Though [Paz's] account of modern poetry is deliberately selective [in Children of the Mire], there are many passages which a more systematic historian of literature might envy. As a Latin American poet, he writes with particular authority of the relation of modernismo to European romanticism and of the extent to which positivism, for nineteenth-century Latin American writers, implied an intellectual crisis similar in its terms, if not in its scope, to that of the Enlightenment in Europe. There are signs, too, that Paz is continuing to adjust his view of the romantic tradition: thus, his long-standing interest in Nerval now takes him back more profoundly than before to the German romantics, and in particular to Jean Paul Richter, the earliest proponent of the "death of God." Whether he is speaking of intellectuals like Marx and Fourier (one of the few writers, for Paz, in whom the possibilities of poetic thought and revolutionary thought coincide), or of the differences between Eliot and Pound, his judgments are invariably accurate and often memorable. (pp. 86-7)

Occasionally, what might have been a genuine insight remains at the level of a bright idea, as when he speaks of an "intimate relation" between Protestantism and romanticism, or of the possible link between accentual versification and analogical vision. More seriously, perhaps, there are moments at which the pattern is made to seem a little too neat, as when certain phenomena are said to be linked by a "contrary dialectic" or are described as "metaphors" of one another. Such verbal shortcuts are particularly frustrating in a writer of Paz's intelligence, since one inevitably feels them to be the result of overcompression, rather than of any basic failure of thought.

Having said this, one can only admire the scope and clarity of the rest. The final sections, in particular, contain some of Paz's most persuasive observations on the situation of the contemporary artist. Roughly, what he is saying here is that the whole conception of the avant-garde is becoming outdated, since, as he puts it, "modern art is beginning to lose its powers of negation" …; or, in terms which deliberately echo the theme of the early chapters, "the present has become critical of the future and is beginning to displace it."… Thus poetry, like politics and ethics, is being driven back on the present, though the very idea of the present has by now taken on the sense of a return to the beginning. Where poetry is concerned, this means a return to the voice of language itself, to the "founding word," which is more permanent and less fortuitous than the utterance of the poet as individual.

These are difficult speculations, though all the more admirable since they offer no easy solutions. Yet, if Paz's account of modern poetry often has more of the quality of a fable than of objective history, his own recent poetic practice is there to provide the necessary body to his theories. Both as a profession of faith and as a subtle commentary on some of the most striking tendencies in the poetry of the last two hundred years, this is an impressive book, and one which could only have been written by a major poet. (p. 87)