Ogden Nash - Salem Press

Critical Survey of Poetry Neruda, Pablo
ple leave on their tools as they wear them down with the
sweat of their hands. He would make poems like buildings,
permeated with smoke and garlic and flooded inside
and out with the air of men and women who seem
always present. Neruda advocated an impure poetry
whose subject might be hatred, love, ugliness, or beauty.
He sought to bring verse back from the exclusive conclave
of select minorities to the turmoil from which
words draw their vitality.
Crepusculario
Neruda’s work is divided into three discernible periods,
the turning points being the Spanish Civil War and
his return to Chile in 1952 after three years of forced exile.
During the first phase of his work, from 1923 to
1936, Neruda published six rather experimental collections
of verse in which he achieved the poetic strength
that carried him through four more decades and more
than twenty books. He published Crepusculario himself
in 1923 while a student at the University of Santiago.
Crepusculario is a cautious collection of poems reflecting
his reading of French poetry. Like the Latin American
Modernistas who preceded him, he consciously adhered
to classical forms and sought the ephemeral
effects of musicality and color. The poem that perhaps
best captures the message indicated by the title of the
book is very brief: “My soul is an empty carousel in the
evening light.” All the poems in Crepusculario express
Neruda’s ennui and reveal his experimentation with the
secondary qualities of language, its potential for the effects
of music, painting, and sculpture.
There are several interesting indications of Neruda’s
future development in Crepusculario that distinguish it
from similar derivative works. Neruda eventually came
to see poetry as work, a profession no less than carpentry,
brick masonry, or politics; this conception of poetry
is anticipated in the poem “Inicial,” in which he writes:
“I have gone under Helios who watches me bleeding/ laboring
in silence in my absent gardens.” Further, in
Crepusculario, Neruda occasionally breaks logical barriers
in a manner that anticipates much of his later Surrealistic
verse: “I close and close my lips but in trembling
roses/ my voice comes untied, like water in the fountain.”
Nevertheless, Crepusculario is also characterized
by a respect for tradition and a humorous familiarity
with the sacred which Neruda later abandoned, only to
rediscover them again in the third phase of his career, after
1952: “And the ‘Our Father’ gets lost in the middle of
the night/ runs naked across his green lands/ and trembling
with pleasure dives into the sea.” Linked with this
respect for his own traditions is an adulation of European
culture, which he also abandoned in his second
phase; Neruda did not, however, regain a regard for
Western European culture in his mature years, rejecting
it in favor of his own American authenticity: “When you
are old, my darling (Ronsard has already told you) / you
will recall the verses I spoke to you.”
In Crepusculario, the first stirrings of Neruda’s particular
contribution to Spanish poetry are evident—themes
that in the early twentieth century were considered unpoetic,
such as the ugliness of industrialized cities and
the drudgery of bureaucracies. These intrusions of objective
reality were the seeds from which his strongest
poetry would grow; they reveal Neruda’s capacity to
empathize with the material world and give it a voice.
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of
Despair
One year after the publication of Crepusculario, the
collection Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
appeared. It would become the most widely read collection
of poems in the Spanish-speaking world. In it,
Neruda charts the course of a love affair from passionate
attraction to despair and indifference. In these poems,
Neruda sees the whole world in terms of the beloved:
The vastness of pine groves, the sound of beating wings,
the slow interplay of lights, a solitary bell,
the evening falling into your eyes, my darling, and in you
the earth sings.
Love shadows and timbres your voice in the dying echoing
afternoon
just as in those deep hours I have seen
the field’s wheat bend in the mouth of the wind.
Throughout these twenty poems, Neruda’s intensity and
directness of statement universalize his private experiences,
establishing another constant in his work: the effort
to create a community of feeling through the expression
of common, universal experience.
Tentativa del hombre infinito
In 1926, Neruda published Tentativa del hombre
infinito (venture of infinite man), his most interesting
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