And while our cultural engines sometimes depoliticize and commercialize Neruda, decaffeinating and reducing him for easy consumption into a “Neruda lite,” his popularity resonates with his fundamental simile that poetry is like bread—that it is about sharing, cooperation, and community. In his Nobel lecture, Neruda maintained that when poets prepare and hand over “our daily bread,” they are answering their call to the “duty of fellowship.” When poetry and bread are shared, there is a sense of communion, and we are all the more whole.
It is no wonder then that new editions of Neruda’s poetry continue to be released in the United States and around the world, from individual volumes to edited collections, from multiple retranslations to discoveries of new text. His poetry’s fusion of raw sexual longing with the potency of nature restores an essential connection between human beings and the natural world. His expressions of the endless facets of love and longing are timeless.
Neruda’s social poetry and personal history are certainly still vital today as well. Since the election of Donald Trump as the forty-fifth president of the United States, questions of the relationship between cultural production and social movements have become more relevant than ever. The legacy of last century’s consummate “people’s poet” resonates strongly with the surge of resistance movements in the United States and beyond, and has much to offer to present-day artists and activists alike as they navigate the tides of a rapidly changing world.
Neruda’s poems have long been used to evoke the power of solidarity and to ignite social change, a trend that is bound to continue. In San Francisco, California, in the tense political climate of 2003 during the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, his verses were draped on banners over the streets, social slogans as urgent then as when he first wrote them. Nearly a decade later, Egyptian art historian Bahia Shehab spray-painted Neruda’s words on the streets of Cairo during the Arab Spring: “You can crush the flowers, but you can’t delay spring.” Bahia emotionally recounted this story in a 2012 TED Talk.
Five years later, during the January 21, 2017, Women’s March—perhaps the largest protest in U.S. history—those same words of Neruda’s that had appeared in Cairo would grace at least one poster, seen in Oakland, California, bearing the original Spanish: “Podrán cortar todas las flores, pero no podrán detener la primavera.”
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Meanwhile, as Neruda’s legacy persists on the world’s stage in so many forms, how does today’s generation of young Chileans feel about him, about his poetry?
They are a post-Neruda generation. Many consider him a great poet, part of Chile’s identity, but also a relic of the past. They don’t want to be held down by him. Many love him as much as anyone who reads his lines, but many others, especially those closely involved with literature, see beyond his iconic status, questioning the hypocrisies and misogyny they perceive in Neruda’s work and life.
That shift might be attributed to the decades that have passed between his life and theirs, except that, curiously, when asked which poets they most admire, these young Chileans often first point to Neruda’s contemporaries, rather than to more recent voices; they cite Mistral, Huidobro, de Rokha, Parra.
An attempt to grasp how a whole generation feels about a poet, and to explore the reasons for the phenomenon, invites the danger of overgeneralization. Yet, to provide some perspective, the following testimonies do provide some insight.
Clearly, Neruda’s poetry still has the power to affect the youth of his country. In 2003, I talked to Jorge Rodríguez, an anthropology student. He said that he enjoys Neruda’s poems “because they hit you”—above all, perhaps, the poem “Walking Around,” with its line “I’m tired of being a man.” There comes a time, Jorge said, when you feel as though you can’t take any more. But then “the poetry gives you strength to go on, thinking and creating and feeling it. So, Neruda, I don’t know, it’s like he’s got that strength.”
Later, in 2014, I wanted to get a sense of how millennials, specifically those concerned with poetry, felt about Neruda, a decade after his centennial. I posed this question to a few literature students at the Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago. The following are their responses:
MARÍA LUCÍA MIRANDA, TWENTY-THREE YEARS OLD:
Poetry that idealizes the feminine image, highlighting only its physical attributes from a male perspective, doesn’t work as well in the twenty-first century as it did before, at least for me and other friends. So I don’t think Neruda’s poetry is all that relevant these days.
ANÍBAL GATICA, TWENTY-FIVE:
Neruda seems to be loaded with a basic machismo, good bourgeois taste with the Communist flag in hand, and a pompous heroism that seems very far away from us. Still, few can escape the seduction of “white breasts [white hills, white thighs].”
LORELEY SAAVEDRA, TWENTY-ONE:
In my opinion, Pablo Neruda serves as an ideal example of what is happening today with the “authority figure” in diverse subjects, like politics and religion. In the realm of literature, Neruda is the figure of a poet fallen from the heavens, a fallen angel, as certain truths about him have come to light and knocked him from his pedestal—far from exemplary acts, now known, that merit scrutiny—like how he abandoned his daughter, who was born with hydrocephaly. New ethical-moral visions have changed how we perceive public figures: Neruda’s consecration as a poet is not enough in our culture now; his failings as a human being must also be acknowledged.
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On July 12, 2004, Pablo Neruda’s centennial was celebrated with a wide range of events throughout the world, most poignantly in Chile. Isla Negra’s narrow dirt roads swelled with more than seven thousand fans, who flocked to their beloved
