Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), born Ricardo Eliezer Neftali Reyes y Basoalto, is one of the best-known poets of the twentieth century, and is regarded as one of the finest Spanish-language poets of his time: writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez famously called him “the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language.” Today, his odes and his love poetry remain especially popular, both in their original Spanish and in translation. His poetry is known for its frank exploration of sexuality, its vivid evocations of the natural world, and its firm, accessible grounding in lived reality. A communist with strong political as well as literary commitments throughout his life, Neruda's later poetry was infused with radical politics and took on historical events such as the Spanish Civil War. Thus, Neruda's stylistic development and his political beliefs can be traced in concert with one another. However, in both his early erotic mode and his later political one, Neruda's poetry was known for insisting upon accessibility, materiality, and intense corporeality. As Neruda himself put it, "I have always wanted a poetry where the fingerprints show." He disdained much of the abstract, elevated poetry of both antiquity and the nineteenth century, and by contrast was excited by the immediacy of surrealism and symbolism. This dramatic vividness has caused some critics to accuse Neruda of tackiness, melodrama, or crudeness—Spanish poet Juan Ramon Jiminez referred to him as a "great bad poet"— while others have argued that these tendencies, in their proper context, have made Neruda rightfully beloved.
It was through love poetry that Neruda first earned his reputation as a poet. In 1924, at the age of 19, Neruda published his first collection of poems (though he had published in various newspapers and magazines prior). Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada (Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair) catapulted Neruda to celebrity, and to this day his writing is in many ways inextricable from his status as a cultural icon, especially in his native Chile. Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada draws on sexual and romantic experiences from Neruda's own life, mixing descriptions of human sexuality with those of the natural world, especially that of rural Chile, where Neruda had spent his childhood. These early poems are personal and sensuous, drawing on archetypal images of womanhood and nature. Though its frank eroticism caused some critical backlash, this remains the world's most popular book of Spanish-language poetry: audiences, especially in translation, have broadly embraced his early love poems over his later political work.
In keeping with the Chilean tradition of offering diplomatic appointments to poets, Neruda was sent to Burma as honorary consul in 1927. This sojourn abroad, which brought him to a series of Asian cities under colonial rule, deeply distressed Neruda. Manuel Durán and Margery Safir have argued that, for him, these locales were "a mixture of chaos, poverty, and fascinating perceptions of the ancient cultures in contrast with a degrading colonial present." The experience would lead Neruda to produce a two-part collection, Residencia en la Tierra (Residence on Earth), followed by a third installment, Tercera Residencia, in, respectively, 1933, 1935, and 1937. Though these poems were, and continue to be, highly praised and even considered Neruda's masterpieces, the poet later renounced their proto-existentialist themes of despair and hopelessness (as Michael Wood has noted in the New York Review of Books). These poems, loaded with surreally dark images of exhaustion, rot, and disease, in many ways contrast with the urgent calls for change that would come to mark much of Neruda's later work. Still, his capacity for creating discomfort and evoking violence emerged in full force in these volumes: Dudley Fitts, in Poetry magazine, notes of Neruda that "His lines are harsh, often deliberately cacophonous. His metric has little to do with the ear: it seems to be a visual-syntactical system whereby lines are measured off arbitrarily at the ends of clauses and concepts."
The poems of the Residencia series sit in something of a transitional space between Neruda's earlier, wholly romantic works and his later political ones, venturing in the later installments into advocacy for Republicanism: Tercera Residencia includes the poem España en el corazon (Spain in Our Hearts), a response to the Spanish Civil War. By firmly taking the side of the Republicans against Francisco Franco's dictatorship, Neruda turned something of a corner, marking himself as a political poet. In his poetic accounts of the Spanish Civil War, Neruda embraced the role of a poet of witness or recorder of historical memory as well as that of an activist, arguing that "Poetry is rebellion." His 1950 collection Canto General is an ambitious attempt to mythologize and celebrate Latin America as a whole through a communist lens, linking descriptions of the continent's land itself to accounts of colonialism and celebrations of contemporary Latin American workers. It tracks the life of the continent starting with pre-Columbian history, attempting, in an extraordinarily ambitious manner, to recover narratives lost to and suppressed by cultural imperialism. Yet in his later work, especially upon returning to Chile after a period of political exile, Neruda retreated from some of these overtly political themes, producing poetry that celebrated details of physical existence and everyday life.
Neruda was awarded the 1971 Nobel Prize "for a poetry that with the action of an elemental force brings alive a continent's destiny and dreams," an evaluation that in many ways remains sound today. Neruda remains a celebrated chronicler of South America as at once a source of radical political potential, a home firmly grounded in quotidian rhythms, and a setting of epic and archetypal narratives. Despite his commitment to poetry as a moral force, Neruda himself wavered and changed his mind throughout his life regarding both political and stylistic matters. He has been criticized for his uncritical embrace of certain authoritarian communist governments, and for his treatment of women in poetry and life. Still, his lifelong adherence to the idea that poetry should be concrete and readable has made him enduringly popular in Chile and abroad, and both in Spanish and in translation. He died in 1973, shortly after the authoritarian Augusto Pinochet overtook the government of Chile: today, it is a topic of debate whether Neruda died of prostate cancer or was assassinated, as a means of preventing him from becoming an anti-Pinochet influence abroad.
