Canto General

the long version

Pablo Neruda's epic poem Canto General is a prodigious work that scrolls out like the chronicle of a journey through the Americas, as the poet strives to provide a unifying vision of reality. Neruda's most audacious and ambitious achievement, Canto General locates and reveals communal sources of strength in the place of our origin, land of our ancestors. The poet 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.--