I apologize to Neruda fans in advance for what is essentially a rant.

If I’m being honest, I don’t like poetry. With a handful of exceptions (Walt Whitman and T.S. Eliot come to mind), the vast majority of it leaves me completely cold. I wish I could appreciate it better given how much I love poetry-adjacent writing in other formats (e.g. poetically-written prose or song lyrics), but something about poetic form almost always comes across to me as awkward, forced, and annoyingly pompous. It doesn’t help when I have to read in translation.

Bearing all this in mind, Pablo Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair failed to impress me after multiple readings. I can accept that much of the use of language is probably poetic genius to those who can appreciate such subtleties, but, as for the content, I found it at best vaguely evocative, at worst quite creepy, and, in general, frustratingly self-serious. Neruda clearly put his whole heart into these poems, and that’s probably why I find them so sickening. They’re totally lacking in that sense of playful self-aware irony that characterizes all of my favourite Latin American writers. If he were somebody else, I would forgive these as the passionate and juvenile creations of an emotionally volatile teenager (and, for what it’s worth, I am fully in support of teenagers being passionate and juvenile while they still have the chance), but knowledge of his later sexual escapades doesn’t help his case. Though it’s not as if I have any moral high ground to stand on – Borges was buddies with Pinochet, yet I find it easier to forgive him simply because he’s a much better writer – and I doubt I would have liked these poems much more had Neruda been an upstanding man for the rest of his life.

Despite my general distaste for them, there were themes that I could certainly relate to throughout these poems. The obsessive love for a person, the way that love can seem to breathe life into the rest of the world, the ambivalent interplay of presence and absence, and the attempt to find beauty in suffering are all things I, as anyone, experienced during my teenage years. But, rather than making me like the poems more, these moments of empathy had the opposite effect; they put on blatant display how silly all of those emotions seem to someone not currently experiencing them. I feel as if love, especially the kind of youthful, passionate, and honestly unhealthy love that is the subject of these poems, is something extremely difficult, if not impossible, to express in language; the only art form I have found capable of approaching that feeling is music, precisely because it doesn’t have the same need for language. Perhaps if I were to read this in a different mindset than I am in currently, or even if I simply put more effort into interpreting it, I could learn to like this collection better.  As is, however, I found it frankly embarrassing.

For a question: which art form, whether literary or otherwise, do you think best conveys the experience of this kind of love?