![]() ![]() Allende asked Neruda to read at the Estadio Nacional in front of 70,000 people when he returned to Chile following his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Years later, Neruda became a close associate of Salvador Allende, the socialist president of Chile. Later, through a mountain route near Maihue Lake in Argentina, Neruda slipped into exile. In the Chilean port of Valparaso, friends harbored him for months in a home basement. In 1948, when conservative Chilean President González Videla declared communism illegal, a warrant for Neruda's arrest was issued. Neruda had a number of political posts during his lifetime, including a stint as a Chilean Communist Party senator. Pablo Neruda read to 100,000 people in honor of Communist revolutiınary leader Luis Carlos Prestes on July 15, 1945, at Pacaembu Stadium in Brazil. His poetry continues to be celebrated around the world for its beauty, passion, and political significance. His death is widely believed to have been caused by heart failure, but many have also speculated that he was poisoned by the military regime. Neruda died in 1973, just days after a military coup overthrew the democratically elected government of Chile. In 1971, Neruda was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his "poetry that with the action of an elemental force brings alive a continent's destiny and dreams." He was also known for his work as a diplomat, serving as a consul in several countries and representing Chile at the United Nations. During this time, he wrote some of his most powerful political poetry. He served as a senator for the Communist Party in Chile and was later forced to go into hiding when the government declared communism illegal. Neruda was a committed communist and spent much of his life advocating for social justice and political change. His most famous collections include Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924), Residencia en la Tierra (1933), and Canto General (1950), which chronicles the history of Latin America and the struggles of its people. Neruda's early poetry was heavily influenced by modernist and surrealist movements, but he later developed his own unique style, characterized by his vivid imagery, political themes, and passion for life. He was born Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto in Parral, Chile, and began writing poetry as a teenager. It’s another free-verse lyric which calls for mutual forgetting but also mutual memory: if his lover forgets him, he will forget her, but if she finds herself remembering him, she can count on him still thinking of her, too.Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) was a Chilean poet and diplomat who is widely regarded as one of the most important and influential poets of the 20th century. Let’s conclude this pick of Neruda’s best poems with one of his most famous. He wasn’t the first to write a poem about the death of a pet dog, but ‘A Dog Has Died’ is remarkable for its unsentimental attitude to death – describing the burial of the beloved pet in rather matter-of-fact terms – even while Neruda embraces the idea of a heaven for dogs. Just as Neruda didn’t write traditional love poems or odes, he also approached the elegy, or poem of mourning, in a new and original way. Neruda’s arresting description of the night flowing through the cat’s dreaming mind ‘like dark water’ makes it worth reading on its own – but there are many other things to admire here. ‘Cat’s Dream’ is a fine poetic depiction of a cat, describing the animal’s physical appearance but then imagining what a cat’s dreams must be like. The poem’s ‘moral’? That things are twice as good when we’re talking about a pair of woollen socks worn to keep the feet warm in the cold winter months.Īs well as writing some of the greatest love poems ever written, Pablo Neruda also wrote well about pets. But he resisted this impulse, instead sliding the socks on over his feet and wearing them. She is a ‘sheepherder’ or shepherdess by profession, so she works with sheep and their wool.įor Neruda, they are ‘heavenly’ socks, which he was tempted to lock the socks away so that he might preserve them forever as rare gifts. Maru Mori (a friend of his) gave him a pair of socks which she had knitted herself. John Keats may have written odes to the nightingale and the Grecian urn, but Pablo Neruda’s greatest ode was written to his socks: specifically, the socks his friend brought to him. And why not? The feet are what support the rest of the woman’s body which the poet adores. In this short free-verse lyric, Neruda describes the male gaze alighting on the woman’s ‘hard’ feet.
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