Ogden Nash - Salem Press

Critical Survey of Poetry Neruda, Pablo
lyric evocation of his entire life, its final pages written
after the coup that overthrew Salvador Allende. Neruda’s
translations include works by Rainer Maria Rilke, William
Shakespeare, and William Blake. The volume Para
nacer he nacido (1978; Passions and Impressions, 1983)
includes prose poems, travel impressions, and the speech
that Neruda delivered on his acceptance of the Nobel
Prize. He has written a novel, El habitante y su esperanza
(1926); a poetic drama, Fulgor y muerte de Joaquín
Murieta (pb. 1967; Splendor and Death of Joaquin
Murieta, 1972); and essays on Shakespeare, Carlo Levi,
Vladimir Mayakovsky, Paul Éluard, and Federico García
Lorca, as well as several works of political concern.
Achievements
Winner of the Nobel Prize in 1971, Pablo Neruda is
one of the most widely read poets in the world today.
His most popular book, Twenty Love Poems and a Song
of Despair, has more than a million copies in print and,
Pablo Neruda (Library of Congress)
like much of his work, has been translated from Spanish
into more than twenty languages. Neruda was so prolific
a writer that nine of his collections of poems have been
published posthumously.
Neruda’s goal was to liberate Spanish poetry from
the literary strictures of the nineteenth century and bring
it into the twentieth century by returning verse to its
popular sources. In Memoirs, written just before his
death, Neruda congratulates himself for having made
poetry a respected profession through his discovery that
his own aspirations are representative of those shared by
men and women on three continents. Writing on the rugged
coast of southern Chile, Neruda found passion and
beauty in the harshness of a world that hardens its inhabitants,
strengthening but sometimes silencing them. His
purpose was to give his fellowmen the voice they too often
lacked.
Biography
Pablo Neruda was born Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto
in the frontier town of Parral in the southern part of
Chile on July 12, 1904. His mother died of tuberculosis
a few days after his birth, and Neruda lived with his
stepmother and father, a railroad conductor, in a tenement
house with two other families. Hard work and an
early introduction to literature and to the mysteries
of manhood distinguished his first seventeen years. In
school, the famous Chilean educator and poet Gabriela
Mistral, herself a Nobel Prize winner, introduced the
young Neruda to the great nineteenth century Russian
novelists. In the fall of his sixteenth year, while he was
assisting in the wheat harvest, a woman whom he was
later unable to identify first introduced the young man to
sex. A wide-ranging, voracious appetite for books and
the wonders of love are memories to which Neruda continually
returns in his work, as well as to the harsh Chilean
landscape and the problems of survival that confronted
his countrymen.
His father’s determination that Neruda should have a
profession took the young poet to Santiago, where he intended
to study French literature at the university. He
had learned French and English in Temuco from his
neighbors, many of whom were immigrants. His affiliation
as contributor to the journal Claridad with the politically
active student group, Federación de Estudiantes,
2755