Selected Poems, Pablo Neruda, 1970

Selected Poems Review

About

Pablo Neruda’s Selected Poems gathers the work of one of the most passionate and politically conscious poets of the 20th century. Written across decades—from surreal early works to mature odes—these poems reveal a man equally in love with the world’s sensual detail and its moral weight. Neruda’s poetry moves from private desire to collective struggle, from the intimacy of love to the vastness of oceans and nations. It’s both personal diary and human testament.

Overview

This collection showcases Neruda’s evolution: the dreamlike imagery of Residencia en la Tierra, the erotic fire of Twenty Love Poems, and the grounded gratitude of his later odes. His language—rich, tactile, and musical—makes the ordinary luminous. Whether describing a tomato or a revolution, Neruda writes with equal reverence. The selection captures his contradictions: sensual and political, solitary and universal, wounded and celebratory.

Summary

(light spoilers) Early poems immerse readers in surreal imagery—forests of memory, rivers of desire—while later ones strip the style to plain-spoken awe. The love poems are timeless in their vulnerability: devotion tinged with loss. His odes to common things—salt, bread, socks—find the sacred in the everyday. Political poems honor workers, resist injustice, and mourn oppression, transforming poetry into resistance. By the end, Neruda’s voice expands to embrace all of life: flawed, fleeting, and astonishingly alive.

Key Themes / Main Ideas

• Love and loss — intimacy as revolution.
• Nature and matter — everything sacred in the material world.
• Politics and humanity — empathy as action.
• Transformation — personal growth mirrored in poetic evolution.
• Gratitude — art as praise for existence itself.

Strengths and Weaknesses

• Strengths — Language that breathes; emotion without artifice.
• Strengths — Range of tone—from sensual to solemn—without losing coherence.
• Weaknesses — Translations vary in rhythm and tone.
• Weaknesses — His romanticism can verge on excess, but sincerity sustains it.

Reviewed with focus on themes, audience, and takeaways — Pablo Neruda