The poet with a dream

No other 20th-century poet ever enjoyed such a global reputation as the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda.

He wrote over 50 books of poems, most of which have been translated into many languages and published all over the world.

One of his books, Twenty Poems of Love, sold over a million copies world-wide by 1961.

Neruda won many prizes for his poetry, including the Chile National Prize for Literature, the Mexican Order of the Aztec Eagle, the Stalin Peace Prize, the Joliot Curie medal and the Nobel Prize for Literature.

He was elected senator in the Chilean parliament and stood as presidential candidate in the 1970 Chilean elections.

He was on the executive board of UNESCO and served as Chilean ambassador in Paris, where he is once said to have spent a three-hour meeting with President Pompidou discussing the poetry of Baudelaire.

He enjoyed the friendships of internationally famous writers and attracted the attentions of women everywhere he went.

For all his glittering international success, however, Neruda always said that the most important event in his literary career took place in Santiago's central market in 1937.

The young poet had been asked to speak at a meeting organised by the porters' union to raise money for the Spanish republic.

Neruda, who was not then an accomplished speaker, froze at the sight of his working-class audience.

In panic, he began to read some of his poems, increasingly aware of the stiff and stony silence around him.

When he finished, the audience rose and embraced him with tears and applause as one of their own, a poet who could speak to them in their own language.

As Adam Feinstein observes in this rather breathless new biography, this was a decisive moment in Neruda's life.

Events in Spain, where he was Chilean consul, had already begun to turn him against the obscure, internalised and adolescent gestures of his early work.

From this point on, Neruda's poetry was characterised by the warm, expansive, plain speaking that brought him so many admirers, from the love poems of The Captain's Verses to the political epic The Heights of Macchu Picchu.

A Passion for Life presents a hugely attractive picture of a man who loved life - especially food, wine, poetry, friends and the company of beautiful women.

Neruda was famously dependent on the women in his life, not only for the love that they gave him and the inspiration they provided but because he couldn't tie his own shoe laces.

Among the book's many pleasures is the story of the 2,000 Spanish republican refugees whom Neruda helped escape to Chile and the extraordinary adventure of his own escape from Chile over the mountains on horseback.

For Neruda, there was nothing special about poets, writers or artists. When he was awarded the Nobel Prize, he took the opportunity to argue that a poet is like a baker, who "performs his majestic and humble task of kneading the dough, consigning it to the oven, baking it in golden colours and handing us our daily bread as a duty of fellowship.

"And, if the poet succeeds in achieving this simple awareness, this too will be transformed into an element in an immense activity, the transformation of the conditions which surround mankind, the handing over of mankind's products - bread, truth, wine, dreams.

"If the poet joins this never-completed struggle to extend to the hands of each and all his part of his commitment, his dedication and his tenderness to the daily work of all people, then the poet must take part in the sweat, in the bread, in the wine, in the dream of all humanity"

This was not a pose. It was the key to Neruda's success and to his genius.

It was also the expression of a political commitment that eventually led him to join the Chilean Communist Party in 1945.

All the great communist artists of the 20th-century - Mayakovsky, Paul Robeson, Nazim Hikmet, Brecht, Louis Aragon, Picasso, Paul Eluard, Miguel Hernandez, Victor Jara - shared Neruda's ability to reach over the heads of the arts world to speak to massive numbers of people.

But such a common touch came at a price. Neruda was accused of being a propagandist, a demagogue, a tool of the Kremlin and a traitor to poetry.

Even Feinstein, who is clearly an admirer, insists on calling Neruda a Stalinist.

In Chile, he went into hiding and then into exile after the Communist Party was forced underground in the late 1940s.

The Italian government tried to expel him. He was imprisoned in Argentina.

Even his funeral, which took place two weeks after the Pinochet coup, was disfigured by a heavy military presence.

To the Chilean soldiers who raided his house as he lay dying, Neruda said: "There is only one thing of danger for you here - poetry."

But then Neruda's poetry was always dangerous to his enemies.

• Andy Croft is the author of Comrade Heart, a biography of British communist poet Randall Swingler, published by Manchester University Press.