Chilean poet, diplomat, and Communist senator — the most widely translated Spanish-language poet of the 20th century and, with Lorca, its most popularly beloved. Born Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto in Parral, southern Chile, he took the pen name Pablo Neruda as a teenager and published Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (Veinte poemas de amor) at twenty — a book of erotic lyrics still read by every Latin American adolescent, and still selling.
A Chilean consular career carried him to Burma, Ceylon, Java, Singapore, Argentina, and Spain; the Spanish posting (1934–37) introduced him to Lorca and to the Republican cause, and the assassination of Lorca in 1936 radicalized him. Residence on Earth (Residencia en la tierra, 1933, 1935, 1947) is the great surrealist-hermetic sequence of his middle period; the Canto General (1950) is the epic he had been moving toward all along — a 15,000-line verse history of the Americas from pre-Columbian nature through Spanish conquest, Bolivarian liberation, and 20th-century dictatorship to Neruda's own partisan present. Its central section, "The Heights of Macchu Picchu," is probably his most durable long poem.
Neruda joined the Chilean Communist Party in 1945, was elected to the senate, was forced into hiding and then exile in 1948 after denouncing President González Videla, and spent the next years writing in Europe and Mexico. The late books — the Elemental Odes (three volumes, 1954–57), each poem an ode to a thing ("To My Socks," "To a Lemon," "To Salt") — returned him to a domestic, plain-spoken register. He won the Nobel Prize in 1971. He died twelve days after the CIA-backed coup of 11 September 1973 that overthrew his friend Salvador Allende; a 2023 forensic report concluded he was most likely poisoned.