Pablo Neruda

Pablo Neruda wrote love poems at nineteen that are still the best-selling poetry in Spanish, became a communist senator, and died twelve days after the coup that ended Chilean democracy. He was born Ricardo Neftalí Reyes Basoalto, the son of a railway worker, and took his pen name partly to spare his father the embarrassment of a poet in the family. Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada appeared in 1924. He entered the consular service and was posted to Rangoon, Colombo, Batavia and then Madrid, where the Spanish Civil War and the murder of his friend Federico García Lorca turned him political; España en el corazón was printed by soldiers on the Republican side using paper made from rags and captured enemy flags. He arranged a ship, the Winnipeg, that carried two thousand Spanish refugees to Chile. Elected senator in 1945, he denounced President González Videla from the floor, was stripped of his seat and went into hiding, crossing the Andes on horseback into exile. Canto General, the thousand-page history of the continent from its geology up, was written on the run. He won the Nobel Prize in 1971 while serving as ambassador in Paris. He died in Santiago on 23 September 1973; a 2023 forensic panel found the official cause unproven. He kept three houses in Chile - La Chascona in Santiago, La Sebastiana in Valparaiso and the one at Isla Negra facing the Pacific - and filled them with ships in bottles, shells, coloured glass and ships' figureheads, on the argument that a poet should own things he can touch. The Odas elementales of the 1950s address a tomato, an onion, a pair of socks, and were written deliberately in language a dock worker could read. His funeral, held while the streets were under military control, turned into the first public demonstration against the new government. His body has since been exhumed twice for testing.

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