RUMEAU Lorca, Neruda, Whitman

Federico García Lorca and Pablo Neruda’s Odes to Walt
Whitman: A Set of Choral Poetry
Delphine Rumeau
Comparative Literature Studies, Volume 51, Number 3, 2014, pp. 418-438

(Article)
Published by Penn State University Press
For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/555086
[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]
federico garcía lorca and pablo neruda’s odes
to walt whitman: a set of choral poetry
Delphine Rumeau
abstract
This article investigates the relation between two poems titled “Oda a Walt
Whitman,” one by Federico García Lorca (Poeta en Nueva York), the other by
Pablo Neruda (Nuevas odas elementales). Both odes pay a tribute to Whitman,
but also deviate from eulogy and provide a frame for a very critical depiction
of contemporary America, thus mixing praise and disparagement. García
Lorca and Neruda both appropriate Whitman’s poetry, though they differ
in the use they make of it. Furthermore, these odes should really be read
as an ensemble by two poets who were once very close. The first time they
met in 1933, they improvised a two-voiced speech, a “discurso al alimón,” in
honor of Rubén Darío—who incidentally happens to have written a son-
net on Whitman. Neruda’s “Oda a Walt Whitman” is not only an address
to Whitman but also a response to García Lorca, a “poem al alimón,” so
to speak. The odes really are a contrapuntal composition, since the voice of
Darío echoes in the distance. Whitman is thus not only the addressee of the
odes, but also a great mediator enabling García Lorca and Neruda’s dialogue.
keywords: Walt Whitman, Federico García Lorca, Pablo Neruda,
intertextuality
While Whitman’s poetry largely relies on the celebration of otherness and

a fervent embrace of the world, it contains very few odes, as if to dissociate
eulogy from lyricism. But this rejection of the genre is ironically counter-
balanced by the numerous odes that were written as tributes to Whitman.
Among them stand two poems, both titled “Oda a Walt Whitman,” by
Federico García Lorca and Pablo Neruda. García Lorca’s ode, written in 1929,
comparative literature studies, vol. 51, no. 3, 2014.

Copyright © 2014. The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.
418
CLS 51.3_03_Rumeau.indd 418 04/09/14 9:47 AM

L O R C A A N D N E R U D A’ S O D E S T O W H I T M A N 419
was to belong to Poeta en Nueva York, published posthumously in 1940. Lorca

wrote this collection while he was staying at Columbia University during the
Great Depression. It provides a complex vision of the city. While poverty,
ruthless capitalism, and the lack of spiritual life fill Lorca with awe, the poet
is also mesmerized by what Whitman was the first to sing: the rhythms of
urban modernity, the shock of encounters with the crowds. The ode was
meant to be accompanied by a “fotomontaje de la cabeza de Walt Whitman
con la barba llena de mariposas” (a photomontage of Walt Whitman’s head
with his beard full of butterflies).1 Years later, in 1956, Neruda devoted one
of his Nuevas Odas Elementales (New Elemental Odes) to Whitman. These
Elemental Odes catalog familiar objects, stating their dignity and beauty,
and welcoming them into the poetical realm. Neruda’s ideas about “impure
poetry”2 and the necessity to cover the whole spectrum of reality echo the
preface to the first edition of Leaves of Grass, which discards as irrelevant
the idea of triviality or pettiness in poetry, since everything uttered by the
poet “dilates with the grandeur and life of the universe”;3 like Whitman,
Neruda believes that “the tree-toad is a chef-d’oeuvre for the highest” (59).
The American bard thus stands amid onions, socks, and French fries as
the object of Neruda’s praise. Both odes are therefore not only addresses to
Whitman but meaningful inclusions of his persona and strong appropriations
of his poetry. Moreover, the exact correspondence of their titles is unlikely
to be a coincidence, considering the intimate bond between García Lorca
and Neruda. They met in 1933 in Buenos Aires and later became very close
while Neruda was the Chilean consul in Madrid, just before the Spanish
Civil War broke out.4 García Lorca’s assassination was deeply felt by Neruda
and marked in many ways a watershed in his poetics, establishing in him
the idea of a more political and committed role of the poet in society. Their
bond is central to my argument, as I would like to read these odes not as
separate tributes but as a contrapuntal ensemble, or more exactly a chorus
of voices echoing Whitman’s.
Incorporating Whitman’s Body
Lorca’s and Neruda’s odes continue the dialogue Whitman set up with his
readers and with the “poets to come.”5 In his final lines, Whitman particu-
larly stresses the idea of corporeal presence and transmission. The conclud-
ing poem, “So Long,” renews the reading pact, asserting that there is no
discrepancy between the text and life: “Camerado, this is no book/Who

420 C O M P A R AT I V E L I T E R AT U R E S T U D I E S
touches this touches a man” (505). At the end of “Song of Myself,” the poet
offers his body up to his readers:
I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,

I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,

If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.
I stop somewhere waiting for you. (89)
This dissemination of the flesh is a democratic version of the Orphic myth,

since the poet’s body fuses with the elements, for the reader to find at will.
Neruda accepts this invitation at the beginning of “Oda a Walt Whitman,”
staging an encounter that is both textual and physical:
Yo no recuerdo
a qué edad,
ni donde,
si en el gran Sur mojado
o en la costa
temible, bajo el breve
grito de las gaviotas,
toqué una mano y era
la mano de Walt Whitman:
pisé la tierra
con los pies desnudos,
anduve sobre el pasto,
sobre el firme rocío
de Walt Whitman6
(I can’t recall
at what age,
or where,
whether it was in the vast humid south
or on the threatening
coast, where the seagulls
cry out sharply,
I touched a hand and it was

Walt Whitman’s hand

I walked the earth
barefoot
I walked on the prairie
on the firm dew
that belonged to Walt Whitman)
This opening clearly echoes Whitman’s endings: Neruda takes the hand
offered by Whitman, or more exactly, he happens to come across it, just as
foreseen in the conclusion of “Song of Myself.” While the American bard
invited his reader to look for his dissolved body under boot-soles, Neruda
goes barefoot for even more direct contact. The Orphic image also looms large
in García Lorca’s ode, when the “maricas” (fairies) gather in a rush around
Whitman’s beard: “¡También ese! ¡También! Y se despeñan / sobre tu barba
luminosa y casta”7 (“That one, too! That one! And they hurl themselves /
on your chaste and luminous beard” [151]).
Interestingly, both poets choose specific parts of the body, offering a
metonymic vision that is characteristic of Whitman’s own apprehension of
reality:8 Neruda focuses on the hand and García Lorca on the beard. The
latter also draws Neruda’s attention as he displays another Orphic image in
which the beard functions as a powerful metonymy:
A todas las esquinas de tu pueblo

un verso
tuyo llegó de visita
y era como un trozo
de cuerpo limpio
el verso que llegaba,
como tu propia barba pescadora
o el solemne camino de tus piernas de acacia. (2:430–43)
(To all your people’s rooms,

a line
of yours paid a visit
and on its arrival the line
was like part
of a clean body
like your own fishing beard
or the solemn path of your acacia legs.)

The dispersion of a body later assimilated for one’s own purposes is also
an image of Lorca’s, as well as Neruda’s, conception of poetic influence: an
impulse for creation rather than an overwhelming burden.
One of the reasons why Neruda was so receptive to Whitman’s poetry,
indeed, is that he saw in it the first literary grasp of American space, from
a personal and non-mediated point of view. Whitman teaches his reader to
see his surroundings for himself, freed from literary prisms or preconcep-
tions. If he develops a complex strategy to lure the reader into his poems, it
is only in order to finally release him from the textual space and to let him
go his own way on the paths of the world, as shown in “Song of Myself ”:
I lead no man to a dinner-table, library, exchange,

But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll,
My left hand hooking you round the waist,
My right hand pointing to landscapes of continents and the
public road.
Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you,
You must travel it for yourself. (83)
Neruda must have been particularly sensitive to this empowering form of

tutoring, since he wrote down on the front page of one of his copies of Leaves
of Grass this line from “A Song of Joy”: “Nothing exterior shall ever take com-
mand of me.” He also commented on this very line in his memoirs, Confieso
que he vivido, explaining that literature should never prevent direct access to
one’s surroundings and self: “‘Que nada exterior llegue a mandar en mí,’ dijo
Walt Whitman. Y la parafernalia de la literatura, con todos sus méritos, no
debe sustituir a la desnuda creación” (5:265) (“Nothing exterior shall ever take
command of me,” said Walt Whitman. And literature’s paraphernalia, with all
its merits, should never be a substitute for solid creation).9 In short, Neruda
was receptive to what he calls Whitman’s “lección vital,” “ese abrazo que da
al mundo, a la vida, a los seres y al paisaje” (5:1154) (vital lesson, his embrace
of the world, of life, of beings, of the landscape). In the ode, Whitman’s book
is only a springboard that gives access to more beyond it:
levantaste
mis ojos
a los libros
hacia los cereales:
ancho,
en la claridad

de las llanuras,
me hiciste ver
el alto monte
tutelar. Del eco
subterráneo,
para mí
recogiste
todo,
todo lo que nacía,
cosechaste
galopando en la alfalfa,
cortando para mí las amapolas,
visitando
los ríos,
acudiendo en la tarde
a las cocinas. (2:429)
(you raised
my eyes
to books,
toward
the treasure
of cereals:
vast,
in the clarity
of the plains,
you made me see
the high
mountain
that tutors us. From the subterranean
echo
you collected
for me
everything,
everything that was being brought to life,
you harvested
gallivanting through the alfalfa,
gathering the poppies for me,
visiting
the rivers,

rushing in the evening

into the kitchens.)
The landscape is typically Chilean: the alfalfa and the poppies are recurring
motifs throughout Neruda’s verse and they are always strongly associated
with Chile. Whitman becomes a guide in a country that is not his own; he
is at ease in the wet region where Neruda was born and he teaches him to
see the beauties of his land. Also, this homage to Whitman owes nothing
to his style and form, since it is written in a very personal manner: the short
lines form a vertical column, while Whitman’s extensive ones stretch across
the page.
As to García Lorca, his relation to traditions and influences are complex:
while he used many patterns inherited from medieval Spain and popular
songs, he also believed in immediacy. In his memoirs, Neruda even relates
how one day, while he was reading his own verse to García Lorca, his friend
begged him to stop for fear of being influenced (4:1095). Such an anxiety
could explain Lorca’s fascination with the “influencing yet releasing from
influence” message from Whitman. It should be conceded, however, that
Lorca’s style seems to borrow a number of specific devices from Whitman,
such as a spectacular use of anaphoric questions and refutations. Furthermore,
Poeta en Nueva York marks a watershed in Lorca’s rhythmic patterns, as it
explores the possibilities of free verse, a typically Whitmanian prosody. But
as is often the case with free verse, it is difficult to locate one specific influ-
ence, since Lorca was also at the time a fervent admirer of T. S. Eliot, as
well as a receptive reader of the surrealists’ experimentations. Overall, his
tribute is certainly not a mimetic homage, but rather an incorporation of
Whitman’s heritage into his collection of poems.
Appropriating Whitman’s Poetry
By taking liberties with Whitman’s model, both poets also claim a right to
misread, appropriate, and adapt it to their own agenda. Indeed, their odes
provide very partial interpretations of Whitman’s “vital lesson.”
Lorca especially retains the homoerotic component, since Whitman
is clearly identified as one of the “maricas,” justifying Lorca’s own desires
and providing him with a reference for his homosexual vision of the city.
Beyond this salient point, it is interesting to see that Lorca constructs a
very ambiguous persona. On the one hand, Whitman is featured as virile

and fleshy: “hermosura viril” (150) (“virile beauty” [151]), “Adán de sangre,
macho” (150) (“macho Adam of blood” [151]). But this depiction of a robust
and potent poet is counterbalanced by Apollonian images that release the
body from its carnal weight:
Ni un solo momento, viejo hermoso Walt Whitman,

he dejado de ver tu barba llena de mariposas,
ni tus hombros de pana gastados por la luna,
ni tus muslos de Apolo virginal,
ni tu voz como una columna de ceniza (150)
(Not for one moment, beautiful old Walt Whitman,

have I not seen your beard full of butterflies,
or your corduroy shoulders worn away by the moon,
or your virginal Apollo thighs,
or your voice like a column of ash [151])
The handsome old man appears vulnerable and his authority is oddly under-
mined by a disturbing comparison:
anciano hermoso como la niebla,

que gemías igual que un pájaro
con el sexo atravesado por una aguja,
enemigo del sátiro,
enemigo de la vid,
y amante de los cuerpos bajo la burda tela (150)
(beautiful old man like the mist,

who cried like a bird
with its sex pierced like a needle.
Enemy of the satyr,
enemy of the vine
and lover of bodies under coarse cloth [151])
The image of the bird whose sex is torn by a needle is a variation on the myth
of Adonis, killed by the tusk of a wild boar driven into his groin. The myth is
travestied, the tusk becoming a needle so as to emphasize the fragility of the poet.
The stanza thus clearly builds an anti-Dionysian image. Whitman remains a
lover of bodies, but in a very chaste way, under the “burda tela.” This depiction

of the homoerotic poet as pure and alien to sexual excess or deviant urges is
stressed again when Lorca specifies what Whitman was not after:
Pero tú no buscabas los ojos arañados,

ni el pantano oscurísimo donde sumergen a los niños,
ni la saliva helada,
ni las curvas heridas como panza de sapo
que llevan los maricas en coches y en terrazas
mientras la luna los azota por las esquinas del terror. (152)
(But you weren’t looking for scratched eyes,

or the darkest swamp where they submerge the boys,
or the frozen saliva,
or the curved wounds like the belly of a toad
the queers wear in cars and on terraces
while the moon whips them through the corners of terror. [153])
Whitman thus comes to embody Apollonian love, linking homoeroticism

to poetry and its finest achievements, while distancing it from any kind of
perversion. However, this vision of Whitman as an enemy of the satyr and
a lover of hidden and chaste bodies is very partial, and even goes against
the triumphant epiphany of the male body in Leaves of Grass. It is a creative
misreading—a concept used by Harold Bloom to define strategies against
the “anxiety of influence.” But again, it is paradoxically a faithful misreading,
which Whitman seems to have allowed, if not programmed, as he offered
his poetry to the unpredictable interpretations of all the “poets to come.”
In Neruda, two elements are especially salient. Not only is Whitman
the poet of open spaces, he is also the champion of “man,” especially the
slave, the worker, and the soldier:
Pero no sólo
tierra
sacó a la luz
tu pala;
desenterraste
al hombre,
y el
esclavo
humillado

contigo, balanceando
la negra dignidad de su estatura,
caminó conquistando
la alegría. [. . .]
Buen panadero!
Primo hermano mayor
de mis raíces (2:430)
(But it is not only

earth
that your shovel
brought back to light;
you dug up
man
and the
humiliated
slave,
with you, swaying
the black dignity of his height,
walked conquering
joy. [. . .]
Good baker!
First elder brother
of my roots)
Neruda particularly emphasizes this political dimension, which is hardly

surprising from a communist poet who considers his art as useful work for the
society of comrades to which he belongs. The apostrophe “buen panadero” is
clearly a gesture of appropriation of Whitman’s poetic and political dimen-
sion. Neruda indeed frequently uses the image of the baker to characterize
his own production as a working poet, as in the piece “Artes poeticas”:
Como poeta panadero

preparo el fuego, la harina,
la levadura, el corazón,
y me complico hasta los codos,
amasando la luz del horno,

el agua verde del idioma,

para que el pan que me sucede
se venda en la panadería. (3:438–39)
(As poet baker

I prepare the fire, the flour,
the yeast, the heart,
and I take the plunge, elbows deep into it,
kneading the light of the oven,
the green water of language,10
so that the bread I get
can be sold in the bakeries.)
The aim of poetry is therefore to be sold in bakeries as an essential food.

Neruda uses this image again in his Nobel Prize speech, which reads as a
reply to Plato’s exclusion of the poet from the Republic. Neruda states the
essentiality of poetry, as necessary to daily life as bread:
El poeta no es un “pequeño dios.” No, no es un “pequeño dios.” No

está signado por un destino cabalístico superior al de quienes ejercen
otros menesteres y oficios. A menudo expresé que el mejor poeta es el
hombre que nos entrega el pan de cada día: el panadero más próximo,
que no se cree dios. Él cumple su majestuosa y humilde faena de
amasar, meter al horno, dorar y entregar el pan de cada día, con una
obligación comunitaria. (5:337)
(The poet is not a “small god.” No, he is not a “small god.” He is not
marked with a cabalistic destiny, superior to that of those who have
other occupations and hold other offices. I have often maintained
that the best poet is he who prepares our daily bread: the nearest
baker who does not imagine himself to be a god. He does his majestic
and unpretentious work of kneading the dough, consigning it to the
oven, baking it in golden colors and handing us our daily bread as a
duty of fellowship.)
Both Lorca and Neruda therefore select specific aspects of Whitman,

those that fit in their own poetics, program, and vision. Neruda said about
Lorca “hay cien Federicos y cantan para todos. Hay Federicos para todo el
mundo” (5:151) (There are a hundred Federicos and they sing for every one.

There are Federicos for everybody). Similarly, the odes show that there are
Whitmans for everybody. Moreover, Lorca’s and Neruda’s apostrophes are not
ritual invocations to a dead poet, but rather appropriations of what remains
for them current and topical. It is Whitman’s significance in the present
time that interests them. However, far from being a total acknowledgment
of Whitman’s everlasting vision, the two odes also depict the betrayal of the
American poet’s ideals in contemporary times.
Manipulating Whitman’s Legacy
A very striking feature of both odes, indeed, is that they are far from
unequivocal in their praise: they laud Whitman’s poetry, but criticize its
lack of achievement and the state of the United States at the time Lorca
and Neruda write. There is, therefore, a strong contrast between the eulogy
addressed to the bard and the disparaging tone used to depict contemporary
America. This movement from euphoria to desolation is also very character-
istic of Pessoa’s “Saudação a Walt Whitman” (“Salutation to Walt Whitman”).
This latter poem belongs to Alvaro de Campos’s five great odes and therefore
relates to the same genre as Lorca’s and Neruda’s tributes. A little digression
on this salutation might help us to understand the specificity of Lorca’s and
Neruda’s odes. Pessoa’s poem begins with an enthusiastic burst, words gush-
ing out with a sense of exhilaration; but this opening only highlights the
sense of total loss that the poet later expresses while addressing Whitman.
This strong oscillation, this sense of collapsing from a triumphant height
to the awe of disintegration and to a feeling of evanescence, is indeed very
much present in Whitman’s poetry. The mood of “Out the Cradle Endlessly
Rocking” contrasts with the euphoric sense of departure of “Starting from
Paumanok.” “Song of Myself,” though largely a blissful exploration of how
the self relates to its surroundings, also stages moments of collapse, expresses
feelings of estrangement and painful bewilderment. Pessoa dramatizes a
dynamics that gives Whitman’s poetry its particular mesmerizing rhythm,
and by maximizing the sense of elation as well as the sense of depression
that follows, he performs an act of appropriation which is akin to Lorca’s and
Neruda’s: he addresses a Whitman who is modeled after his own spectacular
swings, from wonderment to the deep melancholy of the “saudade.”
But while Pessoa radicalizes a sense of contrast which lies at the core
of Whitman’s poetry, Lorca and Neruda play a different card: they contrast
Whitman’s ideals and their subsequent fate, the poems and the world that

failed to live up to them. The criticism is not aimed at Whitman’s poetry

per se, but at its failure to become what Whitman meant it to be: an ideal
program that would eventually infuse the non-textual world. The second
stanza of Lorca’s ode makes this nonfulfillment very clear:
Pero ninguno se dormía,

ninguno quería ser el río,
ninguno amaba las hojas grandes,
ninguno la lengua azul de la playa. (148)
(But none fell asleep,

none wished to be the river,
none loved the large leaves
or the beach’s blue tongue. [149])
All three motifs—the river, the leaves, and the shore, once Whitman’s objects
of delight, desire, and assimilation—are now blatantly rejected. Ultimately,
the odes raise the question of the responsibility for such a disappointment.
Was Whitman’s poetry doomed to fail to inform reality, or is society guilty
of having betrayed his legacy? Can his poetry still be topical and effective?
Interestingly, the odes give different answers to these questions.
For Lorca, the failure lies in the fact that a ruthless urban society
developed in place of the wide-open spaces that Whitman imagined as a
field for democracy and homoerotic encounters. What Lorca suggests is a
highly biased interpretation of Whitman: the vision of a bucolic ideal in
Leaves of Grass is another kind of misreading that enables him to voice his
own complaints and resentment. The city appears in Poeta en Nueva York as
a place of corruption and perversity that it never was for Whitman:
Por el East River y el Queensborough

los muchachos luchaban con la industria,
y los judíos vendían al fauno del río
la rosa de la circuncisión (148)
(By the East River and the Queensboro

the young men wrestled with industry
and the Jews sold the rose of circumcision
to the faun of the river [149])

However, in Whitman, industry and trade were honored as modern activities

that gave the city its feverish energy. The corruption of Whitman’s reimag-
ined Eden is clearly signified as the ode makes its case:
¡También ése! ¡También! Dedos teñidos

apuntan a la orilla de tu sueño
cuando el amigo come tu manzana
con un leve sabor de gasolina (152)
(That one too! That one! Stained fingers

point at the shore of your dream,
when the friend eats your apple
with a slight taste of gasoline [153])
The poem repeats its condemnation in its closing argument:
Duerme: no queda nada.

Una danza de muros agita las praderas
y América se anega de máquinas y llanto. (156)
(Sleep: nothing remains.

A dance of walls shakes the prairies
and America sinks into machines and tears. [157])
These lines provide, again, a partial reading, as they choose to ignore

Whitman’s enthusiastic calls for the “leaping of the ax,” which shapes
open spaces into civilization. Whitman is really the singer of both natural
and urban spaces and sees no contradiction between the “machine and the
garden.”11 Such a misreading helps Lorca strengthen his criticism of urban
modernity. It is also a way to draw a line between a healthy homoerotic
love and the perversions of urban sexuality. But then again, the city was for
Whitman an ideal place for homoerotic love, enabling perpetual encounters.
Lorca thus creates a dichotomy that didn’t exist for Whitman, and by making
him the bard of an ideal Nature, he again performs an act of appropriation.12
As for Neruda, it is Whitman’s political vision that interests him most
in his attack on contemporary America. The slavery issue in particular
epitomizes Whitman’s betrayal. One stanza builds a grotesque picture of
Lincoln’s murderers cavorting in his bed:

Y, ay!
los que asesinaron
a Lincoln
ahora
se acuestan en su cama,
derribaron
su sitial
de olorosa madera
y erigieron un trono
por desventura y sangre
salpicado.
(Alas!
those who murdered
Lincoln
now sleep in his bed
they destroyed
his seat
made of scented wood
and they built a throne
stained with woe
and blood.)
This style is fairly typical of Neruda’s fierce attacks against the oppressors
of the people. The whole stanza condenses a poem from Canto general, “El
viento sobre Lincoln” (“The Wind over Lincoln”), which stages the profa-
nation of the Whitmanian hero’s legacy, as the wind, a powerful soothing
motif in Whitman’s elegy to Lincoln, now carries cries of sufferings from
the South to the president’s ghost. That poem is full of grotesque violent
images, especially when it depicts the acts of the Ku Klux Klan; the end
features a group of schoolgirls singing incongruous songs out of tune by
Lincoln’s tomb. Neruda’s ode to Whitman similarly focuses on the failure
of the Lincoln–Whitman tandem to establish equality in the United States.
However, if both odes excoriate the betrayal of Whitman’s legacy, they
make different uses of it. Lorca does not blame Whitman for his naivety or
for the debacle of his pure homoerotic ideals. Whitman is a soothing figure
for Lorca, who insists that he never forgets him for a single moment. Yet far
from trying to resuscitate his memory, Lorca prefers to let it go as a beauti-
ful, though powerless, thought. He does not try to conjure up his memory
or to continue his quest. The last two stanzas form a cradlesong, which lulls

Whitman to sleep: his tongue is still speaking, but his body has disappeared
and his call is a call for mourning, for a funeral wake. Lorca’s vision is not
altogether hopeless: the last lines express a strong wish, the hope for a black
child, sending out the good news that the “reino de la espiga” (156) (the
kingdom of grain [157]) has come. There is, thus, a hope that Whitman’s
dreams will come true, but it is not Whitman’s message per se that brings
along the change. The ode ends on a prophetic note, a recurring structure
in Poeta en Nueva York,13 but it is a subdued, almost hushed one, compared
with the clamorous final lines of “Danza de la muerte” (“Death Dance”) or
the powerful predictions of “Ciudad sin sueños” (“City with No Dreams”).
Neruda’s ode contrasts with Lorca’s in its conclusion. His address to
Whitman is not in the least elegiac, as it asserts the everlasting power of the
bard. Whitman’s message remains highly topical for Neruda:
no han aplastado
la hierba de tu libro,
el manantial vital
de su frescura (2:432)
(they did not crush

the grass of your book
the vital spring
of its freshness.)
Whitman’s voice, far from dwindling to a nostalgic call, resounds in the

present times, reaching out far, broadcast in the train stations and the ports.
It has the power to bring the people together:
tu pueblo [. . .]
no olvida
tu campana:
se congrega cantando
(your people [. . .]
don’t forget
your bell:
they gather singing)
Neruda uses Christian symbols or connotations (the bell, the verb “con-
gregar”) and displaces their original meaning to convert them into communist

emblems. Whitman’s voice even has a performative power: as people convene

at his call, they march on to establish fraternity over the world. Somehow,
this ode sums up a whole section of Canto general, titled “Que despierte el
leñador.” The beginning of this group of poems depicts nineteenth-century
America as a land of promise and ideals, then shows how things deterio-
rated—went south, as it were—and how capitalism ruined all comradeship.
But soon enough, things go east, and Neruda shows the USSR as the place
where the ideals of nineteenth-century America found a fertile ground to
expand. He then calls up Whitman, who rises again from the dead to sing
with him the song of Stalingrad. Neruda thus borrows Whitman’s style and
words for his communist panegyric. The appeal is less grandiose in the ode,
but it is essentially the same movement: Neruda conjures the American bard
to serve his own ideological purposes.14
Writing “al alimón”
Though there is nothing unusual about such an appropriation, the emphasis

on Whitman’s still fiercely active presence can be interpreted as an indirect
address to Lorca. Neruda’s ode should be read side by side with Lorca’s for
a better understanding of its scope: it should be read “al alimón,” a phrase
suggested by Lorca for a speech that he delivered together with Neruda. The
expression belongs to the vocabulary of bullfighting, referring to a very rare
performance that requires special talents, such as when two bullfighters fight
together one bull but with only one cape and one sword. When the two poets
met for the first time in 1933, for a celebration of Rubén Darío in Buenos
Aires, they improvised, on Lorca’s suggestion, a two-voiced speech.15 No
one apparently noticed the improvisation; such a performance of eloquence
requires bravura but above all intense attention to one another. The odes
are similarly intertwined, as Neruda’s poem is somehow the continuation of
Lorca’s tribute to Whitman: it highlights certain features of the bard that
Lorca left aside, and it resuscitates the poet whom Lorca had buried deep
in oblivion.
This diptych of odes could even be expanded into a triptych, as Whitman
is not only the addressee, but the mediator of a dialogue between the two
poets. Before Lorca’s death, in 1934, Neruda wrote “Oda a Federico Garcia
Lorca,” a vibrant homage to his friend. It has often been commented on for
its prophetic vision of Lorca’s death: his voice is said to be that of a “naranjo
enlutado” (a mourning orange tree) and he is depicted in tears. The poem

shows a striking emphasis on Lorca’s pain: “lloras llorando” (1:331) (you cry
crying). However, Lorca’s portrait is not only filled with death and sadness,
but also with intense joy. It should indeed be emphasized that, while Lorca
is described by many of his friends as a melancholy and even depressed per-
son, Neruda refers to him as a cheerful and laughing friend: “fue el hombre
más alegre que he conocido en mi ya larga vida. Irradiaba la dicha de ver,
de oír, de cantar, de vivir” (5:150) (the most joyful man that I ever had the
chance to meet in my already long life. He was glowing from the bliss he
had in seeing, listening, singing, living). The ode shows Lorca crying, but
also laughing wholeheartedly:
Cuando vuelas vestido de durazno,

cuando ríes con risa de arroz huracanado,
cuando para cantar sacudes les arterias y los dientes,
la garganta y los dedos (1:331)
(When you fly dressed in peach

when you laugh with the laugh of a whirlwind of rice,
when in order to sing you swing your arteries and your teeth,
your throat and your fingers)
To Neruda, somehow, Lorca appears as a fairly Whitmanian character.

Another stanza describes him with green swallows in his hair, shells and cher-
ries intertwined, drawing an image very reminiscent of Whitman’s mosaics
of himself, as well as of Lorca’s metamorphic pictures of Whitman. Lorca
and Whitman thus appear to share strong symbols and to incarnate a poetics
of assimilation. Whitman is a poetic bond between Lorca and Neruda: their
friendship is placed under his auspices.
Rubén Darío—the subject of the 1933 “discurso al alimón”—also wrote
an address to Whitman, in the form of a sonnet. Whitman appears in it as
a solemn patriarch, “bello como un patriarca”16 (handsome as a patriarch),
“sereno y santo” (serene and holy); his “soberbio rostro de emperador” (superb
face of an emperor) is exhibited as the imperishable image of a glorious figure.
Even if Darío also presents Whitman as very much alive—“En su país de
hierro vive el gran viejo” (In his land of iron lives the grand old man)—the
American poet appears as distant, remote and timeless. With his “arruga
olímpica” (Olympic wrinkle), he incarnates a prophet from the Old World
as much as the bard of the New Continent. In short, while Darío presented
a rather stern image of Whitman, enshrined in a well-wrought sonnet, Lorca
and Neruda address him in the present tense to set up a dialogue. The two

odes would therefore be a dialogue between Lorca and Neruda, as well as

addresses to Whitman, and, in a less conspicuous fashion, addresses to Darío:
they somehow resume the discourse “al alimón” and transpose it into the
realm of written poetry. More than a duet, there is something choral about
this set of odes, if one pays attention to their subtexts. Whitman is therefore
the addressee of the odes, but also the great intercessor enabling these poetic
dialogues. The voices of Lorca and Neruda, as well as that of Darío in the
distance, resonate around the evocation of Whitman.
Lorca’s and Neruda’s odes to Whitman function as a sound box echoing
multiple quotes. This could seem paradoxical, since all three poets do not see
literature as an autonomous and reflexive space, but as an experience directly
connected to life, and they paid homage to one another on that ground. Lorca
famously declared that Neruda didn’t write with ink but with blood, while
Neruda asked in his ode to Lorca, “Para que sirven los versos si no es para
esa noche?” (1:333) (What is verse for if not for tonight?). But what the odes
enable is the continuation of a dialogue beyond death: far from merely play-
ing with references, they assert the possibility of fellowship through poetry,
of a communication that goes beyond death and of a bond that resists time.
Moreover, they form an ensemble and somehow illustrate the possibility of a
collective dynamic in poetic creation. Interestingly, Whitman has often been
invoked by poets who opposed a romantic idea of the creative self. Against
an authoritative conception of authorship, some poets, often politically com-
mitted, defended a more collective and participative vision, locating creation
in transmission rather than invention, in an epic chain rather than a lyric
subject. It is no wonder that Whitman, who renounced his copyrights and
invited his followers to incorporate his poetry, should be an iconic figure
for such poets. Lorca—who composed his Romancero Gitano using tradi-
tional forms and gypsy motifs—and Neruda—whose Canto general claims
to be the collective voice of Latin America—can clearly be related to this
trend. A final name deserves to be mentioned to conclude on this creative
fellowship around Whitman, that of the Spanish poet León Felipe. Felipe,
exiled to Mexico after the Spanish Civil War, was well acquainted with both
Lorca and Neruda. In 1942, he translated “Song of Myself,” under the title
“Canto a mí mismo.” He typically appropriates Whitman and enrolls him
in his denunciation of fascism. A year later, he published Ganarás la luz, a
collection that mixes poem and prose, creation and critic, where Whitman
appears as a central figure. Felipe comments on his recent translation and
weaves quotations from Whitman with glosses. It is precisely in this col-
lection that Felipe develops his idea of the dissolution of authorship into a
collective voice and his conception of poetry as one vast continuous creation

beyond time and individuality. As a final sentence of the collection puts it,
“La poesía entera del mundo tal vez sea un mísmo y único poema”17 (The
entire poetry of the world might well be one and only poem). This dense
aphoristic statement is later explained:
Los poemas impresos siguen siendo borradores sin corregir ni terminar

y abiertos a cualquier luminosa colaboración. Aun muerto el poeta
que los inició, puede otro después venir a seguirlos, a modificarlos, a
completarlos, a unificarlos y fundirlos en el Gran Poema Universal.
Y tal vez sea el mismo y único poeta el que venga, porque acaso no haya
más que un solo Poeta en el mundo: El-embudo-y-el-Viento. (255)
(Printed poems continue to be drafts, not corrected or ended, and

open to any bright collaboration. Even if the poet who started
them is dead, someone else can come and continue them, change
them, complete them, unite them and fuse them into the Great
Universal Poem. And maybe it will be the very same and only poet
who will come, because possibly there is only one Poet in the world:
the-funnel-and-the-wind.)
These lines could provide a beautiful commentary on Lorca’s and Neruda’s

odes to Whitman, which constitute the reactivation and continuation of
Whitman’s poetry, and advocate a conception of the poet as a powerful
collective voice.
Notes
1. Federico García Lorca, Poeta en Nueva York, ed. María Clementa Millán (Madrid: Cátedra,
2002), 218. The story of the publication of Poeta en Nueva York is complex: Lorca wrote the
poems in 1929 and 1930, then reordered them and reworked them for six years. He was mur-
dered before completing his work and before the collection was published. The first versions
appear in 1940, but it is not until the 1988 Cátedra edition that the collection was accompanied
by the illustrations planned by Lorca. For a general perspective, see María Clementa Millán’s
introduction to the Cátedra edition (2002); and for more details, see Daniel Eisenberg,
Poeta en Nueva York: Historia y problemas de un texto de Lorca (Barcelona: Ariel, 1976);
Andrew A. Anderson, “The Evolution of García Lorca’s Poetic Projects, 1929–36, and
the Textual Status of Poeta en Nueva York,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 61 (1983): 221–44;
Andrew A. Anderson, “Las peripecias de Poeta en Nueva York,” Boletín de la Fundación Federico
García Lorca 10–11 (1992): 97–123.
2. In 1935, Neruda published a polemical text, titled “Sobre una poesía sin pureza,” in
the first issue of the Spanish review Caballo verde para la poesía, opposing formalist trends
of European poetry at the time. It is reprinted in Pablo Neruda, Obras Completas, ed.
Hernán Loyola, 5 vols. (Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, 1999) (hereafter cited parenthetically
by volume and page number), 5:381.

3. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings: A Norton Critical Edition (deathbed
edition), ed. Michael Moon (New York: Norton, 2007) (hereafter cited parenthetically by
page number), 713.
4. In addition to Neruda’s memoirs, Confieso que he vivido, see Edmundo Olivares, Pablo
Neruda: Los caminos del mundo: Tras las hullas del poeta itinerante II (1933–1939) (Santiago: LOM,
2001); and Sergio Macias Brevis, El Madrid de Pablo Neruda (Madrid: Tabla rasa libros, 2004).
5. The poem “Poets to Come” is one of the final inscriptions of Leaves of Grass.
6. Pablo Neruda, Nuevas Odas Elementales, 2:428–29.
7. Federico García Lorca, Poet in New York, bilingual ed., trans. Pablo Medina and Mark
Statman (New York: Grove Press, 2008) (hereafter cited parenthetically by page number), 150.
8. On metonymy as a central trope in Whitman’s poetry, see C. Carroll Hollis, Language
and Style in Leaves of Grass (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983).
9. For a comprehensive study of the complexities of Neruda’s relation with tradition, see
Selena Millares, Neruda, el fuego y la frague (Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 2008); a
large part of the second chapter, “El impulso romantico,” deals specifically with Neruda’s rela-
tion with Whitman (23–43).
10. The “green water of language,” besides its hopeful and synesthetic connotations, refers
to the green ink that Neruda always used to write.
11. The expression refers to the title of Leo Marx’s seminal work, The Machine in the Garden:
Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964).
12. We therefore partly disagree with Cuvardic’s interpretation of Lorca’s ode, which
concludes that “el yo-lírico también quiere ser reconocido, como lo fue en su tiempo Walt
Whitman, como el poeta profético y visionario que augura la disolución de la anomia urbana
(de la incomunicación entre los habitantes de la metrópoli), y el surgimiento de una nueva época
de amor colectivo. . . . Al tematizar la ciudad de Nueva York desde la denuncia, García Lorca
se declara heredero de la ideología humanista del poeta estadounidense” (the lyric “I” claims
to be the prophetic and visionary poet who, as Walt Whitman once did, announced the end of
urban anomy [of the lack of communication between the inhabitants of the metropolis], and
the dawn of a new era of collective love. . . . By evoking New York City through disparagement,
García Lorca declares himself the heir of the humanist ideology of the American poet.” Dorde
Cuvardic García, “Oda a Walt Whitman: Homenaje de García Lorca al poeta del pueblo y las
multitudes,” Revista de Filología, Lingüistica y Literatura 32, no. 2 (2006): 24–25.
13. On the recurring pattern definition/denunciation/prophecy in the poems of this col-
lection, see Piero Menarini, “Poeta en Nueva York” de Federico García Lorca, Lettura crítica
(Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1975). Also, on the prophetic quality of Lorca’s voice, see Robert
Harvard, “Lorca’s Mantic Poet in New York,” Anales de literatura española contemporánea
25 (2000): 439–78.
14. For a more specific study of this sequence, see Delphine Rumeau, “Walt Whitman and
Pablo Neruda, American Camerados,” Revue Française d’Études Américaines 108 (2006): 47–62.
15. Neruda transcripts the speech in his memoirs (5:517–21).
16. Rubén Darío, Azul (1888; repr., Madrid: Biblioteca EDAF, 2003), 199–200 (as for all
subsequent quotations from this poem).
17. León Felipe, Ganarás la luz (1943; repr., Madrid: Cátedra, 2006), 229 (hereafter cited
parenthetically by page number).

RUMEAU Lorca, Neruda, Whitman

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

RUMEAU Lorca, Neruda, Whitman

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Federico García Lorca and Pablo Neruda’s Odes to Walt

Whitman: A Set of Choral Poetry

Comparative Literature Studies, Volume 51, Number 3, 2014, pp. 418-438

Published by Penn State University Press

For additional information about this article

While Whitman’s poetry largely relies on the celebration of otherness and

comparative literature studies, vol. 51, no. 3, 2014.

CLS 51.3_03_Rumeau.indd 418 04/09/14 9:47 AM

was to belong to Poeta en Nueva York, published posthumously in 1940. Lorca

Incorporating Whitman’s Body

CLS 51.3_03_Rumeau.indd 419 04/09/14 9:47 AM

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,

I stop somewhere waiting for you. (89)

This dissemination of the flesh is a democratic version of the Orphic myth,

CLS 51.3_03_Rumeau.indd 420 04/09/14 9:47 AM

Walt Whitman’s hand

A todas las esquinas de tu pueblo

(To all your people’s rooms,

CLS 51.3_03_Rumeau.indd 421 04/09/14 9:47 AM

I lead no man to a dinner-table, library, exchange,

Neruda must have been particularly sensitive to this empowering form of

CLS 51.3_03_Rumeau.indd 422 04/09/14 9:47 AM

CLS 51.3_03_Rumeau.indd 423 04/09/14 9:47 AM

rushing in the evening

Appropriating Whitman’s Poetry

CLS 51.3_03_Rumeau.indd 424 04/09/14 9:47 AM

Ni un solo momento, viejo hermoso Walt Whitman,

(Not for one moment, beautiful old Walt Whitman,

anciano hermoso como la niebla,

(beautiful old man like the mist,

CLS 51.3_03_Rumeau.indd 425 04/09/14 9:47 AM

Pero tú no buscabas los ojos arañados,

(But you weren’t looking for scratched eyes,

Whitman thus comes to embody Apollonian love, linking homoeroticism

CLS 51.3_03_Rumeau.indd 426 04/09/14 9:47 AM

(But it is not only

Neruda particularly emphasizes this political dimension, which is hardly

Como poeta panadero

CLS 51.3_03_Rumeau.indd 427 04/09/14 9:47 AM

el agua verde del idioma,

(As poet baker

The aim of poetry is therefore to be sold in bakeries as an essential food.

El poeta no es un “pequeño dios.” No, no es un “pequeño dios.” No

Both Lorca and Neruda therefore select specific aspects of Whitman,

CLS 51.3_03_Rumeau.indd 428 04/09/14 9:47 AM

Manipulating Whitman’s Legacy

CLS 51.3_03_Rumeau.indd 429 04/09/14 9:47 AM

failed to live up to them. The criticism is not aimed at Whitman’s poetry

Pero ninguno se dormía,

(But none fell asleep,

Por el East River y el Queensborough

(By the East River and the Queensboro

CLS 51.3_03_Rumeau.indd 430 04/09/14 9:47 AM

However, in Whitman, industry and trade were honored as modern activities

¡También ése! ¡También! Dedos teñidos

(That one too! That one! Stained fingers

The poem repeats its condemnation in its closing argument:

Duerme: no queda nada.

(Sleep: nothing remains.

These lines provide, again, a partial reading, as they choose to ignore

CLS 51.3_03_Rumeau.indd 431 04/09/14 9:47 AM

CLS 51.3_03_Rumeau.indd 432 04/09/14 9:47 AM

(they did not crush

Los poemas impresos siguen siendo borradores sin corregir ni terminar