Essays on Pablo Neruda

12 July 1904

23 September 1973

Poet, diplomat, senator

Spanish, English, French

• International Peace Prize (1950)
• Lenin Peace Prize (1953)
• Nobel Prize in Literature (1971)

12 July 1904 – 23 September 1973

Pablo Neruda, original name Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto, was a Chilean poet, diplomat, and politician who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. He was perhaps the most important Latin American poet of the 20th century.

“Canto general”, “Crepusculario”, “Elemental Odes”, “Residence on Earth”, “Spain in My Heart”, “Then Come Back: The Lost Neruda”, “Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair”

Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto was born on 12 July 1904, in Parral, Chile. He entered the Temuco Boys’ School in 1910 and finished his secondary schooling there in 1920. n 1921 he moved to Santiago to continue his studies and become a French teacher. At age 20, with two books published, Neruda had already become one of the best-known Chilean poets. He abandoned his French studies and began to devote himself entirely to poetry.

In 1927 he was named an honorary consul, and he later represented Chile in several Asian and Latin American countries; late in life he was ambassador to France. In 1945 he was elected senator and joined the Communist Party; he later spent years in exile when the government turned toward the right.

Neruda's body of poetry is so rich and varied that is defies easy summary. He explored themes of love, time, destruction and loneliness in all its varieties. His poetry filled with both harmony and anguish, also raged with political energy, ideas of social decay, isolation, alienation, communism and oppression.

Neruda had died of heart failure on 23 September 1973, at Santiago's Santa María Clinic. Neruda is often considered the national poet of Chile, and his works have been popular and influential worldwide. The Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez once called him "the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language".

“Love is so short, forgetting is so long.”
“You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep Spring from coming.”
“Let us forget with generosity those who cannot love us”