Poet · 20th-century Latin American
Pablo Neruda
Chilean poet · 1904–1973
Pablo Neruda — pen name of Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto — is the most widely read poet the Spanish language has produced. He published his first book at nineteen and the sensational Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair at twenty; by the end of his life he had written love sonnets, surrealist epics, and the Canto General, a sweeping history of the Americas told from the side of the conquered.
He was also a diplomat, a senator, and a communist who spent a year in hiding and crossed the Andes on horseback to escape arrest. Gabriel García Márquez called him "the greatest poet of the twentieth century in any language." He won the Nobel Prize in 1971 and died twelve days after the 1973 coup that toppled his friend President Salvador Allende.
Neruda's work and its English translations remain under copyright, so we present his signature poems with brief excerpts and links to authorized sources.
Pablo Neruda's most famous poems
These poems are still in copyright, so we can't reprint them — but here's what makes each one matter, and where to read it.
Sonnet XVII (I do not love you…)1959
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,in secret, between the shadow and the soul.
From Cien sonetos de amor (100 Love Sonnets), written for his wife Matilde Urrutia, this is the most quoted love poem of the twentieth century and a wedding-reading staple. Neruda refuses ornamental romance — he loves 'without knowing how, or when, or from where,' so closely that 'your hand upon my chest is my hand.' Its power is its plainness; the famous Stephen Tapscott translation keeps that bare intimacy intact.
Read the full poem →Tonight I Can Write (The Saddest Lines)1924
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
Poem 20 of Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, written when Neruda was barely twenty, and the source of his early fame. The speaker tries to write his way out of a lost love and keeps circling back to the same admission — that he no longer loves her, 'but maybe I love her,' that love is short and forgetting is so long. Its restless, self-correcting refrains made it the template for heartbreak poetry in Spanish.
Read the full poem →If You Forget Me1952
I want you to know one thing.
A love poem with a spine: Neruda promises devotion that grows root by root with his beloved's — but warns, just as evenly, that if her love fails, his will withdraw as cleanly as it came. Written during his exile and his deepening love for Matilde, it balances tenderness against self-respect, which is exactly why readers reach for it at the uncertain stage of a relationship.
Read the full poem →Ode to the Tomato1954
One of Neruda's Odas elementales — odes to onions, socks, salt, a watch — that find epic dignity in ordinary things. The tomato 'invades the kitchen,' splits open, and offers itself with no seeds withheld; the poem is a small manifesto for paying ecstatic attention to the world at hand. The Elemental Odes are the warmest, most accessible doorway into Neruda's vast body of work.
Read the full poem →