I.

You will ask where are the lilacs

And the metaphysics muffled in poppies

I will tell you how things stood with me.

There was a copy of Life magazine a few years ago that contained a spread of Communist world leaders, the people Life felt were trying to destroy Our Way Of Life and replace it with the Soviet Union's. Krushchev was in the spread, as were Tito and Mao. And towards the bottom, in a postage-stamp sized photograph, was another of those horrible totalitarians, Pablo Neruda.

Neruda was a Chilean poet, and it was not he, but evil and arrogant men in the United States, who toyed with freedom and replaced it with terrorism and Nazi-like brutality. Neruda's life and his poetry stood as a crusade against just this sort of criminality.

The Chilean poet was a Communist, a devoted member of the party from 1945 until he died in 1973. The son of a railwayman and a witness to the Spanish Civil War, Neruda writes in his newly-translated Memoirs that he became a Communist because of his inability to accept exploitation as a fact of life. It was through Communism that Neruda though he could reach the peasants, miners and the world's discarded. He writes:

...if I have received many awards, awards fleeting as butterflies, fragile as pollen, I have attained a greater prize, one that some people may deride but not many can attain. I have gone through a difficult apprenticeship and a long search, and also through the labyrinths of the written word, to become the poet of my people. That is my reward...

Neruda was a poet of the people, although most North Americans only learned that when he won his long-overdue Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. By that time Neruda's poetry had become virtual proverb for most Chileans. The poet could attract 5,000 or more working people on a rainy night to hear him recite the verses of "Canto General," his paean to them, or "Spain in Our Hearts." During the Popular Unity government of Salvadore Allende, his verses were painted on thousands of walls throughout Chile. A spokesman for the left, Neruda always wrote for, and to, the people, all people. His poetry, and more recently his Memoirs, are Neruda's attempt to detail his apprenticeship to become the poet of his people.

II.

"When the trumpets had sounded and all was in readiness on the face of the earth..."

Neruda grew up as Neftali Ricard Reyes Basaolto, just after the turn of the century, on Chile's frontier. His first poems were imbued with the wilderness, the beauty he saw more than the harshness that was a way of life. A father unsympathetic to his creative urges led Neruda to change his name. He unknowingly adopted that of a famous Czechoslovakian poet, Jan Neruda.

In 1929 he moved to Santiago to attend the Teachers Institute and begin a career as a French professor. The academic career never flourished, but his poetry did. He and fellow poets in Santiago lived the lifestyle traditionally associated with their profession: dressed in black, they often went hungry and struggled to get their work published. It was at this time that Neruda wrote and was able to publish Twenty Poems of Love and an Ode on Desperation, a melancholy collection filled with torment and passion. Neruda would later refer to the poems as the expression of his love affair with Santiago.

Like many South American artists and writers, Neruda followed a course throughout his life that included diplomatic duty--first in Ceylon, Burma and other parts of then-very distant Asia, and then in Spain during the days of the Republic. It was in that latter time that he encountered the people--the young, political poets of Spain--and the passions of the Spanish Civil War. Both were poetic milestones that marked a profound change in his writing.

Neruda was the Chilean consul in Spain when he met Federico Garcia Lorca, a poet who, Neruda writes in the Memoirs, was "the most loved, the most cherished of all Spanish poets, and he was the closest to being a child because of his marvelous happy temperament."