Pablo Neruda wrote about everything. He wrote love poems so sensual they were banned by the Chilean government. He wrote political manifestos so incendiary that he was exiled and hunted by secret police. He wrote odes to tomatoes, to socks, to a dictionary, to a bar of soap, with the same passionate intensity he brought to the Andes and the suffering of miners. He consumed the world with an appetite that was physical, intellectual, and moral, and he returned it as poetry -- over 3,500 pages of it, in a career that spanned fifty years.

He was born Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto in Parral, Chile, in 1904. His mother died of tuberculosis two months after his birth. His father, a railway worker, disapproved of poetry, so the young Neftali adopted the pen name Pablo Neruda -- borrowed from the Czech writer Jan Neruda -- and published his first collection at nineteen. Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, written when he was barely twenty, made him the most famous poet in the Spanish-speaking world. The poems are frank, physical, and heartbreaking: "I can write the saddest lines tonight," begins poem twenty, and several generations of Latin American lovers have agreed.

But Neruda was never content with love alone. He spent years as a diplomat in Asia -- Burma, Ceylon, Java -- where loneliness and the spectacle of colonial poverty radicalized him. The Spanish Civil War completed his transformation. The murder of his friend Federico Garcia Lorca by fascist forces convinced Neruda that poetry without political commitment was an obscenity. He joined the Communist Party, helped rescue two thousand Spanish refugees on a ship called the Winnipeg, and wrote Spain in My Heart, a collection that welded lyric beauty to political fury.

Canto General, his masterwork, is an epic poem of the Americas -- fifteen thousand lines tracing the continent from geological genesis to modern dictatorship, encompassing Macchu Picchu, conquistadors, rubber tappers, and the dictators who sold their nations to foreign capital. The Heights of Macchu Picchu, the book's centerpiece, is one of the great visionary poems of the twentieth century: a climb from modern alienation to the ancient stone city, where the poet demands that the dead rise and speak through him.

He won the Nobel Prize in 1971. He died on September 23, 1973, twelve days after the military coup that killed his friend Salvador Allende and installed the Pinochet dictatorship. The official cause was cancer. Decades later, investigations suggested he may have been poisoned. His house in Santiago was ransacked by soldiers. "You can cut all the flowers," he had written, "but you cannot keep spring from coming." The soldiers could not answer that.