Pablo Neruda
Chilean · 20th century
Chilean poet and Nobel laureate (1904-1973), known for passionate love poetry and political verse.
Connection to Taylor Swift
A poet Uncle Jerry says already sounds very Taylor, sharing her concentrated language of love and loss.
Notable Works
- Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair; Canto General
Appears in the Archive
Context within the Archive
Tonight I Can Write (The Saddest Lines)
“It was rare, I was there I remember it all too well”
In the Red prologue Taylor names Neruda's line "Love is so short, forgetting is so long" as one that stayed with her. Community listeners hear the whole of All Too Well as that line dramatised: a brief love set against a remembering the speaker cannot put down, the song's refrain insisting on what she still holds long after it ended. The acknowledged influence sits behind the song's governing tension between how short the love was and how long the memory of it runs.