In spite of being a "world" poet, as glossily cosmopolitan as they come, [Octavio Paz] remains programmatically Mexican, not to say pre-Columbian; and in spite of being contemporary, so abreast of the very latest movements that he suffers, not gladly, the tag "post-avant-garde," he is still acutely conscious of belonging to his own generation, far from a young one now…. (p. 5)

A Mexican, but what is a Mexican?… The question is not a simple one for Señor Paz himself, and his many prose works on all sorts of subjects, and many of his poems too, are indirectly or directly about it. (p. 7)

A great part of his being a Mexican poet is a variable and ambivalent relation to Spain and her literature, quite like our relation to England and her literature. As we have tended to loosen the colonial relation by adopting other cultures than England's for our literary uses …, Mexico, or rather Central America, has tended to adopt other cultures as counterpoises to Spain, mainly the French…. [For] Paz the French master is not a contemporary … but, of all people, Mallarmé, and this in spite of Paz's affinities with contemporary French surrealism and his friendship with André Breton. (pp. 7-8)

The connection or, as Paz would say, the "correspondence," is surprisingly plain if you take Mallarmé in what has become his essential aspect, his use or expression of Nothingness. The full insistence on that aspect—on Un Coup de Dés, as against the Symbolist sumptuosities of L'Après-Midi d'un Faune or the syntactical fancy-work of such poems as the sonnet on Poe's tomb, which were Mallarmé in my youth—probably dates from about 1959, when Maurice Blanchot, himself a great specialist and virtuoso in Nothingness, published his essay on Mallarmé in a collection entitled, if you please, Le Livre à Venir. It is true that in 1939 Raymond Queneau had already invented the memorable and rather wicked formulation: la mallarmachine à faire le vide, but I imagine that was only a gag in passing, not a decisive reinterpretation.

Though Nothingness as a concept is prevalent enough in France, especially since Sartre's Being and Nothingness, and nihilism as an attitude is now, understandably, common among young Frenchmen, a strong sense of Nothingness as something substantial is far more Spanish than it is French. You can pretty well manipulate le néant, but nada gives no ground. As Spanish, it is to a degree Mexican, and to a high degree if you associate it closely with death…. In spite of the historical anomaly, which is not really an anomaly if you reject, as Paz does, "linear" history in favor of history as multidimensional and discontinuous, Mallarmé "corresponds" to French, Spanish, and Mexican realities simultaneously and even—if you follow Blanchot and not Queneau—to future poetry. Paz's poem Blanco, which uses blanks or white spaces in the manner of Mallarmé, looks like a supercivilized little stunt, and it is that, but it is much more real and weighty than that, to him, and to a contemporary Hispanic reader. It stands firmly on one of the prime intuitions of that culture and is furthermore backed, not so much by a Mallarmé revival, as by modern philosophy, which Paz takes as seriously, and as personally, as an earlier Mexican might take theology.

The Hispanic mind, however, loves to go by pairs of opposites, whether the opposites conflict, complement each other, alternate, or interact. Nothingness and its modes, such as death, emptiness, and silence, have to be countered with Being and its modes, such as life, plenitude, and sound, and all those things are usually made emphatic, peremptory, unmodulated. So that that other side of Mallarmé, his great richness and intricacy, is also to the Mexican purpose. Those qualities are certainly characteristic of Octavio Paz's mind, while he can also be, naturally simplicity itself. In Blanco they are at an extreme, in the dense interlocked passages, which counter the open-work passages on a ground of emptiness. (pp. 8-9)

Repleteness or congestion is a quality of most of his own work, poetry or prose. He may have got it from—or been confirmed in it by—the muralists [Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros],… but he seems to have felt they were old-fashioned political illustrators, and a more congenial source would have been the Baroque façades of Mexican churches and, still more, Aztec sculpture. One of his handsomest poems, "Sun Stone," is a verbal version of the circular Aztec calendar stone, containing as many lines as that calendar has days: 584. The initial scheme is no doubt trivial, at best ritual, but the congestion of the poetic design, like that of the stone, has a rather terrifying force…. [He] can take on far more of the Occult, East and West, come Boddhisatvas, Boehme, or Blavatsky, without being for an instant (or for more than one ecstatic instant) befuddled by it all, than one would think possible. And he has the irrationalities of Surrealism quite in his pocket. And the devotional intellectualism of a Calderón or a Hopkins. The man is an orchestra. (p. 10)

Moving to and fro among the contrarieties of his own mind, those of his country, and those of his lifetime, political and artistic, he still keeps—or instantly recovers—his head and his balance. He goes at everything with a passion, with a voracity of interest, which threatens to carry him away, but he regularly plays a subject against its opposite—Duchamp against Picasso, Pound and Eliot against the European moderns of the same time, or against each other—and that keeps it all steady as well as dramatic. Incidentally, or alternately, he is excellent at elaborating finer distinctions than polar contrast. (pp. 11-12)

In The Bow and the Lyre, a vast and swarming panorama of the poetry of the world as he, a participant, sees it or lives in it, the "savage" or visionary figures, such as Blake or Hölderlin or Rimbaud or Lautréamont loom larger than usual. I see them smaller, but a reader more in sympathy with current poetry of the bardic and prophetic sort may feel, with joy, that Paz has got everything exactly in scale and place at last. I do, though intermittently, and when I do not I am still delighted with the beautifully conducted argument, in thought and style.

One disturbance, for me, comes in his handling of Greek epic and tragedy. Obviously, nobody can have gone through all the scholarship and speculation on those highly unsettled subjects, and if some prodigy had done so, exhaustively, there would be nothing left of his mind to make a generality with. Even the decently informed scholar, if he wants to treat Greek epic and tragedy as single and distinct genres—they are in fact maddeningly multiple and mixed—has to abstract and simplify in a very high-handed way…. At any rate, once he has set up his philosophical formulations of Greek epic and tragedy, he uses them with wonderful dexterity and imagination to distinguish other kinds of epic, the novel, and other kinds of tragedy, Elizabethan, French, and Seventeenth-Century Spanish. And so it goes, through a formidable range of forms, literatures, and ideas.

The Bow and the Lyre, though most of it is early (1956), is no doubt his big central work in prose. Later works are excursions or developments from it. Conjunctions and Disjunctions, while still concerned with modern man and his literatures, is occupied mainly with correspondences and differences in the Orient, especially with the sacred abominations of Tantric Buddhism. Alternating Current is a collection of fugitive and topical essays, brilliantly turned and fascinating to read, whether or not you know the larger work looming behind them. The prose works, together, constitute a monumental accomplishment, and, outside the Hispanic world, they may well outweigh his poetry, since they lose much less in translation. But what are they? Criticism? A few years ago, when I had read very little of him, I referred to him as "the eminent Mexican critic," which was miserably inadequate. Though I still like him best when he is bringing his manifold resources to bear on the analysis of a particular and difficult case, such as Duchamp or Pessoa, the criticism seems incidental to philosophy, as it is in Sartre. Does that make Paz a philosopher?

I think so, but of a kind that is a little strange to us. Our philosophers are not poets, except for Emerson, whereas Spain, from the end of the Nineteenth Century, has produced several philosophers of stature who are poets also, or novelists…. Paz has been compared with Ortega y Gasset, and owes a little to him, but Ortega was not a poet, and Paz is better associated with the others, especially with Machado, to whom, especially as a philosopher of Being and Not-Being, he owes a great deal. Not much, however, as a poet. (pp. 13-15)

In prose or poetry he is Unamuno's "man of flesh and bone" and then some. He carries a skeleton inside him (I owe that one to Machado) and has all the erotic fleshliness our fashion could ask. Moreover he celebrates the asshole, as fact and symbol. How complete can you get? A speculation of his on shit should interest us especially, even the Federal Reserve. Assuming the Freudian correspondence between gold (or capital) and the retention of shit, he proceeds to another correspondence, between gold and the sun, so that gold, not hoarded but invested and expended, becomes, like the sun and its light, the great productive source. I know of no better rationale for capitalism since Calvin, though the method is "savage" and poetic, not logical or theological as in Calvin.

That flight of Baroque imagination indicates, besides his energy and dash, the main terms of his world: man in the mortal flesh and an astronomical universe. That large view of the world need not exclude history, society, terrestrial nature, reason, taste, and other secular matters, but it certainly does subordinate and surround them. It corresponds to the view of Seventeenth-Century Spain and, I gather, that of the Aztecs, so that Paz comes by it naturally, but for him the religion that kept up the scale of Calderón's universe is gone, and the planet Venus is no longer Quetzalcoatl. The stars are now a "vain chess-game, once a combat of angels." You would think the universe would thus shrink to its foreground concerns, history and the rest; but, marvelously, it does not. The Calderonian spaciousness, in which man is "prisoner of the stars," is kept up. On what? Nothingness, largely.

Gertrude Stein one said that Spanish space has always to be "full, very full, of emptiness and suspicion." She was referring to pictorial space, but the remark may serve to account for Paz's cosmic space, which is full, very full—"replete"—with a nada substantial enough to support the constellations.

Though his philosophizing, savage and logical, ranges over everything that concerns him, small and large, myth and history, language and versification, his great distinction is, I feel, as a philosopher of temporality. Not of Time or of History so much as of the brutal changes in temporal orientation he and his generation have had to live in…. Hardest of all to deal with, for literary people, is the fact that modernism depends for its meaning on history, on getting on from the past into the future, and so does the avant-garde. The situation is intricate, to say the least, and worse, unconcluded, but Paz is magnificent in making it articulate, even in its indeterminations. What remains, through the shipwreck of historicism, is evidently the cosmos and the more-or-less nonconsecutive present, in Paz's version, a universe bounded by the stars and then the fulgurant or "eternal" moment of poetic vision. (pp. 15-17)

Renga is of very little interest in itself, as a book of poems. If you can read the four languages in which it is written it is an amusing exercise for your polyglottery, and the roughly surrealist manners, though rather belated, have some charming moments. But the importance of the work, if any, is in the theories behind it, questions of the author and his identity, single or multiple, of Language and languages, of the work as written or something lived. (p. 17)

Early Poems 1935–1955, on the other hand, can be enjoyed in a number of ways, with or without theoretics. The poems, though relatively "early" and preliminary to more impressive works like Blanco and Sun Stone, are not juvenilia, and already the main terms of his world are set…. [One] can spot motifs and manners from more recent predecessors, Machado, Jiménez, and perhaps Alberti, but these early echoings are, as I hear him at least, happily dominated by his own strong voice—not necessarily a shout, but round, full, and emphatic. There is also a delightful variety of forms in this volume, from short epigrams, with and without images, to rather long avalanches of metaphor, from very neat and complete things to long and short fragments, from the very plain to the very fancy. The book, though small, is a multitude.

Is there anything like him in English? He has something in common with Charles Olson, but really not much; with e. e. cummings in his typographical phase, but their differences are vast; with T. S. Eliot as a philosophical poet, but … [Hopkins] may well be our best approach to Paz, at least in his more Baroque stretches. Catholic doctrine apart, they have the same vast world, the same acute sense of the instantaneous and abrupt—in phenomena, but in their phrasing, too—and in both there is "the roll, the rise, the carol, the creation" in the thick of abounding imagery. Hopkins is an approach well enough but no thread for the labyrinth. For the ordinary reader, with little time, the short prose work, Children of the Mire, would be the best possible introduction. (pp. 17-18)