Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (Spanish: Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada) is a poetry collection by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda.

Although the poems draw inspiration from Neruda's real-life love experiences as a young man, the book is not solely dedicated to a single lover.

The poet skillfully blends the physical characteristics of various women from his youth to create an ethereal representation of the beloved, which does not correspond to any specific person but rather embodies a purely poetic idea of his object of affection.

Neruda himself acknowledged that Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair deliberately replaced grandiose poetic ambition and lofty eloquence, which sought to encapsulate the mysteries of humanity and the universe, with a new approach.

Through this book, Neruda achieves an ideal form of communication with the reader while simultaneously maintaining a complex and demanding elaboration that encompasses both the values of the immediate tradition and the new aspects of contemporary poetry emerging at the time of its composition.