We Are Many.

NERUDA, Pablo.

$1,850.00

Item Number: 133314

Signed limited edition, one of only 100 examples, this is number 65. Octavo, original cloth, illustrated with a cut-out by Jim Dine. Boldly signed by Pablo Neruda and the translator Alistair Reid. Fine in a fine dust jacket. Translated by Alistair Reid. Photographs by Hans Ehrmann.

In his philosophical poem We Are Many, Neruda offers the reader a brooding, introspective narrative about his comically confused sense of self-identity and conflict of self. It is an unrhymed and unmetered free-verse poem, which is in keeping with its very modern subject-matter—namely, Neruda's saddening lack of self-knowledge (in contradiction to ancient Greece's Delphic maxim “Know thyself”). Throughout the poem, Neruda expresses his rather comical inability to understand himself or even define himself in any meaningful way. This theme of a philosophical identity crisis and search for oneself is reinforced by the poem's broken architecture, which is replete with seemingly self-contradictory assertions. This free-verse poem begins with two four-line stanzas, but ends with a ten-line stanza—for a total of seven stanzas of varying and gradually increasing number of lines (4, 4, 6, 6, 7, 8, 10). It uses personifications, metaphors, hyperbole, allegory, self-parody, and other similar poetic devices to communicate its philosophical theme and deeper meaning to Neruda's numerous readers.