Pablo Neruda, a Great Latin American Poet

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Pablo Neruda was the most dominant poet of the 20th century. His creative writing touched the heart of common people, outlining the internal darkness he experienced at his young age, wisely registering Latin American political history and social battle in the heroic he composed in exile. The influential feature of his writing is that he always created poems of daily life, such as Elementary Odes, 1954. Such a great poet left an immense impact on people, and readers enjoy his write-ups with full enthusiasm.

Neruda was born on July 12, 1904, in Parral. He took an interest in writing at the age of thirteen and contributed several articles to the daily La Manana. His first publication was Entusiasmo y Perseverancia (Feinstein, Pg: 3). His mother died just after two months of his birth. Neruda spent his childhood with his half-sister Laura, one of his father’s children by another woman. At a young age, surrounding people called him “Neftali,” which was his late mother’s middle name.

He had a great passion for creating text and literature, but his father was not in favor of his hobby. Neruda received great support from others. Among them, future Nobel Prize winner Gabriela Mistral heads the local girls’ school. In 1920, he had written literary journal “Selva Austral” under the pen name of Pablo Neruda, which he took on in memory of the Czechoslovak poet Jan Neruda. In the next year, he shifted to Santiago to complete French courses at the Universidad de Chile to opt for teaching as a career, but Neruda dedicated himself to write poetry. He wrote his first volume of verse, Crepusculario (“Book of Twilights”), which was published in 1923.

Neruda became famous among the people of Chile, but he was struggling with scarcity. This caused extreme anxiety, and he took an honorary consulship in Rangoon in 1927. Afterward, he employed stints in Colombo, Batavia, and Singapore. In Java, he met Maryka Antonieta Hagenaar Vogelzang and they got married (Feinstein, Pg: 150). In his political service, Neruda read huge amounts of poetry and experimented with many dissimilar poetic forms.

He composed the first two volumes of Residencia en la Tierra, which incorporated numerous surrealistic poems. These poems gained a great reputation. Neruda became a zealous communist and continued it for his whole life. Through his speeches and writings, Neruda extended his support behind the Republican side, publishing a collection of poetry called Espana en el Corazon. In 1945, Neruda was elected a Communist party senator for the northern provinces of Antofagasta and Tarapaca in the arid and unfriendly Atacama Desert.

Neruda joined his next diplomatic post as Consul General in Mexico City and worked from 1940 to 1943. In Mexico, he married del Carril after leaving Hagenaar (Feinstein, 2004). When Neruda returned to Chile, he visited Machu Picchu. He composed a book-length poem in twelve parts in 1945 by attracting the austere beauty of the Inca citadel. This book generated awareness and significance in the ancient civilizations of America. In 1953, Neruda was honored by the Stalin Peace Prize award. During World War II, Neruda wrote an ode and praised Fulgencio Batista and later Fidel Castro.

Neruda’s career was very bright. In 1966, an International PEN conference in New York City invited him to attend the program. In 1970, the Chilean presidency selected Neruda as a candidate. In 1971, Neruda was awarded the Nobel Prize for his rich literary work (weeklystandard.com). Neruda ended his life of heart failure on September 23, 1973, at Santiago’s Santa Maria Clinic (The New York Times, 1973).

Neruda used numerous literary styles ranging from erotically charged love poems like his collection Twenty Poems of Love and a Song of Despair, surrealist poems, historical epics, and overtly political manifestos. In his early work, Neruda adopted the style of the symbolist movement, whose writers expressed their ideas, feelings, and values by means of symbols or suggestions rather than by direct statements. After that, he accepted the style which emphasized the unconscious in the creation of literature.

The theme of Neruda’s vast literary work ran through several phases, from early erotic poetry basically dedicated to his own personal ardors to later poetry that articulated his political perspectives. In exile from 1948 to 1952, Neruda created the Canto General, an epic poem depicting Spanish America and its history from a Marxist position. The poem explained the struggles the South American people faced in their battle for freedom from scarcity and repression (Feinstein, 2004).

Neruda was an astonishingly creative poet. He produced more than 40 volumes in his life span. Many readers visualized the early love poems in his magnum opus, and many still reread them. Neruda’s production is remarkably broad. For example, his Obras Completas, continually republished, comprised 459 pages. In his last few years, he published Cien Sonetos de Amor (1959), which includes poems devoted to his wife Matilde Urrutia, Memorial de Isla Negra.

It was a lyrical work of an autobiographic character in five volumes which was published on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. Neruda’s other well-known creative write-ups include the three-volume Residencia en la Tierra, whose poems feature sad, despairing images of the chaos inflicted on earth by society. A good collection of Poems written by Pablo Neruda includes a representative collection of his poems in the original Spanish, with English translations.

To sum up, Neruda gained universal recognition as a poet, and his books were translated into almost all the major languages of the world. He was also vocal on political issues, energetically disapproving of the U.S. during the Cuban missile crisis. He enjoyed many political posts and rich experiences, and this motivated him to create wonderful literary texts. Pablo Neruda is renowned for his political activism and for his eclectic, emotional poetry.

Work Cited

Adam Feinstein, Pablo Neruda: A Passion for Life, Bloomsbury, 2004. Web.

Neruda. La vida del poeta. Cronología| 1944–1953, Fundación Neruda, University of Chile. 2006. Web.

“Pablo Neruda, Nobel Poet, Dies in a Chilean Hospital”, The New York Times, 1973.

Earth-Shattering Poems, Liz Rosenberg, ed.; Henry Holt, New York, 1998, p. 105.

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Pablo Neruda, a Great Latin American Poet

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