Chilean poet Pablo Neruda was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971. His particular passion is love poetry. In his early poetry, he was given to the use of nature imagery and wrote in a personal way characterized by a melancholy view of the world and a preoccupation with unrequited love. In later works, he moved more into surrealism, employing a freer style and surreal imagery. One of his most celebrated works is also the culmination of his move into surrealism--Residence on Earth in 1933. The poems in this work are anguished and filled with despair, structured on surreal images of nature. The attitude expressed in the poems may have been the result of the poet's own sense of loneliness at the time.
Surrealism is a movement in literature and in the arts which began with a manifesto. The movement originated in France in the 1920s:
The surrealists attempted to express in art and literature the workings of the unconscious mind and to synthesize these workings with the conscious mind. The surrealist allows his work to develop non-logically (rather than illogically) so that the results represent the operations of the unconscious (Cuddon 936).
Surrealism developed first as a means of artistic expression and was described by manifestoes from Salvador Dali and others. The concepts underlying surrealism existed in the atmosphere of the time, and the period after World War I saw a new poetry using surrealist principles. Among the poets of the time were Breton, Paul Eluard, and Louis Aragon. The Dada movement had been important during and after the war, and these new poets and artists would transform the dying Dada movement into Surrealism, taking what they valued from the earlier movement and moving the whole toward a somewhat different mode of expression (Rubin 60-61).
Surrealism in literature was a revolution against all kinds of formal literary expression, an attempt to turn away from all previous literary m...