9 - Pablo Neruda

Summary

This chapter offers a survey of Pablo Neruda’s most important poetic works, beginning with his melancholy-drenched Crepusculario and the work that made his famous, Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada, which express the post-adolescent longing for fulfilling love. A new phase was reached with the publication of Residencia en la tierra, inspired by Neruda’s rather negative experience of life as a diplomat in Rangoon. This essay argues that it was Neruda’s intense friendship with the Spanish poet, Federico García Lorca, that pulled him out of his “disgust with existence”; and it was Lorca’s murder in August 1936 in the opening months of the Spanish Civil War that provoked a dramatic transformation in Neruda’s work – he began to see poems as social and political weapons. His political phase – epitomized by Canto general – was followed by four volumes of odes in which Neruda wrote poems in which he sought to make the ordinary appear extraordinary, many of which are exquisite gems.