From Comrades to Enemies: Paz, Neruda and the Origins of their Ideological and Poetic Rupture

• In Event: Poéticas latinoamericanas: filiaciones y desencuentros

Abstract

This paper examines the ideological and aesthetic dimensions of the highly publicized 1943 feud between Octavio Paz and Pablo Neruda, two of 20th-century Latin America’s most celebrated poets. Not only did the rupture end a passionate friendship, but it defined the clash between two opposing and irreconcilable understandings of the function of poetry—pure versus committed poetry—in an era of the fascist threat, communist totalitarianism and World War. Building on the important scholarship of Anthony Stanton, this paper opens a broader discussion of the international Left’s multifaceted Weltanschauung during the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War to better understand the poets’ falling-out on its Latin American and Mexico City terms. Paz’s early essays “Pablo Neruda en el corazón” (1938) and “Poesía de soledad y poesía de comunión” (1943), among others, and the Mexican’s ultimate rejection of Nerudista dictates for committed poetry are all read against the writings of André Gide (Retour de l’U.R.S.S, 1936) and Leon Trotsky and André Breton (Pour un Art Révolutionnaire Indépendent, 1938), which articulate respective impulses of dissent and efforts to reconcile individuality with power while remaining faithful to the revolutionary ideal. This paper will conclude that by breaking with the towering figure of Neruda to discover his own poetic voice while reevaluating his political stance vis-à-vis the Revolution, Paz had come to incarnate in many ways the liberated artist of Trotsky and Breton, an artist who obeyed “No authority, no dictation, not the least trace of orders from above!”

Author

• Daniel Cooper, University of California, Los Angeles