Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, stands as one of the most famous and widely read poets throughout the world today. His most famous book, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, which portrays his love of women, was translated in over twenty languages and, like much of his other works, has over one million copies in print (Stackhouse). As the 1971 Nobel Prize winner in literature, Neruda has a spot in literary history as one of the greatest poets of his lifetime. Although having gone through self-conflicting times, most of Neruda’s poems are about love, his longing for his home country, and Latin America (Sobejano). Neruda was born in Parral, Chile on July 12, 1904 and given the name Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto. He was the son of Rosa …show more content…
As his poems became more and more prominent, Neruda began his political career. In 1927, Neruda met with Chile’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs where “he was appointed as the Chilean consul in Rangoon, the capital of Burma” – an Asian country (Diamond). Not having any experience in diplomacy, Neruda was appointed as ambassador of his country, solely for his gregariousness and accomplishments with his writing. Neruda traveled as consul around the world to places including Dutch East Indies in 1930, Buenos Aires in 1933, and Barcelona in 1934 (Maynard). Although often ascribed to surrealism, Neruda’s poems have also been associated with the modernist era. Granted that he almost never wrote with the style modernists were so famous for, Neruda wanted to alter the way Latin American and Spanish poetry was perceived. He repeatedly changed his style of poetry from book to book, going from romantic and passionate in Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair to surrealistic poetry in Residence on Earth. “Neruda's style of surrealism is not intended to shock or to make his reader laugh; rather, he uses the absurd to represent the complexity of the human mind and modern life” (Diamond). During his life, Neruda’s style was even called Nerudaism because of how diverse his poetry was. Quickly after Residence on Earth, Neruda, once more, changed the way he wanted his poetry to be remarked and began to write about social and political …show more content…
The poem contains no regular meter but manages to express rhythm through assonance and consonance. Author Marjorie Agosin writes in an article how Neruda’s “Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines”, “marks a clear transition from the era of Spanish-American modernism to that of surrealism, with its often disconnected images and metaphors,” (Poetry for Students). When the book was first to be published, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair was refused to print by Chile’s leading publisher. Nonetheless, the book and poems within the book including, “Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines”, received overwhelmingly positive feedback. Neruda’s poem is applauded and even called Latin America’s most beloved poem in an essay written by Dean Rader, a professor at the University of San Francisco: Neruda’s poem both participates in and refuses to participate in expected conventions of modernist aesthetics. At once, the text feels shockingly unpoetic and overwhelming so. The “confusion” in the poem, its paradoxical nature, mirrors the confusion within the speaker of the poem and his own paradoxical stances on the woman who has left him. The poem succeeds because it, like love, like human emotion, cannot be quantified, classified or confined…To express such common and such strong emotions without succumbing to cliché or sentiment or cloying language