Biographical details on Publo Neruda

Publo Neruda born in 1904, parral, chile

He died in 1973, santiago, chile

His natinality - chilean

Genre - poetry

His major works :

Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924)

Residence on Earth (1950)

Black Island Memorial (1964)

The poet known as Pablo Neruda was named Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto at his birth
in 1904. He signed his work “Pablo Neruda” (although he did not legally adopt that name until
1946) because his father, a railroad worker, disapproved of his son's poetic interests. Neruda
grew up in southern Chile and in 1921 moved to Santiago and enrolled in college with the
intention of preparing himself for a career as an instructor of French. He left college soon after,
however, to devote more time to poetry, which had already become his central interest. Pablo
Neruda was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971. This honor came as the culmination
of more than fifty years of writing poetry popular with readers the world over. In the Nobel
citation, the Swedish Academy praises Neruda “for a poetry that with the action of an
elemental force brings alive a continent's destiny and dreams.” His first book, Twilight Book
(Crepusculario), was published in 1923, and the following year he published Twenty Love
Poems and a Song of Despair (Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada), a book of
intensely romantic and erotic poems. In 1930 he married for the first time, but the marriage
was unhappy, and a few years later he left his wife to live with Delia del Carril, with whom he
stayed until 1955. Between 1927 and 1935, Neruda was a Chilean diplomat in, successively,
Burma, Ceylon, Java, Singapore, Argentina, and Spain. Neruda was the Chilean consul in
Madrid, Spain, in the mid-1930s, a time of great political turmoil that led to the Spanish Civil
War of 1936–1939. The forces of ultranationalist general Francisco Franco were triumphant,
and he installed himself as the country's dictator. Neruda's horror at the civil and military
barbarities (including the assassination of his friend, poet Federico García Lorca), which
accompanied Franco's war against the Spanish Republic, transformed him into a deeply
committed political poet and led to his eventual membership in the Communist Party. Neruda's
political awakening is clear in Spain in My Heart, his volume of verse published during this time.
After the war, Neruda was in charge of helping 2,000 Republican refugees in France find asylum
in Chile.

Publishing details on Tonight I Can Write

Tonight I Can Write" was published in 1924 in a collection of poems by Pablo Neruda
titled Veinte poemas de amor y una cancion desesperada. The collection was translated into
English in 1969 by W. S. Merwin as Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair.

Historical context

After World War I, Latin American writers began to gain international recognition. As a
result, these writers started to shift the focus in their works from regional preoccupations to
more universal themes. They also experimented with new literary forms. Modernism, especially
had an impact on Latin American poets. Love, the family, and social protest became popular
subjects, especially with the Uruguayans Delmira Agustini and Juana de Ibarbourou and the
Chileans Mistral and Neruda.