot rim, / The day’s last breath in our sails.”
The intense, direct emotion kindled fires all throughout South America, sparking a rebirth of poetic activity unrivalled in the United States.
In Spain during the early part of the ’30s he began his friendship with the Andalusian poet Federico Garcia Lorca. His poetic output at the time, influenced by civil unrest in Spain, alienation from his beloved Chile and Lorca’s interest in surrealist motifs, culminating in the release of “Residence on Earth,” which from its publication was hailed as his major literary achievement.
“Residence on Earth” begins a new stage of Neruda as poet. His poems become harsh, cutting, jagged attacks on what he sees to be the major social problems throughout the world. He rails against fascism and, in later years, the decadence of American imperialism. Over the years Neruda returned to “Residence on Earth,” adding a second and third book to the opus.
After Lorca’s death at the hands of the nationalists, Neruda returned to Chile where his writing turned more and more to politics and social concerns. Combined with a short political career and long-term alignment with the Communist Party, this new focus led to his exile from Chile in 1948. In his memoirs, he recounts a harrowing escape from the soldiers attempting to arrest him for his outspoken criticism of President Gabriel Gonzalez Videla. His exile saw the publication of “General Song” and the third book of “Residence on Earth,” both full of fiery rhetoric and high political ideals, making him an international poetic star.
His return to Chile, however, harkened a new Neruda, one who became an increasingly inward poet. Gone were the images of war, betrayal and strife that so dominated his political work. Breathtaking works such as “The Heights of Machu Picchu” and the anonymously published “Captain’s Verses” return to the themes of his youth, this time with the distance that comes with age and wisdom. His poetic output increased as he retreated more and more to his house on Isla Negra, focusing more and more on his beloved homeland. Images turn to the sea, to the mountains, to the hard stone earth: “You come from the destitute South, from the house / of privation, regions made hard with the earthuake and cold / that gave us hard lessons in living in the chalk and the clay / while the gods whom they worshiped were spinning away to their death.”
In 1971 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. During his acceptance speech he proclaimed “… I believe that poetry is an action, ephemeral or solemn, in which there enter as equal partners solitude and solidarity, emotion and action, the nearness to oneself, the nearness to mankind and to the secret manifestations of nature.” By now the oscillation between political and sensual was resolved into a new awareness, a new poetic that combined the two as the most human of accomplishments.
This final synthesis produced some extraordinary poetry, but was not to last. Bolstered by U.S. support, the Chilean military staged a coup in September 1973. Communist President Allende, whom Neruda nominated and helped get elected, was found dead, reportedly with a rifle wound to the head, on September 11. September 23, suffering from cancer, with his beloved homeland in chaos and the new dictator Augusto Pinochet ordering the deaths of tens of thousands, Pablo Neruda died of a heart attack. He was 69.
Neruda’s poetic output was tremendous. He wrote over 40 volumes of poetry containing thousands of poems, most currently available in English translations, and numerous other contributions to various journals. His “Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair” is still hailed in Chile as one of the country’s greatest treasures, known by heart by many. In this, his centenary, it is time we take a look back at the extensive poetic achievement of Chile’s greatest son.
