Still, his capacity for creating discomfort and evoking violence emerged in full force in these volumes: Dudley Fitts, in Poetry magazine, notes of Neruda that "His lines are harsh, often deliberately cacophonous. These poems, loaded with surreally dark images of exhaustion, rot, and disease, in many ways contrast with the urgent calls for change that would come to mark much of Neruda's later work. Though these poems were, and continue to be, highly praised and even considered Neruda's masterpieces, the poet later renounced their proto-existentialist themes of despair and hopelessness (as Michael Wood has noted in the New York Review of Books). Manuel Durán and Margery Safir have argued that, for him, these locales were "a mixture of chaos, poverty, and fascinating perceptions of the ancient cultures in contrast with a degrading colonial present." The experience would lead Neruda to produce a two-part collection, Residencia en la Tierra (Residence on Earth), followed by a third installment, Tercera Residencia, in, respectively, 1933, 1935, and 1937. This sojourn abroad, which brought him to a series of Asian cities under colonial rule, deeply distressed Neruda. In keeping with the Chilean tradition of offering diplomatic appointments to poets, Neruda was sent to Burma as honorary consul in 1927. Though its frank eroticism caused some critical backlash, this remains the world's most popular book of Spanish-language poetry: audiences, especially in translation, have broadly embraced his early love poems over his later political work. These early poems are personal and sensuous, drawing on archetypal images of womanhood and nature. Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada draws on sexual and romantic experiences from Neruda's own life, mixing descriptions of human sexuality with those of the natural world, especially that of rural Chile, where Neruda had spent his childhood. Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada(Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair) catapulted Neruda to celebrity, and to this day his writing is in many ways inextricable from his status as a cultural icon, especially in his native Chile. In 1924, at the age of 19, Neruda published his first collection of poems (though he had published in various newspapers and magazines prior). It was through love poetry that Neruda first earned his reputation as a poet. This dramatic vividness has caused some critics to accuse Neruda of tackiness, melodrama, or crudeness-Spanish poet Juan Ramon Jiminez referred to him as a "great bad poet"- while others have argued that these tendencies, in their proper context, have made Neruda rightfully beloved. As Neruda himself put it, "I have always wanted a poetry where the fingerprints show." He disdained much of the abstract, elevated poetry of both antiquity and the nineteenth century, and by contrast was excited by the immediacy of surrealism and symbolism. However, in both his early erotic mode and his later political one, Neruda's poetry was known for insisting upon accessibility, materiality, and intense corporeality. Thus, Neruda's stylistic development and his political beliefs can be traced in concert with one another. A communist with strong political as well as literary commitments throughout his life, Neruda's later poetry was infused with radical politics and took on historical events such as the Spanish Civil War. His poetry is known for its frank exploration of sexuality, its vivid evocations of the natural world, and its firm, accessible grounding in lived reality. Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), born Ricardo Eliezer Neftali Reyes y Basoalto, is one of the best-known poets of the twentieth century, and is regarded as one of the finest Spanish-language poets of his time: writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez famously called him “the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language.” Today, his odes and his love poetry remain especially popular, both in their original Spanish and in translation.
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