If Pablo Neruda was the poet of Chile's ocean, then Gonzalo Rojas, who has died aged 93, was the writer of its land. While Neruda produced many volumes, Rojas published sparingly in a career spanning seven decades. His collected works, Metamorfosis de lo Mismo (Metamorphosis of the Same) came out in one volume, in Spain, in 2000.
His attachment to the earth of Chile came initially from his father, a coalminer in the south of the country. Gonzalo was born in the small town of Lebu, the seventh of eight children. His father died when he was four, and his mother moved to the city of Concepción, where he was sent to a school run by German Jesuits. "They knew what they were doing," he recalled – ever afterwards, he remained influenced by the German romantic poets and the German language.
Rojas said his own attraction to poetry was born one night when his brother called out "re-lam-pa-go" (lightning) during a storm, and he realised how beautiful words could be. Added to that, a childhood stutter made him intensely aware of the power of language.
Rojas published his first poem aged 17, but it was not until he was 30, in 1948, that his first volume, La Miseria del Hombre (The Misery of Man), appeared. The imagery of his early verses was influenced by surrealism, although he always insisted: "I learn- ed more from the miners of Chile than from surrealism."
He continued to publish through the 1950s and 1960s, with volumes such as Contra la Muerte (Against Death, 1964). The opening lines of the titular poem give a good idea of his poetic style:
I tear out the visions
I tear out my eyes every day
I will not and cannot
see men die each day
I prefer to be of stone
to be in darkness
than to tolerate the disgust
of going soft inside
of smiling right and left
and getting on with business
Rojas taught Spanish literature at the universities of Concepción and Valparaiso. His students included Chile's current president, Sebastián Piñera. In the 1960s, Rojas was close friends with another president, Salvador Allende, even though he never joined either Allende's Socialist party or the Chilean communists. He once drily commented: "I would probably have been better known if I had joined the Communist party, but better known for what?"
Thanks to his links with Allende, he was given a diplomatic post in China and then in Cuba. He was about to take up his position as ambassador in Havana when General Augusto Pinochet staged his coup in Chile in 1973 and overthrew Allende. Rojas was stripped of his nationality, and banned from returning.
His attachment to Germany led him to Rostock, in the German Democratic Republic. He was offered a professorship at Rostock University, but, according to him, he was never allowed to teach because of doubts about whether he was politically "reliable". He put his feelings about these years in Domicilio en el Báltico (Domicile in the Baltic). He returned to Chile in 1979, despite Pinochet's continuing rule. By now Rojas's politics had become closer to the kind of critical liberalism espoused by his friend, the influential Mexican poet Octavio Paz.
He taught in Chile and at several universities in the US, while continuing to publish volumes of intense, sensual poems, including Transtierro (1979) and Materia de Testamento (Material for a Testament, 1988). He settled in the southern city of Chillán and was awarded Chile's national poetry prize in 2002 and, in 2003, the prestigious Cervantes prize.
He was married three times and is survived by his sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo.