Legacy: The Artists Behind The Legends

Ricardo Eliecer Fertali Reyes Basoalto, or better known under his pen name Pablo Neruda, was a Chilean poet, politician, and diplomat active during the 20thcentury. From the VERY young age of 13, Neruda’s writing career commenced with producing poetry, though his work spanned various styles of prose, including surrealist poems, historical epics, overtly political manifestos, a prose autobiography, and passionate love poems, which tended to be his most popular and included the collection Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. Throughout his life, Pablo occupied numerous diplomatic positions in his home country of Chile and served a term as a Senator for the Chilean Communist Party; however, much of the mid 20thcentury proved to be tumultuous for Chile’s government, and Neruda found himself riding the waves between politician and exile. In the later years of his life, with the return of communism, Pablo was a close advisor to Chile’s socialist President Salvadore Allende, and went on to win the Nobel Prize in