"Certainly in the old days everybody was scared of revolutionary ideas, particularly writers. In this decade, and especially after the Cuban Revolution, the current fashion is just the opposite. Writers live in terror that they will not be taken for extreme leftists, so each of them assumes a guerrilla-like position. There are many writers who only write texts which assert that they are in the front lines of the war against imperialism. Those of us who have continually fought that war see with joy that literature is placing itself on the side of the people; but we also believe that if it’s only a matter of fashion and a writer’s fear of not being taken for an active leftist, well, we are not going to get very far with that kind of revolutionary. In the end, all sorts of animals fit into the literary forest. Once, when I had been offended for many years by a few pertinacious persecutors who seemed to live only to attack my poetry and my life, I said: 'Let’s leave them alone, there is room for all in this jungle; if there’s space for the elephants, who take up such a lot of room in the jungles of Africa and Ceylon, then surely there’s space for all the poets.'”
--Pablo Neruda, in his fascinating 1971 "Art of Poetry" interview with The Paris Review
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