Pablo Neruda

Pablo Neruda (born Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto on 12 July 1904 in Parral, Chile; died 23 September 1973) was a Chilean poet, diplomat, and politician who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971. He first gained notice as a poet at age 13, and his body of work ranges across surrealist poetry, historical epics, political manifestos, an autobiographical prose work, and intensely erotic love poems—most famously the collection *Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair* (1924). Over his career, he held various diplomatic posts and served as a senator for the Chilean Communist Party. When President Gabriel González Videla outlawed communism in 1948, an arrest warrant was issued; friends hid Neruda for months, and in 1949 he escaped through a mountain pass near Maihue Lake into Argentina, remaining abroad for over three years. He later became a close advisor to socialist president Salvador Allende and served as Chile’s ambassador to France under Allende. After accepting his Nobel Prize in Stockholm, Neruda returned to Chile, where Allende invited him to read at the Estadio Nacional before 70,000 people.

In September 1973, Neruda was diagnosed with prostate cancer. That same month, after a coup led by Augusto Pinochet overthrew Allende’s government (Allende died by suicide), Neruda planned to flee into exile in Mexico. On 23 September, the day before his planned departure, he died at the Santa María medical clinic in Santiago while receiving cancer treatment. The official cause was listed as complications from prostate cancer, but the circumstances have been disputed ever since. In 2011, an investigation began after Manuel Araya, Neruda’s former driver and assistant, claimed that Neruda had been murdered on Pinochet’s orders. Araya said Neruda called him from the clinic hours before his death, reporting that a doctor had injected him in the stomach with an unknown substance. In 2013, Judge Mario Carroza ordered Neruda’s remains exhumed for forensic testing; initial results found no evidence of poisoning. However, in 2015 the Chilean government acknowledged that it was “clearly possible and highly likely” that Neruda was killed by “the intervention of third parties.” In 2017, an international panel of 13 forensic experts reported no indication that Neruda had died of cancer and identified evidence of a potentially “laboratory cultivated bacteria.” A 2023 toxicology report confirmed the presence of *Clostridium botulinum* in Neruda’s teeth, indicating poisoning. In February 2024, a court of appeals ruling reopened the official inquiry into his death.

Neruda is widely regarded as Chile’s national poet, with global influence. Gabriel García Márquez called him “the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language,” and critic Harold Bloom included him in *The Western Canon* as a central figure in the Western literary tradition.

Neruda was born Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto in Parral, Chile, about 350 km south of Santiago. His father, José del Carmen Reyes Morales, worked for the railway; his mother, Rosa Neftalí Basoalto Opazo, was a schoolteacher who died two months after his birth, on 14 September. He was baptized on 26 September in the parish of San Jose de Parral. He grew up in Temuco with a half-brother, Rodolfo (from his father’s remarriage), and a half-sister, Laura Herminia “Laurita,” from his father’s extramarital relationship with Aurelia Tolrà, a Catalan woman. He wrote his first poems in the winter of 1914. Neruda was an atheist.

His father opposed his literary interests, but Neruda received encouragement from others, including future Nobel laureate Gabriela Mistral, who ran the local school. On 18 July 1917, at age 13, he published his first work—an essay titled “Entusiasmo y perseverancia” in the newspaper *La Mañana*—under the name Neftalí Reyes. From 1918 to mid-1920, he published poems and essays in local magazines under that name. In 1919, he won third place in the Juegos Florales del Maule literary contest for his poem “Comunión ideal” (or “Nocturno ideal”). By mid-1920, he had adopted the pseudonym Pablo Neruda—likely derived from Czech poet Jan Neruda, though some sources cite Moravian violinist Wilma Neruda, whose name appears in Arthur Conan Doyle’s *A Study in Scarlet*. In 1921, at 16, he moved to Santiago to study French at the Universidad de Chile, intending to become a teacher, but soon devoted himself entirely to poetry. With help from writer Eduardo Barrios, he met publisher Don Carlos George Nascimento, then Chile’s most important publisher. In 1923, his first volume, *Crepusculario* (Book of Twilights), was published by Editorial Nascimento; the following year saw *Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada* (Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair), a collection whose eroticism caused controversy given the author’s youth. Both works were critically acclaimed and translated widely.