Pablo Neruda Born: Chile's Voice of Love and Revolution

He was 19 when he wrote Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. Pablo Neruda was born Ricardo Eliecer Neftali Reyes Basoalto in Parral, Chile in 1904, the son of a railway worker who disapproved of poetry so thoroughly that the young man adopted a pen name to avoid his father's anger. He chose Neruda after the Czech poet Jan Neruda, and the name stuck for life. The love poems sold millions and made him famous across Latin America before he turned twenty-five, their frank eroticism shocking readers accustomed to the genteel romanticism that dominated Spanish-language verse. He served as a Chilean consul in Burma, Ceylon, and Spain, where the Spanish Civil War radicalized him and turned him into a committed communist. Witnessing the murder of Federico Garcia Lorca and the bombing of civilians transformed his poetry from personal to political, and his epic Canto General attempted nothing less than a poetic history of the entire American continent. He became a Chilean senator, campaigned for Salvador Allende, and was forced into exile when the Chilean government banned the Communist Party. He hid in basements and crossed the Andes on horseback to reach Argentina, a journey that nearly killed him and that he later described as one of the defining experiences of his life. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971, and the citation praised "a poetry that with the action of an elemental force brings alive a continent's destiny and dreams." He was nominated six times before the committee finally said yes. The coup came on September 11, 1973. Allende died in the presidential palace. Neruda died twelve days later, officially of heart failure, in a clinic in Santiago while soldiers ransacked his homes and burned his books in the street. His housekeeper said he had been injected in the stomach at the clinic. Investigations continued for decades, with exhumations and forensic analyses producing conflicting results. A 2023 analysis found evidence consistent with poisoning by Clostridium botulinum, but the case remains officially inconclusive. His poetry is still the best-selling verse in the Spanish language.