Neruda, Poetry and Green ink: The colour of hope
Perhaps the most important Latin American poet of the 20th Century, Neruda was a Chilean poet as well as a
Nancy Cunard born into the family of the Cunard shipping line was a poet and political activist. At an early age she moved to London from America with her mother, Maude Burke. Nancy’s mother became the lover and patron of Sir Thomas Beecham and later provided financial support to Wallis Simpson in the hope that if Simpson became Queen, she would become one of the ladies-in-waiting.
During the early 1900’s Nancy became involved with the literary revolution taking place in England. She had a string of lovers including, T.S.Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis and Aldous Huxley.
In 1920 she moved to Paris. There she took over the ‘Three Mountains Press’, renaming it the ‘Hours Press’, publishing Hemingway, Pound, Beckett and William Carlos Williams. Her own exotic appearance using a lot of African art
brought her fame in the Surrealist,Dada and Modernist literary circles, none more so than with Brancusi, whose sculpture of her defines the ‘Jazz’ movement
of the times. In her own words she believed in ,” the sacred mission of art to change history.”
In the 1930’s she took on the rise of Fascism and in particular the Spanish Civil War. In 1937 she canvassed the leading writers of the time across Europe.
The pamphlet ( Authors take sides,1937 ) printed the numerous and varied responses from Samuel Beckett’s, ‘¡UPTHEREPUBLIC!’ to Evelyn Waugh’s,’…as an Englishman I am not in the predicament of choosing between two evils. I am not a Fascist nor shall I become one..’. George Orwell just asked that such rubbish not be sent to him.
“Nancy functioned best in a state of fury in which, in order to defend, she attacked every windmill in a landscape of windmills.’
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