Pablo Neruda

Famous works

• Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
• Tonight I Can Write (The Saddest Lines)
• Canto General
• Ode to Common Things
• The Heights of Macchu Picchu

From Parral to the world

Born Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto, he took the pen name Pablo Neruda as a teenager — partly, legend says, to hide his writing from his railway-worker father. 'Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair,' published in 1924 when he was nineteen, made him famous overnight and has never been out of print.

A career in Chile's diplomatic service took him to Burma, Ceylon, Java, Spain, and Mexico. The Spanish Civil War, in which his friend Federico García Lorca was murdered, turned him decisively toward political commitment.

The epic and the exile

His 'Canto General' (1950) is a 340-poem epic history of Latin America, much of it written while Neruda — by then a Communist senator — was in hiding from his own government. Its central section, 'The Heights of Macchu Picchu,' is considered one of the great long poems of the twentieth century.

In later life he wrote the 'Elemental Odes,' finding the miraculous in onions, artichokes, and a man's large feet in the sand, and the three autobiographical houses he built in Chile became extensions of his poetry.

Death and afterlife

Neruda died in September 1973, days after Pinochet's coup overthrew his friend Salvador Allende; the official cause was cancer, though his death remains the subject of investigation. His funeral became a public act of defiance against the dictatorship.

Gabriel García Márquez called him 'the greatest poet of the twentieth century in any language.' His love sonnets and 'Tonight I Can Write' circulate globally in translation after translation.

Style

Neruda's style ranges from surrealist interiority to direct public address, always grounded in concrete, sensuous imagery. His odes dignify ordinary objects with Whitmanic abundance and Chilean earthiness.

Legacy

Neruda made poetry a public art form in Latin America — read aloud at rallies and weddings alike. He remains one of the most translated poets ever, and his image of the poet as both lover and witness continues to define what many readers expect poetry to do.

FAQ

What is Pablo Neruda's most famous poem?

'Tonight I Can Write (The Saddest Lines)' from Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair is the most famous, known for the line 'Love is so short, forgetting is so long.'

Did Pablo Neruda win the Nobel Prize?

Yes, the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971, 'for a poetry that with the action of an elemental force brings alive a continent's destiny and dreams.'

Why did Pablo Neruda use a pen name?

Born Ricardo Reyes, he adopted 'Pablo Neruda' as a teenager — reportedly to keep his writing secret from his father, who disapproved of poetry as a career.

What are the Elemental Odes?

Three volumes of odes from the 1950s celebrating ordinary things — tomatoes, onions, socks, bread — in short, accessible lines meant for all readers.