La poésie comme insurrection - Pablo Neruda

Abstract

Pablo Neruda, writer and politician, is considered one of the greatest and most influential poets of the 20th century. Neruda was accomplished in a variety of styles ranging from erotically charged love poems to historical epics, overtly political manifestos and surrealistic poems also, which marked his literary breakthrough. In 1971 Neruda won the Nobel Prize for literature, a controversial award because of his political activism. The Spanish Civil War and the murder of Garcia Lorca, whom Neruda knew, affected him strongly and made him join the Republican movement, first in Spain, and later in France, where he started working on his collection of poems Espana en el Corazon in 1937. He rewrote his Canto General de Chile, transforming it into an epic poem about the whole South American continent, focusing on its nature, its people and its historical destiny. This work, entitled Canto General, was published in Mexico in 1950, and also underground in Chile. It consists of approximately 250 poems brought together into fifteen literary cycles and constitutes the central part of Neruda's production. Shortly after its publication, Canto General was translated into some ten languages. Among his works we can mention Cien sonetos de amor published 1959, which includes poems dedicated to his
wife, Memorial de Isla Negra, a poetic work of an autobiographic character in five volumes.