Born Ricardo Eliecer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto in southern
Chile on July 12, 1904, Pablo Neruda led a life charged
with poetic and political activity. In 1923 he sold all of
his possessions to finance the publication of his first
book, Crepusculario ("Twilight"). He published the volume
under the pseudonym "Pablo Neruda" to avoid conflict with
his family, who disapproved of his occupation. The
following year, he found a publisher for Veinte poemas de
amor y una cancion desesperada ("Twenty Love Poems and a
Song of Despair"). The book made a celebrity of Neruda, who
gave up his studies at the age of twenty to devote himself
to his craft.
In 1927, Neruda began his long career as a diplomat in the
Latin American tradition of honoring poets with diplomatic
assignments. After serving as honorary consul in Burma,
Neruda was named Chilean consul in Buenos Aires, Argentina,
in 1933. While there, he began a friendship with the
visiting Spanish poet Federico García Lorca. After
transferring to Madrid later that year, Neruda also met
Spanish writer Manuel Altolaguirre. Together the two men
founded a literary review called Caballo verde para la
poesîa in 1935. The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in
1936 interrupted Neruda's poetic and political development.
He chronicled the horrendous years which included the
execution of García Lorca in Espana en el corazon (1937),
published from the war front. Neruda's outspoken sympathy
for the loyalist cause during the Spanish Civil War led to
his recall from Madrid in 1937. He then returned to Europe
to help settle republican refugees in the United States.
Neruda returned to Chile in 1938 where he renewed his
political activity and wrote prolifically. Named Chilean
Consul to Mexico in 1939, Neruda left Chile again for four
years. Upon returning to Chile in 1943, he was elected to
the Senate and joined the Communist Party. When the Chilean
government moved to the right, they declared communism
illegal and expelled Neruda from the Senate. He went into
hiding. During those years he wrote and published Canto
general (1950).
In 1952 the government withdrew the order to arrest leftist
writers and political figures, and Neruda returned to Chile
and married Matilde Urrutia, his third wife (his first two
marriages, to Maria Antonieta Haagenar Vogelzang and Delia
del Carril, both ended in divorce). For the next twenty-one
years, he continued a career that integrated private and
public concerns and became known as the people's poet.
During this time, Neruda received numerous prestigious
awards, including the International Peace Prize in 1950,
the Lenin Peace Prize and the Stalin Peace Prize in 1953,
and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971.
Diagnosed with cancer while serving a two-year term as
ambassador to France, Neruda resigned his position thus
ending his diplomatic career. On September 23, 1973, just
twelve days after the defeat of Chile's democratic regime,
the man widely regarded as the greatest Latin-American poet
since Darío, died of leukemia in Santiago, Chile.
(http://www.poets.org)
