Pablo Neruda Biography and List of Works

Chilean poet, diplomat, and Marxist, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. Neruda is the most widely read of the Spanish American poets. From the 1940s his works reflected the political struggle of peasants and workers and socio-historical developments in South America, but he also wrote love poems. Neruda's Twenty Love Poems and Songs of Despair (1924) have sold over a million copies since it first appeared.

"Sucede que me canso de ser hombre.
Sucede que entro es las sasterías y en los cines
marchito, impenetrable, como un cisne de fieltro
navegando en un agua de origen y ceniza."
(from 'Walking Around')

(in English)
I happen to be tired of being a man
I happen to enter tailor shops and movie houses
withered, impenetrable, like a felt swan
navigating in a water of sources and ashes.

Neruda was born in Parral, a small town in central Chile. His father was a poor railway worker and mother was a schoolteacher, who died of tuberculosis when Neruda was an infant. Neruda started to write poetry when he was ten years old and at the age of 12 he met the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral, who encouraged his literary efforts. In 1920 he published poems in the magazine Selva Austral, using the pen name Pablo Neruda to avoid conflict with his family, who disapproved his literary ambitions. From 1921 he studied at the Instituto Pedagógico in Santiago. In 1924 Neruda gained international fame as an writer with VEINTE POEMAS DE AMOR Y UNA CANCÍON, which is his most widely read work.

At the age of only 23 Neruda was appointed by the Chilean government as a consul in Burma (now Myanmar). He held diplomatic posts in various East Asian and European Countries, befriending among others the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca. In 1935-36 Neruda was in Spain but he had to resign from his post because he sided with the Spanish Republicans. As a consul in Paris in 1939 Neruda helped Spanish refugees by re-settling them in Chile. In 1930 he married María Antonieta Hagenaar, but they separated in 1936. In the 1930s and 1940s Neruda lived with the Argentine painter Delia del Carril, who encouraged Neruda's interest in the politics of the Left. They married in 1943. The marriage was not recognized in Chile and in 1955 they separated. In 1966 Neruda married the Chilean singer Matilde Urrutia, who was the inspiration of much of his later poetry.

In 1943 Neruda joined the Communist Party, and in 1945 he was elected to Chilean Senate. He attacked President González Videla in print and when right-wing extremists took the government, he fled to Mexico. In exile Neruda produced CANTO GENERAL (1950), a monumental work of 340 poems. In this work Neruda recreated Latin American history from a Marxist point of view. The central theme is the struggle for social justice. Neruda shows his deep knowledge about the history, geography and politics of the continent - he sees that labour is the driving force of history. Canto General included Neruda's famous poem 'Alturas de Macchu Picchu', which was born after he visited the Incan ruins of Macchu Picchu in 1943.

While in exile, Neruda was awarded the Stalin Prize and the Lenin Peace Prize. He travelled in Russia and China and in 1952 he returned to Chile, after the victory of the anti-Videla forces and the order to arrest leftist was rescinded. He was deeply shaken in 1956 by Khrushchev's revelation in the Twentieth Party Congress of the crimes committed during the Stalin regime. His collection EXTRAVAGARIO (1958) reflects this change in the themes in his works. Neruda turns into his youth; he presents the reader his daily life and examines critically his Marxist beliefs. The tone is partly mocking; the poet looks his personal experiences ironically.

"Poetry is a deep inner calling in man; from it came liturgy, the psalms, and also the content of religions."
(from Memoirs, 1974)

Establishing a permanent home on the Isla Negra, Neruda continued to travel extensively, visiting Cuba in 1960 and the United States in 1966. When Salvador Allende was elected president, he appointed Neruda as Chile's ambassador to France (1970-72). Neruda died of leukemia in Santiago on 23 September in 1973. His death was probably accelerated by the Pinochet coup earlier that month. During his long literary career, Neruda produced more than forty volumes of poetry, translations, and verse drama.

"He was once referred as the Picasso of poetry, alluding to his protean ability to be always in the vanguard of change. And he himself has often alluded to his personal struggle with his own tradition, to his constant need to search for a new system in each book."
(Rene de Costa in The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, 1979)

For further reading: El viajero immóvil by Emir Rodríguez Monegal (1966); The Word and the Stone by Frank Reiss (1972); Pablo Neruda by Salvatore Bizzaro (1979); The Poetry of Pablo Neruda by René de Costa (1979); Pablo Neruda by Marjorie Agosín (1986); The Late Poetry of Neruda by Christopher Perriam (1989); Pablo Neruda by Luis Poirot (1990); Neruda: an Intimate Biography by Volodia Teitelboim (1991)

CREPUSCULARIO, (1923)
, (2000)