Interview with Pablo Neruda

"I insist on telling you that I am not a political poet. I detest that classification which insists on designating me as the representative of an ideologically committed poetry. My ambition as a writer, if there is an ambition, is to write about all the things that I see, that I touch, that I know, that I love, or that I hate. But in pointing out to me “the world of the workers” you make me, in an unconscious and generous way, the spokesman for the anxieties of the masses or of the legions of organized workers, and that’s not the case. I am only the echo in a certain part of my poetry of the anxieties of the contemporary world, of the anxieties of the Latin American world. But I refuse to be classified as a political poet."

Courtesy of Memorius 5: A forum for new verse and poetics.