Making the ordinary extraordinary

Adam Feinstein on Pablo Neruda’s Odes.

When Pablo Neruda published his first of three collections of odes — the Odas elementales (Elementary Odes) — in 1954, he was probably unaware that his Russian hero, Pushkin, had written 130 years earlier that odes were the lowest form of poem because they lacked a “plan” and because mere “rapture” excluded the kind of “tranquility” which, Pushkin said, was “an indispensable condition” of the highest beauty.”

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Neruda, like his friend Pablo Picasso, had the great gift of making the ordinary extraordinary. Nowhere does this Midas-like touch sparkle more alluringly than in the Odes, with their scintillating and contagious passion for life.