The most widely read poet of the Spanish language — a Chilean who wrote aching love poems at nineteen that still sell by the millions, odes to onions, wool socks, and lemons, and an epic reaching to hold an entire continent in verse. He won the Nobel Prize in 1971. He was also a communist who praised Stalin, a diplomat, and a close ally of Salvador Allende, dying twelve days after the 1973 coup that destroyed that government — and his memoir confessed a private cruelty his admirers have never fully reconciled with the luminous work.
He wrote an ode to an onion. He called it round, water-made, a clear globe of cool light, a star kept folded in the kitchen. He wrote one to a pair of wool socks, to a tuna in the market, to his own worn shoes, to a watch in the night. This is the same poet who, at nineteen, wrote love poems so frank and aching that they have sold by the millions and are still murmured between lovers across the Spanish-speaking world. The same poet who spent decades as a Chilean diplomat, who was driven into hiding for being a communist, who tried to put his entire continent into one vast book of verse. Pablo Neruda wanted to name everything, and for a while it seemed he might. He won the Nobel Prize in 1971. Two years later he was dead, days after the coup that destroyed the government of his friend Salvador Allende, and his death and his life have both grown harder to hold simply: a luminous poet, a defender of Stalin, and a man whose own memoir confessed a terrible cruelty.