Pablo Neruda

1) His Biography:

Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), full name Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto, was born in the Chilean town of Parral on July 12, 1904. His father worked for the railways, and his mother was a teacher who died shortly after he was born. His father, who had gone to Temuco at the time, remarried dona Trinidad Candia Malverde a few years later.

The poet spent his infancy and adolescence in Temuco, where he met Gabriela Mistral, the head of the girls’ high school, and fell in love with her. He began contributing pieces to the daily “La Manana” at the age of thirteen, including Entusiasmo y Perseverancia, his first publication, and his first poetry. Under the pen name Pablo Neruda, which he assumed in commemoration of Czechoslovak poet Jan Neruda(1834-1891), he began contributing to the literary journal “Selva Austral” in 1920.

Neruda’s first published book, Crepusculario, contains some of the poetry he produced at the time (1923). One of his best-known and most translated works, Veinte poemas de amor y una cancion desesperada, was published the following year. Neruda studied French and pedagogy at the University of Chile in Santiago, in addition to his literary pursuits. Between 1927 and 1935, he served as an honorary consul in Burma, Ceylon, Java, Singapore, Buenos Aires, Barcelona, and Madrid. During that tough period, he produced a number of works, including Residencia en la Tierra (1933), a collection of esoteric surrealistic poems that marked his creative breakthrough.

The Spanish Civil War and the assassination of Garca Lorca, whom Neruda knew, had a profound impact on him, prompting him to join the Republican movement, first in Spain and then in France, where he began work on his poetry collection Espana en el Corazón (1937). In the same year, he returned to his native country, where he had been summoned, and his poetry for the next few years was marked by a focus on political and social issues. Because it was printed in the heart of the front during the civil war, Espana en el Corazón had a huge impact.

In 1939, Neruda was appointed consul for Spanish emigration in Paris, and then Consul General in Mexico, where he rebuilt his Canto General de Chile into an epic poem about the entire South American continent, its nature, people, and historical destiny. This piece, named Canto General, was published in Mexico in 1950, as well as in Chile clandestine. It is the most important element of Neruda’s work, consisting of around 250 poems organised into fifteen literary cycles. Canto General was translated into 10 languages shortly after its publication. Almost all of these poems were written during a difficult period in Neruda’s life, when he was living abroad.

In 1943, Neruda returned to Chile, where he was elected senator of the Republic in 1945 and joined the Chilean Communist Party. He had to live underground in his own country for two years due to his demonstrations against President González Videla’s brutal stance towards striking miners in 1947, until he was able to flee in 1949.

In 1952, he came home after staying in several European countries. Much of what he wrote at that time bears the imprint of his political activity; one example is Las Uvas y el Viento (1954), which might be thought of as Neruda’s exile diary. His message is broadened into a more comprehensive account of the universe in Odas elementales (1954-1959), where the hymns’ objects – things, events, and relationships – are alphabetically presented.

2) Main Works:

Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair:

Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada is based on Neruda’s personal sexual and romantic experiences, combining descriptions of human sexuality with descriptions of the natural world, particularly that of rural Chile, where he grew up. These early poems are intimate and sensual, using archetypal ideas of gender and nature as inspiration. Though its candid sexuality drew some criticism, it remains the world’s most popular book of Spanish-language poetry: audiences have favoured his early love poems above his later political work, especially in translation.

Residence on Earth:

These poems, which are filled with strange imagery of tiredness, rot, and disease, contrast in many ways with Neruda’s later writing, which is filled with urgent pleas for change. Nonetheless, his ability to elicit discomfort and violence was on full display in these volumes.

Tercera Residencia:

The poems of the Residencia series occupy a transitional place between Neruda’s earlier, purely romantic works and his later political works, straying into Republicanism in the latter instalments: The poem Espana en el corazon (Spain in Our Hearts) is included in Tercera Residencia as a response to the Spanish Civil War. Neruda turned a corner by firmly supporting the Republicans against Francisco Franco’s tyranny, establishing himself as a political poet. Neruda accepted the position of poet of witness or recorder of historical memory as well as that of activist in his literary depictions of the Spanish Civil War, claiming that “Poetry is Rebellion.”

Canto General:

Canto General, published in 1950, is an ambitious attempt to mythologize and praise Latin America as a whole via a communist prism, weaving together descriptions of the continent’s terrain with stories of colonialism and celebrations of current Latin American workers. It chronicles the continent’s history beginning with pre-Columbian times, aiming, in an enormously ambitious manner, to resurrect narratives lost to and suppressed by cultural imperialism.

3) Main themes in his writings:

Abandonment:

Poems like “A Song of Despair” explore the devastation and solitude of abandonment, presenting it as the terrifying polar opposite of intimacy and love. The speaker of “A Song of Despair” reflects on his past girlfriend. The speaker, on the other hand, becomes even more lonely and lost when he recalls this lost love: pleasant memories inevitably lead to a larger sense of melancholy.

In “Tonight I Can Write (The Saddest Lines),” the lover’s abandonment leaves the speaker feeling separated not only from her but also from the natural world that he associated with her. This sense of abandonment is used by Neruda to support his notions that love is a perilous quest that can result in tremendous riches, great loss, or both. Other poems, such as “If You Forget Me,” address this issue in a similar way, building tension by implying the prospect of abandonment to emphasise the intensity and ambiguity of romance. In each scenario, Neruda connects the perilous pursuit of love to the potential of abandonment.

Identity:

Neruda explores the addicting but disturbing quality of love in poems like “Love Sonnet XVII.” Love, he claims, is a risky enterprise because it demands each lover to give up certain aspects of their identity, allowing their identity to become muddled with, and even absorbed by, that of their loved one. The love between the narrator and the lover is particularly hazardous and passionate in Sonnet XVII, owing to the fact that the two participants have given so much of themselves to the other that they have ceased to exist as their distinct selves; their prior identities have been destroyed.

This is a concept that Neruda explores in more than just standard love poems. Neruda indicates that individual lives and identities are inseparable from the objects and people who surround them in his odes, which interrogate the interwoven lives of human beings and the items that surround them. The idea that historical and material circumstances impact the lives of working people in powerful ways that can overcome human wants and actions is explored in Neruda’s political poetry.

Sex:

Figurative language connects sexuality and the natural environment in Neruda’s poetry, notably in the instance of the feminine body. In lines like this from the poetry “Body of a Woman,” metaphor equates women’s bodies to natural landscapes and processes: “Body of a woman, white hills, white thighs, /… / My rough peasant’s body digs in you / and makes the son leap from the depths of the earth.”

Some have criticised these metaphors for objectifying women’s bodies or presenting femininity as a sexually passive state. Neruda, on the other hand, satirises the (rhetorical) sexualization of colonial country in poems like “La United Fruit Company,” stating that “The United Fruit Company/ reserved for itself…/ the delicate waist of America.” In contrast to Neruda’s love poetry, this portrayal of sexualization is a process of possession and control.

In these poetry, sex (and love) blur the lines between people and eliminate power imbalances. Furthermore, the United Fruit Company’s sluggish, business-like sexual objectification contrasts from the intense intensity depicted in some of Neruda’s love poetry. “I hunger your tongue, your voice, your hair. / Silent and ravenous, I prowl around the streets,” the speaker cries in “Love Sonnet XI,” driven insane by desire and love.

Decay and Death:

Neruda connects the sensation of personal pessimism with the greater issue of physical, social, and emotional deterioration, particularly in his Residencia en la Tierra volumes. This theme is treated with a near-melodramatic heaviness at moments, as Neruda tests how far he can push the theme before it overwhelms him. Death and decay are described as an unsettling reversal in Neruda’s poem “Death Alone,” with “death in the bones, / like a pure sound, / a bark without its dog.”

In many of his works, Neruda describes deterioration as a state of waste or asymmetry, in which the world’s resources and sensations emerge unevenly or fail to reach their intended destination. “the sound of worthless swords that can be heard in my spirit, / and the pigeon of blood that’s all alone on my forehead / screaming for things that are missing, missing people, / stuff oddly inseparable and lost,” writes the Widower in “The Widower’s Tango.” Death, on the other hand, is portrayed as an injustice in his more political works, such as “The Dictator,” rather than as useless misery.

“I, the materialist, who never believed / in any promised heaven in the sky… / Yes, I believe in a heaven for all dogdom / where my dog waits for my arrival / waving his fan-like tail in friendliness,” Neruda writes in “A Dog Has Died.” Or, in poems like “Ode to a Large Tuna in the Market,” he explores how death can be a kind of trip into the unknown rather than a nothingness.

Nature:

The natural world is frequently treated as a domain of beauty, richness, and antediluvian mystery in Neruda’s work. The natural world—especially sections of it inaccessible to humans—is characterised as a near-fantastical realm in poems like “Ode to a Large Tuna in the Market,” which contrasts with the crass mundanity of the human and urban world. As a result of the human world’s tendency to intrude on and exploit environment, Neruda’s political and historical poetry frequently use descriptions of unspoilt nature to elide politically dominant narratives and access other, less-dominant ones.

As previously said, in Neruda’s love poetry, the natural environment is frequently associated with sexuality and romance. This is true in the sense that the lover is figuratively portrayed through natural language, as well as in the sense that the lover has the power to change the speaker’s relationship to the natural world, allowing him to feel linked to otherwise inhuman and threatening terrain. If human trade and power battles are encroachments on nature, love and sexuality provide a way back into it in Neruda’s works.

Workers and Work:

Not only does Neruda’s poetry show the influence of socialist politics in its critiques of fascism and colonialism, but also in the way he describes labour and labourers. Even in the unexpected context of “Ode to My Socks,” when the (non-monetized) work of knitting becomes a source of immense beauty and connection, we witness this.

Meanwhile, in “The Heights of Macchu Picchu,” Neruda rhapsodises about the generations of workers who built Latin America’s civilization and culture, saying, “Look at me from the depths of the earth, you, / the farm worker, the weaver, the quiet shepherd, / the tamer of guardian guanacos, / the mason on his defied scaffolding, / the water carrier bearing Andean tears…”

Neruda’s interest in the physical world as an object to be handled, manipulated, produced, and consumed runs through all of his work: if life is basically a material process, as it is in Neruda’s literature, physical labour is central to all aspects of being alive.

4) His relevance today:

The historical circumstances in which Neruda participated directly impacted his legacy. He was an activist-writer in his early years, during Chile’s revolutionary student movement, and the voice of a young generation fighting the country’s ruling elite. In his later years, he fought vehemently against US intervention in Chile and represented Salvador Allende’s historic socialist government as ambassador to France. These eras of extreme political upheaval and dictatorship impacted his interaction with readers and his own writing.

The question remains, as we face a new era of rising authoritarianism and new complexities and injustices to combat: Does poetry have the capacity to impact change? We can print leaflets that say “drop poetry, not bombs,” but the terrible truth is that a single poem will not safeguard dreamers from deportation or restrict an unsuitable president.

Yet, as Neruda demonstrates, poetry’s poignant nature—its unique power of distillation—can effect change through a cumulative, collective effort: each time a poem comes into contact with a person’s consciousness—whether read by a 1930s Spanish Republican soldier, heard on the radio, or penned anew—it incites the possibility of a shift in perspective or an urge toward action, one by one, like gathering drops.

Poetry has the power to energise, educate, and inspire. This won’t stop bombs on their own, but when combined with all of a social movement’s direct actions—marches, grassroots organising, and 7,000 shoes placed on the U.S. Capitol lawn—Neruda has demonstrated how poetry can be an emotionally potent ingredient in greater transformative resistance efforts.

The durability of Neruda’s poetry is evidenced by how often people seek out and invoke his works as a tool to energise, awaken, and sustain them. “Tyranny cuts off the head that sings,” Neruda’s words were draped on banners over the streets of San Francisco in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq: “Tyranny cuts off the head that sings, but the voice at the bottom of the well returns to the secret springs of the earth, and out of the darkness rises up through the mouth of the people.”

“You can cut all the flowers, but you can’t stop spring,” Egyptian art scholar Bahia Shehab spraypainted on the streets of Cairo during the Arab Spring over a decade later. Those identical lines of Neruda that had appeared in Cairo five years earlier would grace posters displaying the original Spanish during the January 2017 Women’s March: “Podrán cortar todas las flores, pero no podrá detener la primavera.”

Cases of social injustice, war, and the failures of liberal democracy compel us to take action. In the face of adversity, Neruda’s poetry changed dramatically. He abandoned his bleak, solitary experimental poetry at the onset of the Spanish Civil War in favour of a decisive style that would compel people to action.

We can all change the way we communicate ourselves, whether we’re poets, teachers, readers, activists, or simple citizens concerned about the world. We no longer need to make pulp out of flags to communicate our message to the resistance forces in the age of social media. We are all able to communicate. We may all participate in the conversation. And poetry can be a part of how we all “explain some things,” as Neruda put it. We can see how the act of expressing oneself, as well as the act of hearing, are essential components of resistance—and of poetry’s particular, enduring power—from Neruda and others.