Nicanor Segundo Parra Sandoval was born on Sept. 15, 1914, in San Fabián de Alico, in southern Chile, one of nine children of Nicanor Parra, a schoolteacher and musician, and Rosa Clarisa Sandoval Navarrete, a dressmaker. The couple emphasized culture, and several of their children became respected artists, notably the folk singer Violeta Parra, who committed suicide in 1967.

Mr. Parra published his first book, “Singer Without a Name,” a year before he graduated from the University of Chile in 1938, with degrees in mathematics and physics. He later studied mechanics at Brown University in Providence, R.I., and cosmology at the University of Oxford in England. He taught theoretical physics at the University of Chile for decades.

“I do physics in order to earn my living, and I do poetry in order to keep alive,” he told The Times in 1968.

In 1963, he spent six months in the Soviet Union translating the work of several Soviet poets into Spanish, but he declined to join the Communist Party. For a time he was a darling of leftists in the United States — though not in Chile, as he related in 1971, when he attended a birthday party for Bobby Seale, the Black Panther leader.

Introduced by Jerry Rubin, the radical activist, as “Chile’s best poet,” Mr. Parra, then 57, said he was viewed with suspicion by many Communists in Chile because of an episode in Washington in 1970.

“I and some other foreign poets read at the Library of Congress,” he recalled. “Afterward, we were taken to a reception at the White House and, before I knew it, I was shaking hands with Mrs. Nixon. Photographs of that appeared all over Latin America, and suddenly my old friends were very cold. I had to cancel a trip to Cuba. It is still very embarrassing.”