“Wheels that traveled long dusty distances with their mineral and vegetable burdens, sacks from coal silos, barrels and baskets, handles and handles for the carpenter's toolbox. From them flow man's contacts with the earth, like a text for all troubled lyricists... In them, we see the confused impurity of the human condition... Poetry is impure like the clothes we we carry, or our body... the deep penetration of things in the transports of love, consummate poetry soiled by the pigeon's claw, marked by ice and by teeth, delicately bitten by our drops of sweat and our use. .. Melancholy, old impure and flawless sentimentality, fruits of a fabulous species lost in memory... this is surely the poet's concern, essential and absolute. (Neruda) Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Pablo Neruda describes his poetic doctrine in Impure Poetry, as an implicit reactionary statement against accusations of banality and morbidity. There he justifies his work as that of a contemporary poet, emphasizing relevance and purpose. For unlike the stereotypical hermetic poet, Neruda was a politically conscious artist, who refused to settle for detached aestheticism and introversion. He considered traditional poetic notions such as escapism in the 20th century, an era full of conflict and disparity; when every institution of faith was collapsing, leading to a general atmosphere of confusion and uncertainty, further aggravated by capitalist, chauvinistic and industrial trends. As Ajanta Dutt explains, “poetry must be discovered through a perception of what seems sinister and destroyed, and which appears from the hidden recesses of human consciousness” (xxxvi). Thus, in the modern storyline, Neruda believed it was necessary to depict these imperfections, as demonstrated by the particular juxtapositions in his imagery, about which Dutt believes that Neruda "deliberately juxtaposes the crude and the beautiful to shock the reader out of complacency » (xxxv). For example, in Ars Poetica: "Between shadow and space, young girls and garrisons, struggling with a strange heart, funeral dreams", or "a stench of clothes scattered on the ground and a desire to flowers” ​​(Dutt 7), which reflects the contradiction between the harshness of reality and the desire to overcome it. In this same poem, Neruda uses a subtle but powerful image which conveys the idea of ​​impure poetry: "a bell rang a little" (Dutt 7), that is to say the poetic voice broken by the ordeal, freeing distorted tones of suffering and truth. Neruda asserted that contemporary poetry should be familiar and topical instead of adhering to distant ideals; it must be rooted in the reality from which it comes. As he stated in Ordinance of Wine: “I speak to the things that exist. God forbid that I make things up when I sing” (Dutt 80). He therefore vouches for poetry, which transcends personal boundaries to reflect on the universal from an individual point of view. The poet must seek to heal the world he inhabits and he can therefore no longer allow himself to be locked into fantasies. He must feel compelled to share his visions with his readers, as Ars Poetica explains: “the morning rumors inflamed with sacrifices now beseech me of this prophecy of mine” (Dutt 7). The poet must seek to purge universal anguish through the power of association and to educate through his verse, so that readers can make a tangible effort to bring about changeessential. For “the verse falls on the soul like dew on the pasture” (Dutt 6). Although this line is quoted out of context in Tonight, I can Write. . . , it embodies Neruda's idea of ​​poetry and his motivations. Such selflessness identifies Neruda with visionaries like Tagore, Brecht, and Dario Fo, and this concern continued to grow with his age, as evidenced by his body of work and his inclusion in the Communist Party in 1939. "Stand up with me, my brother give me your hand from the depths of your scattered pains” (Dutt 30) “Show me: your blood and your furrow; Tell me; here I was scourged because a precious stone was dull or because the earth failed to give its tithe of corn or stone on time” (Dutt 46). Neruda's Marxist sentiment is more than evident in these lines from Canto General. He understood his role as the voice of an oppressed people: “give me all the pain of everyone, / I will transform it / into hope” (Dutt 66). He felt genuine empathy towards the tormented masses and implored them to unite and overcome their misery – this was Neruda's constant effort, his message of hope for the proletariat. Because as he symbolically emphasizes in Ode to Autumn, their strength lies in their numbers: “It is difficult to tear off all the leaves from all the trees in all countries” (Dutt 65). and bullets, / alone alive, sleepy, resounding” (Dutt 8), we find the same hope in an explicit poetic frankness. The future belongs to the proletariat, and it must realize its latent potential – the glorious heritage that lies behind it – and embrace the horrors of the present. In such lines, Neruda exhibits his typical communist optimism. Raised in postcolonial Chile, Neruda witnessed the implicit dichotomies and contradictions of the Latin American milieu and strove to depict them in his work. For example, in Discoverers of Chile: “Shadows of thorns, shadow of thistle and wax, / the Spaniard encountering its dry silhouette, / observing the dark strategies of the terrain” (Dutt 9). In this sterile imagery, Neruda captures the complexity of perceptions between the two civilizations. The natives, through the motif of "shadow", are considered simple and uncivilized, unlike the Spanish "discoverers". Also, “all silence lies in its long lineage” (Dutt 9); silence remains a constant motif in Neruda's poetry; here, it denotes the ravaged appearance of colonized Chile. This is why Enrico Mario Santi describes Neruda as “fiercely anti-intellectual, a political activist…”. . . the incarnation of the Latin American poet” (70). A sentiment shared by the Swedish Academy when it awarded Neruda the 1971 Nobel Prize and recognized him as "the poet of violated human dignity", who "brings to life the destiny and dreams of a continent" ( Santo 70). In this regard, a parallel can be drawn with the growth of "magical realism" in Latin American literature, because its proponents were also driven by a socio-political conscience, and the genre allowed them to express their discontent with their situation in the form of fantastic fiction. The Spanish Civil War played an important role in shaping Neruda's activism, as he worked to express his resentment against the horrors of fascism in his adopted country. Susnigdha Dey explains: “In such a situation, poetry cannot remain a specimen of beautiful letters. He can no longer remain so pure” (Chilean Poetry 29). Because art reflects life, and the conscious artist could therefore no longer lose himself in “art for art’s sake” while everything around him was being torn apart. Because of these sinister concerns, Jon M. Tolman highlights a distinctive feature of Neruda's poetry with regard to his conception of time: "each passing moment emergesin a silent, slowly accumulating menace that fills its surroundings, oppressive with its weight. Time grows like a parasitic plant that eats away life. In this way, the symbol of time serves as a bridge between the related themes of death and loneliness” (Dey, Pablo Neruda 40). Here we see the effect that Neruda wanted to create: depicting omnipresent despair as a mundane daily reality. Again, one might recall similar themes inherent in “magical realism,” developed by Gabriel García Márquez in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Neruda on residence on Earth: “These poems should not be read by the youth of our country. These are poems imbued with pessimism and terrible anxiety. They do not help us to live; they help to die” (Dey, Pablo Neruda 41). These verses betray the hesitation and uncertainty of the young poet; Naturally, Neruda, at least initially, was skeptical about the ramifications of his work. He had immense but uncertain concern for his compatriots, who were still “learning to build and read” (Dey, Pablo Neruda 46). Nevertheless, his convictions had matured by the time he wrote Third Residence (1947), where “he promised to unite the walk of the lone wolf with the walk of man” (Dey, Pablo Neruda 42). Subsequently, he strove to achieve a political goal beyond the purely aesthetic (Agosin 89), and after Canto General, he finally accomplished the difficult transition from obscurity to clarity for the sake of his readers (Dey, Pablo Neruda 46-47). As Dutt explains: “His aim is to strip his writings of any distorted or complex factors that might hinder the reader's understanding. His tone is optimistic and positive” (xxxix). Canto General reflects Neruda's concern for the individual, he speaks of "invisible men", so that the poem becomes the collective chronicle of a people. Neruda, like Walt Whitman, is a minstrel who transmits and transforms the history of his continent” (Agosin 92). In the poet’s own words: “Poetry is like bread, and it must be shared by all” (Dutt 65). Thus, the poet must disseminate his ideals so that they can be imitated, like the one claimed in The Way Spain Was: “How deep within me / grows the lost flower of your villages” (Dutt 8). In the essay, Pure and Impure Poetry, Robert Penn Warren traces the dogma of pure poetry through various sources ranging from Sidney to Poe. However, he asserts, “poetry wants to be pure, but poems do not” (229). Realizing the individuality of a literary work and its relationship to the circumstances of its creation, Warren further cites George Santayana to justify the intrusion of "impure" aspects into a poem: "Philosophy, when a poet is not foolish, enters inevitably into his poetry. , since he entered her life. . . . Poetry is an attenuation, a reworking, an echo of a gross experience; it is in itself a theoretical vision of things at arm's length” (249-50). Subsequently, Warren presents his own vision of poetry: “the good poem must, in one way or another, involve the resistances; it must convey something of the context of its own creation. . . a good poem involves reader participation; it must, as Coleridge says, make the reader “an active creative being”” (251). These ideas correspond to those of Neruda, and in fact, one might be tempted to say that Neruda took them a little further thanks to his passionate dedication. Works consultedAgosin, Marjorie. General song: The word and song of America. Neruda, Walcott and Atwood: poets of the Americas. Ed. Ajanta Dutt. Delhi: Worldview-Book Land, 2010. 87-95. Print.Ajanta Dutt, ed. Neruda, Walcott and Atwood: poets of the Americas. Delhi: Worldview-Book Land, 2010. Print.. 2011.