Pablo Neruda was a great love poet. Love poems form the core of his abundant output and he wrote his love poems from the start to the end of his career as a poet. In 1971 he told a Mexican interviewer that love was his main theme: ‘I have written ten books about love.’ To the next question about politics, he denied that it was essential to his poetry: ‘What is essential? It is to discover what one truly feels at every moment of life.’ This ambition can be located at the very start of Neruda's career as a poet when, in his poem ‘Sensación autobiográfica’ [Autobiographic sensation], he asserted his version of that male life-ambition of planting a tree, writing a book and having a child with a woman: ‘Haber amado a una mujer y haber escrito / un libro’ [To have loved a woman and to have written a book]. In 1965 he told Mario Vargas Llosa that his advice to a young poet was to ‘continue writing poems to his lover’, for poetry begins as communication between lovers. Throughout this Companion, I will argue that the lover as destinee of a poem creates the illusion of intimacy for later readers. He dedicated a copy of his Cien sonetos de amor to Vargas Llosa's wife so that the poems could be read aloud to her. A secondary underpinning of this book is how Neruda's poetry stresses the need to voice a poem. Voice enriches text, emotionalises and humanises it.

Neruda was also a love poet in a less Romantic mode, with poems dealing with love for his patria, for his continent, its fauna and flora and geology; he wrote love poems about his fellow poets, his beloved Chileans and all working-class Latin Americans. He also celebrated, as a kind of tepid love poem, the simple things of life. Despite, then, the love poems to his party, to fellow communists and friends, it is essentially as a Romantic love poet that he survives and will be read and learnt by heart. The other side of the coin is that he is also a fierce hater and was involved, poetically and biographically, in countless scandals and feuds.