For example, while Gabriela Mistral was head teacher at the Girls’ High School in Temuco, Chile, and already recognized as an outstanding poet, a teenage boy came to her with his own poems, asking for her opinion.
[3] In contrast to this tenuous link, the relationship between Huidobro, De Rokha and Neruda was one of the most persistent rivalries in Chilean cultural history.
The other three poets’ links with the Communist party was a reflection of the political climate at the time and their desire to fight for the social change in Chile.
Neruda reacted to his peers’ criticism by writing a text called "Aquí estoy" (Here I am), published in Paris in 1938, where he denounced their animosity and vilification.
Despite this criticism, Neruda is recognized as one of the twenty six authors that make up the Western canon of literature, along with Shakespeare, Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes, Michel de Montaigne, Molière, Milton, Samuel Johnson, Goethe, Wordsworth, Jane Austen, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Tolstoy, Ibsen, Freud, Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, Borges, Neruda, Fernando Pessoa, Samuel Beckett.