Pablo Neruda's Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1942) is one of the cardinalbooks of Spanish American lyric sociability and sentimental education. Though this work has been widely scrutinized and examined -turned from document into "monument"- both its generative process and sociocritical correlative context have not been suffi ciently pondered in order to tackle the mechanisms and procedures that co-construct its second published edition by the poet. From bio-bibliographical, critical, and historical references, this article attemps to synthetically explore the textual, aesthetic and sociocultural strategies articulated in Twenty Love Poems' manufacture, proposing an interpretation that emphasizes the author's self-critical exhaust...