Forty years after his death, the body of a poet will be gently disinterred from his grave at Isla Negra, on Chile’s Pacific coast. The hope is that Pablo Neruda’s remains will answer a question that has exercised Chileans ever since his sudden death. Was he murdered by the military regime that killed his old friend, Salvador Allende, on 11 September 1973? Or did he die of natural causes, or of sorrow, just 12 days later?

Neruda’s funeral procession was delayed by Pinochet’s regime for two months; but in the end, it was the only public demonstration the military dictatorship could not suppress. Ten thousand people marched through Santiago, chanting “Neruda presente” – “Neruda is with us” – and linking his name with the dead president and the Popular Unity government he headed.

Neruda was to have been a Communist party presidential candidate in the 1970 elections, but he stood down when his party joined Allende’s coalition. Yet he was a figure of enormous political significance.

He was that rare thing – a public poet, and a great one, held in deep affection by every layer of Chilean society. For the skill that earned him such esteem was his ability to find beauty in ordinary things. The Elementary odes he began to write in the early 50s captured the poetry of the everyday – in old suits, warm woollen socks, onions and the rich juicy tomatoes that grace every Chilean table. Yet at the same time he recorded and responded to historical events with his trademark theatrical rhetoric. At times it led him into ill-timed hymns of praise, like his odes to Stalin. But his politics are not to be found in these “official” expressions, but in his passionate, emotional responses to events that changed his own life.

Much of his early work was intimate and personal. His wonderful 20 poems of love, published in 1924, have convinced several subsequent generations of young women of the urgency of love. And it is a rare Chilean who cannot quote quite large sections of the little book. Later, as he travelled the world in minor diplomatic posts, it is his solitude and the sense of a world in crisis that dominates.

The turning point came in Spain, when the joy he felt in the company of Lorca and Buñuel and others in Madrid was destroyed by Franco’s coup in July 1936.

It was a moment of personal transition. In his poem I Explain a Few Things, he asks a rhetorical question – “Where have all the lilies gone?” His answer is repeated in mounting anger – “Come and see the blood in the streets!” From that moment on, Neruda became a witness to history, his art placed at the service of the struggle for social justice.

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