Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto (1904–73,) who wrote under the pseudonym Pablo Neruda, was a Chilean poet and diplomat. He is renowned for presenting the tragedy of the human condition through surreal imagery in his poetry. He was the best-known 20th-century poet from Spanish America and was awarded the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Born to a railroad worker, he signed his work “Pablo Neruda” inspired by the Czech poet Jan Neruda because his father disapproved of the son’s poetic interests. He legally adopted that name in 1946. Neruda’s mentor was the poet and future Nobel Prize laureate Gabriela Mistral; she introduced Neruda to the works of Walt Whitman, a poet Neruda said had a profound influence on him.
Neruda traveled widely in the diplomatic service from 1927 to the early 1940s (in South-East Asia, Argentina, Spain, and Mexico;) after World War II, he visited the USSR, China, and Eastern Europe. He had joined the Chilean Communist Party in 1945 and was elected to the Chilean Senate, remaining a political activist and poet after that.
Sometimes called the “Picasso of Poetry,” Neruda was a writer of many styles and many voices. No sooner had he mastered one poetic form or mood than he moved to another. His vast and varied work, comprising of over 40 volumes of poetry published over five decades, is pivotal to every significant development in Spanish and Spanish American poetry between the 1920s and the 1970s. He always wrote in green ink, because he considered it the color of hope.
Neruda’s first major collection of poetry was Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada (Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, 1924.) His most ambitious work was his epic Canto General (General Song, 1950,) much of which he wrote on the run from the Chilean police and which confirmed his reputation. Canto General was initially conceived as an alternative history on Chile and was later expanded to cover the history of all the Americas.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Pablo Neruda
They can cut all the flowers, but they cannot stop the coming of spring.
—Pablo Neruda
A bibliophile of little means is likely to suffer often. Books don’t slip from his hands but fly past him through the air, high as birds, high as prices.
—Pablo Neruda
Topics: Books, Reading
I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.
—Pablo Neruda
Topics: Authors & Writing, Rain
I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.
—Pablo Neruda
Topics: Love
Now, on the road to freedom, I was pausing for a moment near Temuco and could hear the voice of the water that had taught me to sing.
—Pablo Neruda
Topics: Youth
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
—Pablo Neruda
I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.
—Pablo Neruda
I stroll along serenely, with my eyes, my shoes my rage, forgetting everything.
—Pablo Neruda
Topics: Walking
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