Chilean authorities will exhume the body of poet Pablo Neruda as part of an investigation into his 1973 death, a foundation said Friday.

Neruda is buried alongside his wife, Matilde Urrutia, in Isla Negra, a coastal area in central Chile.

He died on September 23, 1973, just 12 days after a right-wing military coup ousted socialist President Salvador Allende.

"We hope that the exam will help to clarify doubts that might exist with respect to the poet's death," the Pablo Neruda Foundation said in a statement.

It said a date for the exhumation has not been set.

The Nobel Prize-winning poet's death certificate says he died of prostate cancer, but Neruda's former chauffeur alleges that he was killed by an injection in the clinic where he was undergoing treatment, according to Chile's Communist Party, which called for Neruda to be exhumed.

Neruda, a Communist Party member, was also a lawmaker and served as Chile's ambassador to France.

Internationally, he is best known for his writing.

Neruda received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971 "for a poetry that with the action of an elemental force brings alive a continent's destiny and dreams."

The investigation into his death follows another high-profile exhumation.