the publication ofCrepusculario, 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 youthe earth sings.Love shadows and timbres your voice in the dying echoingafternoonjust as in those deep hours I have seenthe 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 work from a technical point of view. In this book-length poem, Neruda employed the “automatic writing” espoused by the Surrealists. The poem celebrates Neruda’s discovery of the city at night and tests the capacity of his poetic idiom to sound the depths of his subconscious. Ignoring the conventions of sentence structure, syntax, and logic, Neruda fuses form and content.

The poem opens in the third person with a description of the poet asleep in the city of Santiago. It returns to the same image of the sleeping man and the hearth fires of the city three times, changing person from third to second to first, creating a circular or helical structure. The imagery defies conventional associations: “the moon blue spider creeps floods/ an emissary you were moving happily in the afternoon that was falling/ the dusk rolled in extinguishing flowers.”

In the opening passages, Neruda explores the realm between wakefulness and sleep, addressing the night as his lover: “take my heart, cross it with your vast pulleys of silence/ when you surround sleep’s animals, it’s at your feet/ waiting to depart because you place it face to face with/ you, night of black helixes.” In this realm between motive and act, Neruda’s language refuses to acknowledge distinctions of tense: “a twenty-year-old holds to the frenetic reins, it is that he wanted to follow the night.” Also, the limits that words draw between concepts disappear, and thoughts blend like watercolors: “star delayed between the heavy night the days with tall sails.”

The poem is a voyage of exploration that leads to a number of discoveries. The poet discovers his own desperation: “the night like wine enters the tunnel/ savage wind, miner of the heavens, let’s wail together.” He discovers the vastness of the other: “in front of the inaccessible there passes by for you a limitless presence.” He discovers his freedom: “prow, mast, leaf in the storm, an abandonment without hope of return impels you/ you show the way like crosses the dead.” Most important, he discovers wonder: “the wind leaving its egg strikes my back/ great ships of glowing coals twist their green sails/ planets spin like bobbins.” The abstract becomes concrete and hence tractable: “the heart of the world folds and stretches/ with the will of a column and the cold fury of feathers.” He discovers his joy: “Hurricane night, my happiness bites your ink/ and exasperated, I hold back my heart which dances/ a dancer astonished in the heavy tides which make the dawn rise.”

When the poet finds his beloved, he begins to acquire a more logical grasp of objective reality, but when he realizes that he is still dreaming, his joy becomes despair. He gradually awakens; his senses are assaulted by the smell of the timber of his house and the sound of rain falling, and he gazes through the windows at the sky. Interestingly, his dream visions do not abandon him at once but continue to determine his perceptions:

birds appear like letters in the depths of the skythe dawn appears like the peelings of fruitthe day is made of firethe sea is full of green rags which articulate I am the seaI am alone in a windowless roomsnails cover the walkand time is squared and immobile.

In this experimental work, Neruda mastered the art of tapping his subconscious for associative imagery. Although he never returned to the pure Surrealism of Tentativa del hombre infinito, it is the union of strikingly original and often surreal imagery with earthly realism that gives Neruda’s mature poetry its distinctive character.

Residence on Earth, and Other Poems

In the poems of Residence on Earth, and Other Poems, Neruda first achieved that mature voice, free of any derivative qualities. One of the greatest poems in this collection, “Galope muerto” (“Dead Gallop”), was written in the same year as Tentativa del hombre infinito, 1925, although it was not published in book form until 1933. “Dead Gallop” sets the tone for the collection, in which Neruda repeatedly expresses a passionate desire to assimilate new experiences: “Everything is so fast, so living/ yet immobile, like a mad pulley spinning on itself.” Many of the poems in Residence on Earth, and Other Poems begin in the same manner, recording those peripheral and secondary sensations that reside on the fringe of consciousness. They work toward the same end, resolving the new into understandable terms. As the poems come into focus, the reader participates in the poet’s assimilation of his new world. For example, the significance of his vague memories of saying goodbye to a girl whom he had left in Chile gradually becomes clear in one poem:

Dusty glances fallen to earthor silent leaves which bury themselves.Lightless metal in the voidand the suddenly dead day’s departure.On high hands the butterfly shinesits flight’s light has no end.You kept the light’s wake of broken thingswhich the abandoned sun in the afternoon throws at the church steps.

Here, one can see Neruda’s gift for surreal imagery without the programmatic irrationality and dislocation of the Surrealists.

In Residence on Earth, and Other Poems, too, there are magnificent catalogs in the manner of Walt Whitman: “the angel of sleep—the wind moving the wheat, the whistle of a train, a warm place in a bed, the opaque sound of a shadow which falls like a ray of light into infinity, a repetition of distances, a wine of uncertain vintage, the dusty passage of lowing cows.”

Like Whitman, Neruda in Residence on Earth, and Other Poems opens Spanish poetry to the song of himself: “my symmetrical statue of twinned legs, rises to the stars each morning/ my exile’s mouth bites meat and grapes/ my male arms and tattooed chest/ in which the hair penetrates like wire, my white face made for the sun’s depth.” He presents uncompromising statements of human sensuality; he descends into himself, discovers his authenticity, and begins to build a poetic vision that, although impure, is genuinely human. He manages in these sometimes brutal poems to reconcile the forces of destruction and creation that he had witnessed in India in the material world of buildings, work, people, food, weather, himself, and time.

Although Neruda never achieved a systematic and internally consistent poetic vision, the balance between resignation and celebration that informs Residence on Earth, and Other Poems suggests a philosophical acceptance of the world. “Tres cantos materiales” (“Three Material Songs”), “Entrada a la madera” (“Entrance to Wood”), “Apoges del apio” (“Apogee of Celery”), and “Estatuto del vino” (“Ordinance of Wine”) were a breakthrough in this respect. In “Entrance to Wood,” the poet gives voice to wood, which, though living, is material rather than spiritual. Neruda’s discovery of matter is a revelation. He introduces himself into this living, material world as one commencing a funereal journey, carrying his sorrows with him in order to give this world the voice it lacks. His identification with matter alters his language so that the substantives become verbs: “Let us make fire, silence, and noise,/ let us burn, hush and bells.”

In “Apogee of Celery,” the poet personifies a humble vegetable, as he does later in The Elemental Odes. Neruda simply looks closely and with his imagination and humor reveals a personality—how the growth of celery reflects the flight of doves and the brilliance of lightning. In Spanish folklore, celery has humorous though obscene connotations which Neruda unflinchingly incorporates into his poem. The resultant images are bizarre yet perfectly descriptive. Celery tastes like lightning bugs. It knows wonderful secrets of the sea, whence it originates, but perversely insists on being eaten before revealing them.

Popular wisdom also finds its way into the poem “Ordinance of Wine.” Neruda’s discovery of the wonders of matter and of everyday experience led him to describe the Bacchanalian rites of drunkenness as laws, the inevitable steps of intoxication. In the classical tradition, Neruda compares wine to a pagan god: It opens the door on the melancholy gatherings of the dishonored and disheartened and drops its honey on the tables at the day’s edge; in winter, it seeks refuge in bars; it transforms the world of the discouraged and overpowers them so that they sing, spend money freely, and accept the coarseness of one another’s company joyfully. The celebrants’ laughter turns to weeping over personal tragedies and past happiness, and their tears turn to anger when something falls, breaks, and abruptly ends the magic. Wine the angel turns into a winged Harpy taking flight, spilling the wine, which seeps through the ground in search of the mouths of the dead. Wine’s statutes have thus been obeyed, and the visiting god departs.

In “Ordinance of Wine,” “Apogee of Celery,” and “Entrance to Wood,” Neruda reestablished communion between humans and the material world in which they live and work. Since work was the destiny of most of his readers, Neruda directed much of his poetry to this reconciliation between the elemental and the social, seeking to reintroduce wonder into the world of the alienated worker.

Neruda was writing the last poems of Residence on Earth, and Other Poems in Madrid when the Spanish Civil War erupted. The catastrophe delayed the publication of the last book of the trilogy by twelve years. More important, the war confirmed Neruda’s stance as a defender of oppressed peoples, of the poor. Suddenly, Neruda stopped singing the song of himself and began to direct his verse against the Nationalists besieging Madrid. The war inspired the collection of poems Spain in the Heart, a work as popular in Eastern Europe as is Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair in the West. These poems, such as Neruda’s 1942 “Oda a Stalingrad” (“Ode to Stalingrad”), were finally published as part of Residence on Earth, and Other Poems. They were written from the defensive point of view of countries fighting against the threat of fascism. In them, the lyric element almost disappears before the onslaught of Neruda’s political passion. Indeed, from 1937 to 1947, Neruda’s poetry served the greater purpose of political activism and polemics:

You probably want to know: And where are the lilies?the metaphysics covered with poppies?And the rain which often struckhis words filling themwith holes and birds?I’m going to tell you what has happened.I lived in a neighborhood in MadridMy house was calledthe House of Flowers . . .And one evening everything was on fire. . . Bandits with planes and with Moorsbandits with rings and duchessesbandits with black friars giving blessingscame through the sky to kill children.

More than ten years had to pass before Neruda could reaffirm his art above political propaganda.

Canto General

During the 1940’s, Neruda worked by plan on his epic history of Latin America, Canto General. Beginning with a description of the geography, the flora, and the fauna of the continent, the book progresses from sketches of the heroes of the Inca and Aztec empires through descriptions of conquistadores, the heroes of the Wars of Independence, to the dictators and foreign adventurers in twentieth century Latin America. Neruda interprets the history of the continent as a struggle toward autonomy carried on by many different peoples who have suffered from one kind of oppression or another since the beginnings of their recorded history.

The Captain’s Verses

Neruda, however, did not disappear entirely from his work during these years. He anonymously published The Captain’s Verses to celebrate falling in love with the woman with whom he would spend the rest of his life, Matilde Urrutia. Unlike his previous women, Matilde shared Neruda’s origins among the poor of southern Chile as well as his aspirations. These poems are tender, passionate, and direct, free of the despair, melancholy, and disillusionment of Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair and of Residence on Earth, and Other Poems.

Las uvas y el viento

While working in exile for the European Peace Party, Neruda recorded in Las uvas y el viento (the grapes and the wind) impressions of new friends and places, of conferences and renewed commitments made during his travels through Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. Neruda warmly remembers Prague, Berlin, Moscow, Capri, Madame Sun Yat-sen, Ilya Ehrenburg, Paul Éluard, Pablo Picasso, and the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet. The most interesting works in the collection re-create Neruda’s return to cities from which he had been absent for more than thirty years.

The Elemental Odes

Neruda’s travels through the East assured his fame. His fiftieth year signaled his return to Chile to fulfill the demand for his work that issued from three continents. In 1954, he built his house on Isla Negra with Matilde Urrutia and published the first of three remarkable collections, The Elemental Odes, followed by Nuevas odas elementales (new elemental odes) and Tercer libro de odas (third book of odes). In these books, Neruda returned to the discoveries made in the “Material Songs” of Residence on Earth, and Other Poems. In the odes, Neruda’s poetry again gained ascendancy over politics, although Neruda never ignored his political responsibilities.

The elemental odes reflect no immediately apparent political concern other than to renew and fulfill the search for an impure poetry responsive to the wonder of the everyday world. Neruda writes that earlier poets, himself included, now cause him to laugh because they never see beyond themselves. Poetry traditionally deals only with poets’ own feelings and experiences; those of other men and women hardly ever find expression in poetry. The personality of objects, of the material world, never finds a singer, except among writers such as Neruda, who are also workers. Neruda’s new purpose is to maintain his anonymity, because now “there are no mysterious shadows/ everyone speaks to me about their families, their work, and what wonderful things they do!”

In the elemental odes, Neruda learns to accept and celebrate the common gift of happiness, “as necessary as the earth, as sustaining as hearth fires, as pure as bread, as musical as water.” He urges people to recognize the gifts they already possess. He sings of such humble things as eel stew, in which the flavors of the Chilean land and sea mix to make a paradise for the palate. Against those who envy his work and its unpretentious message of common humanity, Neruda responds that a simple poetry open to common people will live after him because it is as unafraid and healthy as a milkmaid in whose laughter there are enough teeth to ruin the hopes of the envious.

Indeed, the language of the elemental odes is very simple and direct, but, because Neruda writes these poems in such brief, internally rhyming lines, he draws attention to the natural beauty of his Spanish, the measured rhythm of clauses, the symmetry of sentence structure, and the solid virtues of an everyday vocabulary. In the tradition of classical Spanish realism, the elemental odes require neither the magic of verbal pyrotechnics nor incursions into the subconscious to achieve a fullness of poetic vision.

Later work

After the collection Extravagaria—in which Neruda redirected his attention inward again, resolving questions of his own mortality and the prospect of never again seeing places and people dear to him—the poet’s production doubled to the rate of two lengthy books of poems every year. In response partly to the demand for his work, partly to his increased passion for writing, Neruda’s books during the last decade of his life were often carefully planned and systematic. Navegaciones y regresos (navigations and returns) alternates a recounting of his travels with odes inspired by remarkable people, places, and events. One Hundred Love Sonnets collects one hundred rough-hewn sonnets of love to Matilde Urrutia. Isla Negra is an autobiography in verse. Art of Birds is a poetic ornithological guide to Chile. Stones of the Sky, Ceremonial Songs, Fully Empowered, and The House at Isla Negra are all-inclusive, totally unsystematic collections unified by Neruda’s bold style, a style that wanders aimlessly and confidently like a powerful river cutting designs in stone. Las manos del día (the hands of the day) and La espada encendida (the sword ignited), written between 1968 and 1970, attest Neruda’s responsiveness to new threats against freedom. Geografía infructuosa (unfruitful geography) signals Neruda’s return again to contemplate the rugged coast of Chile. As Neruda remarks in his Memoirs concerning his last decade of work, he gradually developed into a poet with the primitive style characteristic of the monolithic sculptures of Oceania: “I began with the refinements of Praxiteles and end with the massive ruggedness of the statues of Easter Island.”