page_title: Nicanor Parra
section_title: Life
hierarchical_section_title: Nicanor Parra / Life
caption_attribution_description: Español: Nicanor Parra, escritor chileno, hacia 1935.
context_page_description: Nicanor Segundo Parra Sandoval was a Chilean poet and physicist. He is considered one of the most influential poets in the Spanish language of the 20th century, often compared with Pablo Neruda. Parra described himself as an "anti-poet," due to his distaste for standard poetic pomp and function; after recitations he would exclaim "Me retracto de todo lo dicho".
context_section_description: Parra, the son of a schoolteacher, was born in 1914 in San Fabián de Alico, near Chillán, in Chile. He came from the artistically prolific Parra family of performers, musicians, artists, and writers. His sister, Violeta Parra, was a folk singer, as was his brother Roberto Parra Sandoval.
  In 1933, he entered the Instituto Pedagógico of the University of Chile, where he qualified as a teacher of mathematics and physics in 1938, one year after the publication of his first book, Cancionero sin Nombre. After teaching in Chilean secondary schools, in 1943 he enrolled in Brown University in the United States to study physics. In 1948, he attended Oxford University to study cosmology. He returned to Chile as a professor at the Universidad de Chile in 1952. Parra served as a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Chile from 1952 to 1991, and was a visiting professor at Louisiana State University, New York University, and Yale University. He read his poetry in England, France, Russia, Mexico, Cuba, and the United States. He published dozens of books.
  His collection Poemas y Antipoemas (1954) is a classic of Latin American literature, one of the most influential Spanish poetry collections of the twentieth century. It is cited as an inspiration by American Beat writers such as Allen Ginsberg.
  A fictionalized version of Parra appeared in Alejandro Jodorowsky's autobiographical film Endless Poetry (2016).
caption: Parra in 1935
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