Neruda: The Biography of a Poet

by Mark Eisner

At the break of dawn on September 11, 1973, generals of the Chilean armed forces launched a coup d’état against the democratically elected government of President Salvador Allende, a Marxist-Socialist. The air force bombed the presidential palace; soldiers swarmed the grounds. Allende shot himself rather than face capture. Twelve days later, Pablo Neruda, central figure of the Chilean Left and beloved poet, died in a Santiago hospital. He had been gravely ill with metastatic prostate cancer. Many say he died of a broken heart as well, as terror swept across his beloved country, as his friends were tortured, as all the social progress they had struggled for was quickly destroyed. While he lay in the hospital, the military ransacked his home. Neruda’s funeral became the first public act of resistance against the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. As thousands of Chileans

Neruda’s behavior, both here and throughout his time in Asia, was imperialism perpetrated on a human scale, an exact replica of the imperialism perpetrated on a geopolitical scale against which he ranted both while in Asia and while writing his memoirs. His rape of a person based on his sense of entitlement and inherent superiority was a perfect expression of the rape of one nation by another based on these same presumptions of merit and worth. In his narcissism, he could not see the connection.

would transform it continuously, according to his aesthetic vision and touch. He used to say that he had a second profession, that of a rather surreal architect, a transformer of homes, and it proved true. It was from this house that he composed himself and his poetry, while sitting on a stone bench outside or in his little writing room with the infinite sea out his window. The house became his vessel with the water below him. Isla Negra was an externalization of himself. Built on top of a small, sharp hill above a rocky beach, the house at Isla Negra spreads in various extensions to form the shape of a boat. He wanted it to have as many curves as possible, frustrated by how so many houses are just pure rectangles. He wanted his home to be impure, like the poetry he had preached. The house was furnished with his eclectic collections: ship figureheads, ships in bottles, seashells from the beaches of the world, sextants, astrolabes, ethereal rare butterflies and insects linking back to his childhood train excursions, miniature Mexican guitars, glass jugs in a spectrum of hues, beautifully carved wooden stirrups covering a wall just like in his childhood home, seventeenth-century maps of the Americas and the oceans, pictures of some of his favorite writers (Poe, Baudelaire, and Whitman) who had their place of honor wherever he lived, and first editions of their books, a giant shoe that once hung outside a cobbler’s shop in Temuco. He even made a special room for the wooden ho...

The poem’s melody of innocent thoughts and imagery conveys that Neruda’s work doesn’t always have to be raw with politics or love; that, at the heart of it all, his poetry is about the wonder of being human. This is what keeps people coming back to Neruda, the essential poetic expression of what we are at our core, the elementary within the complex, the ordinary and the infinite, the true and the unknowable.