Agenda
 Purpose
 Bio of Pablo Neruda
 Personal Connection
 Literary Analysis
 Pre-Spanish Civil War
 Post-Spanish Civil War
 Later Years
 Overview and Questions
Purpose
The purpose of my capstone is to
analyze and connect the poetry of
Pablo Neruda to the historical
events that surrounded his life.
Chronology

1904 – Born Ricardo
Eliecer Naftalí

March 1921 – Moved to
Santiago

1923 – Crepusculario
appeared


1924 – 20 Poems of
Love and a Song of
Despair published



1927 – Named consul
of Rangoon

1932 – Returns to Chile
from time in the Orient

1934 – Moves to
Barcelona, named
Consul.

1936 – Spanish Civil
War initiates, Neruda
starts writing poems
for Spain in our
Hearts
1940 – Returns to
Chile
1945 – Joined the
Communist Party and
elected Senator for
the provinces of
Tarapacá and
Antofagasta
1948 – Chilean
Supreme Court
approves the
impeachment of
Neruda as Senator

1950 – First publish of
Canto General made in
Mexico

1952 – Returns to Chile
from exile

1970 – Neruda’s efforts
pay off as Allende wins
presidency.

1971 – Granted the
Nobel Prize of
Literature

September 11, 1973 –
President Salvador
Allende killed in the
military coup d'état

September 23, 1973 –
Pablo Neruda died
Personal
Connection
While studying in Chile I visited all
three of Neruda’s houses, and I
took a Chilean poetry class. Before
leaving to Chile, my older brother
gifted me a book of Pablo
Neruda’s.
Literary analysis
Pre Spanish Civil
War
Post Spanish Civil
War
Later Years
 Crepusculario
 Third Residence
 Elemental Odes
 20 love poems and a
song of despair
 Canto General
 Estravagario

Residence I y II
 The Grapes and the  Memorial of Isla
Wind
Negra
“The social message is bitter and
pessimistic… a bleak vision of the future. No
solution is offered for injustice and misery.”
(pg. 2)
-Salvatore Bizzarro
Crepusculario
“Barrio sin luz” / “Neighborhood Without Light”
The poetry of the things goes away
or it isn’t able to condense my life?
Yesterday- watching the last twilightI was a patch of moss among some ruins.
The cities – soot and revengesthe gray filth of the suburbs,
the office which hunches the backs,
the boss of turbulent eyes.
Blood of a red sky over the hills
blood on the streets and the squares,
pain of broken hearts,
pus of loathings and of tears.
…
And here I am, sprouted up among the ruins,
biting only all the sorrows,
as if the crying was a seed
and I the sole furrow of the earth.
20 Poems of Love and a Song of Despair”
…
Pale blind diver, luckless slinger,
lost discoverer, in you everything sank!
It is the hour of departure, the hard cold
hour which the night fastens to all the
timetables.
The rustling belt of the sea girdles the shore.
Cold stars heave up, black birds migrate.
Deserted like the wharves at dawn.
Only the tremulous shadow twists in my
hands.
Oh farther than everything. Oh farther than
everything.
It is the hour of departure. Oh abandoned
one.
Although love is the main focus, he
ends the book with despair.
The female body is idolized, exotic images
are compared with nature. For example,
white hills for the body of a woman.
Residence on Earth
I (1925-31) and
II (1931-35)
• Unity
• Burial in the East
• Only Death
The poems from these two books were
written during Neruda’s time as
consul of Chile in the Orient. These
times were very lonely for him, and he
explains his anguish from solitude in
these poems.
Residence on Earth I y II
“Unity”
There is something dense, united,
seated in the depths, / repeating its
number, its identical sign. / How clear
is it that the stones have touched time,
/ in their fine substance there is a smell
of age / and the water that the sea
brings from salt and sleep.
“Only Death”
Death is in the folding cots: / In the slow
mattresses, in the black blankets / she
lives stretched out, and she suddenly
blows: / she blows a dark sound that
swells the sheets, / and there are beds
sailing to a port / where she is waiting,
dressed as an admiral.
Spanish Civil War
 The war started in 1936, when Neruda was Consul of Chile
in Spain.
 For Pablo the war started with the death of one of his best
friends, the great poet Gabriel García Lorca.
 Due to the brutality he witnessed, Neruda sided with the
Republic against the Fascists.
 From his early stages of despair and solitude within the
masses, this turning point pushes Neruda toward hope for
the future by banning together and finds that misery loves
company.
Third Residence
(1935-1945)
• The Furies and the Sorrows
• Meeting Under New Flags
• Spain in Our Hearts
• “I Explain a Few Things”
• “Battle of the Jarama River”
• “Solar Ode to the Town’s
Army”
“Battle of the
Jarama River”
Between the earth and the drowned platinum
of olive orchards and Spanish dead,
Jarama, pure dagger, you have resisted
the wave of the cruel.
…
He shows us his support for
the people, the small towns,
and the Republic against the
fascists in Spain.
The bitter wheat of your people was
all bristling with metal and bones,
formidable and germinal like the noble
land that they defended
Furthermore, Neruda shows his support of a violent revolution; a common
characteristic of the communistic ideology.
Neruda’s Forced Exile
 As Senator of two northern provinces in Chile, Neruda
openly spoke and published articles in support of the copper
and nitrate miners.
 He called out and embarrassed the President at the time,
Gabriel González Videla.
 Videla sent out for his arrest, and Pablo fled into exile while
finishing his book Canto General.
 Neruda’s political ideologies lead him to this exile, and a
propagandist tone is found in Canto General without taking
away from his poetic artistry.
I. The Lamp on Earth
II. Heights of Machu Picchu
III. The Conquerors
IV. The Liberators
V. The Betrayed Sand
VI. America, I don’t invoke
your name in vain
VII. General Song of Chile
VIII. The Land Called Juan
IX. Awaken the Woodcutter
X. The Fugitive
XI. The flowers of Punitaqui
XII. Rivers of Song
XIII. Coral New Year for the
Homeland in Darkness
XIV. The Great Ocean
XV. I Am
Canto General (1938-1949)
With Chile as the main inspiration, Neruda gives a clear view on how he would like
to see the South American continent. All of the previous events he witnessed up to
this point influenced his ideology, and it is seen in the social and political themes.
X. The Fugitive
XIII. “American Sand, Solemn”
I don’t feel alone at night,
in earth’s darkness.
I am the people, innumerable peoples.
…
Death
, martyrdom, shadows, ice, suddenly
cover the seed.
And the
town seems buried.
But the
corn returns to the earth
…
From death we are born.
Later Years
• Elemental Odes
• Memorial of Isla Negra
After a long road of solidarity through his adolescence,
The horrific events he lived through in Spain, and his
hectic life in politics, his later years brought a search
of a more simple life; the poetry of Neruda also finds
simpler tones.
Elemental Odes
“Ode to Socks”
Mara Mori brought me
a pair of socks
…
Violent socks,
my feet were two fish made of wool,
two long sharks
sea blue, shot through
by one golden thread,
…
my feet were honoured in this way
by these heavenly socks.
…
I resisted the mad impulse to put them
in a golden cage and each day give
them
birdseed and pieces of pink melon.
…
The moral of my ode is this:
beauty is twice beauty
and what is good is doubly good
when it is a matter of two socks
made of wool in winter.
Overview
 Early Life Struggles
 Spanish Civil War
 Conflicts with Chile
 His simpler form
 Nobel Prize of
Literature, 1971
Questions?
Thank you!