Unusually, his Nobel prize for literature in 1971 was celebrated in every Chilean household.
Pablo neruda toward the splendid city summary full#
Despite his fear of the sea, his home is full of nautical references – ships and shells and figureheads – and he usually wore a captain's cap. He could seduce crowds but he was a renowned flirt, and his love poetry continued to attract and fascinate women throughout his life.īy the late 1960s he was spending most of his time at his beautiful home at Isla Negra, on Chile's coast.
Neruda was a powerful and moving reader of his own work his slightly high-pitched voice half spoke half sang his words, their rhythm resonating with the soft music of Chilean speech. It was the same people who crowded into his public readings in football stadiums and factory canteens. It was, perhaps, his gesture of gratitude to those who had sheltered him – the ordinary, nameless people who built the roads and cities of an earlier society. Neruda watched the iguanas emerge from the primal sludge, and pays homage to the anonymous hands that built the great civilisations of the south. The book-length poem that emerged was a celebration of the Indian America that existed long before it was conquered and claimed by Spain. He was given protection in the homes of peasants and miners, as he moved from house to house. It was written in hiding, after the Communist party was banned in 1947 and Neruda, then a senator, was forced to flee.
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.Ī General Song is an epic retelling of Latin American history. The turning point came in Spain, when the joy he felt in the company of Lorca and Buñuel and others in Madrid was destroyed by Franco's coup in July 1936. Later, as he travelled the world in minor diplomatic posts, it is his solitude and the sense of a world in crisis that dominates. And it is a rare Chilean who cannot quote quite large sections of the little book. His wonderful 20 poems of love, published in 1924, have convinced several subsequent generations of young women of the urgency of love. Much of his early work was intimate and personal. But his politics are not to be found in these "official" expressions, but in his passionate, emotional responses to events that changed his own life. At times it led him into ill-timed hymns of praise, like his odes to Stalin. Yet at the same time he recorded and responded to historical events with his trademark theatrical rhetoric. The Elementary odes he began to write in the early 50s captured the poetry of the everyday – in old suits, warm woollen socks, onions and the rich juicy tomatoes that grace every Chilean table.
For the skill that earned him such esteem was his ability to find beauty in ordinary things. He was that rare thing – a public poet, and a great one, held in deep affection by every layer of Chilean society. Yet he was a figure of enormous political significance. Neruda was to have been a Communist party presidential candidate in the 1970 elections, but he stood down when his party joined Allende's coalition.
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