Pablo NerudaA poet whose works are powerful enough to move hearts and change perspectives, despite any barriers that may have gotten in the way. By Caitlin Cavanaugh, Andrea Ricca, and Michael
Grant
“Peace goes into the making of a poem as flour goes into the making of bread.”-Pablo Neruda
July 12, 1904 Parral, Chile
Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto
Began writing poetry at nine
Background Info
Father did not approve of passion
Pablo NerudaMoved to Santiago
CrepuscularioDiplomat
Biography
BiographyCaballo verde para la
poesíaSpanish Civil War
What Spain Was LikeSpain was a taut, dry drum-head Daily beating a dull thud Flatlands and eagle's nest Silence lashed by the storm. How much, to the point of weeping, in my soul I love your hard soil, your poor bread, Your poor people, how much in the deep place Of my being there is still the lost flower Of your wrinkled villages, motionless in time And your metallic meadows Stretched out in the moonlight through the ages, Now devoured by a false god. All your confinement, your animal isolation While you are still conscious Surrounded by the abstract stones of silence, Your rough wine, your smooth wine Your violent and dangerous vineyards. Solar stone, pure among the regions Of the world, Spain streaked With blood and metal, blue and victorious Proletarian Spain, made of petals and bullets Unique, alive, asleep - resounding.
BiographyMexico
Senate and Communism
Hiding
Back in ChileMatilde Urrutia
AwardsLeukemia
On September 23, 1973, Pablo Neruda died in
Santiago Chile.
Biography
Love, We’re Going Home Now
Love, we're going home now,Where the vines clamber over the trellis:Even before you, the summer will arrive,On its honeysuckle feet, in your bedroom.
Our nomadic kisses wandered over all the world:Armenia, dollop of disinterred honey:Ceylon, green dove: and the YangTse with its oldOld patience, dividing the day from the night.
And now, dearest, we return, across the crackling seaLike two blind birds to their wall,To their nest in a distant spring:
Because love cannot always fly without resting,Our lives return to the wall, to the rocks of the sea:Our kisses head back home where they belong.
Natural elements/references to nature
Love Passion
Loneliness
Neruda’s Style
OdesRepetition
Single words
Neruda’s Style
“turtle platedwith severeamberscales”
“The graceful Olives Polished By the hands”
“Come See the blood along the streets Come see”
Literary Criticism
Some considered a portion of his work as not even poetry but “rhetoric propaganda”
Called the “Lorca or Alberti of Spanish America”He wrote “like breathing” but his style
transformed over many yearsWrote “impure poetry” (a term which he coined)An “obscure name” in the United States“Jumble of quality and perversity”
We AgreeA fair percent of his poems were “rhetoric and
propaganda”He was the “Lorca or Alberti of Spanish
America”Died with a high-volume of poems and
transformation of styleHe wrote “impure poetry”“Jumble of quality and perversity”
The White Man’s Burden
“ Lost in the forest, I broke off a dark twigand lifted its whisper to my thirsty lips:maybe it was the voice of the rain crying,a cracked bell, or a torn heart.
Something from far off it seemeddeep and secret to me, hidden by the earth,a shout muffled by huge autumns,by the moist half-open darkness of the leaves.
Wakening from the dreaming forest there, the hazel-sprigsang under my tongue, its drifting fragranceclimbed up through my conscious mind
as if suddenly the roots I had left behindcried out to me, the land I had lost with my childhood---and I stopped, wounded by the wandering scent ”
One of his most outward poems about his political beliefs but still metaphorical
We DisagreeAn “obscure” name in the United States
To Wrap Things Up…
Neruda has proven that the drive for success can be strong enough to knock down any walls that may be in the way
He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971
He died at 69 years old and with all his work collected together; in published form the book had well over 3000 pages
