Pablo Neruda: The poet with a revolutionary spirit (+Christmas)

On July 12, 1904, Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto was born, better known as Pablo Neruda, a Chilean poet, considered among the most outstanding and influential artists of his century; the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language, according to Gabriel García Márquez.

His many awards include the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971 and an honorary doctorate from the University of Oxford. No Western hemisphere poet of our century admits comparison with him, has written literary critic Harold Bloom, who considers him one of the twenty-six central authors of the Western literary canon of all time.

In addition, he was a prominent political activist, senator, member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, pre-candidate for the presidency of his country and ambassador to France.

Neruda's literature distinguishes different stylistic periods. Since his work General Song (1950), the author circumscribes himself to the so-called Soviet socialist realism, promoted by Andrei Zhdánov, and in which Neruda would reach his culmination with The Grapes and the Wind (1954).

His last public appearance was on December 5, 1972, where the Chilean people paid homage to the poet at the National Stadium. And a year later, in February 1973, for health reasons, he resigned his position as ambassador to France.

After the military coup of September 11, his health worsened and on the 19th he was urgently transferred from his home in Isla Negra to Santiago, where he died due to prostate cancer on the 23rd at 22:30 at the Santa María Clinic. In 2011, an article collected statements by Manuel Araya Osorio, the poet's assistant from November 1972 until his death, who claimed that Neruda had been killed in the clinic after being given a lethal injection. Although the information was denied by the Pablo Neruda Foundation, the Communist Party requested, on December 6, the exhumation of the remains of the Nobel Prize in Literature, to verify if he was poisoned.

Neruda's house in Santiago was looted after the coup led by General Augusto Pinochet and his books were set on fire. The poet's funeral was held at the General Cemetery. The members of the Communist Party's board of directors attended the meeting, despite being persecuted by the regime. Although the attendees were surrounded by soldiers armed with machine guns, there were defiant cries of homage to him and Salvador Allende, along with the intonation of La Internacional. After the funeral, many of the attendees who were unable to flee ended up joining the lists of those disappeared by the dictatorship.

Mazo News Team