~ finding the right voice ~
Published in June 1924, the collection launched its author to fame at just 19 years of age and is 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 grief. Drawn from the poet's most intimate and personal connections, the poems combine 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 grand eloquence that sought to encompass the mysteries of man and the universe with a new mode. The vocabulary is generally simple, although it belongs to the domain of conventional literary language since Romanticism and Modernism.