The Poet Resigns: Essays on Poetry in a Difficult Time

Neruda’s Earth, Heidegger’s Earth

236 Neruda’s Earth, Heidegger’s Earth It is good, at certain hours of the day and night, to look closely at the world of objects at rest. Wheels that have crossed long, dusty distances with their mineral and vegetable burdens, sacks from the coal bins, barrels, and baskets, handles and hafts for the carpenter’s tool chest. From them flow the contacts of man with the earth, like a text for all troubled lyricists. The used surfaces of things, the wear that the hands give to things, the air, tragic at times, pathetic at others, of such things— all lend a curious attractiveness to the reality of the world that should not be underprized. (xxi) that passage comes quote from “Towards an Impure Poetry,” the editorial Pablo Neruda wrote for the first issue of the shortlived and fabulously-named Spanish journal Caballo verde para la poesía (Green Horse for Poetry) in 1935. The editorial was really an act of poetic self-defense: ever since the Chilean poet had arrived in Spain, Neruda had been under withering attack from the poet Juan Ramón Jiménez, who considered Neruda’s work vulgar. Calling Neruda’s imagination a sewer and a scrap heap, Jiménez objected to the world Neruda depicted. Stoked by the Mallarméan notion of poesie pur, with its ideal of a language as music, Jiménez wished Neruda would purge his poetry of all of the chunks of coal and shoe soles that, in his opinion, cluttered the verse with ugliness. Neruda had been reading and translating Whitman, and had invested heavily in a very different poetic enterprise than had Jiménez. Neruda was young and provincial and felt persecuted by the older, more established Jiménez, who seemed, said Neruda, to be “publishing tortuous com- 237 Poetry in a Difficult World mentaries against me every week” (Felstiner 106). “Towards an Impure Poetry” is certainly intended as a riposte to Jiménez. But its importance goes further than its immediate occasion in the debate between the two poets: the passage offers a key to understanding Neruda’s The Heights of Macchu Picchu, one of the most acclaimed sections of his great, sprawling Canto General, and a book-length poem cycle in its own right. The Heights of Macchu Picchu was published a decade after the essay on impure poetry, and is often seen as somewhat discontinuous with his work of a decade earlier. After all, the intervening years saw the Spanish Civil War, which politicized Neruda’s poetry, and his time in Mexico, when he took inspiration from Diego Rivera and the Mexican muralist tradition and turned toward broad depictions of history and society. John Felstiner claims in Translating Neruda: The Way to Macchu Picchu that The Heights of Macchu Picchu is simply “inconceivable” without the events of civil war. This is certainly true. But it’s also true that there’s a continuity with the project outlined in “Towards an Impure Poetry.” To understand the nature of the continuity, we need to understand Neruda’s essay, which has much more to it than a simple defense of the Whitmanic depiction of ordinary objects in poetry. The most powerful idea in “Towards an Impure Poetry”—an idea Neruda acts on in the composition of The Heights of Macchu Picchu, is the idea of the earth. It’s something very much akin to what Heidegger was articulating in his lectures on art in Zurich and Frankfurt right around the time Neruda composed his essay. These lectures would later see publication as “The Origin of the Work of Art,” but not until 1950. It is not known whether Neruda knew about the lectures. It seems possible but unlikely—the main conduit bringing German philosophical ideas into Spanish intellectual life was Miguel de Unamuno, who was near the end of his life in 1935. The similarities between Neruda’s essay and Heidegger’s more deeply thought through exposition are probably coincidental , a matter of intellectual zeitgeist rather than direct influence. But the similarities of both idea and terminology are certainly very real. When Neruda writes about the importance of looking at objects at rest, he’s referring to an interestingly non-utilitarian, disinterested kind of perception, in which we become aware of the reality of things we’d 238 The Poet Resigns been taking for granted. “Wheels that have crossed long, dusty distances with their mineral and...