[In the following essay, Kelly considers Prado 's place among and influence on other Latin-American writers.]

I PRADO'S HISTORICAL ROLE

Pedro Prado was the first important poetic voice heard in Chile in the twentieth century. From 1915 to 1924 he held the enviable status of undisputed leader of an entire generation of poets, painters, and critics. He became the pivotal figure in the general artistic renaissance in Santiago. His literary preeminence was due to both formal and thematic innovations. He initiated the use of free verse in Chile in his first book Flores de Cardo. The work, published in 1908, clearly broke with all prior poetic traditions. Prado first demonstrated in this slender volume, and subsequently in El llamado del mundo of 1913, that a poem could be something other than a vehicle of Romantic sentimentality or Modernist preciosité. A poem, he believed, need not adhere to any pre-established systems of rhythm and rhyme. This stance opened the way for later poetic experimentation by others.

In 1912 Prado was the first Chilean to utilize the hybrid genre of the prose poem in La casa abandonada. This significant, but neglected, early work developed through its very plastic form the poetic and thematic possibilities of metaphysical concerns and Chilean nature. Prado introduced the peumo, boldo, patagua, and litre trees into poetry. To this literary arboretum, he added a Chilean aviary of humble chercanes, diucas, raras, and other common native birds. He awakened Chileans to the poetic and esthetic values of the surrounding landscape and continued the metaphysical inquiry that he initiated in El llamado del mundo.

By 1915 Prado had defined the prose poem form and combined it with philosophy in one of his major works, Los pájaros errantes. From this book came the first clear manifestations of the anti-lyricism and anti-rationalism of modern Chilean poetry, particularly in the works of Pablo de Rokha, Pablo Neruda, and Vicente Huidobro. That same year Prado organized the group "Los Diez," composed of luminaries of the period, among whom Eduardo Barrios, novelist; Augusto d'Halmar, novelist and short story writer; Armando Donoso, critic; Gabriela Mistral, Nobel poet laureate, were a few (the best known perhaps outside of Chile's narrow frontiers) of the changing decimal membership. "Los Diez" brought artists together to exchange ideas, to enjoy the mutual support of similarly oriented people, and to encourage creative activities by implementing, in their subsidiary role as publishers, the establishment of a review devoted to all the arts.

Prado's publishing activities commenced in a short-lived review, Revista contemporánea, which he founded and financed in 1910. He intended it to be a serious vehicle of communication for the multiple aspects of Chile's art, thought, and culture. The noble attempt failed, but the impetus provided by his "brothers," "Los Diez," led him to establish once more a publishing enterprise. This time, however, "Los Diez" represented a self-supporting effort where poets and writers not necessarily members of "Los Diez" could find an outlet for their works without financing their own publication. This was a commercial novelty at the time which indicated to Chilean publishers that a portion of the reading public would actually pay for literary works of Chilean authorship.

Prado acquired an international reputation after the publication of Alsino in 1920. He had begun his novelistic career with a pleasant, escapist work, La reina de Rapa Nui, in 1914. Alsino and Un juez rural established him among the best of the Latin American novelists and earned him a firm place in the histories of the novel of Spanish America. The psychological realism of Un juez rural carried over to his last short stories "El pueblo muerto" and "La risa en el desierto" which have merit for their concise structure and their thematic impact.

At the end of his literary peak Prado, still experimenting, ventured into a hybrid dramatic form in Androvar which in some ways resembles a play, but is under his own classification a dramatic poem. The play was innovative in its concept of philosophy presented as drama.

The actual conclusion of Prado's long literary career came in four volumes of sonnets published from 1934 to 1947. The sonnets represented another kind of innovation for Prado since he had assiduously avoided traditional forms and genres throughout most of his life. The sonnets began as personal, lyric revelations and ended in hermetic, awkward expressions of philosophy. These poems hold little interest for the general reader. Even the most serious students and admirers of Prado's many talents come away saddened and disillusioned by their quality.

II PRADO'S INFLUENTIAL ROLE

Among the direct influences on individual writers, we must mention Prado's significance to Pablo Neruda, one of Latin America's principal poets and another Chilean Nobel laureate. The initial impact on Neruda was Prado's early and active encouragement of the adolescent poet. Crepusculario, Neruda's first book published in 1921, contained a woodcut of a drawing by Prado, a tacit imprimatur. Vocal approval came in the pages of Zig-Zag. Neruda tells us that Prado, "wrote before anyone else a quiet, masterly page, charged with meaning and foresight, like a dawn at sea." Neruda's poetic form in Anillos, published in 1926, clearly imitated Prado's earlier prose poem form. This book represented the young man's first endeavour in this genre, a genre synonymous with Prado. The older poet's imprint is palpably evident in Neruda's "El otoño de las enredaderas" ("Autumn of the Vines"), "Imperial del Sur" ("South Imperial"), and "Primavera de agosto" ("August Spring"). The imagery of these three poems resembles Prado's in "La esperanza" ("Hope") and "El guijarro" ("The Pebble") from Los pájaros errantes. Both men had recourse to images of leaves, birds, flight, the wind and its voice, and of the ocean's restless, eternal movement forever reminding man of his own fleeting existence. Neruda's poetic lexicon, syntax, and rhythm in the first two prose poems reflect those of "La esperanza" ("Hope") and "El guijarro" ("The Pebble") in Los pájaros errantes, but "Primavera de agosto" finds its echo in Prado's even earlier La casa abandonada in "Las pataguas" and "El bosque" where Chilean trees are described and sung. Prado used his descriptions to form didactic symbols; Neruda sang of his unbridled joy, almost passion at the arrival of spring, of "time's return."

Prado's deep, poetic love for Chile, first revealed in La casa abandonada, does not wane until after 1924 when he becomes more preoccupied with death. The birds, the trees, the plants, the Andes, and especially the sea are integral parts of Prado's best poetic works. The same aspects of nature are projected in Neruda's Anillos, in his General Song, particularly that portion known as the "General Song of Chile," and in Elemental Odes. For both poets, the close observation and rendering of nature and the landscape have as their end the celebration of instinctual, telluric, and poetic knowledge over inferior logic and reason.

The single most important and enduring force exerted on Neruda was Prado's intellectual stimulation and inspiration. This meaningful, intangible influence received eloquent public recognition in Neruda's autobiographical speech, "Mariano Latorre, Pedro Prado, and My Own Shadow." This speech, read in 1962, pointed out the immense debt that writers of his generation owed to earlier masters. He confessed that "noting in my own book of accounts, I owe no small amount to three great men of our literature" (the critic "Alone," Eduardo Barrios, and Pedro Prado). In Neruda's recollections, Prado's gift of intelligent conversation most clearly stands out. He recounts that "suddenly one summer afternoon I felt the need of Prado's conversation.… His stock of direct observations on people and nature was prodigious. Perhaps this is what is called wisdom and Prado most approaches what in my adolescence I could call a wise man.… But no one since has given me that sensation of the supreme power of intelligence received at my young age, not even André Malraux who crossed more than once with me … the roads between France and Spain, giving off the electrical sparks of his extremist Cartesianism." Neruda adds two other famous European literary names, but hastens to clarify that "among my wise friends this Pedro Prado of my youth has remained in my memory like the tranquil image of a great blue mirror in which might have been reflected, in an extensive way, an essential landscape made of meditation and light, a serene cup always brimming with reasoning and balance."

Gabriela Mistral echoes and corroborates Neruda's observations on the magic effect of Prado's conversation. She wrote that his "conversation will have to be called the most substantial in Chile, which is wise and restless at the same time, so pithily original this talk and so manly in the real virtues of manhood (of creating, of teaching, and of illuminating), that he who enjoyed it has eaten of the ox of Ulysses sprinkled with spices and he will seek a similar conversation his whole life. There are days, days of strong hungers and months of shivering in foreign lands, when I look for that lost conversation the same way as my deluded eyes look for the Andes."

Apart from his historical, innovative role in Chilean literature and his intellectual influence on two Nobel laureates, Prado continues to interest, if he no longer directly influences, contemporary Chilean writers. It is notable that in a 1970 poll of the reading preferences of 250 Chilean writers, Prado was fourth in esteem after Pablo Neruda, Gabriela Mistral, and the novelist Manuel Rojas among national authors. Even though most of Prado's works and reputation have been confined to Chile, his novels and the original, unique prose poems of La casa abandonada and Los pájaros errantes have justifiably earned him a place of honor in the evolution of Latin American literature. No writer of his time, and possibly no writer since, at least in Chile, has more successfully combined philosophy, esthetic good sense, fiction, and poetry.