Pablo Neruda as the Place-maker: An Ecocritical Enquiry of ‘Place’ in Neruda’s Selected Poems

Throughout the more than 50 years of Pablo Neruda’s poetic career, natural places were a fundamental component of his poetry. Neruda was a major 20th century Latin American and Nobel Prize winning poet who was famous as a political poet. This paper examines the concept of ‘place’ in Neruda’s selected poems to reveal his experiences and emotions connected to specific places. ‘Place’ is an essential component of ecopoetry. In this paper, we utilise the conceptual framework of ecopoetry, which is a sub-theory of ecocriticism. Ecopoetry is a genre of poetry that explores how human beings are connected to their habitat or home, how ‘home’ is defined and built, and how a sense of ‘place’ is invoked. In this paper, we scrutinise the relationship between man and place (nature) with an emphasis on ecological awareness. Therefore, the paper will illustrate how the environment is closely associated with the concept of place. Based on the evidence presented, we propose that Neruda was very much an ecopoet and a ‘place maker’. Through his poetry, he establishes his poetic goal to achieve ‘topophilia’ or love of places by illustrating that the knowledge of spiritual belonging is the result of the knowledge of one’s physical roots.