The Adolescent Poetry of Pablo Neruda (1920–1924)

This chapter situates Neruda’s early books ( Crepusculario and Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada ) in contexts that emphasize the legacy of pleasure and self-identification of his work. It attempts to “clear” some of the sins of Neruda by focusing on his poetry as sexually liberating for all parts involved, as a deliberate attempt at going back to a poetics of the flesh. Both Crepusculario and Veinte poemas are adolescent texts that deserve both respect and empathy as testimonies of the survival instinct that impels the young to do great and crazy things, sometimes simultaneously. We must regard Neruda as what he was when he wrote these powerful verses: a teen who self-consciously alternates between a state of revengeful, self-centered alpha- machito and the depths of sadness, solitude, and despair. Each poem, sometimes even each line, encapsulates that most Nerudian and adolescent of tensions: the feeling of uncontrollable power and a feeling of a sadness so deep that it does not even recognize itself except by reading itself from afar.