Word: neruda
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...career as a French professor. The academic career never flourished, but his poetry did. He and fellow poets in Santiago lived the lifestyle traditionally associated with their profession: dressed in black, they often went hungry and struggled to get their work published. It was at this time that Neruda wrote and was able to publish Twenty Poems of Love and an Ode on Desperation, a melancholy collection filled with torment and passion. Neruda would later refer to the poems as the expression of his love affair with Santiago...
Like many South American artists and writers, Neruda followed a course throughout his life that included diplomatic duty--first in Ceylon, Burma and other parts of then-very distant Asia, and then in Spain during the days of the Republic. It was in that latter time that he encountered the people--the young, political poets of Spain--and the passions of the Spanish Civil War. Both were poetic milestones that marked a profound change in his writing...
...Neruda was the Chilean consul in Spain when he met Federico Garcia Lorca, a poet who, Neruda writes in the Memoirs, was "the most loved, the most cherished of all Spanish poets, and he was the closest to being a child because of his marvelous happy temperament...
Garcia Lorca was assassinated for his Republican sympathies less than two years after they met, an event which symbolized the beginning of the civil war to Neruda. The poet immediately threw his support to the Republic and as a result was recalled from Spain--non-intervention was the policy of the day--but the civil war had been burned into his consciousness...
...third volume of Neruda's Residence on Earth, so different in tone from the first two, pays homage to that destruction and marks the distinctive change in the tenor of his poetry. He writes in his Memoirs of his change from naturalistic verse to political...