Day Fifteen - Pablo Neruda's Nobel Lecture

As we reach the middle of National Poetry Month 2011, I figured some words from the legendary Pablo Neruda might be a nice halfway marker. 1971 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, a cancer stricken Neruda accepted his prize in Stockholm, but would die a short time later. Here are some of Neruda's words delivered during his Nobel Prize lecture. Few poets have enjoyed the process of writing and helping others to delight in words as much as Pablo Neruda. Let's see what he had to say...

"Ladies and Gentlemen, I did not learn from books any recipe for writing a poem, and I , in my turn, will avoid giving any advice on mode or style which might give the new poets even a drop of supposed insight...Because in the course of my life I have always found somewhere the necessary support, the formula which had been waiting for me, not in order to be petrified in my words, but in order to explain me to myself..."

"And I believe that poetry is an action, ephemeral or solemn, in which there enter as equal partners solitude and solidarity, emotion and action, the nearness to oneself, the nearness to mankind, and to the secret manifestations of nature."

---Pablo Neruda