Singing up Country in the Poetry of Judith Wright and Pablo Neruda

Abstract

Pablo Neruda (born 1904) and Judith Wright (born 1915) are world poets. Not only has their work been widely read within the worlds of Spanish and English literatures, but their poems are very actively attuned to the variety of processes that compose the world itself. After growing up in quite remote parts of their respective countries, each poet always sought to speak beyond his or her immediate locale. To read their work is to observe an intersection of Romantic and modem sensibilities, where a love for the natural environment is tempered by political imperative: to liberate Chile from capitalist rule, in the case of Neruda, or to liberate Australia from colonialist modes of destruction, in the case of Wright. What we also see is the extent to which each poet's perception of the natural world was reflective of their relationships to their nations' histories.