The reception for Neruda—his persona, his politics, and his poetry—was not always so rosy. Among his critics was the poet Pedro Rueda Martinez, who insisted in the conservative Bogotá newspaper El Siglo that Neruda’s politics were a weakness: “He has wanted to mix his verse with the sentiment of class warfare. It’s almost a fanatical proletariat who puts aside his purely emotional artistic impulse in order to foment party hatred.”
The paper’s founder, Laureano Gómez, also criticized Neruda, as Neruda was celebrated by the liberal government, which Gómez opposed in favor of fascism. Gómez published defamatory poems he wrote against Neruda under a pseudonym. Of course Neruda couldn’t just let this go, and he responded with a tight, witty rhyme satirizing Gómez: “Laureano never laureado.”
Delia and Neruda found themselves next in Lima, Peru, where they were given an honorary lunch by President Manuel Prado of the recently restored Peruvian democracy. In the following days, Neruda gave a lecture, “A Journey Through My Poetry,” in the gorgeous Teatro Municipal. Shortly afterward he delivered a talk to Peruvian writers that he had just composed. Entitled “America, Your Lamps Must Keep Burning,” it highlighted the bonds between Chile and Peru just as he had done with Mexico. Another manifestation of his evolving Pan-Americanism, the name of the talk echoes the name he’d give to the first canto of Canto General, which portrays the genesis of the Americas: “A Lamp on Earth.”
President Prado then facilitated an expedition to Machu Picchu for Neruda and Delia. The Incan ruin was not yet the tourist spot it is today; they traveled through the Andes for three days by burro and foot. The mystical site inspired his magnificent poem “The Heights of Macchu Picchu,” which became the second canto of Canto General. “I thought it held the umbilicus of American history there; it was the center, the apotheosis, and the origin of the entire American continent. I think that a European can admire the grandness of Machu Picchu but cannot comprehend the historical sentiment that the sight of her inspires in us.”
In fact, Neruda said that the idea to expand the scope of Canto general de Chile into a Canto general for all of the Americas was born while visiting that ancient site: “The nucleus of the work emerged in my country, but after visiting Mexico, Peru, and especially Machu Picchu, I felt personally tied to American soil, to the entire continent.” He needed to return and change course with the canto, to write this new projection.
One of the reasons “The Heights of Macchu Picchu” is such an extraordinary poem is that Neruda had discovered how to be politically direct without applying strict dogmatic or social realist formulas to his verse. It illuminates Pan-American history through the lens of Neruda’s own process of discovery. He is able to forge a vision of the inequality in the past that still exists in the present: “I thought about a lot of things after my trip to Cuzco [the settlement near Machu Picchu]. I thought about the American man of old. I saw his old struggles as intertwined with his current ones.” “The Heights of Macchu Picchu” provides a voice for generations past and present. He wrote the poem while watching the ocean at Isla Negra.
The poem’s division into twelve parts resembles the Stations of the Cross, each a meditation at a stop along his pilgrimage to find his lost roots. The chronicles of the peregrination are presented almost as religious scripts, which express the continental vision he had been striving for.
The first canto begins, as Neruda put it, “with a series of autobiographic memories”:
From air to air, like an empty net,
I went wandering between the streets and the atmosphere,
arriving and saying good-bye
Up until then, throughout his life, he had gone from one day to the other, “from air to air,” from nothing to nothing. He felt like an empty net. From Poem VII in Twenty Love Poems:
Leaning into the evenings I toss my sad nets
to that sea which stirs your ocean eyes.
And from Poem XIII:
Between the lips and the voice, something goes dying.
Something with bird wings, something of anguish and oblivion
The way nets don’t hold water.
The fourth section of “The Heights of Macchu Picchu” begins with his admission that “Powerful death invited me many times.” But by the sixth section, he finds the resting place that allows him to see the site as sacred, to meditate on his Pan-American vision and see history and future in one continuum:
And then on the ladder of the earth I climbed
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
up to you, Macchu Picchu.
High city of scaled stones,
at last a dwelling where the terrestrial
did not hide in its sleeping clothes.
In you, like two parallel lines,
the cradle of the lightning-bolt and man
rocked together in a thorny wind.
Mother of stone, spume of the condors.
High reef of the human dawn.
Shovel lost in the first sand.
He begins to find a sense of solidarity, of community, as the transforming moment occurs, in which Neruda witnesses the past in the present: “I felt the sense of community in the construction . . . as if in that construction man had left behind the truest continuation of his life.”
This was the dwelling, this is the place:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Here the gold thread was fleeced off the vicuña
to clothe the love affairs, the tombs, the mothers,
the king, the prayers, the warriors.
The poem reaches its climax in
