Pablo Neruda, writer: “Even if they cut all the flowers, they will not be able to stop spring”

There are ideas that outlive those who formulate them. They pass from mouth to mouth, cross borders and generations, and end up becoming part of the common heritage, to the point that almost no one wonders where they came from.

Few phrases have traveled as far as this one. “They can cut all the flowers, but they cannot stop spring” is repeated on banners, murals, and social media, almost always attributed to Pablo Neruda. Its message is clear: the visible manifestations of something can be destroyed, but not the force that makes them sprout again and again.

That is why it has become a slogan of resistance. Movements all over the world have embraced it, and in Chile it reappeared strongly during the protests of2019.

However, there is a problem: there is no evidence that Neruda wrote it. His biographer, Mark Eisner, acknowledges that the quote is apocryphal, since it does not appear in any of his works nor is there any record that he ever said it. Nor could he have written it against Pinochet, as is often claimed: the poet died twelve days after the 1973 coup.

Even so, the fact that the phrase is attributed to him is no coincidence. Nature as a metaphor for life and political commitment run through much of his work.

Pablo Neruda, a Nobel announced on October 21

On October 21, 1971, the Swedish Academy announced that Neruda was the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. The jury highlighted a poetry that, with the force of a natural element, gave life to the destiny and dreams of an entire continent. At that time, the author of Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair and Canto General was Chile’s ambassador to France.

He received the award in Stockholm in December. It was the second Nobel Prize in Literature for Chile, after the one Gabriela Mistral received in 1945, and the definitive recognition of one of the great voices in Spanish.