• 5 months ago
Transcript
00:00Hey, whatcha writin' there?
00:09Poetry, huh?
00:10Lemme see.
00:12I sing the body electric, literally.
00:15Nerves abuzz with charmed quark passion.
00:19My heart a tireless steel piston.
00:23My dreams a positronic trance.
00:28Um, it's really...
00:30Hey, speaking of poetry!
00:33Dear Tim and Moby,
00:34Who was Pablo Neruda?
00:36From Hansel
00:38Pablo Neruda was one of the most gifted and influential poets of the 20th century.
00:44He's best known for his love poems, but over a career spanning half a century, his style and focus kept changing.
00:52He was born Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto in 1904 in Parral, Chile.
00:59His father worked for a railroad and wanted his son to follow in his footsteps.
01:04But Ricardo wasn't interested in trains. He wanted to be a poet.
01:09When his father found out that a magazine had published his 14-year-old son's poems, he burned the writings.
01:16From then on, Ricardo wrote under the pen name Pablo Neruda, taken from two of his heroes, French poet Paul Verlaine and Czech poet Jan Neruda.
01:26Neruda published his first collection, Book of Twilights, when he was still in his teens.
01:32A year later, he published what would become his most popular collection, Twenty Love Poems and A Song of Despair.
01:39Using the natural world as a metaphor for a doomed love affair, the poems were praised for their emotional honesty.
01:47What? Let me see that.
01:51Yeah, it has some pretty racy descriptions. The poems shocked some readers.
01:57But the book appealed to a wide audience and has since sold millions of copies.
02:03Actually, no, even successful poets usually aren't very well paid.
02:08To make a living, Neruda took a job as an honorary diplomat, representing Chile and countries around the world, including Myanmar, Indonesia, Singapore and Argentina.
02:19It wasn't a happy time for Neruda. He was intensely homesick and appalled by the treatment of natives in colonial Southeast Asia.
02:27During this time, he wrote his next major work, Residence on Earth, a collection of surrealist poems.
02:34Oh, surrealism is a school of art that focuses on subconscious ideas and the imagination.
02:40You can learn more about it in our Surrealism movie.
02:43True to form, Neruda's surrealist poems are a dreamlike jumble of imagery from his travels in Asia.
02:50Residence on Earth was critically acclaimed, but Neruda still needed money, so he accepted another diplomatic post, this time in Spain.
02:58It was there that he became politically active when the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936.
03:05Well, it started when General Francisco Franco led Spain's army in an uprising against the government.
03:12Franco wanted to establish a fascist government with all power concentrated in a single dictator.
03:18Neruda vocally opposed Franco, especially after his friend and fellow poet Federico Garcia Lorca was executed by fascist soldiers.
03:27From this point on, Neruda's poetry and his life became more political.
03:33After returning to Chile, Neruda became a senator for the Communist Party.
03:39Communism is an economic and political system in which, ideally, wealth is divided equally between all citizens.
03:46After an anti-communist government took control of Chile, though, Neruda and his wife were forced to flee to avoid arrest.
03:54He spent the next few years traveling the world, and in 1950, he published what some consider his masterpiece,
04:00Canto General, a grouping of more than 200 poems that explore the history of Latin America.
04:06Two years later, with a new government in power, Chile welcomed Neruda home as a hero.
04:12For the rest of his life, he was celebrated around the world and in his own country.
04:16He even won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971.
04:20Neruda died just two years later.
04:24Another poem?
04:36It's... it's, uh...
04:38Hey, what's that?