Concepts and Context
What is context? The environment in which a text is responded to or created. Context can include the general social, historical and cultural conditions in which a text is responded to and created (the context of culture) or the specific features of its immediate environment (context of situation). The term is also used to refer to the wording surrounding an unfamiliar word that a reader or listener uses to understand its meaning.
Romance and Revolution: The Poetry of Pablo Neruda
Contextual Understanding
Canto General: An Overview
Canto General: An Overview
Neruda depicts history as a vast, continuous struggle against oppression. Constructed in fifteen parts, and made up of more than fifteen thousand lines, Canto General unfolds in successive epochs, celebrating the flora and fauna and geology of Neruda's homeland and recounting episodes in the lives of explorers and conquistadors, emperors and dictators, revolutionaries and everyday laborers. What remains are the connections between people and their landscape, emphasizing that there will always be more to unite us than to divide us.
The Heights of Macchu Picchu
Canto II: The Heights of Macchu Picchu Teaching Notes
This series of 12 Cantos was inspired by Neruda’s 1943 visit to the ancient Inca city of Macchu Picchu in Peru, a citadel, fortification, and stronghold that was built in the mountains near Cuzco. These cantos vividly depict the history of Spanish America and are also a potent commemoration of pre-Columbian culture. In his Cantos, Neruda ascends the pyramids of this magnificent city and is both impressed by the sheer majesty of the spectacular pre-Columbian ruin and devastated by what the site brings. The 12 parts focus on the geography, architectural splendor, and natural flora and fauna of the Inca people. This series of stylistically elevated poems use metaphors, personification, and imagery to vividly describe the struggles of the people of South America against poverty and national and international oppression, to name a few global issues.
The Conquistadors
Canto III: The Conquistadors
In this section of Canto General, Neruda discusses major figures and events of the colonization: the rape, as he calls it, of Cuba; Cortez’s take over; the burning of native books; at that Atahualpa’s death...Neruda presents primarily the struggle of Araucanians, a native tribe who has never been subdued until now, While detailing their unity and surviving, he also dramatizes the Advent of Pedro Valdivia and his parceling out of the Chilean landscape. In these poems Neruda portrays the violent nature of the occupation of Chili: a country that is no longer unified, but cut up and parcelled out into territories. His beloved country becomes a stage for conquest, rage, and terror in the hands of the conquistadors.