Octavio Paz stands in the first rank of poets on the world-scene today. I'd stress the notion world-scene because it won't do thinking of him as a local, a Mexican or even South American.

Paz's poetry, uttered in what seems a direct, even brutally vigorous language, derives its transcendental thrust and vision, its visual, aural, tactile power from the intellectual authority of the French Symbolists, from Surrealism during the 20s and 30s, from English and German romantic poets—all melded through the sonorities of 17th-century Spanish Baroque masters.

What results is a poetry cosmopolitan, truly international, often somewhat mystical in a realistic or materialistic way. Partly, it's the Latin American's situation that forces such development….

The language that long ago was imposed on ancient native empires has worked to create a necessarily complex, irrational and tensely potent continuum, as is demonstrated in Paz's magnificent long chant, "Sun Stone."…

[Paz] has recently gone from his erotic, world-seeing rapturous lyrics toward a structuralist and Buddhist view, via concrete poetry, and is exploring (and erring too, I think: see "Blanco," a long poem) … the silences between words and sounds, the blank spaces between words.

Paz must emerge from this passage through theory; he has the power. He may be reacting against the way the world is being crammed with sheer noise, but it's no help to speak about the unspeakable, when the poet's task, finally, is to express it itself.