"The greatest poet of the twentieth century - in any language." - Gabriel Garcia Marquez Neruda wrote the first volume of Residence on Earth in 1933 during his years in the Far East, a time of great loneliness and personal crisis for him. Volume two was inspired by his time in Spain and friendship with Federico Garcia Lorca, while in volume three Neruda finds his role as the monumental poet of the people. Residence on Earth is Pablo Neruda's greatest achievement, a poetry written to speak of everyday life directly to the reader, where Neruda found his public voice and espoused his political faith that solutions could be found to injustice and misery. Residence on Earth is Neruda's own poetic autobiography, his journey from modernism and surrealism to a poetic realism and commitment that makes him "the people's poet". Neruda's first great work and the expression of his mature voice, political, engaged and committed where Neruda speaks not only for the victims of repression such as his friend and fellow poet, Frederico Garcia Lorca, but for entire continents. The spontaneity and directness of Neruda's voice finds its great subject in Residence on Earth, as he became "the people's poet" addressing the reader with poems that are realistic and refer to the or-dinary, exalting the basic things of existence while speaking for a politically committed vision of a reformed world.