This chapter studies Pablo Neruda’s stay in Buenos Aires in 1933 through an urban perspective. His network is also considered, including Sara Tornú, Norah Lange, Oliverio Girondo, and Federico García Lorca. In a metropolis as cosmopolitan as Buenos Aires was at the beginning of the twentieth century, foreigners could quickly feel at home thanks to the existence of a solid network of sociability that facilitated the integration of the newcomers. For Neruda, who came with the ease that an official position allowed him, it was the possibility of quickly accessing already existing spaces both of expression and recognition, and of sociability (meetings at cafes, private social gatherings, homages). An analysis of Neruda’s urban footprint and his network reveals what a metropolis like Buenos Aires could bring to the intellectuals, especially to Neruda, who was starting then his international career. This urban perspective is thus intended to be a new methodological approach to the study of Pablo Neruda’s works.

In 1934, Pablo Neruda arrived in Barcelona as a Chilean diplomat, and in February 1935, he became the Chilean consul in Madrid. Living in Spain during the Second Republic and the Spanish Civil War marked a turning point in Neruda’s poetry. The Spanish Civil War provoked a historical awakening in Neruda’s poetics – as exemplified in España en el corazón – that paved the way to his ambitious poetic project of Canto general, as he aimed to historicize and politicize his portrayal of Latin American ruins. This essay on how the Spanish Civil War marks Neruda’s poetics examines how the use of the apostrophe throughout España en el corazón reveals the dialogic nature of his poetic project, which intends both to speak to a Republican Spain, with its dead soldiers and poets, and to defy the fascist leaders of the war.

This chapter analyzes Pablo Neruda’s engagement with the English-speaking world. Neruda’s presence made an indelible mark on the cultural spheres in the United States, United Kingdom, and other countries where English is used, notably through his English translations, international travels, and engagement with Anglophone literature. His Nobel Prize in 1971 solidified his status globally, yet his reception in the United States and United Kingdom was affected by Cold War politics. Neruda’s vast literary network, knowledge of Anglophone poetry, and cultural exchanges shaped his impact in the United States and United Kingdom, in particular. Exploring these aspects, supported by the poet’s own memoirs, literary studies, translations, and lasting influence in popular culture, highlights his legacy in the English-speaking realm. Neruda’s intercultural interactions therein emphasize the complex political atmosphere during many major events of the twentieth century in which Neruda played a crucial role and became well-known as both Chile’s greatest poet and a hero for the political Left.

The history of development and structure of various musical compositions and adaptations from 1969 onward of aspects of Pablo Neruda’s Canto general is examined in three exemplary cases: Aparcoa’s “musical poetic work,” first performed in 1970; the Canto general oratorio composed in 1972–80 by Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis; and the “Alturas” (“Heights of Macchu Picchu”) work by Los Jaivas, composed in 1980–81. These musical compositions and adaptations, as well as their performance, broaden out the ways in which new generations interpret and frame Neruda’s life and works. They are also aspects of Neruda’s “cultural afterlife,” while being new creations, as words, within the sphere of music.

Pablo Neruda is a fundamental author in twentieth-century Latin American literature. He is a poet who has been characterized by his commitment to the scope of love, and, at the same time, his political work makes him an intellectual of universal stature. Due to his love poetry, in the Arab world he has been associated with authors such as Nizâr Qabbânî and Mahmûd Darwîsh. This text tries to trace the dialogue that Pablo Neruda has established with the Arab world and how his topics have allowed us to respond symbolically to the issues of our time and the need of certain social and political situations.

This essay analyzes the ambivalent status of objects in Pablo Neruda’s poetry. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s studies of the paradoxes present in the figure of the collector, it traces the way poetic objects in Neruda’s odes appear simultaneously as treasured possessions and utilitarian agents of revolution. Although the portrayal of everyday objects in his later work has been read as propagandistic, it is in their personal link to the poet as collected objects that Neruda’s objects retain the potential for social change Benjamin outlines in the collector.

This introductory chapter examines the life, oeuvre, and contested legacy of Pablo Neruda against the backdrop of contemporary debates about cultural memory, ethics, and artistic value. Beginning with recent episodes of public denunciation in Chile, it situates Neruda within a broader dilemma: how to read and evaluate the work of canonical authors whose biographies reveal profound moral failures. The introduction traces Neruda’s evolution as a poet, diplomat, and political actor, highlighting the breadth of his literary production, from love poetry and avant-garde experimentation to epic, politically engaged verse and elemental odes. Rather than offering hagiography or cancellation, it argues for a contextualized reading that recognizes both the gravity of Neruda’s transgressions and the enduring influence of his work on world literature, politics, and cultural imagination. It frames the volume as a collective effort to read Neruda critically, historically, and globally.

Widely considered to be a quintessential avant-gardist work, Pablo Neruda’s Residencia en la tierra (Residence on Earth, 1925–35) also emerges from historical, political, and personal events that inform and act as reference points throughout the book. Contrary to prevailing interpretations of this classic book of poetry, his battle with poetic language and vanguardist aesthetic stances coexists with a realist aesthetic that highlights the sociohistorical and individual circumstances in which he is immersed. Written mostly overseas, where he served as low-level consul, the combination of the avant-gardist techniques depicts the poetic subject’s alienation from nature and society. Neruda represents the speaker as using a hermetic poetic language as a way of divulging his own estrangement. He begins to overcome this stage thanks to his relationships with women, his increasing political awareness, and his use of nature as positive force in his poetry and life.

Pablo Neruda served as Consul General in Mexico from 1940 to 1943. This was a foundational period on his path toward becoming Latin America’s politically engaged poet par excellence, when his verse and public persona fused around a sharpened commitment to the working class and the struggles against fascism and imperialism. As a haven for left-wing exiles, Mexico City during World War II was a “key node” in global cultural Cold War debates about “the relationship between the intellectual to revolution,” according to Patrick Iber. Neruda found common cause with Mexico’s ideologically engaged muralists, including David Alfaro Siqueiros, and feuded with the more artistically independent poets, principally Octavio Paz (Nobel Prize, 1990). Years later, during an odyssey of political exile from his native Chile, Neruda returned to Mexico. There, in 1950, he published his magnum opus, Canto general, a sweeping epic about Latin America’s revolutionary historical destiny, considered the literary equivalent of Mexican muralism.

Environmental violence is a cycle that preserves global power through the unequal distribution of pollutants while affecting society's most vulnerable ecosystems and populations. This concept poses a series of associations and interdependencies between our economic systems, our power structures, and our relation to nature. However, culture could interact with environmental violence beyond the supplementary role it has assigned in the model of environmental violence following Galtung's typology. Culture has autonomy from the economic practices that pollute the environment and its inhabitants. Under certain conditions, specific praxis and beliefs could dismantle the binary between the classical Marxist concepts of base and superstructure on which the relation between cultural violence and environmental violence, as defined, seems to depend. Therefore, there is a need to reconsider how culture, and our ways of understanding it, are part of the cycle in which our ways of production and consumption are incompatible with the stability of the environment and society. This chapter traces how far culture can, in its autonomy, reproduce the practices associated with environmental violence by analyzing a canonical Latin American poetic discourse: the poem Alturas de Macchu Picchu by Pablo Neruda.

Pablo Neruda’s Macchu Picchu and Octavio Paz’s Tenochtitlán determine how the modern city in twentieth-century Latin American poetry is conceptualized as one shaped by its ruins. This chapter explores how these earlier visions of the city are reconsidered in Latin American poetry from the 1960s and 1970s. It analyzes Rosario Castellanos’ Poesía no eres tú (1948-71) and José Emilio Pacheco’s Irás y no volverás (1973), and how their poems about the Tlatelolco massacre shed light on how Neruda’s Macchu Picchu and Paz’s Tenochtitlán shape modern poetics and their political critique to contemporary violence. Pacheco’s allusions to the icnocuícatl in “La visión de los vencidos” and the use of multiple voices in “Manuscrito de Tlatelolco” link the political ruins of the Mexican state after the massacre to the violent legacy of its colonial past. Castellanos’ defiant response to the massacre in “Memorial de Tlatelolco” problematizes the Aztec historical past and the moral decay of the Mexican state. These poems underscore an ethical and political critique of modernity through a representation of economic, ecological, and political disasters. The urban space in ruins stirs a poetic meditation on the torn self, shaped by a society in crisis.

Pablo Neruda’s Macchu Picchu and Octavio Paz’s Tenochtitlán determine how the modern city in twentieth-century Latin American poetry is conceptualized as one shaped by its ruins. This chapter explores how these earlier visions of the city are reconsidered in Latin American poetry from the 1960s and 1970s. It analyzes Rosario Castellanos’ Poesía no eres tú (1948-71) and José Emilio Pacheco’s Irás y no volverás (1973), and how their poems about the Tlatelolco massacre shed light on how Neruda’s Macchu Picchu and Paz’s Tenochtitlán shape modern poetics and their political critique to contemporary violence. Pacheco’s allusions to the icnocuícatl in “La visión de los vencidos” and the use of multiple voices in “Manuscrito de Tlatelolco” link the political ruins of the Mexican state after the massacre to the violent legacy of its colonial past. Castellanos’ defiant response to the massacre in “Memorial de Tlatelolco” problematizes the Aztec historical past and the moral decay of the Mexican state. These poems underscore an ethical and political critique of modernity through a representation of economic, ecological, and political disasters. The urban space in ruins stirs a poetic meditation on the torn self, shaped by a society in crisis.

Chapter 3 begins with an examination of how anticommunism manifested in Mexico, Guatemala, and Uruguay, highlighting the importance of the National Security Doctrine and the notion of internal enemy, and analyzing the secret police files of Octavio Paz, Frida Kahlo, and Elena Poniatowska, and others, as illustrations of anticommunist paranoia. The examination of anticommunism culminates with analysis of Miguel Ángel Asturias’s collection of stories Week-end in Guatemala and its references to the 1954 coup d’état. The chapter then turns to the Cultural Cold War, using declassified documents from the CIA, to examine the organization of the Continental Cultural Congress (Santiago, 1953), with emphasis on the counter-maneuvering led by the American Embassy in Chile and Pablo Neruda’s role as one of the organizers of the Congress. Finally, it discusses Neruda’s “non-political” poetry at the time, The Captain’s Verses, vis-à-vis his “political” poetry.

This chapter illustrates the major claims of the countershelf through its most frequent occupant, Pablo Neruda. Yet his appearance is different than later Latin American authors, who act primarily as stylistic models. Instead, it is Neruda himself who lives on, reincarnated as a “transmigrant,” who acts as a site of internal contestation between projects that are stylistically, even generically, quite distinct. After Neruda’s Nobel Prize and untimely death in the early 1970s, the painter Vivan Sundaram, poets including Agha Shahid Ali, Marie Cruz Gabriel, and Sirsir Kumar Das, and prose writers like Mohsin Hamid and Ravish Kumar all reincarnate Neruda’s persona as a way of thinking about the contest between aesthetic and political commitment through which their own creative endeavors might become global. Their perception of Neruda’s conflictual commitments emerges out of the real arc of his poetic career. These prompt a reconsideration of one of the most discordant – and yet essential – moments of Neruda’s oeuvre: his reincarnation-themed poetry of the first volume of Residencia en la tierra – written while Neruda worked as a consular functionary in British India from 1927 to 1929.