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Bud Parr has engaged in deliberate deceit in writing, “Schwartz’s thesis that Neruda’s status as ‘the greatest poet of the twentieth century’ came from being a ‘Stalinist at exactly the right moment, and not because of his poetry’ fails exactly because Schwartz offers nothing to prove that statement and doesn’t address the actual poetry.”

If you read my article, you will find the following comments on “the actual poetry”:

“Late nineteenth-century poetry in Spanish was dominated by the inflated rhetoric of Rubén Darío, on whom Whitman and the French Parnassiens exercised a baleful influence. Then came the ‘Generation of ‘98,’ the group of extraordinary writers in Spain who, in the aftermath of that country’s defeat in the Spanish-American war, carried out something comparable to the Imagist revolution of Pound and his contemporaries--clearing the exaggerated, gassy vocabulary of Rubén out of the idiom, replacing it by a clean, spare style as well as a harsh recognition of the realities that had befallen Spanish society and culture. They included some of the great modern classics of the language: Unamuno, Azorín, Ortega y Gasset, Pío Baroja, and Valle-Inclán.

“Above all, Antonio Machado exemplified this new poetic diction in Spanish. The Generation of ‘98 had major echoes in Latin America, but also paved the way for the ‘Generation of 1927,’ which comprised a yet more brilliant constellation of poets, known for an even less cluttered modernist style: Pedro Salinas, Jorge Guillén, Gerardo Diego, Dámaso Alonso, Vicente Aleixandre, Federico García Lorca, Luis Cernuda, Rafael Alberti, Manuel Altolaguirre.

“To move from the lucid achievement of these extraordinary men to the pseudo-Whitmanese of Neruda represented an immense step backward for Spanish poetry; it meant a return to the lazy, overwrought excesses employed by imitators of Rubén Darío, without the solid Catholic values and connection to the Nicaraguan landscape found in Rubén and his better disciples (most of them known only among his fellow Nicaraguans). Everybody who knows Spanish literature recognizes this fact--everybody except a few academic demagogues and a large number of American newspaper reviewers, who are still responding to the reputation built for Neruda by the Soviet machine. The admirers of Neruda are tourists in their approach to Hispanic literature, like people who attend a flamenco dance performance and think they have seen Spain--but with a politically correct edge.”

In addition, I quoted some 20 lines from Neruda’s poem on the death of Stalin.  This should seem to me sufficient attention to “the actual poetry.” I will not waste my time dissecting Neruda’s bad verse poem by poem. 

Stephen Schwartz

    – Stephen Schwartz (07/29  at  02:54 PM)

Mr. Schwartz,

It seems that through the power of Google the respected journalist and the lowly blogger with an opinion meet. Or, said differently, the respected journalist meets his audience. I would like to say that those of differing viewpoints are not enemies, so comments such as “if you read...” are out of place. Clearly I read your article or I would not have taken the time to write about it in my corner of the world. There is nothing “deceitful” about taking you to task for being polemical instead of critical in light of the fact that you begin with the assertion that Neruda is a “Bad Poet.” That is why I contrasted your article with Simic’s review. I realize that your intent was something different than Simic’s and you are entitled to your opinion that Neruda’s poetry is “doggeral,” but you did not convince me, your reader, of that assertion. 20 out of a thousand lines, or bird’s-eye comments that begin with “Late nineteenth-century poetry...” do not, in my opinion, address the poetry in the least and are simply not persuasive.

I welcome hearing more of what you say about this outside of what you have already written, if indeed, such an endeavor is worth your time.

Respectfully yours,

Bud Parr