Pablo Neruda

Update: Please don't read this post. This is all false. :)

I have never been a big fan of Pablo Neruda. His poems mostly appeal to love-struck and heart-broken teenage lads and lasses or those who think the sole purpose of poetry is to serenade their girl-friends. Since I had better things to do when I was a teenager, I never quite warmed up to his Hundred Love Sonnets or Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. Both of which I found very unoriginal, cliched, cloying and devoid of any provocative imagery, thought or feeling.

Neruda was awarded the Nobel prize for literature and like many other awardees it was more of a recognition of the place he occupied on the political spectrum, which was to the left, not of the liberal/progressive variety but of the dark, messy, Stalinist kind. The conservative critic Stephen Schwartz sums up his achievements in an article called Bad Poet, Bad Man:

Pablo Neruda was a bad writer and a bad man. His main public is located not in the Spanish-speaking nations but in the Anglo-European countries, and his reputation derives almost entirely from the iconic place he once occupied in politics--which is to say, he's "the greatest poet of the twentieth century" because he was a Stalinist at exactly the right moment, and not because of his poetry, which is doggerel.

He later even claims that Neruda plagiarised one of his poems from Tagore. Although he doesn't make it clear as to which poem he is alluding to. If you haven't read Neruda's poems yet, you can check them out here. His most famous poems are "A Song of Despair", "Saddest Poem" and two other poems which, at least from their titles, look fit to be printed on Valentine day cards rather than in a serious poetry collection. They are "I Crave Your Mouth, Your Voice, Your Hair" and "I Do Not Love You Except Because I Love You". Hmm, very romantic indeed! Check out the poems for yourself here.