Biography & Background

At first, I thought that Pablo Neruda  only wrote love poems, and I heard a ballad of one of his poems for a listening test in AP Spanish - I think it was "Me Gustas Cuando Callas" or "I like for you to be still". Anyways, it was beautiful, as well as the background music accompanying it.
After doing a bit of research about him, I never knew that he was also a significant political figure as a diplomat and as a communist. He was also friends with other famous Hispanic literary figures such as Gabriela Mistral, another Chilean poet, and Federico Garcia Lorca, a Spanish playwright. Mistral, who was a teacher at a local girl's school when Neruda was a boy, recognized Neruda's talent and encouraged him to write poems, unlike his father. "Pablo Neruda" was first a pseudonym for the young poet, Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto, to hide his identity from his father, choosing the name Neruda in memory of the Czechoslovak poet Jan Neruda. Later, he legally changed his name to Pablo Neruda.

What is also surprising is that one of the first books that Neruda published is the most famous of all his works: Veinte poemas de amor y una cancion desesperada, or Twenty Poems of Love and a Song of Despair.
As quoted from Poetry Foundation.org: "While other Latin American poets of the time used sexually explicit imagery, Neruda was the first to win popular acceptance for his presentation. Mixing memories of his love affairs with memories of the wilderness of southern Chile, he creates a poetic sequence that not only describes a physical liaison, but also evokes the sense of displacement that Neruda felt in leaving the wilderness for the city. 'Traditionally,' stated Rene de Costa in The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, 'love poetry has equated woman with nature. Neruda took this established mode of comparison and raised it to a cosmic level, making woman into a veritable force of the universe.'"

A a fun fact that I found was that Neruda always wrote in green ink because it was the color that he equated with hope, but I'm not entirely sure if this is true because I saw it on wikipedia without a reference link...

A brief biography of Pablo Neruda can be found here: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1971/neruda-bio.html
And a more thorough one here:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/pablo-neruda