“The Invisible Man” is very reminiscent of “The Heights of Macchu Picchu.” There he expressed the Incan workers’ plight, their silenced language, to raise consciousness with the hope of stimulating social change. At the end of “The Invisible Man,” he asks his fellow Chileans to share their concerns, their stories of suffering, in order to transmit the story of their plight as well.
“The people give me my poetry and I give my poetry to the people,” Neruda proclaimed at a party fund-raiser the year the poem came out. It was a pretentious assumption, in the same vein as presuming to be the spokesperson for the ancient workers. Still, he had the perception and the motivation to create unique poetry that interpreted the social realities of “the people” in a radically different way, allowing their stories to transcend the oppressive ideologies of the upper, ruling classes. It was that reciprocity that defined his life at this stage, the role he had assumed on and off the written page, answering his calling as if it were an obligation. The poet’s calling: an obligation, yet also a natural impulse; simultaneously being called while calling to others.
give me
the everyday
struggles
because they are my song,
and that way we will walk together,
shoulder to shoulder,
all of humanity,
my song unites them:
the song of the invisible man
who sings with humanity.
“The Invisible Man” would be the first poem, a kind of preface, for the first of four books of odes Neruda published between 1952 and 1959—a total of 216 odes.* In 1953, Neruda said, “On our earth, before writing was invented, before the printing press was invented, poetry flourished. That is why we know that poetry is like bread; it should be shared by all, by scholars and by peasants, by all our vast, incredible, extraordinary family of humanity.” Neruda’s new odes reached an extremely vast range of readers. The odes were oriented toward social themes; their style was still realist, the style in which he had been writing over the past decades. Yet perhaps more than almost all the other poems written after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, his approach in the odes was experimental, full of the innovation and creative spontaneity with which he began his career.
Neruda’s close friend Miguel Otero Silva, editor in chief of El Nacional in Caracas, who had published Neruda’s denouncement of González Videla, asked him to contribute a weekly column of poetry. Neruda agreed but asked that the poems be printed in the main news pages rather than the arts supplement. Although only a handful of his odes appeared in the paper, through the practice he found the form for his odes.
The small columns of the newspaper obliged Neruda to make shorter lines, and the opportunity to reach all the readers of the newspaper—not just those who read the culture pages—led Neruda to make the poems seem simpler, though not simplistic, using everyday language for everyday people about everyday things. This simple, elementary form reflected the odes’ relationship to the elementary objects he wanted to describe. The poems Neruda wrote for the newspaper were the drawing board for hundreds more, which would, through those four books of his, elevate the quotidian in a political act of subverting social hierarchy.
Often the ordinary subject matter—onions, tomatoes, conger eel chowder, even socks—and their free, almost prosaic voice made the odes seem less “poetic,” more plainspoken. But Neruda’s thoughtful, conceptual associations gave the poems a compelling, often surprising punch, so that they captured the reader’s attention. Through his technique, he was able to make these everyday subjects seem sublime. As Jaime Concha, professor emeritus of Latin American literature at the University of California, San Diego, puts it: by focusing on the “fragile singularities” of these objects, individually and minute within the midst of all the universal laws of the material world, Neruda makes “the great energies of totality pulse within these minuscule grains, both symbolic and edible.” One of the remarkable qualities of the odes is that he achieves all of that through complex, challenging, groundbreaking poetic work behind the scenes of the lines; he is able to place the object within a matrix of social relations and then spin a transformational poem around it without disturbing the poem’s simple, elemental appearance and accessibility.
Neruda wrote odes to everything, from a chestnut fallen on the ground to poverty, from Walt Whitman to an anonymous bricklayer. Perhaps Neruda wrote too many odes, for at a certain point their efficient beauty isn’t sustained. Still, this new form was among his greatest literary achievements, in particular the first two volumes. The odes are a major reason Neruda is considered to be one of the most exuberant poets of all time.
The odes are organized alphabetically, as if he set out to write an ambitious, innovative encyclopedia in line with the famous eighteenth-century French Encyclopédie, whose descriptions reflected the ideals of the Enlightenment thinkers who contributed to it, including Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Voltaire, with Denis Diderot as chief editor. Inspired by the thirty-nine-volume set of the Encyclopédie he had purchased while in exile in France, Neruda intended to describe and record everyday elements and objects that have a social function, that relate and are useful to the daily experience of humankind. He hoped to expand upon the records of the Enlightenment thinkers by adding in a higher, more developed dose of class consciousness and by elevating the ode form to deliver the essentials of each subject to the reader in a dynamic and memorable way.
In his careful, meditative examination of each subject, Neruda sometimes demonstrated social disparities. In virtually every poem he expressed a natural optimism that came from describing the reality of everyday objects, sometimes by animating them and presenting them as living beings. In a few cases the subjects were living beings, such as César Vallejo or Paul Robeson, but sometimes they were intangible, as in “Ode to Happiness,” or inanimate, like in “Ode to the Chair”:
War is vast
