In a separate piece, Huidobro also wrote an extraordinary self-defense on the matter:
The publication of this plagiarism has produced a curious phenomenon in the little circles of the friends and accomplices: great indignation: (uterine) fury. Against whom? Against Neruda for having plagiarized? Against Tagore for having written a rather foolish poem ten years ago with the same ideas that it’s going to have ten years after Pablo Neruda? No. The indignation goes against the person who discovered the plagiarism. And that’s incredible. And because he was right, the gang becomes infuriated with Huidobro, who had no art or part in the issue.
Attacks continued, especially by de Rokha, to the point that Lorca, Alberti, Hernández, Aleixandre, Cernuda, and eleven other Spanish poets published three recent Neruda poems in an edition entitled Homage to Pablo Neruda in defense of their friend. Part of the prologue read:
Chile has sent to Spain the great poet Pablo Neruda, whose evident creative force, in full possession of his poetic destiny, is producing extremely personal work, to honor the Spanish language . . . We, poets and admirers of the young and distinguished American writer, when publishing these unpublished poems—latest testimony of his magnificent creation—we do nothing more than highlight his extraordinary personality and his unquestionable literary stature.
Neruda lunched at Carlos Morla Lynch’s house shortly afterward. The elder diplomat noted Neruda was delighted with the pamphlet his friends had sent in opposition to Huidobro, his enemy. “All men are small, when the moment demands that they be great,” noted Morla Lynch.
Those opposing Neruda dismissed Homage as partisan praise. Eventually, the “literary war” reached such a point that in April 1935 Neruda finally entered the fray. He responded to his adversaries with a scathing poetic retort that he didn’t publish, but instead let make its way hand by hand through Spain and all the way back to Chile. Everyone knew it was by him, even though he didn’t sign it. The poem is defiantly entitled “I Am Here.”*
Bastards!
Sons of whores!
Neither today nor tomorrow
never
will you be finished with me!
I’ve got my testicles full of petals,
I’ve got my hair full of birds,
I’ve got poetry and steam,
cemeteries and houses,
people who gasp,
fires,
in my “Twenty Poems,”
in my weeks, in my adventures,
and I shit on the whore who gave birth to you,
de Rokhas, gallows,
snaky Huidobros . . .
In the fifth edition of Twenty Love Poems, released in 1937, Neruda states at the beginning of the book that Poem XVI was, “for the most part, a paraphrase of Tagore’s The Gardener.” He then writes, “This has always been known publicly,” adding, “Those resentful individuals who tried to take advantage of this circumstance in my absence have been punished with the obscurity they deserve and the enduring vitality of this adolescent book.”
A more renowned literary rival then joined the voices criticizing Neruda. The Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez, who would win the 1956 Nobel Prize in Literature, represented poetry’s old guard. While Jiménez’s poetry was refined, Neruda aimed to transcend formal purity. Yet it was more than just different approaches to poetic style that separated the two. Jiménez called Neruda “a great bad poet.”* This slight seemed to come more from the fact that he was experiencing a changing of the guard in Spanish poetry. He was being left behind, while Lorca’s generation—which included Neruda—was taking center stage.
After Jiménez’s “great bad poet” remark, Neruda and his friends started to prank call Jiménez’s house, hanging up the phone as soon as he answered. But more significantly, Neruda composed a more mature rebuttal to Jiménez’s insult with his pen. The poet and printer Manuel Altolaguirre had just asked Neruda to start and edit a beautifully designed poetry review, featuring the contemporary poets, to be “the finest presentation of the best work in Spain.” Neruda named the magazine Caballo verde para la poesía (Green Horse for Poetry). As small as they may have been, these journals helped set the cultural climate of a period of time. For the first issue, Neruda wrote a manifesto, “On Impure Poetry,” proclaiming the urgent need for a new style, a direct contrast to Jiménez’s beautiful but refined, “pure,” distanced verse. It begins:
It is very appropriate, at certain times of the day or night, to deeply observe objects at rest: the wheels that have covered long, dusty distances, bearing heavy loads of vegetables or minerals, sacks from the coal yards, barrels, baskets, the handles and grips of the carpenter’s tool. The contact of man with the universe exudes from these things a lesson for the tormented poet. The worn surfaces, the wear that hands have inflicted on things, the often tragic and always wistful aura of these objects, lend to reality a fascination not to be taken lightly.
The confused impurity of human beings is displayed in them, the proliferation, materials used and discarded, footprints and fingerprints, the permanent mark of humanity inundating all objects from within and without. That is the kind of poetry we should strive for, worn away as if by acid from the labor of hands, impregnated with sweat and smoke, smelling of urine and lilies, and seasoned by the various professions that operate both within and outside the law.
A poetry impure as old clothes, as a body, with its food stains and shame, with wrinkles, observations, dreams, vigilance, prophecies, declarations of love and hate, beasts, blows, idylls, manifestos, denials, doubts, affirmations, taxes.
This declaration essentially rebuts Jiménez’s strong advocacy for a “naked” poetry based on the nuances of language and intellect. In contrast, Neruda sought to rehumanize the poem from that form. Times were changing. Neruda’s manifesto quickly influenced many of his Spanish friends and beyond, especially because of the need for turbulent poetry as an expression of the increasingly turbulent circumstances in Spain. The country was experiencing the pains of great political upheaval, bitterly polarizing and well on the
