How Neruda became a communist (without "poetic conversion")

Abstract

As citizen and poet -inseparably- Pablo Neruda's defi nitive affiliation with the communist cause came about in 1935 during the anti-fascist writers conference in Paris. Nonetheless, working against the hypothesis of his "poetic conversion" (Amado Alonso) or of his bending under external ideological pressure, this essay proposes to demonstrate that Neruda's politically committed poetry developed naturally from the poetics underlying Residence on Earth, and not from its negation. In addition it provides evidence of how the dramatic historical circumstances that Europe lived through in 1935, and an important change in the Comintern's political strategy, decided this fi rst phase of Neruda's commitment to the communist project.