Word: neruda
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Nineteen forty-five was an important year for Neruda: he joined the Communist Party, was elected a Senator from Tarapaca and Antofagasta, two Chilean provinces populated by workers in the copper and nitrate mines, and wrote perhaps his most famous collection of poems, The Heights of Macchu Picchu. His decision to become a Communist caused him continual harassment; newspapers often would ignore his letters and censor his statements. He was briefly imprisoned in Argentina with no explanation given. Anti-Communist priests persecuted his poor friends and, finally, the Chilean courts ordered his arrest for criticizing the government, forcing him into...
...flight from Chile, through the harsh Southern Andes into Argentina and eventually over to Paris, left an impression on him perhaps as great as the events of a decade before. It was this journey, among mountain peasants who had never heard the name or the poetry of Pablo Neruda, that he recounts in his Nobel Lecture and repeats in the Memoirs. The trip across the Andes contained a simple lesson for Neruda: the poet must identify with mankind because "there is no such thing as a lone struggle...
...Most of Neruda's time until his return to Chile in 1952 was spent writing, living in Europe and traveling in Asia and the Soviet Union, which he loved oblivious to the imminence of what he would later call "Stalin's dark night." The revelations of the Twentieth Congress came as a grave shock to Neruda, one which the Memoirs show he could only hesitatingly accept. He refutes accusations in the Memoirs that he remained a die-hard Stalinist, even after the Congress, yet he writes that he can never forget that Stalin had appeared to the world...
...Neruda's life through the 1950s and '60s was much less eventful than his first 40 years. He divorced his wife of 18 years, Delia del Carril, and moved in with Mathilde Urrutia, about whom he wrote The Captain's Verses. That work went unsigned for many years not, as some critics said, because the CP disapproved but because, Neruda explains in the Memoirs, the passionate love for Urrutia he splashed throughout The Captain's Verses would have caused his wife unnecessary and harsh anguish...
...time was also spent collecting sea shells--15,000 of them--and rare books. When the books and shells overflowed his house, Neruda packed them up and delivered them to Chile's National University in Santiago. Anti-communist thundering against the acceptance of the gift consigned them to oblivion; 20 years after he had donated the collection, Neruda related that they never had appeared before the public, perhaps having been returned to the sea and the used bookstores of the world...