The manifesto did not abandon the lyrical material that formed the first parts of Residence. But it did announce his new aesthetic, which was taking shape, influenced by the circumstances of his life in Spain and by the writing of his Spanish friends. He expanded the scope of his poetry to incorporate everything, from political declarations to dreams and prophecies.
Neruda described the elements of a new style of poetry grounded in human experience, an insurgent response to injustice and violence. Neruda was surrounded by leftists doing everything they could to defend the Second Republic against its conservative, right-wing, and fascist enemies. It was against this backdrop that Neruda’s “On Impure Poetry” argued for a dirty poetry, grimy from the hands of the worker, smelling of both “urine and lilies.” Neruda now stressed writing about the real over the ideal, the everyday instead of the extraordinary. It was a complete departure from his poems of the Far East; there was no turning back now for Neruda.
His early 1935 poem “Statute of Wine” shows the sheer departure from any purities of the past:
I speak of things that exist. God deliver me
From inventing things when I’m singing!
* * *
While writing in Spain, inspired by Lorca and others, Neruda became deeply absorbed in reading the work of earlier master poets. He published translations of poems by William Blake and parts of Walt Whitman’s epic “Song of Myself.” He had started to read Whitman when he was fifteen, and at nineteen he proposed and wrote a review in Claridad of a new translation of the “beautiful words of the boy from Camden.” Lorca had begun to idolize Whitman while living in New York six years earlier, after learning from a friend of Whitman’s love for his “comrades” and of his attempt to articulate that love in Leaves of Grass. Lorca’s exalting “Ode to Walt Whitman” is the longest (and most explicit) poem in the book that came from that trip, Poeta en Nueva York (Poet in New York). But it wasn’t just Whitman’s homosexuality; it was his radical use of free verse, with language that surprises, and “Song of Myself” is a poem of democracy, a poem that dramatizes how one’s imagination fuels creative power. All of this resonated with Neruda’s mood while in Spain, as he too began to see Whitman in a heroic light.
“Song of Myself” was first published in 1855. But the outbreak of the U.S. Civil War six years later had a transformational effect on Whitman and his poetry. The tragedies surrounding him called for a more politically driven voice; his idealistic romanticism was replaced by realism, with which he directly documented what he saw through the poetry of witness, no longer of imagination. Four years after Neruda translated “Song of Myself,” the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War affected Neruda in much the same way.
Neruda would have a lifelong relationship with Whitman. He was a major influence on much of Neruda’s poetry written after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, particularly Canto General. In The Western Canon, Harold Bloom claims that Neruda “can be regarded as Whitman’s truest heir. The poet of Canto General is a worthier rival than any other descendant of Leaves of Grass.”* A few years after Canto came out, Neruda told a Continental Cultural Congress in Santiago how much Whitman had meant to him recently, and reprised the bard’s statement from 1871: “I should demand a programme of culture, drawn out, not for a single class alone or for the parlors or lecture rooms, but with an eye to practical life, the west, the workingmen, the facts of farms and jackplanes and engineers.”
It’s for an action of love to my country
that I reclaim you, necessary brother,
old Walt Whitman of the gray hand.
so that with your extraordinary help
verse by verse we kill Nixon, sanguinary
president, at the root.†
* * *
Finally, in September 1935, Residence on Earth was published in Spain, by Cruz & Raya, who not only published the first volume, but a second containing twenty-three poems written since 1931.* Neruda’s new poetry was enormously successful with readers. Most important, the book garnered critical acclaim outside Neruda’s traditional circles. Two months after the book’s publication, the Paris magazine Le Mois proclaimed:
You can be sure that there is no country in Europe where poetry is as prosperous as it is in Spain and Latin America. The young stars of Spanish poetry that have gathered around the master Juan Ramón Jiménez are truly first-rate talent.
However, the most important publication of the year is undeniably the combination of two volumes by the Chilean Pablo Neruda, “Residence on Earth,” an admirable book, the work of a great and true poet, a poet with a powerful, courageous spirit, with a profound and broad vision.
Neruda’s old mentor Gabriela Mistral was also in Madrid, serving as consul. She wrote a rave review of the book that appeared in Chile’s El Mercurio on April 23, 1936, calling Neruda the poet who “discovers and delivers to us the most unsuspected forms of ruin, agony, death and corruption.” Neruda “comes following various ripples of poetic trial runs, like a giant tidal wave that propels the very innards of the ocean onto the coast, where those before him had used nothing but weak, small strokes.” Shortly after the review, Mistral—whom Morla Lynch had described as “magnificent and extraordinary”—fell from grace in Chile when a Santiago journalist published some of her private letters, which outraged Spaniards, Chileans in Spain, and the diplomatic community. In one of them, she wrote to her Chilean friends the poet María Monvel and the critic Armando Donoso:
I still don’t know whether I should tell you about the Spain I know, or let you keep your version of it. The two are so different! . . . For the past two years, I have been living in the midst of an indecipherable people, full of oppositions, absurd fraud . . . It is hungry
