Ampliare

I cannot say that Pablo Neruda is the best poet of Chile, or the best Chilean of all the poets, but he is the most recognized, translated and read in and out of this southern nation, a thin strip of land meandering  the Pacific Ocean.
It has been said and written so much about him, also member of the Chilean Communist Party, that I do not want to be too repetitive.
I was about 17 when I approached the poet that Garcia Marquez considered the best in all languages. And it was, as I believe happened to most of my generation, one afternoon when I was attracted to a girl from school and did not know what was going to say to her.
From his celebrated and controversial 20 poemas de amor y una canción desesperada, written at the age of 24, Neruda became the champion of the verse for young girls, who fell sleepy to the beat of those neo-romantic verses that sounded like gunshots of lilies in their ears.
Neruda received the Nobel Prize for Literature on 21 October 1971. His nomination for the presidency of Chile was yielded to his friend Salvador Allende, in a gesture that went down in history as a great note of gratitude and respect for his countryman, that one the poet felt to be better prepared for such a responsibility.
He addressed several issues. Social policy was one of them, and he did it without easily falling into the networks of the pamphlet, without being manipulated by the impulses of the transitional junctures of politics.
One of the greatest achievements of Neruda was that he built accessible poems without losing the pulse of an aesthetic that was able to evolve over the years in the constant coming and going from dissimilar geographies. He was always next to the popular struggles, living with the yearning for justice and freedom, to which the poet knew how to sing with its authentic emancipatory vocation.
Beyond searching for influences, it requires that we dedicate to Neruda our best songs of intimacy and respect. It is a demonized lyric, without any doubt. We became less shy in front of the female conquest and his poems have contributed in the five continents to the reunion of dispersed young couples and to calming juvenile disenchantments.