The Best Poet

I have often maintained that the best poet is he who prepares our daily bread…. He does his majestic and unpretentious work of kneading the dough, consigning it to the oven, baking it in golden colors, and handing us our daily bread as a duty of fellowship. And if the poet succeeds in achieving this simple consciousness, this too will be transformed into an immense activity, in a simple or complicate structure which constitutes the building of a community, the changing of the conditions which surround mankind, the handing over of mankind’s products: bread, truth, wine, dreams.  Pablo Neruda, from his 1971 Noble Lecture