Sonnet LXXXIX
By the time Pablo Neruda wroteOne Hundred
Love Sonnetsfor Matilde Urrutia in 1959, he was
already a giant figure on the world stage of politics
and the arts. In his political career, he had met
Nehru, Castro, Che Guevara, Stalin, and Mao
Tse-Tung. In the world of art, he knew Octavio
Paz, Picasso, Garcı ́a Lorca, Diego Rivera, and
Gabriel Garcı ́aMa ́rquez. He had lived through
the Spanish Civil War, World War I and World
War II, and had been exiled from his country as a
communist. Though fifty-five, he could still write
passionate poems to the woman who would stand
beside him for the last years of his life, up until his
dramatic death during Chile’s military coup in- Thousands turned out in the streets for his
funeral to mourn their beloved poet, despite the
ban by the dictator who destroyed Neruda’s life-
time of hope and work for the people of Chile.
Neruda was that unusual phenomenon, a
popular and literary writer at the same time. The
Chilean man in the street or in the mines could
recite Neruda’s poems, and at the same time, the
poets of the world took note of his constant inno-
vations in verse. He wrote over thirty books of
poetry, won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and
served his country as diplomat, senator, and pres-
idential candidate. He was the South American
Walt Whitman in his magnetic personality and
poetic ability to unify his continent’s history in
Canto general(1950). Some critics separate Neru-
da’s poetry into categories such as political or
romantic, butOne Hundred Love Sonnetscontains
258
PABLO NERUDA
1959