“The familial bond between the two poets [Walt Whitman and Pablo Neruda] points not only to a much-needed reckoning of the affinity between the two hemispheres, but to a deeper need to establish a basis for an American identity: ‘roots,’ as Neruda referred to his fundamental link with Whitman” (Nolan 33).
 

        Both Walt Whitman and Pablo Neruda have been referred to as poets of the people, although it is argued that Neruda with his city and country house, his extensive travels, and his political connections, was never really “one” of the mass.  Nonetheless, his work and energies went into supporting the common working man, and not the elite.  By the late 1940’s Neruda had openly defined himself as a communist, looking for the equal treatment of all citizens of Peru.  Whitman, though not overtly political like Neruda, did emphasize the equality between all in his writing.  The appellation, “poet of the people,” is used to indicate their sympathies towards a commonality in humans, if not the “common man”.  As the term “commoner” carries various connotations and needs much explaining, I prefer to discuss the two authors as grassroots poets.  “Poets of the people” and “grassroots poets” have many similarities, but by using the term grassroots I draw on grassroots theater studies which illuminate certain artistic purposes and themes.  Thinking of Whitman and Neruda as grassroots poets can deepen our understanding of their personas and their work, and especially indicate a similarity of purpose between the two poets who employed different structural styles of writing.

       First and foremost, the term “grassroots” hinges on a sense of community.  It implies a political motivation from the bottom up.  Neruda’s and Whitman’s common search for identity, both on a personal and especially a larger scale, is closely tied to ideas of community.  Through their writings these poets explored the meaning of being American (North and South), and managed to evoke a feeling of oneness, of community between fellow countrymen that had been fragmented and lacking previously, due largely to colonialism and ties to European dominance.  In Poet-Chief, James Nolan writes:  “It was Whitman who, above all else, infused Neruda with the courage and direction to dispel the dominant European cultural models of his own era and to look to his own American landscape and language as a source for the music, voice and persona of his poetry” (33).

       The term “grassroots” is additionally appropriate for the purposes of this analysis when we break down the word into its component parts.  Whitman used the imagery of grass (recall his famous Leaves of Grass), whereas Neruda uses the imagery of the tree with its intertwining roots to call up a sense of connected oneness between people in general, but specifically used to unite the people of America.  In his chapter “This Ecstatic Nation:  Tribe, Mask, and Voice,” James Nolan explores Whitman’s and Neruda’s voice as a New World construction that ties together the diversity of their nations through the connection to geography and history.  At this point it is extremely helpful to look at a brief section in which Nolan points out the similarities between Whitman’s use of grass and Neruda’s use of trees.  (From Nolan 172-173):

 
Neruda’s tree of the people appears as a parallel expression to Whitman’s grass, a  structurally as well as metaphysically organic metaphor for the mosaic  assemblages of loosely related leaves and branches that constitute the two books  [Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Neruda’s Canto general].  As a point of cohesion  among dissimilar parts and people, this tree is identified with Neruda’s own  shamanic voice as well as with the communal spirit of the American people:

  Aquí viene el árbol
  de la tormenta, el árbol del pueblo.
  De la tierra suben sus héroes
  como las hojas por la savia,
  y el viento estrella los follajes
  de muchedumbre rumorosa
  hasta que cae la semilla
  del pan otra vex a la tierra.
      (IV:1:374)

  Here comes the tree, the tree
  of the storm, the tree of the people.
  Its heroes rise up form the earth
  as leaves from the sap,
  and the wind spangles the whispering
  multitude’s foliage,
  until the seed falls
  again from the bread to the earth.
      (71)

This tree of the people serves as a ubiquitous and equalizing agent of tribal  continuity, as well as a means of fusing the various secondary ‘I’s’ with the  respective ‘I’ of the poet, of uniting the many with the one, as does Whitman’s  grass:

  Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
  And it means, sprouting alike in broad zones and
   narrow zones,
  Growing among black folks as among white,
  Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them
   the same, receive them the same.
      (“Song of Myself”:6:34)

out of the death of the individual, however, grows the perpetuity of the tribe, its  roots claiming the land as American and sending nourishment toward the collective  future, lending spiritual coherence to the present:
 

  Aquí viene el árbol, el árbol
  cuyas raíces están vivas,
  sacó salitre del martirio,
  sus raíces comieron sangre
  y extrajo lágrimas delsuelo:
  las elevó por sus ramajes,
  las repartió en su arquitectura.
  Fueran flores invisibles,
  a veces, flores enterradas,
  a veces iluminaron
  sus pétalos, como planetas.

  Here comes the tree, the tree
  whose roots are alive,
  it fed on martyrdom’s nitrate,
  its roots consumed blood,
  and it extracted tears from the soil:
  raised them through its branches,
  dispersed them in its architecture.
  They were invisible flowers --
  sometimes buried flowers,
  other times they illuminated
  its petals, like planets.

 
In Whitman’s version, there is also a growing “onward and outward” into spirit,  despite --or perhaps because of-- the democratically horizontal nature of his  foliage:
 
  What do you think has become of the  young and old men?
  And what do you think has become of the women and
   children?
 
  They are alive and well somewhere,
  The smallest sprout shows there really is no death,
  And if ever there was it led forward life, and
   does not wait at the end to arrest it,
  And ceas’d the moment life appear’d
  All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
  And to die is different from what any one supposed,
   and luckier.

        By looking at Nolan we have established a basis for the shared importance of both terms “grass” and “roots” in Whitman’s and Neruda’s work.  Likewise we must examine the meaning of “grassroots.”  The Random House Webster’s College Dictionary (1991) defines grassroots as:  “1. ordinary citizens, especially as contrasted with the leadership or elite.  2. the agricultural and rural areas of a country.  3. the people inhabiting these areas, especially as a political, social, or economic group.  4. the origin or basis of something.”  Each of these definitions resonates with the two poets’ works.  We have already taken notice of how Whitman and Neruda supported the ordinary citizens.  Though their writings are not limited to subjects of agricultural and rural areas, these locations and especially the people who inhabit them do hold a prominent position in their work.  For Neruda especially, the political, social and economics of a group is vital.  The last definition, “the origin or basis of something,” can be applied to both men’s poetry as expressing a national identity.  They are each seen as ground breakers in creating a specific literature for the people of the Americas.
 
      Beyond this cursory and surface level understanding of the term itself, we can come to a more complex understanding of grassroots functions by examining grassroots theater.  In particular, I focus on Bas Kershaw’s study, The Politics of Performance.  In this work, Kershaw examines how alternative theater may be effective in disrupting and overturning the dominant ideology of a society.  The aim of such theater which includes community and grassroots theater is to “combine entertainment with ... debate, discussion, socio-political proposals and recommendations” (Kershaw, 5).  The focus of grassroots or community theater is always on a specific community with particular concerns.  According to McGrath, whom Kershaw quotes, this type of theater can work in several ways.

Firstly it can contribute to a definition, a revaluation of the cultural identity of a  people or a section of society, can add to the richness and diversity of that  identity.  Secondly, it can assert, draw attention to, give voice to threatened  communities, can, by allowing them to speak, help them to survive.  Thirdly, it  can mount an attack on the standardisation of culture and consciousness which is a  function of late industrial/early technological ‘consumerist’ societies everywhere.   Fourthly, it can be and often is linked to a wider political struggle for the right of a  people or a section of a society to control its own destiny, to ‘self-determination’.   Fifthly, it can make a challenge to the values imposed on it from a dominant group  - it can help to stop ruling class, or ruling race, or male, or multi-national capitalist  values  being ‘universalised’ as common sense, or self-evident truth:  as such, it  presents a challenge also to the state’s cultural engineers, in Ministries of Culture,  Arts Councils, universities, schools and the media.  (McGrath in Kershaw, 11)

        With this basic understanding of “grassroots” with in the context of community theater, let us proceed to a comparative study of grassroots sentiments in excerpts from Neruda’s  The Heights of Macchu Picchu, and Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself.  Go to analysis
 
 

Kershaw, Baz.  The Politics of Performance.  Radical Theatre as Cultural Intervention.   New York:
        Routledge, 1992.

Nolan, James. Poet-Chief.  The Native American Poetics of Walt Whitman and Pablo  Neruda.  Albuquerque:
        University of New Mexico Press, 1994.
 
Whitman, Walt.  Leaves of Grass (1855).  in Walt Whitman Poetry and Prose.  New York:  The Library of
        America, 1996.