[In the following essay, Zubizarreta explores literary connections between Paz and Robert Frost.]

While scholars of Octavio Paz may be familiar with his 1945 interview of the American poet Robert Frost, few readers of Frost are aware of the literary connections between the two great writers. The last twenty volumes of the annual MLA bibliography, for example, list no titles indicating a comparative focus on both poets, and Frank and Melissa C. Lentricchia's compilation of 1976 is the only substantial bibliography that includes the interview as a source. None of the available Frost biographies—not even Robert Frost: The Later Years, 1938-1963 (1976), the third volume of Lawrence Thompson's meticulous and slanted account of Frost's complex life, or William H. Pritchard's balanced and sympathetic Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered (1984)—mentions Paz's visit with Frost in Vermont. None of the various collections of letters, interviews, or reminiscences brings up Paz. Furthermore, in “On Octavio Paz,” Richard Poirier only briefly refers to the “afternoon's conversation with Frost” (6), and neither Lesley Lee Francis, Frost's granddaughter and a scholar of Spanish language and literature, nor Mordecai Marcus and Judith Oster, the authors of two recent studies of Frost's poetry, cite Paz's talk with Frost. Nor do any of the contributors to Earl Wilcox's forthcoming compilation of essays dealing with Frost's influence on modern writers discuss Paz, the 1990 Nobel laureate.

The interview reveals as much about Paz's aesthetic concerns and formal techniques as it does about Frost's, and both poets range over subjects such as the relationships between creativity and solitude, art and nature, individual talent and tradition, humor and passion. Frost's answers to Paz's questions bolster the American's image as a sophisticated modern pastoral poet preeminently concerned with the imagination's struggle to carve out of the chaotic flux of the quotidian and of human experience momentary constructs of order that help defer the confusion of nature, time, and death. The subjects broached by Paz indicate the interests of a writer who—though separated by language, landscape, and culture from the endemically New England Yankee poet—is equally intrigued with the nature of art as “a momentary stay against confusion” and as a process by which the poet, speaking in the language of his land and time, may define the dichotomies of the human self and the natural world, the solitude of the poetic voice against the void (Frost, Prose 18). Paz and Frost are widely regarded as the laureates of their respective cultures: one, the poet of Mexico's native identity and history, its pervasive and indigenous, hot, acrid dust, a symbol of Mexico's particular reality and of the characteristic Latin American preoccupation with time and death; the other, the Yankee bard of northern snow and dark woods, equivalent symbols of Frost's restless anxiety over outer chaos and over even more troubling inner “desert places” (Frost, Poetry 296). Using Paz's interview of Frost, then, as a starting point for intertextual study, we may discover that the Mexican and the American share numerous qualities in their respective works, especially the central theme of how the power of the poetic word may stay for a moment “ese polvo [o esa nieve] que apenas se toca se deshace entre las manos …” (“that dust [or that snow] which, when you barely touch it, sifts through your fingers …”) (“Visita” 39; “Visit” 9).

Both poets, for instance, acknowledge vigorously the particularities of the phenomenal world, the irreducible thereness of the physical while also invoking the ineffable mystery of being, the ghostly incandescence of spiritual life and desire. Frost writes in “Mowing,” one of his earliest poems, “The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows,” a line that reflects the poet's blurring of the division between fact and dream, between the equally vivid forces of outer and inner realities (Poetry 17). The blurring is a function of what Poirier calls Frost's “work of knowing,” a process that fuses vision and “a sense of persistent and demanding daily reality” in the “mythic properties of language itself” (Work 275). Many such moments of fusion appear in Frost's work. In “After Apple-Picking,” the speaker is midway up a ladder “sticking through a tree / Toward heaven still,” caught between the actual world of bough, barrel, and “hoary grass” and the spectral world of dream, desire, and imagination, the drowsy seduction of “Essence of winter sleep.” But the physical world, the distinct “scent of apples” beckons his return, anchors him to nature's tones and touch:

And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.

(Poetry 68-69)

The “creaking room,” “clomping here” and “clomping off,” shifting log, and “roar / Of trees and crack of branches” in “An Old Man's Winter Night” demonstrate similarly Frost's acute sense of the physical life around him (Poetry 108), and the robust immediacy of imagery in “Birches” reflects the poet's grounding in primary experience, in a world “Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs / Broken across it, and one eye is weeping / From a twig's having lashed across it open.” As in “After Apple-Picking,” however, the speaker of “Birches” wants both access to heaven and contact with earth:

I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

(Poetry 122)

The delicacy of the balance between outer and inner meaning is conveyed in “Birches” by the precarious climb upward and the swing downward. In “Good Hours” it is suggested by the poet's solitary journey outward for a “winter evening walk” away from village cottages with “folk within,” and then his repentent return inward, only to discover “no window but that was black.” The poet's troubled solitude is heard in the sound of “creaking feet” that “Disturbed the slumbering village street / Like profanation, by your leave, / At ten o'clock of a winter eve” (Poetry 102).

Paz, too, is a poet compelled by the vitality of the natural world and the mysterious meanings that lie beyond man's concrete apprehensions and that ultimately subvert comprehension and the efficacy of language. In the opening paragraph of the interview, Paz sets the stage for his encounter with Frost by conveying in prose the equivalent of Frost's poetic attention to natural detail in a process that reveals the imagination's ongoing attempt to construct direction, boundary, and meaning:

Después de veinte minutos de caminar por la carretera, bajo el sol de las tres, llegué por fin al recodo. Torcí hacia la derecha y empecé a trepar la cuesta. A trechos los árboles que bordeaban la senda daban un poco de frescura. El agua corría por una acequia, entre hierbas. Crujía la arena bajo mis zapatos. El sol estaba en todas partes. En el aire había un olor a hierba verde y caliente, con sed. No se movía un árbol, ni una hoja. Unas cuantas nubes descansaban pesadamente, ancladas en un golfo azul, sin olas. Cantó un pájaro. Me detuve para quitarme el saco: “Cuanto mejor sería tenderme bajo este olmo. El sonido del agua vale más que todas las palabras de los poetas.”

(“Visita” 33)

(After walking along the road for twenty minutes in the three-o'clock sun, I finally came to the bend. I turned right and began to climb the slope. At intervals the trees bordering the path afforded a little coolness. There was water running among grasses in a brook. The sand creaked under my shoes. The sun was everywhere. The air smelled of hot, thirsty green weeds. Not a leaf stirred on the trees. Above them, a few clouds rested heavily, anchored in a windless blue gulf. A bird sang. I halted: “It would be much better to lie down under the elm. The sound of water is worth more than all the words of poets.”)

(“Visit” 8)

The bordering trees (“lines,” as Frost calls them in “The Wood Pile,” “Straight up and down … / Too much alike to mark or name a place by / So as to say for certain I was here / Or somewhere else: I was just far from home”), the sibilant brook, the creaking of sand under foot, the bird in song, the reflective and self-conscious stance—all are details that Paz may well have deliberately borrowed from Frost but that in any case reveal the Mexican poet's affinity for the spectacle of the physical (Poetry 101). While clouds are motionless in a perfect sky, “ancladas en un golfo azul, sin olas” (“anchored in a windless blue gulf”) the poet is tempted to join his surroundings in an instance of pure physical beauty and stasis, and the pressure of the moment leads him to acknowledge the limitations of language: “El sonido del agua vale más que todas las palabras de los poetas” (“The sound of water is worth more than all the words of poets.”).

But the words of a poet are what Paz has come for, and the irony is not unintentional, as Paz hints in the typically inflated but sly, Frostean grand pose of the line. (We may recall, for instance, Frost's “I shall be telling this with a sigh … / Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— / I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference” or the shaky assurances of “For Once, Then, Something” [Poetry 105, 225].) Words, metaphor, poetry bridge the gap between imagination and reality, between dream and fact—or at least momentarily attempt to reconcile such dichotomies. The sound of words and the sound of water are inseparable realities in the poem, which is itself a third reality, or, according to Frost's contemporary Wallace Stevens, a supreme fiction: “the intensest rendezvous … / How high that highest candle lights the dark” (367-68). Yet the dilemma remains: water is water; poems are words. And metaphor is momentary play. But it is also “riesgo mortal” (“mortal risk”), essential play. So Paz attests, “En cada verso nos aguarda una decisión y no nos queda el recurso de cerrar los ojos y dejar que el instinto obre por sí solo. El instinto poético consiste en una tensión alerta” (“There is a decision waiting for us in every line, and we can't get around it by shutting our eyes and letting instinct work by itself. Poetic instinct consists in an alert tension”) “Visita” 36; “Visit” 8). Poetic instinct is the imagination's response to an exigent reality, and the poem itself is the alert tension, the momentary stay against confusion. Elsewhere, in the poem “Aquí” (“Here”), Paz writes,

Mis pasos en esta calle
Resuenan
          en otra calle
donde
          oigo mis pasos
pasar en esta calle donde
Sólo es real la niebla
(My steps along this street
resound
          in another street
in which
          I hear my steps
passing along this street
in which
Only the mist is real.)

(Collected Poems 48-49)

Notwithstanding Michael Wood's insights about the differences between Paz's and Stevens's “perceptions of … reality” (327), the lines remind us of Stevens's “Metaphors of a Magnifico” or “Valley Candle”:

My candle burned alone in an immense valley.
Beams of the huge night converged upon it,
Until the wind blew.
Then beams of the huge night
Converged upon its image,
Until the wind blew.

(19)

Frost ponders the problem similarly in “Now Close the Windows” and “Tree at My Window,” in which the reality of sights and sounds outside a window is counterpoised by the equally pressing forms of the imagination, a precarious equation reflected in the thin pane of glass that separates yet simultaneously joins perceived and perceiver:

Tree at my window, window tree,
My sash is lowered when night comes on;
But let there never be curtain drawn
Between you and me.
Vague dream-head lifted out of the ground,
And thing next most diffuse to cloud,
Not all your light tongues talking aloud
Could be profound.
But, tree, I have seen you taken and tossed,
And if you have seen me when I slept,
You have seen me when I was taken and swept
And all but lost.
That day she put our heads together,
Fate had her imagination about her,
Your head so much concerned with outer,
Mine with inner, weather.

(Poetry 251-52)

The glass is fragile, indeed, as Frost suggests in his response to Paz's comments about the tension of poetry: “The chance of failure is hiding in every line, every phrase. So is the danger that the whole poem will fail, not just a single line. And that's how life is: we can lose it at any moment. Each moment is a mortal risk. And each instant is a choice” (“Visit” 8).

Hence, in the opening observations of the interview, Paz dwells on the actualities of natural detail, but after meeting the great white-haired American sage-poet, dressed “[c]on su camisa blanca abierta—¿hay algo más limpio que una camisa blanca limpia?—” (“[w]ith his open white shirt—is there anything cleaner than a clean white shirt?—”) Paz turns the interview into a philosophical dialogue on how the poet lives both in the world and out of it, participates both in natural realities and human experience and out of them through the life of the creative and critical imagination. He observes:

Con … sus ojos azules, inocentes e irónicos, puros, su cabeza de filósofo y sus manos de campesino, parecía un viejo sabio, de esos que prefieren ver al mundo desde su retiro. Pero no había nada ascético en su apariencia, sino una sobriedad viril. Estaba allí, en su cabaña, retirado del mundo, pero no para renunciar a él, sino para contemplarlo mejor. No era un ermitaño, ni su colina era una roca en el desierto. El pan que comía no se lo habían llevado los tres cuervos; él mismo lo había comprado en la tienda del pueblo.

(“Visita” 34)

(With … his innocent and ironical blue eyes, his philosopher's head and farmer's hands, he appeared an ancient sage, one of those who prefer to see the world from their place of retirement. But there was nothing ascetic about his appearance, only a virile sobriety. There he was in his cabin, retired from the world, not in order to renounce it but to contemplate it better. He was not a hermit and his hilltop was not a rock in the desert. The bread he ate had not been brought to him by the three ravens, he had bought it himself at the village store.)

(“Visit” 8)

The harmonizing force, the interposed miracle in such a dialectic of head and hands is the word, the “magical realism” of articulation. Paz takes up the theme with Frost, and in the peculiar Latin American language of hyperbole, fantasy, and fancy—a language that one can only guess must have amused and intrigued Frost because of his own tendencies toward a diametrically terse, understated, acerbic Yankee wit—Paz describes to Frost how in Mexico,

[l]a naturaleza es hostil … Además, somos pocos y débiles. Al hombre lo devora el paisaje y siempre hay el peligro de convertirse en cactus … Es un país que un día se va a convertir en piedra. Los árboles y las plantas tienden a la piedra, lo mismo que los hombres. Y también los animales: perros, coyotes, serpientes. Hay pajaritos de barro cocido y es muy extraño verlos volar y oírlos cantar, porque uno no se acaba de acostumbrar a la idea de que son pájaros de verdad.

(“Visita” 34-35)

([n]ature is hostile. … Besides, we are few and weak. The landscape swallows men up, and there is always the danger of being changed into a cactus … It is a country that will turn to stone some day. The trees and plants are tending toward stone, the same as the people. And the animals, too, the dogs and coyotes and snakes. There are birds made of baked clay and it is very strange to see them fly and hear them sing, because you have not got used to the idea that they are actually birds.)

(“Visit” 8)

Frost's response to the liberty of such creative language is later to liken it to the freedom of the country: both poetry and “country things,” as Frost suggests in a different context (the complex lyric “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things”), are “experience[s] in freedom. It's like poetry. Life is like poetry, when a poet writes a poem. It starts out by being an invitation to the unknown: he writes the first line and doesn't know what comes next.” “Tiene usted razón” (“You are right”), answers Paz. “La poesía es la experiencia de la libertad. El poeta se arriesga, se juega el todo por el todo del poema en cada verso que escribe” (“Poetry is an experience in freedom. The poet takes chances, he gambles the whole poem in every line he writes”). “And you can't take it back,” adds Frost. “Each act, each line, is irrevocable and forever. You're compromised forever in every line” (“Visita” 36-37; “Visit” 8). As in Frost's “The Tuft of Flowers,” the poetic act is as vitalizing as country mowing—inviting dreaming, weary men to bond in “brotherly speech”—but also as perpetually unfinished as the country work of stacking wood in “The Wood-Pile”: although the gamble of metaphor may, like blooms spared from the keen scythe, survive the encounter with country, with reality's pressures, and offer the poet a moment of “sheer morning gladness,” it also may end, like the “cord of maple,” the meticulous “labor of … ax,” wasted and sinking in the “frozen swamp … / With the slow smokeless burning of decay” (Poetry 23, 101-02). Always risk, always compromise. Paz, too, knows the formula:

Yo dibujo estas letras
como el día dibuja sus imágenes
y sopla sobre ellas y no vuelve
(I draw these letters
as the day draws its images
and blows over them
                                                  and does not return.)

(Collected Poems 252-53)

If the poet's encounter with the flux and intractable otherness of the quotidian, the resolute rush of things toward “the universal cataract of death / That spends to nothingness,” is fraught with peril, if what is at stake is nothing less than the formidable meaning of life itself, then the poet's risk is considerable, indeed (Poetry 259). Every line of essential poetry is a wager of life, every metaphor a hedging that will end, one hopes, in a “clarification of life,” as Frost puts it in “The Figure a Poem Makes” (Prose 18). Metaphor is the key to resisting the void; the analogical imagination is the source of order against confusion. Both Frost and Paz dwell on such discovery in their work. Frost, for example, is Stevens's equal in the extensive appropriation of Vaihinger's “As If” philosophy, Heidegger's phenomenological positing, and William James's concept of the will to believe. Such systems of thought share the premise of a phenomenal world utterly separated from the mind. Thus, the ordinary course of experience remains inscrutable and confusing until the creative will of imagination imposes a symbolic order of its own upon the apparent formlessness of things, its constitutive metaphors perhaps momentary and artificial but constructive and substantive. In Stevens, for instance, we find the poet's celebration of fictive things:

The poem refreshes life so that we share,
For a moment, the first idea … It satisfies
Belief in an immaculate beginning
And sends us, winged by an unconscious will,
To an immaculate end.

(209)

And in Frost, we are reminded that the background of life is “hugeness and confusion shading away from where we stand into black and utter chaos; and against the background any small man-made figure of order and concentration … To me any little form I assert upon it is velvet, as the saying is, and to be considered for how much more it is than nothing” (Prose 107).

The problem in Frost is that the “alert tension” of the poem and the tendency to philosophize “not in schools but out on the fringes” result in a curious and—for early critics of Frost such as Malcolm Cowley, Yvor Winters, and George W. Nitchie—a confounding and ambiguous stance (“Visita” 39; “Visit” 9). For Frost, the creative imagination is, as Lentricchia says, a “redemptive” force that in post-Kantean idealistic epistemology is “in some part constructive of the world”; without the shaping will of human consciousness, the physical world remains chaotic, devoid of meaning (Landscapes 5-7). Yet the creative effort is at best momentary, and the imposed order illusory—concessions that reveal Frost's tough-minded, albeit reluctant and usually fearful acceptance of an irreducible phenomenal world that resists the constitutive acts of mind. Frost's poetry repeatedly, necessarily asserts form as “velvet,” as “much more … than nothing,” but his strong grounding in Yankee pragmatism compels him to acknowledge the door in the dark, into which we inevitably stumble and have our “native simile jarred” if we are poets with wide, outstretched arms (Poetry 265).

Frost's “The Wood-Pile” demonstrates the poet's struggle to shape the insistent thereness and inexorable decay and confusion of the outer world. The first three lines delineate the familiar pattern of a speaker contemplating the edge of a formless sky of desert places, a dark and lovely woods, an impervious geode, a frozen swamp (see Poetry 296, 224, 332, 101 for references). The speaker in this poem enters the swamp, looking for signs of natural order, and at first the “hard snow” seems an adequate symbol because it resists his step. But the surface collapses: “now and then / One foot went through.” The neutral white snow is ambiguous, perplexing. His next effort centers on the view, which, because it “was all in lines / Straight up and down of tall slim trees,” promises to locate and fix him spatially, but the trees are unfortunately “too much alike to mark or name a place by / So as to say for certain I was here.” Each endeavor to establish a constant point of reference fails, and the tension of the plight is heightened by contradictory language: the speaker is “Out walking in,” he wants to “turn back” but “go on farther,” and the snow is “hard” but one foot “went through.” The flight of a bird introduces a horizontal plane, adding a three-dimensional quality by which the poet-figure can further chart his location, but the strain of pathetic fallacy diminishes the effort. Finally, the carefully crafted wood-pile, a “cord of maple, cut and split / And piled—and measured, four by four by eight,” becomes the speaker's token of the triumph of imagination over the disordered reality of the swamp. But the gain is only temporary, for the pile is rotting, collapsing; the stay against disintegration has failed. Having risked the venture, however, having wagered form against “hugeness and confusion,” the poet's recourse is to turn to “fresh tasks” and wrestle for new, meaningful creations that may hold off a moment longer the “slow smokeless burning of decay” (Poetry 101-02).

One of Paz's significant thematic predilections as a poet tends to parallel Frost's concerns with the role of metaphor in the imagination's efforts to define and order through the power of analogy the outer confusion of shifting reality. On the subject of how metaphor—thus language itself—as analogy bridges the gulf between the conceiving imagination of poet and the physical world perceived by senses, Paz writes, “Analogy is a rhythmic vision of the universe; before becoming an idea, it is a verbal experience. If the poet hears the universe as a language, he also utters the universe” (Mire 94). In “Entre Lo Que Veo y Digo …” (“Between What I See and What I Say …”), Paz puts it this way:

                                                            [La poesía] No es un decir:
es un hacer.
                                                  Es un hacer
que es un decir.
                                                            La poesía
se dice y se oye:
                                                                 es real.
Yapenas digo
                                                       es real,
se disipa.
                              ¿Así es más real?
                                                            ([Poetry] is not speech:
it is an act.
                                                  It is an act
of speech.
                                                            Poetry
speaks and listens:
                                                                 it is real.
And as soon as I say
                                                                      it is real,
it vanishes.
                                                            Is it then more real?)

(Collected Poems 484-85)

The intermediary force of the word is efficacious enough, though illusory and impermanent, to blur boundaries of sound and sense, outer and inner realities, bringing Paz's meaning of word as act close to Frost's notion of poetry as performance, an idea Frost reveals in an interview with Poirier: “I look at a poem as a performance. I look on the poet as a man of prowess, just like an athlete. He's a performer. And the things you can do in a poem are very various. You speak of figures, tones of voice varying all the time … Every poem is … some sort of achievement in performance … The whole thing is performance and prowess and feats of association. Why don't critics talk about those things: what a feat it was to turn that that way and what a feat it was to remember that—to be reminded of that by this?” (Lathem 233-34). The associative power of metaphor is a momentary spectacle of the imagination's resolve to name the physical world, to say it is real in poetry, which is also real and speaks and listens. Word becomes world; world becomes word: “The universe is … ruled by rhythm; everything is coded; everything rhymes,” Paz says in the essay “The Siren and the Seashell” (29). “Poet's Epitaph” also conveys the sense of words as act, performance, illusion:

Quiso cantar, cantar
para olvidar
su vida verdadera de mentiras
y recordar
su mentirosa vida de verdades.
(He tried to sing, singing
not to remember
his true life of lies
and to remember
his lying life of truths.)

(Early Poems 14-15)

And in the poem “Entre Lo Que Veo” (“Between What I See”), he adds,

Idea palpable,
                                                  palabra
impalpable:
                                                  la poesía
va y viene
                                        entre lo que es
y lo que no es.
                                                            Teje reflejos
y los desteje.
                                                            La poesía
siembra ojos en la página,
siembra palabras en los ojos.
Los ojos hablan,
                                                            las palabras miran,
las miradas piensan.
                                                                      Oír
los pensamientos,
                                                                 ver
lo que decimos,
                                                            tocar
el cuerpo de la idea.
                                                                                Los ojos
se cierran,
                                                            las palabras se abren.
(Tangible idea,
                                                            intangible
word:
                                        poetry
comes and goes
                                                            between what is
and what is not.
                                                            It weaves
and unweaves reflections.
                                                                      Poetry
scatters eyes on a page,
scatters words on our eyes.
Eyes speak,
                                                  words look,
looks think.
                                                  To hear
thoughts,
                                        see
what we say,
                                                  touch
the body of an idea.
                                                                      Eyes close,
the words open.)

(Collected Poems 484-87)

And so we return to words: the sounds of the words of poets: “El sonido del agua vale más que todas las palabras de los poetas” (“The sound of water is worth more than all the words of poets”). Conversely, in “Una mujer de movimientos de río” (“A Woman Whose Movements Are a River's”), Paz suggests that, in fact, the sound and sense of words are worth a world:

Una mujer de movimientos de río
De transparentes ademanes de agua
Una muchacha de agua
Donde leer lo que pasa y no regresa
Un poco de agua donde los ojos beban
Donde los labios de un solo sorbo beban
El árbol la nube el relámpago
Yo mismo y la muchacha.
(A woman whose movements are a river's
Transparent gesturing that water has
A girl made of water
Where may be read the irreversible present
A little water where the eyes may drink
The lips swallow in a long single drink
The tree the cloud the lamp
Myself and that girl.

(Early Poems 28-29)

The original Spanish resounds, an endless flow of words, gestures, desire: the language becomes gesture, desire; the woman becomes the river; the poem becomes a clarification of life, an immaculate end. Woman, river, poet are one in the alert tension of the poem.

At the end of the interview, Paz reflects on his meeting with Frost and likens the American's poetic strategies, especially the use of humor as defense against the spending rush of the universal all, to the “gravedad sonriente” (“smiling gravity”) of the Spaniard Antonio Machado. Though there is much dust in the work of Machado, Paz muses, and much snow in the poems of the other, the two would have enjoyed each other as artists predominantly concerned with the essential risk of words. “El campo es … la experiencia de la soledad” (“The country is an experience in solitude”), Paz had remarked to Frost earlier, but so is poetry (“Visita” 36; “Visit” 8). In the act of forging meaning out of either dust or snow “que apenas se toca se deshace entre las manos …” (“which, when you barely touch it, sifts through your fingers …”), the poet is truly alone, as in love and death.

Paz's later analysis in El Laberinto de la Soledad (The Labyrinth of Solitude) clarifies the connection between the solitude of the creative act and the solitary experiences of love and death, a formula in which “[c]reación y destrucción se funden … y durante una fracción de segundo el hombre entrevé un estado más perfecto” (“[c]reation and destruction become one … and during a fraction of a second man glimpses a more perfect state”) (177; trans. mine). Jason Wilson indicates that “Paz's love is a metaphor of … freedom” and suggests that we “[r]eplace ‘love’ with ‘poetry’” in Paz's sweeping analysis of the “dialectic of solitude” to see how integrally tied the two are, an interpretation that returns us to Paz and Frost's agreement that poetry (and for Paz, evidently, love, too) is an experience of freedom because it is one of life's highest creative acts (56). The intimacy of creative, poetic language, as Paz agrees in a 1986 interview with Melinda Porter, is like “an oceanic feeling that one also feels when in love” (79). As Poirier reminds us in his essay on Paz, the equation of creativity (which includes poetry and life itself) with love as set against the world's unalterable course towards death would have pleased Frost, for in 1939 Frost wrote: “The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same as for love. No one can really hold that the ecstasy should be static and stand still in one place. It begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life … a momentary stay against confusion” (Poirier, “Paz” 6; Frost, Prose 18). In turn, Paz, a poet of kindred mind, would have been pleased to know, if only by premonition, that Frost would eventually make the Mexican's great themes of solitude and creativity the focus of one of the last poems he wrote, in his final year of life:

In winter in the woods alone
Against the trees I go.
I mark a maple for my own
And lay the maple low.
At four o'clock I shoulder ax,
And in the afterglow
I link a line of shadowy tracks
Across the tinted snow.
I see for Nature no defeat
In one tree's overthrow
Or for myself in my retreat
For yet another blow.

(Poetry 470)

D. P. Gallagher concludes about Paz's work that “in the end the instant magic of the poem must surrender to the blankness of the space that follows it” (81). The Mexican and the American, the great poets of the dust and snow that vanish all too quickly even in the spell of poetry, met only once. But perhaps they would have enjoyed bracing together another time for yet another blow against a diminishing world and against the blankness of that space after the poem.

Works Cited

Cowley, Malcolm. “The Case Against Mr. Frost.” New Republic 11 Sept. 1944: 312-13; 18 Sept. 1944: 345-47.

Francis, Lesley Lee. “Robert Frost and the Majesty of Stones upon Stones.” Journal of Modern Literature 9 (1981-82): 3-26.

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———. El Laberinto de la Soledad. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1959.

———. Children of the Mire: Modern Poetry from Romanticism to the Avante-Garde. Trans. Rachel Phillips. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974.

———. The Siren and the Seashell and Other Essays on Poets and Poetry. Trans. Lysander Kemp and Margaret Sayers Peden. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976.

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