Bad Poet Man

Posted by Linda Sue Grimes Aug 20, 2008

Stephen Schwartz, in the Weekly Standard, offers a useful overview of the Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda. Schwartz writes, "Readers in the United States seem destined to have Neruda thrust upon them every few years, much as the cicadas return to whine and roar up and down the East Coast."

Neruda was a plagiarist who lifted from Rabindranath Tagore. Schwartz accurately describes the flawed poets this way: "Pablo Neruda was a bad writer and a bad man. His main public is located not in the Spanish-speaking nations but in the Anglo-European countries, and his reputation derives almost entirely from the iconic place he once occupied in politics--which is to say, he's 'the greatest poet of the twentieth century' because he was a Stalinist at exactly the right moment, and not because of his poetry, which is doggerel."

Please see "July Poet - Pablo Neruda: 'To be men! That is the Stalinist law!'" for an analysis of one of his poems that is never held up for adulation.