The Poet as Vanguard: Pablo Neruda and the Politics of the Global South

Pablo Neruda has been described by some as the most widely read poet ever. His output was prodigious and diverse. He was also very much a man and a poet of his time, that of the first three-fourths of the ‘short’ twentieth century, a time very different from our own. That raises the question: Is it possible to split the poet from his politics? A standard recommendation of literary critics is to stick to Neruda’s ‘non-political’ work and forget the rest. Yet, Neruda himself insisted that not only his poetry but also his personal life and his politics formed an indivisible whole. At a time when the rise of Asia and South America is changing the global landscape, it is especially important to come to terms with the central perspective that inspired Neruda’s oeuvre : his identification with the common man and with the South; his anti-colonial spirit (honed during his Asian sojourn) and his extraordinary grasp of what José Martí referred as ‘nuestra América’. This article explores how Neruda provides us with a vocabulary and a grammar that allows us to look at the emerging new world of the twenty-first century with fresh eyes.