El hondero entusiasta (1923–24), 1933

Hernán Loyola, in his notes to Neruda's complete poems, establishes the genealogy of this aborted collection, as an ambitious project begun in the early 1920s, concurrently with the Veinte poemas de amor. Neruda tucked them away until he returned to Chile from the Far East in 1931 and published a selection of these poems. He prefaced them with an ‘advertencia del autor’ [foreword] and blamed their defect on too close an imitation of the Uruguayan poet Carlos Sabat Ercasty (1887–1982), whose work he had reviewed. They exchanged letters (four extant, PN5, 932–5), and Sabat Ercasty agreed that he had been imitated. Amado Alonso was the earliest critic to follow up this explicit but crushing influence. Neruda confessed that he lost many of the original poems and, ten years later, saw them as a ‘document of an excessive, ardent youth’ (PN1 159). They are the consequence of having read Sabat Ercasty and other poets too passionately, and not having been able to differentiate his own from their voice. Recently, Dominic Moran has studied this debt and the change it forced on Neruda's style, consolidating Neruda's and Loyola's insights. He concluded that the ‘similarities of subject matter, style and language which border on plagiarism, making it difficult to believe that Neruda was blissfully unaware of just how derivative his poem was’. In his critical edition, he convincingly argues that the Veinte poemas make more sense when read in the light of this imitation and crisis. I would add that Sabat Ercasty reads to me like Whitman, and Neruda had also read Whitman. In a survey of Whitman's influence, Guillermo de Torre called Ercasty one of the ‘prole whitmaniana’ [Whitman's offspring].

A working title had been ‘flechero entusiasta’ [enthusiastic archer]. The poet as ‘archer’ suggests both Eros and his arrows and Rimbaud and his Red Indians, and occurs as a self-image in poem 1 of Veinte poemas. As does ‘hondero’ [sling], another weapon, this time associated with David and all boys. The ‘entusiasta’ indicates Neruda's faith in what poetry stirs up: the prophetic frenzy, being possessed by a god.