Pablo Neruda (1904-1973)

When I was writing love poems, when love poems sprouted from me on every side, and I was dying of sadness, wandering, abandoned, gnawing the alphabet, they told me:

"How grand you are!" ... Then I seized hold of life, I faced her, I kissed her, I went down through the tunnels of the mines to see how other men live, and when I came out, my hands stained with filth and sorrows.

I held them up to show the generals, and I said:

"I have no part of this crime." --Pablo Neruda, Canto General

WHEN CHILE'S new rulers seized power last week, they set themselves huge tasks. There were books to burn, settlements to destroy, opponents to torture, people to kill. There were thousands of refugees from other countries to catch and send back. Factories and farms were in the hands of those who worked them, and the generals meant to give them back to the old managers and manor lords. The poor people of Chile had tasted self-government, in the places where they worked as well as the Senate House, and the generals meant to teach them that self-government is for those who leave the rich alone, that democracy does not include sovereignty over the privileged, that freedom is for the well-to-do and in revolutionary times not even for them.

Yet with all these interesting and important efforts before them, the generals found time to exempt one Leftist, Communist poet Pablo Neruda, from the general proscription. Neruda, they explained, was a national treasure. So when he died of cancer Sunday night, the generals sent condolences to his widow.

Neruda would have scorned such special treatment, as he scorned all the actions of the people one of his poems denounced, with passion and accuracy, as the dictatorship of the flies. Neruda never claimed to inhabit a special world for poets divorced from the struggles and the suffering of ordinary people. The son of a railway worker killed in a fall from his train, Neruda lost the consulship accorded his early poems by declaring Chile opposed to facism in Spain without waiting for his government's instructions. In 1944, the nitrate miners of Antofagasta asked Neruda to run for the Chilean Senate, where he served for four years. In 1948, unwilling to refrain from criticizing an American-supported dictator, Neruda was forced to go underground. For several months miners and working people helped him evade the Secret Police, passing him from house to house. With him, Neruda carried the manuscript of Canto General.

For 25 more years Neruda wrote poetry, read poetry to villagers, and propagandized for socialism and peace. For a short time in 1970 he was the Communist candidate for president of Chile, and then Popular Unity's first Ambassador to France. In 1971, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Neruda is the second world-famous Chilean to die, along with hundreds or thousands of unknown heroines and heroes, since the generals seized power. The mourners who braved the generals' cameras and spies to sing the International at Neruda's funeral Tuesday mourned not only Neruda but also Chilean freedom, those assassinated by the generals, and Salvador Allende, the president who had fought for freedom and the people.

But in a sense, the life of Neruda, the poet, speaks to university people like ourselves even more directly than the life of Allende, the doctor-turned-politician. It shows that intellectuals need not divorce themselves from other people, that the educated need not acquiesce in the world's oppression and so become a part of it. It shows that poets need not blind themselves to poverty, that they can instead stand up as men and women should and earn the right to say: "I have no part of this crime."