Pablo Neruda

Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto (12 July 1904 - 23 September 1973), better known by his pen name and, later, legal name Pablo Neruda, was a Chilean poet-diplomat and politician who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971. When he was 13 years old, he became known as a poet, and he wrote in a variety of styles, including surrealist poems, historical epics, overtly political manifestos, a prose autobiography, and passionate love poems like the ones in his collection Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924). He is among the most important historical figures in Chile.

During his lifetime, Neruda held numerous diplomatic positions in various countries and served as a Senator for the Chilean Communist Party. When Chilean President Gabriel González Videla declared communism illegal in 1948, a warrant for Neruda's arrest was issued. Friends hid him for months in the basement of a house in Valparaíso, and in 1949 he escaped into Argentina via a mountain pass near Maihue Lake; he would not return to Chile for more than three years. He was a close advisor to Chile's socialist President Salvador Allende, and when he returned to Chile after accepting his Nobel Prize in Stockholm, Allende invited him to read in front of 70,000 people at the Estadio Nacional .

Neruda was hospitalized with cancer in September 1973, during the Augusto Pinochet-led coup that overthrew Allende's government, but returned home after a few days because he suspected a doctor of injecting him with an unknown substance with the intent of murdering him on Pinochet's orders. Neruda died on September 23, 1973, just hours after leaving the hospital. Although it had long been reported that he died of heart failure, the Chilean government's Interior Ministry issued a statement in 2015 acknowledging a Ministry document indicating the government's official position that "it was clearly possible and highly likely" that Neruda was killed as a result of "third-party intervention." However, an international forensic test conducted in 2013 rejected allegations that he was poisoned. It was determined that he had prostate cancer. Pinochet, backed by elements of the armed forces, refused permission for Neruda's funeral to be made public, but thousands of grieving Chileans defied the curfew and crowded the streets.

Neruda is widely regarded as Chile's national poet, and his works are well-known and influential around the world. Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez once called him "the greatest poet of the twentieth century in any language," and critic Harold Bloom included Neruda in his book The Western Canon as one of the writers central to the Western tradition