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'''Pablo Neruda''' a Chilean poet, diplomat and politician (1904-1973) who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1973 and is regarded as one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. His verse ranged from erotic and surrealist experiment to vast epics of the Americas, and his public life made him a symbol of political commitment in poetry.

== Early Life and First Books ==
Pablo Neruda was the pen name of Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto, born in 1904 in Parral, a town in central Chile. His mother died soon after his birth and he was raised by his father, a railway worker, in the southern town of Temuco, where he grew up among forests, rain and the frontier landscape that would remain a deep source of his imagery. He began writing as a boy and published his first poems in local newspapers.

He adopted the pen name Pablo Neruda to conceal his literary ambitions from his father, and the name, taken in part from the Czech writer Jan Neruda, became his identity for the rest of his life. In 1921 he moved to Santiago to study at the university and threw himself into the capital's literary life. Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, published in 1924 when he was still a student, made him famous almost overnight and has never since gone out of print.

== Diplomat, Surrealist and Poet of the Americas ==
Neruda entered the diplomatic service and held consular posts in Asia, including Rangoon, Colombo and Singapore, and later in Buenos Aires, Barcelona and Madrid. These years of travel and loneliness produced the dense, hermetic poems of Residence on Earth, in which he absorbed the techniques of surrealism and wrote with a dark, hallucinatory energy about isolation, decay and the dreams of the solitary mind. His experience of the Spanish Civil War then transformed him politically and poetically.

The execution of his friend, the poet Federico Garcia Lorca, and the suffering he witnessed in Spain turned him toward a poetry of solidarity and struggle, and he became a committed supporter of the Republican cause. From this crisis came Spain in My Heart, a passionate and immediate response to the war, and then the vast Canto General, an epic of the American continent, its landscapes, its indigenous past, its conquest and its peoples, his most ambitious work and one of the great long poems of the century.

== Political Life and Exile ==
Neruda joined the Communist Party and was elected to the Chilean senate, becoming a prominent public figure and an ally of the left. When the government of Gabriel Gonzalez Videla turned against the communists in the late 1940s, he was forced into hiding and then into exile, escaping across the Andes on horseback in a celebrated flight that became legendary in Latin America. He travelled through Europe and the Soviet Union, meeting writers and political leaders, and in 1950 he received the International Peace Prize.

He returned to Chile in the 1950s and entered a productive late period, publishing odes to everyday things, memoirs, and love poetry that reclaimed the intimate voice of his youth. His political commitments brought him both admiration and controversy. He was a lifelong supporter of Salvador Allende, and when Allende won the presidency in 1970, Neruda served as ambassador to France. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971, the culmination of a career that had united poetry and politics.

== Love, Politics and Poetic Voice ==
Neruda's poetry is remarkable for its range and its appetite. He wrote with equal intensity about erotic love, having composed both the youthful Twenty Love Poems and the mature One Hundred Love Sonnets, and about the material world, celebrating onions, socks, artichokes and rain in his odes with a tenderness that made ordinary objects luminous. His poetics combined the sensory immediacy of his early verse with a sweeping historical imagination.

He believed that poetry should belong to the people and address the whole of reality, from the private motions of desire to the broad currents of history, and he deliberately cultivated a public voice that spoke for the suffering and the dispossessed of his continent. Critics have seen in his work the influence of Whitman, whom he admired for his expansive democratic vision, and of the French surrealists, whose experiments with image and dream he adapted to his own purposes.

== Death and Legacy ==
Neruda died in Santiago in September 1973, only days after the military coup that overthrew Allende and installed the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. His funeral became a protest, with mourners gathering around his coffin in defiance of the new regime, and he was buried in his garden at Isla Negra, the coastal house he loved. His home there, filled with collections of shells, bottles and figureheads, is now a museum, and two other houses he built are also preserved.

For decades after his death his work continued to be published, studied and translated, and his political legacy was claimed by movements across Latin America. He is remembered above all as the poet who made the whole continent his subject and who insisted that beauty and justice were inseparable. Alongside Cesar Vallejo and Octavio Paz he stands among the foremost poets of Latin America, and his love poems and odes remain among the most frequently read and recited poems in the world.

== See also ==
* Canto General
* Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
* One Hundred Love Sonnets
* Gabriela Mistral

== References ==

<ref name="r1">Adam Feinstein, Pablo Neruda: A Passion for Life, Bloomsbury, 2004.</ref>
<ref name="r2">Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, translated by W. S. Merwin, Cape, 1969.</ref>
<ref name="r3">Pablo Neruda, Canto General, translated by Jack Schmitt, University of California Press, 1991.</ref>
<ref name="r4">Rene de Costa, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, Harvard University Press, 1979.</ref>

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[[Category:Literature]]
[[Category:Poetry]]
[[Category:Chile]]

Pablo Neruda - Revision history

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