Pablo Neruda was the pen name of the Chilean writer and communist politician Ricardo Eliecer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto, born in Chile on July 12, 1904. Garcia Marquez called him “the greatest poet of the 20th century”. Neruda was accomplished in a wide variety of styles, ranging from erotically charged love poems, surrealist poems, historical epics, and overtly political manifestos. Some of Neruda’s most beloved poems are his “Odes to Common Things”. In 1971, Neruda was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature after several years of being overlooked for his political activism. He died of heart failure on September 23, 1973, twelve days after Augusto Pinochet’s coup d’état.

He writes optimistic, beautiful and unpretentious poetry.
I love “elemental odes”