Great poet except for this below. Having a role in the assasination of Trotsky. And being awarded the Stalin Peace Prize.
http://eserver.org/clogic/2002/dawes.html Realism, Surrealism, Socialist Realism and Neruda's "Guided Spontaneity"*
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/marxism2.html
> ...Here's a part of a poem on the death of Stalin in 1953 by the Chilean
> Communist poet Pablo Neruda. (It is usually, but not always, omitted from
> editions of Neruda's collected poems.)
To be men! That is the Stalinist law! -We must learn from Stalin his sincere intensity his concrete clarity ...Stalin is the moon, the maturity of man and the peoples. Stalinists, Let us bear this title with pride. ...Stalinist workers, clerks, women take care of this day! The light has not vanished. the fire has not disappeared, there is only the growth of light, bread, fire and hope in Stalin's invincible time! ...In recent years the dove, Peace, the wandering persecuted rose, found herself in his shoulders and Stalin, the giant one, carried her at the heights of his forehead, ...A wave beats against the stones of the shore. But Malenkov will continue his work.
...We will sail there together, a poet is a fisher- man and the sea to the distant Captain who when entering into death left to all the peo- ples as a legacy, his life.
Neruda's own loyalty to Stalin had motivated him, while a Chilean consul, to give false Chilean passports to a team sent to Mexico to assassinate Leon Trotsky in 1940, who had been a rival of Stalin in the Soviet Union. (That attempt was repelled by Trotsky's guards.) He also gave a Chilean passport to the Mexican painter David Siquieros so he could flee the country while on bail after taking part in an attack on Trotsky's residence
-- Michael Pugliese