Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) was a Chilean poet, diplomat and politician whose work ranges from intimate lyric to surrealism, epic history and public political poetry. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971. Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, published when he was young, made him famous across the Spanish-speaking world.
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair is a lyric sequence of erotic longing, memory, landscape and loss. The poems do not tell a plot, but they trace an emotional arc from sensual address to abandonment and despair.
