One might also argue that Neruda helped democratize poetry by making the “poetic” less exclusive.
http://blog.sfgate.com/drader/2011/03/03/the-10-greatest-poets-my-list/
And so, the top pick goes too . . .
PABLO NERUDA. Why Neruda? Well, he has done everything poetically. He’s written an epic (Canto General), he’s authored the most popular love poems of the Americas (Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair), he wrote some of the most imaginative and influential surrealist poetry (Residencia en la Tierra), he’s published some of the best odes in poetic history (Elemental Odes), he’s penned love sonnets that rival Shakespeare (100 Love Sonnets), he’s composed some of the most biting and most effective political poetry, and he wrote an achingly beautiful book of poems comprised entirely of questions. In Latin America, Neruda was and is poetry.
The Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes tells a story about visiting a seaport in Chile. One night, as the fishermen were reeling in their nets, he heard them singing, as a song, verses from Neruda’s poem Canto General. He was amazed. So, he walked up to the fishermen and told them how pleased the poet would be to know they were singing his poem. Their reply: “What poet?” Neruda’s poem had so thoroughly saturated Chilean culture that it had taken on the weight and significance of myth, folklore.
No poet has more passionately and thoroughly spoken for his people than Neruda. Canto General, for example, is a 15-part book, comprised of over 200 poems and 15,000 lines. It tries to map the entire history of Latin America. It is an insanely ambitious project that seemed to unify a country. His poems articulated hopes, dreams, desires, histories, protest, sexuality, beauty, and national pride like no one before or since. Because of his poetry he became an ambassador, a statesman, and even his party’s candidate for president of Chile.
Think about this: a poet so popular, so beloved: a poet with so much cultural cache that he could be a viable candidate for president. And in 1970 no less. His funeral was a national day of mourning, so significant it’s described in Isabel Allenda’s The House of the Spirits. He’s even had a movie made about him, The Postman. In Chile his houses are national museums, and his legacy is deific.
From a poetic perspective he is just as important. He influenced poets around the world. American poets like W. S. Merwin, Mark Strand, and James Wright read him in Spanish, and it changed their own poetry, becoming more associative, more surreal, which in turn altered British and American verse. One might also argue that Neruda helped democratize poetry by making the “poetic” less exclusive.
Neruda believed poetry could change the world, and he knew that well-crafted, passionate poetry could, under the right circumstances, create aesthetic, political, and cultural revolutions. Neruda’s work is as close as we have in poetry to something like Uncle Tom’s Cabin in fiction. It altered a political and cultural landscape.
We see this throughout his work but perhaps best articulated in the final lines of his famous poem “The Heights of Macchu Picchu,” where the poet, history, and the reader become one:
I come to speak for your dead mouths.
Throughout the earth
let dead lips congregate,
out of the depths spin this long night to me
as if I rode at anchor here with you.
And tell me everything, tell chain by chain,
and link by link, and step by step;
sharpen the knives you kept hidden away,
thrust them into my breast, into my hands,
like a torrent of sunbursts,
an Amazon of buried jaguars,
and leave me cry: hours, days and years,
blind ages, stellar centuries.
And give me silence, give me water, hope.
Give me struggle, iron, volcanoes.
Let bodies cling to me like magnets.
Come quick to my veins and to my mouth.
Speak through my speech and through my blood.
How my heart sings 