While it is impossible to provide hard proof of the theories as to why these conditions arose, there are certain historic truths that lend some solid insight and help us understand the cultural nutrients that fertilized the land from which grew not only Neruda’s poetry, but the verse of a slew of superior lyricists, all from the same soil of such a small country.
Chile has long produced a wealth of luminary poets, from the sixteenth-century epic poetry of Alonso de Ercilla, to early twentieth-century voices such as the Nobel Prize–winning Gabriela Mistral and Vicente Huidobro, to the many important contemporary voices of this day. These include the Mapuche Elicura Chihuailaf; Raúl Zurita, a modern master in the poetry of resistance; and Nicanor Parra, who pushed the limits of Chilean poetry as much as Neruda may have defined them. There are also two legendary singer-songwriters, Violeta Parra (Nicanor’s sister) and Victor Jara. For centuries, Chileans have lived with poetry, reading and reciting and absorbing themselves in it. This tradition traces back to the people who inhabited the land before colonization, especially in Neruda’s south. The culture and oral traditions of the indigenous Mapuche people were steeped in lyric verse through their unwritten language, Mapudungun. The manner in which they elected their leaders exemplifies this. For the position of strategic leader, a candidate must prove he is a sage: that he is wise, prudent, and patient. He also must demonstrate his command of the language. Toward this end, one of the tests was a trial of rhetoric in a ritual exercised through poetry. The candidates recited, they sang, they engaged their audience with poems they created spontaneously, odes to everything that surrounded them (as Neruda did in his four books of odes). Through language they had to connect the tribe to its ancestors (as Neruda did in Canto General).* The most legendary strategic leader in Mapuche history was named Lautaro. The house in which Neruda grew up, in Temuco, was located at 1436 Lautaro Street.
This is how deeply poetry is ingrained in the Mapuche culture, the Mapuche who constituted Chile before the conquistadores. There were other indigenous people in the north with cultural ties to the Inca and the Aymara and Quechua peoples and languages. The claims are uncertain, but these small nation groups seem to also have influenced the importance of poetry in Chilean society. They had their own oral poetic tradition, and some contemporary Chile-specific vocabulary derives from them. Music has always been crucial to the Aymaran culture, with copla, rhymed verse composed by special techniques, playing a central role.†
As a child in Temuco, Neftalí’s worldview was influenced by the Mapuche but not necessarily by their language. At the time it was still a secret language, as missionaries and colonists still repressed the Mapuche when they spoke Mapudungun. He would have rarely heard it and definitely not understood it. If anything, over the years he might have picked up on some of the syllables and sounds.*
The importance of language, especially poetic language and structure, to Chilean indigenous peoples created a foundation upon which conquering Europeans would build. The colonists established a special lyrical culture specific to Chile from their arrival, specifically in the person of Alonso de Ercilla, a member of the Spanish troops. In a 1970 interview for the Paris Review, Neruda said,
Chile has an extraordinary history. Not because of monuments or ancient sculptures, which don’t exist here, but rather because Chile was invented by a poet, Don Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga . . . a Basque aristocrat who arrived with the conquistadores—quite unusual, since most of the people sent to Chile came out of the dungeons.
De Ercilla, “the young humanist,” wrote La Araucana on scraps of paper as the Spanish troops pursued the native people in the forests and towns around Temuco, the region from which the poem’s name derives. Neruda described the poem as “the longest epic in Castilian literature, in which he honored the unknown tribes of Araucania—anonymous heroes to whom he gave a name for the first time—more than his compatriots, the Castilian soldiers.”
Published in full in 1589 and then translated throughout Europe, it is still considered one of the great masterpieces of the Spanish Golden Age, one of the most significant epics of the Spanish canon. It is also the first Spanish American poem where nature emerges as part of the actual narrative story, an element in the heroic quest itself. That was especially important to Neruda, as it is set in the wilderness around Temuco. The forests described in the lines were some of those that he explored; the deluging rains were the same that he endured; he walked the great rivers whose banks became literary and logical obstacles to the conquistadores’ advances. The use of nature as the protagonist in such a fundamental text heavily influenced the poetry of many of the great Chilean poets, Raúl Zurita believes.
The first Spanish who came to Chile gave birth to a creole and mestizo class, who in turn used popular lyric poetry to protest the Spanish rule, which became part of the country’s culture leading to Chile’s independence.
These are the anthropological explanations that help explain the uniqueness of poetry in Chile. But there are social factors that were also of great importance. Chile’s poetry is rooted in the remarkable oral storytelling tradition of the Chilean campesino, the mine worker, the factory worker, the proletariat of the country. Stories told through verse were passed down in front of a fire, from one generation to another. At the turn of the twentieth century, northern miners would break into poetry readings at social gatherings.
In the early twentieth century, coinciding with Neftalí’s coming of age, poetry in Chile served as an art that was accessible to people who were poorly educated. They were the principal audience for the poets, more so than those in
