Pablo Neruda is a poet best remembered for his vivid writings about everyday objects, romanticised through an employment of the most sensual aspects of life in the human senses. Reading his poetry, one can find a man in love with the very pursuit of life’s simple pleasures, if not for the very idea that the sensual lends itself to the sexual. Twenty Love Poems is a work which lives up to this ideal, a love of living and all unconscious actions associated with it including but not limited to the most prominent in the form of smelling, touching and tasting. Yet it is also one of the most personal, informing the reader of what a poet should be: one who, if not speaking for everyone, then speaks for living instead. 

    Of course, Pablo Neruda and the old world attitudes which accompany him are not without their controversy when viewed through a contemporary lens. This week I was intrigued by the debate highlighted concerning female autonomy, gender roles and what some might mistake neglecting the voice of others guise as a diehard romanticism. Personally, I am reminded of the poetry of John Donne in one past English class and the troubling male-centred perspective through which we view relationships (as seen in “A Flea” and several others).  They brought to mind a similar conversation I had with my professor–hopefully not viewed as an argument by him!–about the implications of judging the old world too harshly, or not nearly enough. 

    As for where I stand on the debate, I think art can be interpreted in a manifold of ways, and is therefore the most powerful means through which to champion free expression. At risk of boxing myself into a single category, I would confess that I am a liberal in the creative and political realm. What might be seen as a distasteful statement to one reader can in its entirety encapsulate how another thinks; it is therefore impossible to assume what one intended or did not intend owing to the subjective nature of art.

   By writing about a seemingly non-consensual relationship, it is possible Neruda was commenting on the despair and anger which one might feel towards creative endeavour, or the passion involved in the fact. Perhaps each embrace is not a corporeal one, but instead a spiritual assemblage of a priceless work of art, with all the blood, sweat and tears required to produce the whole. As the lecture states, Pablo Neruda was a writer, not a lover. Perhaps his art was more involved with themes of anarchy than any anachronistic ideal of him somehow being a defender of women!

    My question would be how do we account for the works of those which came before modern social movements: is it better to judge them as products of their time which might inform us of our present, or relics only useful for telling us something about an era? S