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To get an idea of what Macchu Picchu looks like click here. 

        Walt Whitman’s "Leaves of Grass" and Pablo Neruda’s “Canto general" focus on the issue of identity.  In the preface to his 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman writes, “... the genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors... but always most in the common people” (5-6).  In writing Leaves of Grass, he created a work that sought to honestly portray these “common people” and capture their essence as uniquely American.  Neruda had similar goals when he published his collection.  Scholar Marjorie Agosin summarizes, “Canto general (General Song), as the title indicates, is a comprehensive song, a hymn to a continent in which the poet expresses the historical and social vision of the American people” (62).  The central works in each of these books, respectively, are “Song of Myself,” and “Alturas de Macchu Picchu” (“The Heights of Macchu Picchu”).
 
        I choose to present these two works for readers’ examination because I find they clearly illustrate Whitman’s and Neruda’s grassroots tendencies.  Much as Whitman sought to give voice to a new nation in a new form of poetry, Neruda reaches back to the foundation of his own continent in order to clarify a Latin American existence as separate from European colonization.  Agosin tells us that “in Canto general Neruda concentrates on the stories of those who have no voice, ‘invisible men,’ so that the poem becomes the collective chronicle of a people.  Neruda, like Walt Whitman, is a minstrel who transmits as well as transforms the history of his continent. ... To the ‘objective’ history of Latin America he adds his own subjectivity” (63).
 
        Neruda visited Macchu Picchu, the “lost” city of the Incas in Peru,  in 1943 on his return from France to Chile.  The poem this visit inspired, “Alturas de Macchu Picchu" ("The Heights of Macchu Picchu") was written on Isla Negra in 1945 as part of a longer book of collections called “Canto General”  With “Macchu Picchu” Neruda “inscribed Latin American experience into the world's conscience” (Tapscott 203).  As Agosin points out,
 “the visit to the citadel at Macchu Picchu is of capital importance in understanding the Canto General.  Neruda himself asserts that this experience expanded his horizons and his sense of being a part of the American continent.  He began to identify not only with Chile but with all of America” ( 59).

           Both poets are lauded for their ability to express both deeply personal and broadly universal sentiments in the search for identity.  A careful reader of poetry will recognize and differentiate between what the poet has supplied and what the reader brings to the meaning him/herself.  In the following section I encourage you to accept Neruda’s and Whitman’s invitation to find their cultural identity through their poetry.  Neruda offers us a journey back to his cultures’ ancestral roots much as he did when he visited Macchu Picchu.  Whitman, in turn, traces the lives of those around him in order to portray how the diversities create a oneness.  I  have selected several passages from each poem and pose guiding questions to help you consider the grassroots elements at work.  I offer suggestions and considerations to these questions, but propose no definitive answer or opinion, as my wish is to encourage readers to enjoy and examine poetry with their own perspectives.  The purpose of this exercise is to hone the reader's critical and interpretive skills in identifying some of the tools with which Neruda and Whitman have fashioned their  work. 
 

BRIEF SUMMARY OF "The Heights of Macchu Picchu":
"In the poem which Neruda wrote about the ruins [of Macchu Picchu] this citadel becomes the center of a tangled skein of associations with disparate and intertwining strands.  It is by no means a clear-cut symbol, because its meaning shifts as the strong current of emotion winds between past and present, but Neruda's journey gradually takes on the nature of a highly personal 'venture into the interior' in which he explores both his own inner world and the past of Latin American man.  There is no explicit mention of the city till the sixth of the twelve poems which form the sequence, its earlier sections dealing not with Neruda's physical journey but with a kind of pilgrimage through human life in search of meaningful truth.  When Neruda does reach Macchu Picchu, its heights turn out to be the place from which all else makes sense, including his own continent" (Tarn x-xi).
 

BRIEF SUMMARY OF "Song of Myself":
A poem of 52 sections in which Whitman engages in a process of self discovery which is inherently linked to the identity of his nation.  He expresses a great oneness of being between all different types of people in the United States.  Whitman often takes on the role of different characters, and maintains that much is to be learned from experience rather than from books alone.  He feels tied to the land, his ancestors, and the history of the country.  He encourages his readers to be critical of and open-minded to all they encounter.
 
 

From:   "The Heights of Macchu Picchu"  by: Pablo Neruda in 1945  translated by: Nathaniel Tarn (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966)

From:  "Song of Myself"  by:  Walt Whitman in Leaves of Grass (1891-92)  in Walt Whitman Poetry and Prose.  New York:  The Library of  America, 1996.

  in the segments below
click flag of Chili for Spanish version

Then up the ladder of the earth I climbed  through the barbed jungle's thickets  until I reached you Macchu Picchu.  Tall city of stepped stone,  home at long last of whatever earth  had never hidden in her sleeping clothes.  In you two lineages that had run parallel  met where the cradle both of man and light  rocked in a wind of thorns.  (sec. VI)

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this        soil, this air,  Born here of parents born here from parents the same,       and their parents the same,  I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,  Hoping to cease not till death.  (sec. 1)

questions 1 
How is place being set up here?  What are some of the key words that indicate a building of identity?  
Click here for suggestions.
 
 

You dead of a common abyss, shades of one ravine--  the deepest-- as if to match  the compass of your magnitude,  this is how it came, the true, the most consuming death:  from perforated rocks,  from crimson cornices,  and cataracting aqueducts,  you plummeted like an autumn  into a single death.  Today the vacant air no longer mourns   nor knows your shardlike feet,  forgets your pitchers that filtered the sky   when the knives of the lightning ripped it open  and the powerful tree was devoured  by mist and felled by wind.   It sustained a hand that suddenly pitched  from the heights to the depths of time.  You no longer exist:  spider fingers, frail  threads, tangled cloth -- everything you were  dropped away:  customs and tattered  syllables, the dazzling masks of light.  And yet a permanence of stone and language  upheld the city raised like a chalice  in all those hands: live, dead and stilled,  aloft with so much death, a wall, with so much life,  struck with flint petals:  the everlasting rose, our home,  this reef on Andes, its glacial territories.  (sec. VII)

A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full        hands;  [...]  And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of        graves.  Tenderly will I use you curling grass,  It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,  It may be if I had known them I would have loved them,  It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out of their mothers' laps,  And here you are the mothers' laps.   This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of        old mothers,  Darker than the colorless beards of old men,   Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths  [...]  I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young        men and women,  And the hints about old men and mothers, and the        offspring taken soon out of their laps.  What do you think has become of the young and the 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 is really 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.  (sec. 6)

 questions 2
What, or whose story is being told here?  In which way do you see a grassroots effort in this passage.  What is the thrust, or purpose here?
Click here for suggestions.
 
 

 

When, like a horseshoe of rusting wing-cases, the        furious condor   batters my temples in the order of flight   and his tornado of carnivorous feathers sweeps the        dark dust   down slanting stairways, I do not see the rush of the        bird,   nor the blind sickle of his talons --   I see the ancient being, the slave, the sleeping one,   blanket his fields -- a body, a thousand bodies, a man, a        thousand  women swept by the sable whirlwind, charred with rain        and night,  stoned with a leaden weight of statuary:  Juan Splitstones, son of Wiracocha,  Juan Coldbelly, heir of the green star,  Juan Barefoot, grandson to the turquoise,  rising to birth with me, as my own brother.  (sec. XI)

I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the        wise,  Regardless of others, ever regardful of others,  Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man,  Stuff'd with the stuff that is coarse and stuff'd with the        stuff that is fine,  One of the Nation of many nations, the smallest the        same and the largest the same,  A Southerner soon as a Northerner, a planter        nonchalant and hospitable down by the Oconee I        live,  A Yankee bound my own way ready for trade, my joints        the limberest joints on earth and the sternest joints        on earth,  A Kentuckian walking the vale of the Elkhorn in my        deerskin leggings, a Louisianian or Georgian,  A boatman over lakes or bays or along coasts, a        Hoosier, Badger, Buckeye;  (sec. 16)

 
 questions 3
What similarities in form do you observe between the two poets here?
Click here for suggestions.
 

 

Look at me from the depths of the earth,  tiller of fields, weaver, reticent shepherd,  groom of totemic guanacos,  mason high on your treacherous scaffolding,   iceman of Andean tears,  jeweler with crushed fingers,  farmer anxious among his seedlings,  potter wasted among his clays --  bring to the cup of his new life  your ancient buried sorrows.  Show me your blood and your furrow;  say to me:  here I was scourged  because a gem was dull or because the earth  failed to give up in time its tithe of corn or stone.  Point out to me the rock on which you stumbled,  the wood they used to crucify your body.  (sec. XII)

The pure contralto sings in the organ loft,  The carpenter dresses his plank, the tongue of his        foreplane whistles  The married and unmarried children ride home to        their Thanksgiving dinner,  [...]  And of these one and all I weave the song of myself.  (sec. 15)  __________  The disdain and calmness of martyrs,  The mother of old, condemn'd for a witch, burnt with           dry wood, her children gazing on,  The hounded slave that flags in the race, leans by the        fence, blowing cover'd with sweat,  The twinges that sting like needles his legs and neck,        the murderous buckshot and the bullets,  All these I feel or am.  (sec. 33)  __________  The young mechanic is closest to me, he knows me        well,  The woodman that takes his axe and jug with him shall        take me with him all day,  The farm-boy ploughing in the field feels good at the         sound of my voice,  In vessels that sail my words sail, I go with fishermen        and seamen and love them.  (sec. 47)

 questions 4
What or who comes together, is connected by the end of the poem, and how?  How does this unity fit into grassroots efforts?  Do you feel there are overt or latent political views being expressed?

click here for suggestions
 
 

I come to speak for your dead mouths.  Throughout the earth   let dead lips congregate,  out of the depths spin this long night to me  as if I rode at anchor here with you.  And tell me everything, tell chain by chain,  and link by link, and step by step;  sharpen the knives you kept hidden away,   thrust them into my breast, into my hands,  like a torrent of sunbursts,  an Amazon of buried jaguars,   and leave me cry:  hours, days and years,  blind ages, stellar centuries.  And give me silence, give me water, hope.  Give me the struggle, the iron, the volcanoes.  Let bodies cling like magnets to my body.  Come quickly to my veins and to my mouth.  Speak through my speech, and through my blood.  (sec. XII)

My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach,  With the twirl of my tongue I encompass worlds and        volumes of worlds.  Speech is the twin of my vision, it is unequal to measure        itself,  It provokes me forever, it says sarcastically,  Walt you contain enough, why don't you let it out        then?  (sec. 25)  __________  Now I will do nothing but listen,  To accrue what I hear into this song, to let sounds        contribute toward it.  (sec. 26)  __________  And as to you Corpse I think you are good manure, but        that does not offend me,  I smell the white roses sweet-scented and growing,  I reach to the leafy lips, I reach to the polish'd breasts         of melons.  (sec. 49)  __________  I swear I will never again mention love or death inside        a house,  And I swear I will never translate myself at all, only to        him or her who privately stays with me in the open         air.  If you would understand me go to the heights or         water-shore,  The nearest gnat is an explanation, and a drop or       motion of waves a key,  The maul, the oar, the hand-saw, second my words.  (sec. 47)

 questions 5
How do you reconcile the violent image of the knife thrust in the breast with torrents of sunshine, the struggle with the hope?
Why is it important to speak for dead mouths, and how can speech be a twin vision?

click here for suggestions
 
 

Suggestions 1
  The idea of home as tied to the earth begins to establish a sense of belonging and of community.  Home is where we belong and are accepted.  Words such as "lineage" and "cradle" indicate birth and connections of identity, as do "parents born here of parents the same."

return to questions 1

Suggestions 2
 Simply telling a story that has been suppressed by dominating hegemony can be empowering.
“The majority of community plays have dealt with hidden histories - episodes in the past of the community which are little known or have been forgotten.  This is one main source for any ideologically oppositional thrust in performance.  For often hidden histories are suppressed histories and their discovery implies an act of liberation”
(Kershaw, 194).  For these poets, past history is not dead, rather it lives on in us and must be acknowledged by us.   
 
return to questions 2
 
suggestions 3

return to questions 3
Both poets give a type of list of different kinds of people.  Neruda writes of remembering and seeing these people of the past, whereas Whitman writes of becoming these people, experiencing their lives directly.

suggestions 4
In grassroots efforts it is important for everyone to feel a shared identity, to be a part of a greater community.  Then with combined effort to achieve common goals, a more peaceful existence can ensue.  “The celebration of unity -- of a common identity over-riding internal differences - is a fundamental aim of [Ann] Jelicoe’s approach to the staging of community plays.  This tends to push overt political debate into the background” (Kershaw 190).  On the other hand, Agosin argues  “Marxist materialism in the Canto general is most evident in the poem “The Heights of Macchu Picchu” whose final section invokes... a rebirth, a future, and the hope of a people united” (Agosin 60).  The poor are the oppressed and they struggle to resist.  “History is reconstructed and redeemed by the workers themselves.  They become the authors of a new destiny, breaking the cycle of perpetual colonization” (Agosin 60).

return to questions 4

suggestions 5
Both of these passages emphasize the importance of finding a place for your voice to be heard, but also the importance of listening to the stories of others.  Both express a sense of regeneration after death.  It is one of the aims in grassroots efforts to re-stage past (dead) stories, in order to give them a voice and a place in society today.  Grassroots especially tries to open people's eyes to less pleasant stories, so that the events may be changed or prevented from recurring.

return to questions 5

Agosin, Marjorie.  Pablo Neruda.  Trans.  Lorraine Roses.  Twayne’s World Author  Series  Latin American
        Literature.  Ed. David Foster. Boston:  Twayne Publishers,  1986.

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

Tapscott, Stephen.  “Pablo Neruda.” Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry.  A  bilingual anthology.  Ed.
        Stephen Tapscott.  Austin:  University of Texas Press,  1996.  201-203.

Tarn, Nathaniel.  Preface.  "The Heights of Macchu Picchu" (1945).  By Pablo Neruda.  trans. Nathaniel Tarn.
        New York:  Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966.
Whitman, Walt.  Leaves of Grass (1855).  in Walt Whitman Poetry and Prose.  New York:  The Library of
        America, 1996.