Pablo Neruda

He began writing poetry soon, and in 1921 published The Song of the party, her first poem, under the pseudonym Pablo Neruda, in homage to the Czech poet Jan Neruda, whose name remained thereafter and legalized in 1946.

His mother died only a month later he was born, when his father, a railroad employee, moved to Temuco, where young Pablo Neruda early studies and met Gabriela Mistral. He also began work on a newspaper until he was sixteen he moved to Santiago, where he published his first poems in the magazine Clarity.

After publishing several books of poetry, in 1924 achieved international fame with Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, a work which, with infinite human Tentative distinguishes the first phase of his poetry, marked by the transition from modernism to avant-garde forms creationism influenced by Vicente Huidobro.

The economic problems led to Pablo Neruda to undertake, in 1926, the consular career that took him to live in Burma, Ceylon, Java, Singapore and, between 1934 and 1938 in Spain, where he became involved with Garcia Lorca, Aleixandre, Gerardo Diego and other components of the so-called generation of '27, and founded the magazine Caballo Verde para la Poesía. Since its first manifesto, he sided with a "Poetry without Purity" and next to the immediate reality, in line with its social awareness.


Pablo Neruda

In this regard, the Republicans supported Neruda at the outbreak of civil war and wrote Spain in the heart. Gradually his poetry underwent a transition to form-fitting and more somber tone to perceive the passage of time, chaos and death in everyday life.

Back in Chile in 1939 Neruda joined the Communist Party and his work underwent a shift to the political background which led to the exaltation of the American myths of Canto general. In 1945 he was the first poet to be awarded the National Prize for Literature in Chile. At the same time, from his seat as senator used his speech to denounce the abuses and inequities of the system. That attitude provoked the government persecution and his subsequent exile in Argentina.