[Hirsch is a poet. In the following essay, he contemplates characteristics of Paz's poetry.]

Octavio Paz practiced poetry like a secret religion. He dwelt in its mysteries, he invoked its sacraments, he read its entrails, he inscribed its revelations. Writing was for him a primordial act, and he stared down at the blank page like an abyss until it sent him reeling over the brink of language. The poems he brought back are filled with ancient wonder and strangeness, hermetic wisdom, a dizzying sense of the sacred. They are magically uprooted from silence. Here is his eerie little poem "Escritura" ("Writing"): "I draw these letters / as the day draws its images / and blows over them / and does not return."

Paz started writing poems as a teen-ager and never let up until the end of his life. Lyric poetry was for him a core activity, at the root of being, and for nearly 70 years he was driven to try to connect to himself and to others through the sensuality—the rhythmic fervor—of words. Inspiration was for him not a static entity but a forward thrust, an aspiration, the act of going "beyond ourselves to the encounter of ourselves," Paz wrote poetry with a sharp awareness of being himself and, simultaneously, someone or something else. He called this "the other voice," He believed the merging of voices—the act of poeticizing—was a way of breaking temporal succession, "a means of access to pure time, an immersion in the original waters of existence."

I have been devouring Paz's poems and essays most of my life now, and feel as if a radiant light passed out of the world when he died on April 19 at the age of 84. A literary era, the whole cultural landscape of the Americas, seems diminished. There was an energetic clash within Paz between poetry and history, each making its competing claims on his formidable intelligence. One was a wayward siren song calling him to a perpetual present, to an erotic consecration of instants and to a superabundance of time and being, whereas the other materialized as a measured speech reminding him of the social and political needs of others, a voluble lecture about the nature of civitas, the importance of worldly concerns and the laws of temporal process.

Paz, had a keen sense of the civic responsibilities of the poet. He eagerly entered the political fray—as a foreign diplomat, as the founding editor of many magazines, as an outspoken critical thinker. Like Isaiah Berlin, Paz was a cultural pluralist and a hero of liberal democracy ("My freedom begins with the recognition of the freedom of others," he declared). From his youth he was tormented by the question of whether it was worthwhile to write poetry, and out of this need to explain himself he grew into a wonderful apologist for poetry itself. His appreciation extended to literature of all types, and he became "a literary one-man band" (as Irving Howe termed him) and an insightful cultural archeologist. His prose work is framed by The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950), a kind of psychoanalysis of the collective Mexican psyche, and In Light of India (1995), a testimony to the influence India had on his life and work. How amazing that Paz's quest for modernity led him back to beginnings, to antiquities, to the temples and gods, the myths and legends of pre-Columbian Mexico, as well as to the wellsprings of Indian religion.

Paz never lost sight of poetry's irrational power and sacred mystery, its archaic roots, its spiritual audacity. "Poetry is knowledge, salvation, power, abandonment," he wrote in The Bow and the Lyre, a sustained defense of poetry that Shelley himself might have cherished. Paz treated lyric poetry as a revolutionary emotional activity, a spiritual exercise, a means of interior liberation, a quest for transfiguration. The obituaries for him have been respectful and filled with praise, and yet reading them I have felt as if Paz's reputation as a man of letters, his books on the history and politics of our time, threatened to overshadow his work as a poet, though all his writing grew out of his commitment to poetry. As he put it in Poetry, Myth, Revolution: "Since my adolescence I have written poems, and have never ceased writing them. My ambition was to be a poet and nothing but a poet. In my books in prose it was my intention to serve poetry, to justify and defend it, to explain it to others and to myself. I soon discovered that the defense of poetry, scorned in our century, was inseparable from the defense of freedom. That is the source of my interest in the political and social questions that have convulsed our time." Paz returned to the question of freedom, psychological and otherwise, with ruthless intensity throughout his life.

Paz knew so much about inner freedom that it comes as a shock to recall he wrote much of his poetry out of a radical sense of estrangement and exile, a feeling of unreality. He considered the experience of being born "a wound that never heals," and he sought through poetry to reunite with others. His poems are filled with shadowy tunnels and bridges, dark crossings and thresholds, elemental passageways, vertiginous heights. He vacillates between isolation and connection, solitude and communion, doubt and rapture. He had an uncanny feeling for the inner spaces that keep opening in poetry, and his lines can induce a kind of mental slippage and vertigo, a sense of traveling down endless interior corridors:

     I search without finding, I write alone,
     there's no one here, and the day falls,
     the year falls, I fall with the moment,
     I fall to the depths, invisible path
     over mirrors repeating my shattered image,
     I walk through the days, the trampled moments,
     I walk through all the thoughts of my shadow,
     I walk through my shadow in search of a moment….

Paz had a skeptical intelligence, but he was not a cerebral poet, as has often been suggested. Rather, his poems are driven by a sometimes anguished, sometimes joyous eroticism. Most of his poems seem shadowed by the obscure absence or presence of the beloved. When the beloved is absent from the poem, Paz feels acutely cut off from nature and from himself, delivered back to his own estranging desires and to the linear flow of time. But when the beloved visits the poem, he feels the overflowing circularity of time, the dance of being, the affirmation of an eternal moment. Poetry becomes a means of attainment, the reconciliation of opposites, a way of participating in an abundant universe. It becomes a form of creative love that annuls the temporal world. Here "all is transformed, all is sacred, / every room is the center of the world, / it's still the first night, and the first day, / the world is born when two people kiss."

In his splendid book on love and eroticism. The Double Flame, Paz explicitly links the erotic act and the poetic act through the agency of imagination. "Imagination turns sex into ceremony and rite, language into rhythm and metaphor," he writes. "The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities, and rhyme a copulation of sounds; poetry eroticizes language and the world, because the operation is erotic to begin with." I am moved by Paz's suggestion that love, like poetry, "is a victory over time, a glimpse of the other side, of the there that is a here, where nothing changes and everything that is, truly is." We almost have to turn back to Emerson for such a wide-ranging and powerful embrace of the imaginative fulfillments both of poetry and of human love.

Octavio Paz left behind more than 40 books, an immense labor we will be mining for years to come. Readers of the original Spanish and of the many inspired translations will be returning again and again to this poet of separation and fusion, this mind of the Americas. His legacy is greater enchantment, more life.