Pablo Neruda was without doubt one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century but his work is extremely uneven. There is a view that there are two Nerudas, an early Romantic visionary and a later Marxist populist, who denied his earlier poetic self. By focussing on the poet's apprenticeship, and by looking closely at how Neruda created his poetic persona within his poems, this Companion tries to establish what should survive of his massive output. By seeing his early work as self exploration through metaphor and sound, as well as through varieties of love and direct experience, the Companion outlines a unity behind all the work, based on voice and a public self. Neruda's debt to reading and books is studied in depth and the change in poetics re-examined by concentrating on the early work up to Residencia en la tierra I and II and why he wanted to become a poet. Debate about quality and representativity is grounded in his Romantic thinking, sensibility and sincerity. Unlike a Borges or a Paz who accompanied their creative work with analytical essays, Neruda distilled all his experiences into his poems, which remainhis true biography. Jason Wilson is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Spanish and Latin American Studies, University College London.

The Poetry of Pablo Neruda offers the most comprehensive English-language collection ever by "the greatest poet of the twentieth century--in any language" (Gabriel García Márquez). "In his work a continent awakens to consciousness," wrote the Swedish Academy in awarding the Nobel Prize to Pablo Neruda, author of more than thirty-five books of poetry and one of Latin America's most revered writers and political figures-a loyal member of the Communist party, a lifelong diplomat and onetime senator, a man lionized during his lifetime as "the people's poet." Born Neftali Basoalto, Neruda adopted his pen name in fear of his family's disapproval, and yet by the age of twenty-five he was already famous for the book Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, which remains his most beloved. During the next fifty years, a seemingly boundless metaphorical language linked his romantic fantasies and the fierce moral and political compass-exemplified in books such as Canto General-that made him an adamant champion of the dignity of ordinary men and women. Edited and with an introduction by Ilan Stavans, this is the most comprehensive single-volume collection of this prolific poet's work in English. Here the finest translations of nearly six hundred poems by Neruda are collected and join specially commissioned new translations that attest to Neruda's still-resounding presence in American letters.

In this collection of twelve essays, the editors attempt to define the poet as prophet in Western literature and to select the general attributes of prophetic writing. The essays focus, in the main, on the prophetic tradition in the English-speaking world, as well as on a sufficient number of writers outside that tradition, to prove that all prophetic writing shares common features.

In this compelling collection, Teresa Longo gathers a diverse group of critical and poetic voices to analyze the politics of packaging and marketing Neruda and Latin American poetry in general in the United States.

Pablo Neruda (1904–73) is one of Latin America’s best known poets, adored by readers for the passionate love lyrics written during his early years in his native Chile, and respected by critics for the dark, hypnotic verses he composed during his later, solitary years as a diplomat based in the Far East. As Dominic Moran shows in his concise biography of Neruda, rarely have the life and works of a writer been so intimately and dramatically bound up as they are in Neruda. In Pablo Neruda, Moran takes a detailed and often critical look at this relationship, focusing as much on what the poetry sometimes strategically hides about Neruda the poet, the lover, and the political proselytizer, as what it reveals. Moran describes a life that was marked by an increasingly militant communism, the seeds of which can be traced to Neruda’s experiences in Spain during the early months of the Spanish Civil War. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Neruda became a literary torchbearer for the International Left, and he spent his final years campaigning to bring socialism to his beloved Chile. He lived just long enough to see his hero Salvador Allende unseated by Augusto Pinochet’s bloody coup. Pablo Neruda paints a fascinating picture of one of the most prodigiously gifted literary figures of the twentieth century. It will appeal to fans of Neruda’s verse who wish to learn more about the life behind it, as well as to readers interested in Latin American literature, politics, and history.

First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.