-Pablo Neruda

The Nobel Prize-winning writer Pablo Neruda is informally recognized as the national poet of his native Chile. Neruda served his country as a diplomat, senator, and advisor to President Salvador Allende. He wrote of his work as a poet, "If my poetry has any meaning at all, it is [its] tendency to stretch out in space, without restrictions, and not be happy to stay in one room. . . . Another poet of this same hemisphere helped me along this road, Walt Whitman, my comrade from Manhattan" (262). Neruda’s most Whitmanesque work is the epic Canto general (1950), which explores the history and geography of South America, effectively translating Whitman’s expansive verse not only into the Spanish language, but also into the socialist activism that Neruda gave his life to support.