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Love and Politics

Pablo Neruda

Born on July 12th, 1904, Pablo Neruda, or Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto, was a Nobel-winning, Chilean poet and diplomat whose staunch support for communism and fierce love of Chile and his Chilean compatriots, intertwined to create a powerhouse of a man. He has been called one of the greatest poets of the 20th century by the likes of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Harold Bloom, and had the literary respect from writers such as Octavio Paz, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriela Mistral, and has remained one of the most widely read poets in the world.

Though his literary contributions were undeniably positive, his career as an outspoken diplomat and fervent communist ideology drew ire and controversy. He praised Joseph Stalin for his interpretation of Marxism, and even went so far as to write poems like “Canto Stalingrado” (1942) and “Nuevo Canto de Amor a Stalingrado” (1943) and accepting the Stalin Peace Prize. This fervor for Stalin famously compromised his long standing friendship with the great Mexican poet Octavio Paz. Neruda withdrew support for Soviet leadership years later, but he remained faithful to communism.

His poetry ranged from topics of South American history, politics, social justice, revolutions, surreal poems on love, women, and artichokes. Of poetry, he wrote in a manifesto that it should be “impure as the clothing we wear, or our bodies, soup-stained, soiled with our shameful behaviour, our wrinkles and vigils and dreams, observations and prophecies, declarations of loathing and love, idylls and beasts, the shocks of encounter, political loyalties, denials and doubts, affirmations and taxes.” The chaotic destitution in many of his poems reflected this belief completely.

Many might remember him as something more than simply a poet, someone much closer to a revolutionary figure and a cult of personality himself. His poems certainly ran the gamut for coverage of all topics. But through and through if one doesn’t know Neruda as a love poet, then one doesn’t know him at all. In his poem “The Fickle One”, Neruda writes, “[…] to you, without my moving, / Without seeing you, distant you, / Go my blood and my kisses, / My dark one and my fair one, / My broad one and my slender one, / My ugly one, my beauty, / Made of all the gold / And of all the silver, / Made of all the wheat / And of all the earth, / Made of all the water / Of sea waves, / Made for my arms / Made for my kisses, / Made for my soul.”

Even in his poems that don’t seem to center around love at all, the voice and passion of the lover is obvious. In a poem titled “Ode to Clothes,” Neruda writes, “[…] clothes, / I too go forming you, / extending your elbows, / snapping your threads, / and so your life expands / in the image of my life.” It is a reverence and sensitivity not just for objects or people or cultures but for their uses and effects upon one another intertwined that creates the lover in Neruda that is the joie de vivre. For more of his poetry, read his Selected Works.

By Thad Higa