Pablo Neruda became the great poet of the oppressed peoples of the earth.

Twenty previously-unknown poems by Chile’s Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda have been discovered among sheaves of manuscripts in boxes and will be published this year.

The poems were stumbled upon when the Pablo Neruda Foundation was carrying out a rigorous cataloguing of the poet’s manuscripts. They have been verified as being Neruda’s work after being examined by experts, the foundation said.

Six of the poems relate to the theme of love and the others have different themes and date from 1956 onwards.

“It has not been possible to date all these poems, because they don’t all carry the date on which they were written; the poet only dated them in some cases,” said Dario Oses, director of the foundation’s library.

Neruda, one of Latin America’s most admired and influential writers, died in September 1973. Famed for both his passionate love poems and staunch communist views, he is best known for his collection Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, published in 1924.