SELECTED POEMS: NERUDA - Poetry

So commented Pablo Neruda in his acceptance speech as the Chilean Communist Party Candidate for the presidency in 1969, for in his poety Neruda sought to record his own experiences as directly as possible. His second collection of poems, Veinte Poemas de Amor, concerned with the discovery of woman and of the universe, brought him national recognition when he was barely twenty. But it was the Spanish Civil War and its ordinary atrocities, as much as the death of Lorca and the personal injustice of losing his post as consul, that proved the catalyst for Neruda's drive to create a poetry for and of the poeople. As the poet, historian of 'My thin country', he envisages to those points, in his own time and in our past, when men and woman began to separate themselves from nature and make their imprint on the world and like the pioneering railway builders in the giant forestlands of Chile where he grew up, take their destiny into their own hands.