Pablo de Rokha

Carlos Díaz Loyola, known as Pablo de Rokha, was born on October 17, 1894, in Licantén. Alongside Gabriela Mistral, Vicente Huidobro, and Pablo Neruda (with whom he maintained an epic, forty-year literary blood feud), De Rokha was one of the four foundational pillars of 20th-century Chilean poetry.

His 1922 monumental book Los gemidos (The Groans) was an explosive, uninhibited eruption of surrealist, philosophical, and social grief. A fierce communist who sold his own books out of a suitcase across the dusty towns of Chile, his 1961 elegy Canto del macho anciano mourned his beloved poetess-wife Winétt de Rokha. Awarded the National Prize for Literature in 1965, he took his life with a gun gifted by David Alfaro Siqueiros in 1968.