Neruda’s popularity soared. The potential for him to find new muses multiplied among the surging ranks of female fans captured by Twenty Love Poems. He had come a long way from the essay in Claridad about being able to have sex only with prostitutes he couldn’t afford. The student activist José Santos González Vera wrote that women read Neruda’s poetry and “right away wanted a memento of their own.” Yet during this time period, although the poet appeared to bask in attention from women, his attention was fixed just on Albertina and Laura.
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From the outset, Neruda had wanted Twenty Love Poems to appeal not only to the younger generation, but also to older readers steeped in traditional poetry. Just as publishers who catered to a broader readership rejected it, upon its release those readers met it with resistance as well. In Zig-Zag, whose editor had turned down the book for publication, the writer and literature professor Mariano Latorre wrote a negative review of Twenty Love Poems. He stated that the book “fails to convince,” that “its pain, its desperation, is excessively rhetorical and cerebral.” Latorre couldn’t find any real fury in the book, no outburst, “no shout in which the poet lets himself go and his poetry acquires the painful and simple intimacy that marks Verlaine’s.”
Another critic, the Augustinian priest Alfonso Escudero, in an article on Chile’s 1924 literary activity in the respected magazine Atenea, concluded that “emotion is absent” in Neruda’s verses. Even Alone, who had financed the publication of Neruda’s first book and kept up correspondence with the young poet, wasn’t convinced of the new volume’s merits. In his review in the newspaper La Nación, Alone explained that Twenty Love Poems was unfortunately dominated by “a certain halting, almost painful brusqueness, the result, perhaps, of an excessive ambition for novelty.” While this might have worked for others, it didn’t work for Alone. “Women always believe words of love directed at them are beautiful; but we find them disconcerting, disorienting and senseless.” In his use of “we,” he seems to separate the perspective of one generation from another, men from women. He added, “I understand that some madness is needed to speak in verse and to sing, but madness, as with everything, has its limits.”
In conclusion he compares the book to a barren field. While the earth is swollen and the field well plowed, the seeds tossed by the poet’s generous hands “still haven’t sprouted, they lack the water of human emotion . . . Let us wait like the farmers who always defer their hope until the next year.”
The contrast was stark between the established critics’ rejections and the vitalized emotions so many others received from Neruda’s work. Why such disparity between the critics and the public? The former simply didn’t know how to respond to such work. They were disturbed by the direct mentions of sex in the poem. Yet they also failed to embrace Neruda’s subliminal use of sexual wordings as a poetic tool, especially in the construction of the metaphors woven through the book. Furthermore, the fixation by critics (and many readers) on the references to the body overshadowed fundamental aspects of the book’s potency. The poems are filled more with pining than professions of love. Some of the erotic language may have been strong and different, even violent in its diction—“I’m going to plow through you”—but the poems themselves are not truly seductive.
The critics and similar old-guard readers could see his imagery only as being uncomfortably direct and thus dismissed it as not being poetry of culture, as insulting and lowbrow. Traditional folklore, especially seen in the song and dance of the Chilean cueca, as well as in a good deal of contemporary popular art, was abundant with corporeal and sexual terms. But folklore was “low culture”; poetry was supposed to be “high culture.” This separation colored most criticism of the time.
Critics like Alone and Latorre were still clinging to poetry steeped in sentimentalism, especially Chilean poets such as Manuel Magallanes Moure and Max Jara. Jara’s latest book, published just two years before Twenty Love Poems, had swept up Alone, Latorre, and others in its melancholy. Despite the deliberately manufactured construction of that sentiment—exactly what Neruda was trying to avoid in his compositions—the critics held on to these poems as ideal representatives of Chile’s high culture. They weren’t sure what to do then when this “peasant” Pablo Neruda, just a kid, tried to lower, if not eliminate, the separation between the echelons, to make high-quality, serious poetry accessible to all.
While the critics seemed shocked by the raw eroticism in his lines, Neruda was not the first highly regarded South American poet to use such imagery. In the years between the turn of the century and Twenty Love Poems’ 1924 debut, two highly successful, rather revolutionary female poets on the other side of the Andes had already written erotic verse that also visibly connected the body and the soul. The revered Uruguayan poets Delmira Agustini and Juana de Ibarbourou—the latter so popular across the continent that she’d earn the nickname Juana de América—infused such motifs into highly sexual poems. Still, to the critics (and many readers) in Santiago, these women were outside their orbit and were not seen as relevant enough to threaten the definition of poetry, as this young man from their own provinces did.
Critics and other readers also had difficulties dealing with the language Neruda constructed, not just because of its eroticism, but because the book’s phrases and metaphors simply sounded so different: “Leaning into the evenings I toss my sad nets / to that sea which stirs your ocean eyes” (Poem VII), or “Thinking, trapping shadows in the profound solitude . . . Thinking, letting birds loose, undoing images, burying lamps” (Poem XVII). The forms of the poems also varied throughout the book, which was unsettling for some, captivating for others.
In his important book The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, René de Costa highlights other fundamental features that
