El Amor

Great part of Neruda's fame and influence has been achieved because of his love poetry. 

Neruda is often called the "poet of love" and his poems and famous phrases definitely do justice to this nickname that has been given to him. Some of Neruda's most intense love poems include both sensual and physical attractions to women (or to a woman) as well as the emotional and mental connection that truly makes two people bond. 

A very famous love poem is "Body of a Woman". This poem represents the physical attraction that Neruda felt towards a "woman" he was apparently in love with. However, many suppositions have arisen as to which woman was his muse. Some options include some of his wives or even his lovers, for he was indeed a man of the ladies, but Neruda confessed in an interview that indeed he loves one woman--without mentioning her name-- and he also stated that he simply loves the body of a woman. That magical, curvilineal statue that makes women goddess like. Despite the Catholic barriers in Chile, Neruda dared to write openly about the private parts of a woman's body and about loving sexually maybe even outside of marriage.

However, even though Neruda is a complete advocate of love and passion, his poetry also reflects that just like love can be a heaven for lovers, it can also become hell when one stops feeling the same way. Through many of his despair poems, he shows the loss that he went through in his life: in losing wives, lovers, and ultimately the biggest love of his life--his daughter. 

One of his most famous despair poems "Tonight I can write the Saddest Lines" suggests how he felt when he lost a woman that he evidently loved very much. "Sometimes she loved me too." Neruda states. The following image is from that poem, and it contains one of his most remarkable and famous lines:

With the poetry of love, loss, despair, sensuality, and beyond, Neruda reflects the deepest and even the darkest and most secret human values and shows us what is like to embrace our own human nature.