Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) is one of Latin America’s best known poets, and perhaps its most controversial. He is adored by readers for the passionate love lyrics penned during his early years in his native Chile, and respected by fellow poets and literary critics for the dark, hypnotic verses he composed during his later, lonely years as a diplomat based in the Far East. Pablo Neruda paints a fascinating, if not always flattering, picture of one of the most prodigiously gifted but also one of the most equivocal literary figures of the twentieth century.