Reflection Of The Poetry Of Pablo Neruda's Life

Pablo Neruda is one of the most famous poets of our time. He started out writing love poems and throughout the years transitioned to political poems and “Odes” about everyday objects. The transition from best selling love poet into a world famous political one, is directly related to Neruda’s personal experience. This raises the question “To what extent is Pablo Neruda’s poetic persona a direct reflection of his personal experiences , as can be seen in the contrasting poems “Tonight I write the saddest verses” ,“ I explain some things” and “The United Fruit Co” .

Neruda started writing poems at a very young age, publishing his first book “ 20 love poems and song of despair” at the age of 19. In his collection of poems, “Tonight I can

In his poem I explain some things , he even directly asks “Federico from under the earth”, to remember the peaceful life they led before the war. This poem is a turning point in Neruda’s life, since he explains why he can no longer “write about Lilacs”(1) or “metaphysics filled with poppies”(3), after having seen “the blood on the streets” in Spain. The lilacs are a symbol of Neruda’s previous poems about love and other physically beautiful things. By the use of rhetorical questions at the beginning of the poem “You will ask[…]?, Neruda tries to make the reader feel as if he can sense what they are thinking, making him and his readers feel like one. The poem contrast Neruda’s peaceful life in Madrid with life after the outbreak of the Spanish civil war. The first half of the poem deals with a description of the “neighborhood of Madrid, with Church bells, with clocks, with trees”. (7-9), describing the calm and ordinary life he led in Madrid, where as the second half of the poem, Neruda focuses on Spain during the civil war and uses words such as “blood” “shooting” “knives and fire”, to show how violent and disruptive Spain has become (40-41). He repeated “come see the blood on the streets “ to invites his readers to witness the massacre that is going on in Spain. He is

He believed that the country belonged to the people and that the government should focus on improving the country, instead of taking the resources for themselves. This point of view can be seen in his poem “United Fruit Co.”, which is a direct critic to the United States and its involvement in Latin American countries. Neruda mentions how the United States “reserved the juiciest for itself”(7-8), referring to the banana republics established all other Latin America, who took over most of the natural resources and used them for their own benefit, instead of letting the countries develop and progress . This idea of American exploitation is the main theme of the poem, which condemns how these American corporations were treating the native workers, and letting “Indians fall over, buried in the morning mist”(8). Neruda argues that due to the abuse from these American corporations, it “attracted the dictatorship of the flies”. Here we can see how Neruda represents dictators as flies, that “adept tyranny”(28). Flies often are seen as pest who feed of other people, and that is possibly why Neruda chose to symbolize dictators as flies, because to him, dictators are the parasites of a country, who feed of the counties resources and income to use it for themselves, thus leading to a tyrant reign. He stopped using personal pronouns, and started writing in third person, making the poem less personal.