Neftalí displayed a remarkable skill in working with the traditional forms of meter and rhyme, cutting his teeth by pushing the envelope of what could be composed within a chosen construction. In the liceo, he would have been hearing the amorous verses of Garcilaso de la Vega, who in the early sixteenth century brought the innovations of the Italian Renaissance into the world of Spanish poetry. Among his most important innovations was extending the lines of stanzas from eight syllables or fewer to eleven syllables, allowing for a notable increase in flexibility.
Neftalí was also reading the “historical cadences” of Francisco de Quevedo’s baroque sonnets, their rapid rhythms often in epigrams. As an avid reader both in and out of class, Neftalí was seduced by these traditional metered forms. He used them first as a primary exercise in his composition; the impulse to do so sprang forth spontaneously. Other than some side instruction from his various mentors, he was writing of his own volition, without a formal creative writing class. He worked within the patterns just as a painter might start off doing simple exercises, even a paint by numbers. It was a way to practice and sharpen his skills and to gain confidence by finding success within the established, sometimes quite complicated, forms that he would push the boundaries of later.
His disciplined and constant practice during these teenage years produced some very successful poems and proved to be essential training for Twenty Love Poems, which he would start writing about five years later. Part of that book’s power derives from Neruda’s deft use of a diverse set of forms and poetic techniques to intensify the expressions of emotion, squeezing them into the set structure, the confinement pressurizing the sentiments, increasing their potency. And the frequent use of rhythmic repetition within these poems helped pop the emotion off the page, off the reader’s tongue. As the poet Robert Hass has written, form is “the way the poem embodies the energy of the gesture of its making.”*
As René de Costa argues in his book The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, there was an additional, purposeful effect caused by using these disciplined styles. The form of successive symmetrical stanzas, often quartets, falls down the page, giving the reader the impression that it wasn’t just a quickly written piece, but rather a measured, classically composed poem, a true literary construction. The sentimental value of a poem—or an entire book—is then elevated, even glorified, by association with the classics. Neftalí definitely wanted to do everything he could to add glory to his verse.
During Neftalí’s transformative thirteenth year, he started craving something beyond just the urgent, crucial flight he felt in the basic act of writing. Possibly also as a consequence of Orlando’s influence, Neftalí started to feel strongly—if not desperately—that if others weren’t reading his poetry, it lacked purpose. He became preoccupied with his poetry being shared and promoted, primarily so that both he and his work could be accepted, approved, and validated. Despite his shyness, Neftalí was so certain that poetry was the one positive thing that he had inside of him that he summoned up the courage to submit his work for publication. Encouraged by Orlando, he sent one of his poems to the popular Santiago magazine Corre-vuela (Run-Fly). The magazine was considered by contemporary readers to be somewhat frivolous and vulgar compared with other publications, but it did have a section dedicated to highlighting young poets from the provinces.
When its reply came, Neftalí ran to the offices of La Mañana, yelling, “Tío, Tío, they’re going to publish my poem! They’re going to publish my poem!”
On October 30, 1918, just a few months after his fourteenth birthday, his poem “My Eyes” was published:
I wish my eyes were hard and cold,
that they wounded deep inside the heart,
that they didn’t express anything from my empty dreams or hope, or illusion.
Forever indecipherable to the sacrilegious,
deep blue and smooth with tranquil sapphire
and that they didn’t glimpse human pain or the joy of being alive.
But these eyes of mine are naive and sad:
not how I want them nor how they should be.
It’s that my heart dresses these eyes of mine, and makes them see its pain.
Like many of his poems in these years, “My Eyes” is concerned with finding escape from his personal desolation. He is aware, importantly, that his perception of the world isn’t unfiltered reality. His heart that pumps his blood, his emotions, and his sensitivity add a human element to the vision, which causes the eyes not just to perceive their surroundings but also to cause these scorching sensations.
Within the next two years, before graduating from the liceo, he would publish nearly thirty poems: fifteen more in Corre-vuela, as well as pieces in Selva austral (Austral Forest), Temuco’s own literary journal; the Cultural Review of Valdivia, the biggest city to the south; and Siembra (Sowing) in Valparaíso, the port city seventy-five miles northwest of Santiago. Most of the journals that took his work were of rather radical tendencies.
Neftalí received these successes modestly, but with great satisfaction. His early achievements further drove his determination to be a poet, not only because he wanted to rise above his physical and social awkwardness, but also because he already felt he was on a path to hold the oficio, or vocation, of poet for all his life.
Chapter Four
The Young Poet
I come from a dark region, from a land separated from all others by the steep contours of its geography. I was the most forlorn of poets and my poetry was provincial, oppressed and rainy.
—“Toward the Splendid City,” Nobel lecture, 1971
Chile has a long history of reverence for poetry. From the early sixteenth-century epic poetry of Alonso de Ercilla to the strong roots of oral poetics in indigenous Mapuche culture, Chile has earned its reputation
