Twenty love poems and a song of despair

Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair is one of the most celebrated works by Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Published in June 1924, this poetry collection catapulted its author to fame at just 19 years old, and it remains one of the most renowned literary works of the 20th century in the Spanish language. Boldly metaphorical and sensual, this collection juxtaposes youthful passion with the desolation of heartbreak. Drawn from the poet's most intimate and personal connections, the poems blend eroticism and the natural world with the influence of expressionism and the poet's genius. Neruda himself noted that Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair is the conscious result of replacing poetic ambition and the grand eloquence that sought to encompass the mysteries of man and the universe with a new approach. The vocabulary is generally simple, though it belongs to the realm of conventional literary language since Romanticism and Modernism.