Bencivenga, Jim, Review in The Christian Science Monitor, April 22, 1999, p. 21.

This reviewer finds Nerudas poems in Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair to be focused on a speaker who is like "Narcissus turning away from his image in the pool only to find it wherever he looks."

Review in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 240, No. 45, November 8, 1993, p. 59.

This reviewer states that in Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair "Neruda charts the oceanic movements of passion, repeatedly summoning imagery of the sea and weather."