[In the following essay, Wilson offers a biographical and critical overview of Paz and his works, focusing mainly on the phase of his career from 1931 through the early 1940s.]

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City in the middle of a bloody and chaotic revolution. However, he avoided this gruesome turmoil and was brought up in a large rundown house in Mixcoac by his pious mother—Josefina Lozano, daughter of Spanish immigrants—a spinster aunt (who introduced him to authors like Victor Hugo and Rousseau), and his paternal grandfather. His father, Octavio Paz, a journalist and lawyer who defended the peasant revolutionary Emiliano Zapata (1877?-1919) in New York and who helped introduce agrarian reform after the Revolution, was usually absent. Paz evoked this family in his long poem Pasado en claro (The past clarified/copied out, 1975). His grandfather was influential: he had fought against the French (1862-68) and supported the dictator Porfirio Díaz (1830-1915); he had written novels and possessed a good library vital to Paz's early literary preparation. The library was rich in classical authors, Spanish classics, and Mexican modernistas like Amado Nervo (1870-1919), but stopped at about 1900.¹

Protected by his religious mother and educated by French Marist fathers, Paz was immune from the violence and political maneuverings of those revolutionary days. Yet he grew up in a Mexico coming to terms with its unique Revolution, a period (1917-) often analyzed by Paz but never as a personal experience.

Paz's passion for the fate and history of his country forms part of an intellectual awakening to the dilemmas of postrevolutionary Mexico's possible directions: the Ateneo group, especially José Vasconcelos (1881-1951) and Alfonso Reyes (1889-1959), the philosopher Samuel Ramos (1897-1959), the muralist painters, novelists, anthropologists, and archeologists combined to form a tradition, to which Paz himself actively contributed, that sought to rediscover Mexico's identity. But this nationalistic soul-searching did not determine Paz's early classical and conservative literary development. Only as an adolescent in the 1920s did he discover his own voice through the dissident poets congregated round the magazine Contemporáneos (1928-31) whose European cultural curiosity led Paz to discover the modern Spanish poets in Gerardo Diego's Antología (1932) and then back in time to Juan Ramón Jiménez (1881-1958) and Antonio Machado (1875-1939). This discovery of a non-Mexican modern tradition forms part of our study.²

Paz came of age as a young poet in the crisis years that marked the 1929 Wall Street crash, the rise of fascism, and the appeal of Russian socialism—but from the perspective of a Mexico puzzled by the violence and changes in a seemingly unique revolution that had closed the nation to experiences other than its own. The quality and temper of Paz's writings must be seen in the light of his need to make an idealistic order out of his times's confusions and who as a religiously educated but agnostic young poet turned elsewhere for models in a climate hostile to anything that was not zenophobically Mexican.

THE MORAL STANCE

As early as 1939, on his return from fallen Republican Spain, Paz wrote concerning Emilio Prados (1899-1962)—in Paz's literary review Taller—that “poetry, the best poetry, is a conduct: it expresses itself in acts. It is an image come to life.”³ Far more urgent than writing a good poem, an aesthetic ivory tower response to the twentieth-century experience of competing ideologies, this suggests an urge to act out the values of poetry as a way of changing man. The images released by the poet on paper change the poet and make this change in consciousness the real poem. By 1939 Paz had discovered his identity as a poet, not as a Mexican nor a revolutionary. What unites artists as diverse as Tamayo, Cernuda, Breton, Michaux, and Villaurrutia is their moral stance toward art. Paz rescued this moral vision from the collapse of surrealism: “Surrealism is not a poetry but a poetic and even more decisively, a vision of the world.”⁴ In 1954 Paz stated that surrealism seduced him beyond its theories about automatic writing because of its “intransigent affirmation of certain values.”⁵ Paz expanded this notion to include his own work. To Claude Fell in 1975 he defined his celebrated essay El laberinto de la soledad (The Labyrinth of Solitude) as moral criticism.⁶

Paz characterized these values as the clash within himself between poetry and history, often employing these terms as shorthand notions for complicated processes. For example, the nightmare of history is everything that happens that threatens individual freedom. History becomes a repressive process that dehumanizes: what has been “arrebatada / por ladrones de vida hace mil siglos” (snatched away / by thieves of life a thousand centuries ago, P [Poemas (1935-1975)] 269). History suggests the degradation of life, the tyranny of successive time, rationality, ideologies, nationalisms, religions, science, and alienating city life. For Paz its immediate form was the period of Mexican history he grew up in. He could not avoid becoming imbued with Mexico's revitalised postrevolutionary nationalism. In his desire to become a poet in those circumstances he equated Mexican and all nationalisms as a mental disease. In the 1930s political life invaded every aspect of life. Poets were obliged to study economics, for poetry was not a useful social activity. Paz, reacting to this impinging of history on his freedom to be, became an outspoken critic of this narrow-minded authoritarian view of society (Pe, 66-67).

Paz came to view the revolutionary Mexican one-party system critically because he had experienced a vision of a just and free society in Spain in 1937 where the poet had a role to play and fully participated in society. Paz had witnessed the birth of the New Man there, even if briefly, before the fall of the Republic and claimed: “this memory never abandons me.”⁷ The ruins of this vision of the New Man haunted Paz, especially in the context of the failure of the Russian socialist revolution, the one hope of a just society for most European intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s, but that had deeply deceived Paz, who early recoiled from Stalin's version of socialism, with its gulags and totalitarian immobility. These disappointments sharpened his moral focus about the dangers of any form of authoritarianism. In 1950 he agreed that totalitarian socialism may transform the economy of a country, but “it is doubtful if it manages to free man. And this is the only thing that interests us and that justifies a Revolution” (L, 152). In 1979 he confessed that much of his intellectual life had been a polemical dialogue with Marx and Marxisms, thus linking him with other dissidents (from his friendship with Victor Serge onward) who fear the way rigid ideologies control and distort history.⁸

In opposition to history the values of poetry could be synthesized to what has been called the surrealist incandescent triangle of love, liberty, and poetry.⁹ In a letter in answer to an attack from a hostile Mexican critic in 1959 Paz elaborated: “We are facing new obstacles that will not be economic but spiritual. In the industrial society such as we are beginning to glimpse all these words—art, poetry, imagination, game, love, soul, dream, analogy—shine by their absence. Man is going nowhere if it is not to find himself. The great conquest is not of outer space but of inner.”¹⁰ The values of poetry as listed by Paz become any means that can liberate man's numbed inner space.

This moral stance is not dogmatic. As a value it is determined by its plurality, its openness to life's unexpected happenings. Paz defines human nature as a personal experience manifested vividly in the here and now and irreductible to history. It is this intangible, unmeasurable, untestable extra quality that Paz explores and defends in himself. Poetry for him becomes a saber espiritual (spiritual knowledge), a suspicion of an alternative reality, the other shore so often evoked by Paz. Art's mission is to oppose rigid ideologies and systems, as well as the functionaries who support them, in favor of “the invincible yes of life” (H, 176). In this sense poetry affirms an ecstasy whose intensity of pure life abolishes history. Paz's great theme is the redemption of the divided alienated individual through love or union with the Other, a completion of the isolated individual in a passionate couple that offers hope of a collective salvation.

The active bitter conflict between poetry and history generates moments of freedom, an epiphany that Paz calls “poetic instants.” Consequently, the poet's reactions to history become a test of his moral fiber. At this level Paz's desire to become a poet, to rebel against necessity and write poems without guilt, has led him to explore the functions of the poet and poem in society, both Western and Eastern, almost anthropologically. Many of his poems are explicitly about the possibility of poetry in a world that negates freedom. This desire to work out his salvation as a poet inevitably invokes the fatality of having been born a Mexican. This implies belonging to the marginalized provinces of the great empires of the twentieth century (Europe, the United States, Russia, Japan). Thus Paz's measuring himself with the world's great poets and thinkers takes on poignancy; he was not born in one of the centers of power and had to fight his way out of a limited nationalistic tradition to discover his true roots, his mexicanidad (Mexicanness), his contemporaneity with all who suffer history, his freedom. Paz's vueltas (returns) from living abroad (Spain, the United States, France, India) to Mexico have engendered his most fertile thinking about values. This moral stance, tested by the accidents of history, travel, change, love, aging, reading, and so on, supplies a remarkable coherency to the diversity of his work.

THE EARLY POEMS (1931-36) AND LITERARY DEBTS

Paz published his first poem at the age of seventeen in 1931. He never collected it, but in 1982 Hugo Verani resuscitated “Cabellera” (“Head of hair”), signed Octavio Paz Lozano, whose most revealing detail is the epigraph, in Spanish, from the French poet Saint-John Perse.¹¹ This epigraph suggests that French poetry sparked off Paz's career as a poet. Saint-John Perse's Anabase (1922) was translated by Octavio Barreda in January 1931 in the magazine Contemporáneos whose poets initiated Paz into modern poetry.¹²

In 1933 Paz published his first book, Luna silvestre (Rustic moon), in an edition of sixty-five copies, but he never reedited this slim volume. In his 1979 Poemas (1935-75) the initial date (1935) proclaims that his real career as a published poet began slightly later than 1933. Yet he does include dated poems written earlier: “Nocturno” (“Nocturne,” 1932), “Otoño” (“Autumn”), “Insomnio” (“Insomnia,” 1933), and “Espejo” (“Mirror,” 1934). Although Paz refused to disinter Luna silvestre, these earliest poems belong to the same period. Glancing through the seven poems of Luna silvestre, many lines and words repeat themselves as echoes from “Nocturno” (P, 63) from nocturno to sueño (dream), sombra (shadow), and estrella (star), as well as the use of questions “¿Cómo decir los nombres … ?” (How to say the names, P, 63) with “¿Con qué nombre clamarte … ?” (With what name to call you out) in Luna silvestre.¹³ These early poems are excessively lyrical in a Spanish purged of circumstantial details and color, of all that is nonpoetic. They are idealistic strainings to reach perfection, but they fail: “¿Cómo decir, oh Sueño, tu silencio en voces?” (How to say, O dream, your silence in voices? P, 63). From this conservative Castillian language it would be hard to deduce that this is a Mexican poem. Paz was already attempting to be universal, to belong linguistically to a world of pure poetry without abstruse images or distorted syntax. His later poetry can be seen as a moral reaction against the false naiveties of lyrical poetry.

Paz's later poetry further reacts against excessive dependence on Rubén Darío and the Mexican poet Xavier Villaurrutia. The rhythm and diction of lines from “Nocturno” (P, 63) like “Negra escala de lirios llameantes” (Black scale of blazing irises) aptly echo Darío's “diríase un trémulo de liras eolias” (you could say a quavering of aeolian lyres) from “Era un aire suave” (It was a sweet tune) in Prosas profanas (Profane proses, 1898).¹⁴ There are modernista borrowings in many other words (“trémula,” “camelia”). The debt to Villaurrutia culminated in a book tribute by Paz called Xavier Villaurrutia en persona y en obra (X. V. in person and in work, 1978). This important Mexican debt is transparent in Paz's early poems from “Nocturno,” whose title recalls Villaurrutia's famous “Nocturnos” published in 1928-29 in the magazine Contemporáneos (avidly read by Paz) and collected in Nostalgia de la muerte (Nostalgia for Death, 1938). Nearly every line from Paz's 1932 poem reveals an echo from Villaurrutia: “sombra de las voces” (shadow of voices), “mármoles ahogados” (drowned marble statues), “sueño” (dream), “asesinado” (assassinated), and “silencio” (silence) are all associated with Villaurrutia's magnificent “Nocturno de la estatua” (Nocturne of the statue; first published December 1928), lucidly commented on by Paz in 1978.¹⁵ Just the titles of Paz's other pre-1935 poems “Espejo” and “Insomnio” evoke Villaurrutia's work. These early poems, confused with the suppressed Luna silvestre, establish a position against which Paz reacts. This position encompasses both the traditional romantic lyrical poem embodied in Darío and the poetics of the solipsistic, isolated individual locked into his dreamscape, a metaphor of a no place, embodied in Villaurrutia. Paz's early poetry is Mexican only by association with Villaurrutia and his poetics of absolute interiority.

Paz's first answer to this inward, idealistic stance is political; it comes to fruition, following his 1936 trip to Yucatán, in Spain in 1937 where he traveled with his first wife, Elena Garro, and Carlos Pellicer. A political stance enters the once pure poems, breaking with both the ivory-tower purity and with Villaurrutia's obsessive self-explorations symbolized in his use of the mirror as key image. Paz opens himself out into a dialogue with history, a feature quite absent in Villaurrutia.

This crucial break involves Paz's debt to the generation of poets who literary historians have grouped around Contemporáneos, the magazine central to Paz's education as a poet and which gave him “an unforgettable jolt.”¹⁶ For it is Paz's differences with this group of individuals—Villaurrutia, Gorostiza, Cuesta, Ortiz de Montellano—that allowed him to find his own voice.¹⁷ And here a stylistic dependence on Villaurrutia is only the surface of debts we now isolate.

(1) The Contemporáneos were characterized by a universalist approach to poetry and art, especially French literature: these poets disseminated, through translations and critical notes, the best world poetry of the time: Blake, Saint-John Perse, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Neruda, Langston Hughes, Gide, Cocteau, etc. To Julián Ríos in 1973 Paz admitted that Villaurrutia “opened the doors of modern poetry for me.”¹⁸ In 1954 Paz had thanked this generation for introducing Baudelaire, Nerval, and Blake (Pe, 175).

(2) Their universalist attitude implicitly denounced the cultural nationalism prevalent in Mexico during the 1920s and 1930s. Simply by affirming poetry, they went against the grain of socialist realism, the novels and memoirs of the Revolution. The same applies to their reaction against the politicized muralist painters. In Villaurrutia's case, he defended Tamayo (a defense continued polemically by Paz) and the photographer Manuel Alvárez Bravo. Villaurrutia also wrote magnificent essays on Ramón López Velarde and Sor Juana—reorientations continued and enriched by Paz who, following this lead, almost single-handedly redefined the Mexican poetic tradition, epitomized in his anthology Poesía en movimiento (1966).¹⁹

(3) Paz adopted the Contemporáneos's general cultural alertness and curiosity. Exemplarily, Villaurrutia reviewed books, films, and art shows: his tastes were genuinely eclectic, spreading from Rilke (Paz wrote an uncollected piece on Rilke),²⁰ to Gide, Borges, Pirandello, and Valéry, even if this eclectic “intellectualism” at times annoyed Paz (Pe, 77).

(4) Paz differed from the Contemporáneos in terms of his moral intensity; he shared no wish to “escape everyday life.”²¹ In 1954 Paz defined this moral gap concerning the issues of the day between his generation and his predecessors as that between literary experiences (the purity of the poem) and “vital” attitudes (Pe, 75). Poetry had to be lived; it was a force that would transform man and destroy bourgeois society. Paz's moral imperative: “The world will be ordered according to the values of poetry—liberty and communion” (Pe, 78-79).

(5) This moral intensity concerning the values of poetry revealed the gap between Villaurrutia's private, anguished, oddly perverse poetic world (the bizarre images in his “Nocturno de la estatua”) and Paz's own discovery of the centrality of erotic love with woman (his other), liberty and politics. It was around politics, too prosaic to enter a Contemporáneos poem, that Paz diverged. According to Paz, Villaurrutia resented ideas, philosophy, Marxism, and current events, while for Paz “our situation in history anguished us.”²² In the 1930s Marxism seemed the only antidote to the catastrophic times.

(6) Most central to Paz's debt is the way both he and Villaurrutia before him reacted to surrealism. Both are suspicious of blind, mindlessly automatic (mechanical) writing, yet both admitted dabbling with it. Both admire the claims and ideas of surrealism. Both seek lucidity in poetry, “Keeping oneself awake,” said Villaurrutia.²³ Both poets read deeply into the romantic sources of surrealism (Blake, Nerval, Rimbaud). Paz praised Villaurrutia's “intellectual” poems, adding: “I like the language of dreams, but mistrust dreamy poets.”²⁴ Paz defended this clearheadedness and in so doing confirmed his moral debt.

Paz has enumerated further debts to Villaurrutia in terms of the craft of poetry: to curb his lyrical facility, be wary of words, and read poetry aware of the secret nuances (X, 34). Paz had inherited a wide-ranging cultural avidity from the Contemporáneos poets, but found their center empty; he aspired to a more moral and political core-interest in political events, revolution, changing man and society, Marxism, etc.

YUCATáN

In 1937 Paz broke off his formal university studies—and to which he never returned: he called himself an autodidact—in order to do something more useful than study literature in the seclusion of a campus. This gesture suggests a tilting of the scales in favor of revolutionary action over reflection. Paz's dilemma centered on how to remain a lyrical poet in such harassing times, even in revolutionary Mexico under the most revolutionary president until then, Lázaro Cárdenas. Going to Yucatán resolved this dilemma. Paz worked to help implant Mexican educational policy by setting up a school in a poor rural area near Mérida. It was social concern that led Paz there, not a desire to study Mayan ruins. These experiences resulted in a long poem whose final shape has dogged Paz over forty years. Entre la piedra y la flor (Between stone and flower) was begun in Yucatán and published in 1941. In 1976, explaining his revisions, Paz identified his intentions as political: to show the asphyxiating relationship that tied workers to the impersonal, abstract, capitalistic economy (P, 666).

Entre la piedra y la flor is divided into four sections. The title presupposes the peasant who lives “entre” (between) the desert—vividly evoked in images in the first section—and the flower of the sizal plant that ties him to a miserable world as exploited proletariat. The second section taps the poet's shock faced with human suffering in that stony shell of a land. The sizal's sharp-pointed leaves are opposed to this plant's sexual flower, which flowers just once in the plant's life, and compared with the flowering of human life in such harsh conditions. Section 3 centers on man immersed in this plantation land. For sizal is more than a plant: it represents a share in the stock market, man's labor, time, and sweat. The anonymous peasants wear themselves out cultivating this “abstract” plant. Paz then describes this peasant in a language reminiscent of his later El laberinto de la soledad (the male is polite, ceremonious, and obliging but whips his wife), and he also delves into the superstitious core of this man. Section 4 returns to money and how it controls the life-cycle. Paz develops a chain of life-denying analogies: money-wheel-number-bone-time. Certain peasant values escape the tyranny of money—the poem becomes a litany here—like their attitude to death, singing, happiness, and sorrow, their illiteracy (a wisdom ignored by money), and witchcraft. The 1976 revision conserves Paz's attack on death-giving money as the reality of those oppressed lives: an orthodox anticapitalist view (P, 92-99).

We will contrast the 1976 version with some of the deleted fragments, in order to catch Paz's moral/political anger of the late 1930s. The first four sections of the 1976 version are complete rewritings. In the 1941 version the peasants are addressed in the tú form, the comrade/brother familiarity; in the 1976 version this becomes simply man in the third person, “them” (P, 98). But more telling than the re-creations and new images is Paz's suppression of the fifth canto. In the original this canto leads from the poet's observations and interpretations to what action must be taken. Action, the task (tarea) typifies the language of those times. The poet in 1941 (1937) wanted to absorb the peasant's anger and end the capitalist world. “Para acabar con todo” (To finish everything) ends the poem; this revolutionary's tabula rasa is cited four times.²⁵ The crucial revolutionary verb arder (to burn) occurs ten times and points to Paz's political commitment, his “Horno invisible y puro” (Invisible and pure oven), a moral purity that later offended the poet. Paz has pruned his political revolutionary identification between the peasant's lot and the poet's task. In 1976 this conventional 1930s stance seemed ingenuous.²⁶

SPAIN

In 1971 Paz recalled the radical Spanish poet Rafael Alberti's 1934 visit to Mexico. It was the first time that Paz heard poetry read aloud in public; he left dazzled. When Paz met Alberti in a bar he read him his own poems. Alberti commented that Paz's early poetry was not social or revolutionary, but added, “he is the only revolutionary poet among you, because he is the only one trying to transform the language.”²⁷ That Paz still remembered Alberti's actual words is significant; it is also important that Alberti defined revolutionary poetry as seeking a revolution in language, not reflecting a revolutionary content. In 1984 Paz again returned to this 1934 encounter with the politicized Alberti. He modifies his admiration for Alberti's rather theatrical readings but again re-creates Alberti's praise for exploring his own intimacy. Paz ends: “I have never forgotten his words.”²⁸ Alberti had guessed that Paz was not offering idealistic revolutionary rhetoric to satisfy his bad conscience.

In July 1936 Spain began her ferocious civil war. Paz, ever sensitive to current events, reacted from Mexico with a passionate poem echoing in its title the great rallying cry of the Republicans: “¡No pasarán!” (“They will not pass”). This circumstantial outburst has not been collected, though Paz published it in El nacional (4 October 1936) and as a pamphlet. This pamphlet has an epigraph from Elie Faure about Spain being the reality and conscience of the world. Thirty-five hundred copies were printed and all profits were ceded to the Popular Front in their “heroic” fight. The poem is an elegy that opposes human frailty and gentleness to the forces of death. Badajoz (which fell in August), Irún (fell in September), and a funerary wind are cited in a poem whose obvious protest unites it with many other poems (especially by Neruda and Vallejo) where the moral intensity and purity of the language is heightened by sharing the moral stance of the tender world of friends and comrades closing ranks against evil. The poem ends:

Detened al terror y a las mazmorras,
para que crezca, joven, en España,
la vida verdadera,
la sangre jubilosa,
la ternura feraz del mundo libre.
Detened a la muerte, camaradas!(29)

(Stop terror and the dungeons / so that true life, / jubilant blood, / the fertile tenderness of the free world / may grow, young, in Spain. / Stop death, comrades!)

At a level of values, as a poet, Paz defended youth, the true life, love, and freedom. This poem would be hard to identify as Pazian—it appeals to a collectivity and voices a collectivity—but its moral defense of “la vida verdadera” (a phrase often used by Paz) surpasses all political creeds. If these values had socialist connotations then, Paz later shed the political husk and maintained the moral seed. The poet Efraín Huerta, reviewing this poem in 1937, thought it would “burn the reader's hands.”³⁰

Before finally embarking for Spain, Paz's involvement with the Spanish Republican cause and socialist politics had diverted his intimate lyric poetry into more political channels. In 1951 Paz evoked the fervor of those years: moral concepts like freedom, the people, hope, revolution shone brightly and without irony (Pe, 278). As if the word and the concept at last fused: the poet just had to name pueblo (people) and the concept became reality, the suffering Spanish people, the proletariat. As a poet, this fusion banished his alienation for the word became rooted to the thing. Simply to name was to create.

In 1937 Paz married Elena Garro and left with Carlos Pellicer for Spain, invited by Pablo Neruda to attend the second Congress of the International Association of Writers, part of the Alliance of Intellectuals in the Defence of Culture, held in Barcelona and Valencia. It was organized by Neruda from Paris (he met Paz at the station), with a secret aim (according to Hugh Thomas) to attack Gide for his critique of Russia. Some eighty writers from twenty-six countries turned up.³¹

Paz spent almost a year in Spain, but never actually fought. He said to Rita Guibert: “Spain taught me the meaning of fraternity.”³² During those hectic, thrilling, and dangerous days Paz lived out his socialist/Utopian dreams of a classless society where everybody was a poet. The intellectual poet rubbed shoulders with peasants, all equal. Paz: “Eating with those peasants during a bombardment … that's something I can't forget.”³³ In El laberinto de la soledad (1950) Paz elevated this companionship (pan—bread: a key symbol for Paz at this experiential level) in Spain to a glimpse of full human potential realized, akin to a religious revelation. Paz: “I remember that in Spain, during the war, I had a revelation of the ‘other man’ and another kind of solitude … open to transcendence” (L, 23). The peasant faces Paz examined portrayed a desperate hope in a concrete and universal sense that he had “never seen since” (L, 24). Socialism shifted from a dream to a reality, the dawn of a New Man. Paz preserved this vision embodied by peasants and poets in Spain at the center of his view of the function of poetry, and he never abandoned it. This was the experiential basis to a belief that poetry restores being, awakens otherness, and transcends alienation and solitariness. Paz summarized: “In every man beats the possibility of being, or more exactly of being again, another man” (L, 174). In Spain he claimed (in a note on Antonio Machado whom he visited in 1938): “Liberty had become embodied” (Pe, 212).

That this was merely a glimpse of a potential soon crushed by Franco forms part of Paz's later rejection of a purely political revolution. He confessed to Couffon that Spain had revealed to him the impossibility of an immediate transformation of the human condition.³⁴ A sense of the ridiculousness of the intellectual's participation during those violent events emerges in Stephen Spender's memoirs World within World (1951). When Paz's wife suddenly burst into hysterical weeping while the children in a village danced for the poets Spender underwent “a moment of realization.”³⁵ For many of the European left-wing poets the fall of Spain symbolized the end of an epoch, the collapse of all hopes about individual action against fascism exposed by Cyril Connolly: “The defeat of the Spanish Republic shattered my faith in political action.”³⁶ But Paz differed; he returned to Mexico secure about possibilities for a new man, embodied in Spain in a non-Marxist revolutionary tradition.³⁷ Something had been born in Spain that would never die (Pe, 283).

Equally decisive for Paz in Spain was his meeting with many of his favorite poets. Not only during the Congress, but in bars, cafés, and trains he made contact with poets he had only read before: Neruda, Vallejo, Machado, Spender, Bergamín, Huidobro, Péret, Altolaguirre, and Miguel Hernández. In Spain he also first read Luis Cernuda, a revelatory encounter. In 1942 Paz recalled his brief meetings with Miguel Hernández in Valencia, Madrid, and Paris: “days of passion and truth in which on discovering you [Hernández] and Spain, I discovered a part of myself, a rough tender root that made me greater and older” (Pe, 217). This revelation about his universal roots as a human being, roots older than his Mexican identity, is fundamental. He echoed this discovery in his long but severely abridged poem Raíz del hombre (Root of man), published in 1937. Through Hernández Paz heard (as he told Ríos) his first personal critique of Soviet Russia, for Hernández had just visited Moscow. The human aspect of his stay, the cosmopolitan congregation of writers, excited Paz. Borkenau described the babel of languages spoken, the electrical political enthusiasm, the adventure of a moral war, while Toynbee evoked a carnival atmosphere.³⁸ But unlike his English counterparts (Spender, Auden) Paz suffered no guilt about participating as a poet rather than as a fighter in the war.

In Spain Paz wrote and published poems. For example, his “Elegía a un joven muerto en el frente” (“Elegy to a young man killed on the front”), though written in Mexico in 1937, was extended in Valencia and published in Hora de España, a magazine “in the service of the popular cause,” edited by Gil-Albert, Altolaguirre, Gaya, and Serrano Plaja who exiled themselves in Mexico and continued to collaborate with Paz. In 1979 Paz returned to the circumstances surrounding this elegy suppressed in his previous collections. He has modified aspects of the poem from its 1937 appearance. For example, the 1979 opening “Has muerto camarada / en el ardiente amanecer del mundo” (You died comrade / in the burning dawn of the world, P, 99) leads on to “Y brotan de tu muerte / tu mirada, tu traje azul” (And from your death / your look, your blue suit bursts out …); but in the 1937 we read “Y brotan de tu muerte horrendamente vivos / tu mirada / tu traje de héroe” (I have underlined the deletions: horridly alive, hero).³⁹ Further deletions like “crece al hombre en puños como frutos / puños de combatiente y camarada” (Grows in the man in fists like fruit / fists of a combatant and comrade) point to a toning down of the rousing political rhetoric of 1936. In a long note (1979) Paz details the ironic circumstances surrounding this elegy and names the nameless hero as José Bosch. He tells how they met, about Bosch's anarchist leanings, the two days spent in jail together, and how eventually Bosch was deported back to Spain. Then Paz read Bosch's name on a list of dead in the Civil War and thus was born his legend. Paz and his friends had a martyr (P, 671). In Spain in 1938, reading his poems aloud, Paz came across his old friend alive. They met and chatted before Bosch disappeared again for ever.

In Spain Paz wrote an “Oda al sueño” (“Ode to dream”) dated Madrid 1937, collected in 1960, then deleted;⁴⁰ an “Oda a España” (“Ode to Spain”) dated Madrid, Paris 1937;⁴¹ a poem originally called “El barco” (“The boat”) dated Atlantic ocean 1937, presumably his boat journey to Spain which has survived as “Los viejos” (“The old people”) in his Poemas. He also edited a book Bajo tu clara sombra y otros poemas sobre España (Under your clear shadow and other poems about Spain) in Valencia 1937 with a note by Altolaguirre including “¡No pasarán!,” his elegy and one of the odes. The title poem, dated 1935—1938 in its 1941 Tierra nueva edition—is a long meditative poem about words, woman, and love published during a civil war and best catches Paz's attempted fusion of an inner moral stance and change with a political one.

His “Oda al sueño” bears traces of having been written in the middle of the war in Madrid, but as a frame for a love poem, where the poet and his lover “Dormimos sobre escombros / solos entre las ruinas y los sueños” (We sleep on rubble / alone amongst the ruins and dreams)⁴² of a gutted, bombed Madrid. There at night the poet discovers that the horrors of war can be redeemed by erotic love and dreaming. The poet is able to rescue his alienated, divided self: “Sueño, bajo tu manto delirante / el hombre, aniquilado, se conquista” (Dream, under your delirious cloak / man, annihilated, conquers himself).⁴³ The dream plunges man back into his roots, for dreams and lovers tap the “grace of eternity.”⁴⁴ This experience of the redeeming dream in anguished times, of lovers re-creating a paradise in the ruins of a war “indefensos y rotos nuestros cuerpos” (our bodies defenceless and broken) exemplifies how Paz avoids any political definition of the poet's role. The poet's function is to remind his reader, his comrades, of those other inner values necessary in such vile times. Paz returned to these circumstances years later in his Piedra de sol (Sun Stone, 1957):

Madrid, 1937,
en la Plaza del Angel las mujeres
cosían y cantaban con sus hijos,
después sonó la alarma y hubo gritos,
casas arrodilladas en el polvo,
torres hendidas, frentes escupidas
y el huracán de los motores, fijo. …

(P, 268-69)

(Madrid 1937 / in the Plaza del Angel women / were sewing and singing with their children / later when the alarm sounded there were shouts / houses kneeled in the dust / towers split, facades spat on / and the hurricane of the motors, fixed.)

During this fascist airial bombardment the lovers perform, as in his previous ode:

los dos se desnudaron y se amaron
por defender nuestra porción eterna,
nuestra ración de tiempo y paraíso,
tocar nuestra raíz y recobrarnos,
porque las desnudeces enlazadas
saltan el tiempo y son invulnerables. …

(P, 269)

(the two of them stripped and made love / to defend our eternal portion / our ration of time and paradise / to touch our root and recover ourselves / because entwined nakednesses / leap over time and are invulnerable.)

Two words—raíz and eterno—link 1937 with 1957, while the values of love, defending human integrity, are made even clearer as this poem impersonalizes the lovers, interpreting erotic love as a sensation that encodes a salvation, a paradise invulnerable to history. Paz's defense against evil (the fascists who deny freedom, love, poetry) was to write a poem evoking values, not to shoot a gun. But the word “defense” links the activities at the level of social usefulness.

Paz's “El barco,” later “Los viejos” (formally owing something to Pablo Neruda's “El fantasma del buque” from Residencia en la tierra),⁴⁵ is placed in precise circumstances, the Atlantic ocean, 1937, apparently a ship of evacuees (P, 102n.), fleeing fascist Spain. Or is the poem about Paz's ship going to Spain, with fighters going to war as a 1941 version suggests with its “van los hombres partidos por la guerra” (men set off for war)?⁴⁶ But Paz rises above his personal experience and realistic setting to invoke the moral strength of these “hombres hermosos” (fine men) who uprooted themselves to support freedom in Spain. Paz lends them natural qualities, deep voices of oranges, and cider. The 1941 poem ends: “Allí los reconozco, / allí los nombro con los ardientes nombres de mis lágrimas, / y me disuelvo en ellos y me salvo” (There I recognize them / there I name them with the burning names of my tears / and I dissolve in them and save myself). His admiration and tears of celebration for their sacrifice (a moving detail from those days) allow him to identify with them and feel saved. A reiterated notion: the fight against fascism redeemed and resolved guilt, alienation, and solitude. Paz eliminated this ending in 1979.

Paz's “Oda a España” (not collected) written in Madrid and Paris (1937) summarizes the young Paz's involvement in the Spanish Civil War. The poem explicitly deals with the “deeds of this war” and Paz's “testimonio vivo” (living testimony). All Spain speaks through him as a value embodying natural, simple, human decency. He describes his position clearly: “Sé que soy joven, … / pero yo quiero, amigos, camaradas, / que mis palabras, ojos, manos, lengua, … / hablen tan vivamente, / como esos hechos duros y gloriosos …” (I know I am young / but I want, friends, comrades / my words, eyes, hands, tongue / to speak as lively as those hard glorious deeds). He proclaims his awe for those young workers who sacrificed their lives and feels linked to those comrades through their spilt blood and the blood of life running through his living veins. For it is tierra (earth, elemental mother earth) that speaks through all of the participants the values of peace and love. Paz's insight is that Adam, the New Man, was being reborn in Spain (see note 41).

It is at this level of love (blood, earth, human voice: the analogies are deliberately archetypal and obvious) that we can read Bajo tu clara sombra, written in Mexico in 1935 but published in Spain during the war. In its original version it is a long elegy in ten cantos celebrating words, love, prehistory, woman, man, and the natural world. Paz felt these values needed affirming during the Civil War, experienced as a moral crusade against the forces of evil. The poem justifies the necessity of poetry, man's inner purity, love, and all that unites man and woman with life: “la palabra del goce de la tierra” (the word of pleasure of the earth).⁴⁷ Pax celebrates man's innocence: “y tornamos a ser tierra inocente, / y el aire, en los espacios, / madura desnudez y libertad” (and we become innocent earth again, / and air, in the spaces, / matures nakedness and liberty). The function of poetry is to recall man's real nature: “me desnudan de mí” (they strip me of myself), a nature deeper than ego, personality, and history. This experience occurs in the present tense of the act of love:

donde vibra el instante,
la frenética música:
la cima de los besos,
la plenitud del mundo y de sus formas.

(Where the instant vibrates / the frantic music: / the peak of kisses, / plenitude of the world and its forms.)

The poet allows himself to be the channel of this natural upsurge where words are compared to sap rising up the stalk/throat (Paz returns to this image in Blanco, (White/target, 1966) for the poet is spellbound by life (Paz had been reading Nietzsche at the time). Paz defended this version of harmony and integrity in a war. This is the poem's real context.⁴⁸

Paz's scant poems dealing with this formative period in his life do not seem overtly political, but in this specific historical context and dilemma, they do defend values. And they concern “man,” not Mexican man. Paz said to Couffon that during the Civil War he explored the problem of contemporary man.⁴⁹ It was a crisis period in Western history. Juan Gil-Albert reviewed Bajo to clara sombra in Hora de España in 1937 stressing the difference in Paz between the real poet and propaganda. Paz has not confused passion for a cause with poetry; he concludes: “when a young man writes these poems in which life shines out, he is, for the mere fact of having written them, on the side of the revolution that men desire.”⁵⁰

RETURN TO MEXICO

Paz returned to Mexico via Paris in 1938, determined to continue the fight against fascism and not too disillusioned over the collapse of the Popular Front. Paz supported Lázaro Cárdenas's official policy of welcoming all Republicans to Mexico and refusing recognition of Franco's dictatorship. From 1938 Paz wrote a daily article on political events for the left-wing newspaper El popular, gave speeches in favor of the cause, and founded a literary magazine Taller (Workshop,) 1938-41 with militant overtones that had an open-doors policy for the Spanish exiles, to such an extent that Rafael Solanas called it a Spanish magazine edited in Mexico, displacing Mexicans, while Abreu Gómez chided that it should concern itself with the Mexican Revolution: “Taller must finish the ideological work of the Revolution.”⁵¹ The magazine ran to twelve numbers with Paz editing numbers 5 to 12. It was essentially a literary review.

In his own review Paz published the poems “Noche de resurrecciones” and the “Oda al sueño,” and over the period 1938-42 he increased his critical output in prose as a complementary side to being a poet, as if he needed prose to sort out and define his position. A crucial encounter for Paz was with the exiled Spanish poet León Felipe. In 1938 he wrote a “Saludo a León Felipe” (“A greeting to L. F.”) in which he insisted that Mexicans recognize their links with the Spaniards and discover their full humanity (Pe, 194). In 1939, in Taller, Paz wrote “El mar” (“The sea”), an eulogistic review of Felipe's El hacha (The axe), a book Paz called “the spiritual history of Spanish man.”⁵² Paz explains what a poet makes of the accidents of politics (the Spanish Civil War): “a poet gathers the historical experience and converts it via poetry into a metaphysical experience,” what Paz himself did and a socially justifiable and important activity.⁵³ Felipe's “blasphemy” prolonged the view current then that Spain was the world's bad conscience, the loss of its pure voice a crime shared by all. Paz as a Mexican whose government actively helped particularly blamed the Western democracies. In 1971 Paz told Julián Ríos that it was Felipe's moral attitude to the world rather than his actual poems that so moved him. León Felipe embodied the Spanish cause.

Already in his Taller poem “Noche de resurrecciones,” with its romantic hint of rebirth through night, Paz had begun his separation from explicit political circumstances in a poem whose value lay in its insistence on origins, dream, and the night, a world of “hacia dentro” (toward the inside) seeking the sources of love. It continues the themes and treatment of Bajo tu clara sombra and meditates on what is universal and eternal in all men. In an age of feuds, cataclysms, and world wars a search for some transcendent refuge, a “solitaria llama” (solitary flame) makes sense.⁵⁴ The poem is collected and abbreviated in Poems (1979).

Paz himself has made much of what he called the Taller generation. He became their spokesman, but without Paz, this generation is not as varied or rich as the Contemporáneos grouping of poets. We see the Taller group as a modification and underscoring of what the Contemporáneos stood for embodied in one person, Octavio Paz. In a 1963 interview Paz confirmed this view by stressing the Contemporáneos poets as “exemplary masters of rebellion” opening Mexican letters to the new poetry and beginning a tradition of criticism that culminates in Paz.⁵⁵ In 1982 a facsimile edition of Taller appeared, and in 1983 Paz published a memoir about his participation in the magazine (S, 94-113). The main difference between the generations centered on left-wing politics; the name Taller, workshop, craft, community, explains the intensions best. By 1983 Paz regards this political tendency with shame, and his memoir is a mea culpa confessing his blindness to Stalin and Russia. It is ironic that Paz also admits his antipathy to André Breton's clear-sighted break with the Stalinists in 1930 when by 1947 he had befriended Breton and shared his “moral indignation” with left-wing totalitarianism.

As well as collaborating with Spanish exiles in Taller, Paz also edited a small anthology of contemporary Spanish verse called Voces de España (1938), that commemorates the second anniversary of their “heroic fight.” In a letter published in Letras de México (1938) Paz explained that he wished to keep alive the spirit that sacrificed itself for “human freedoms” in those poets who actually fought for Spain (and thus excluding Salinas and Aleixandre).⁵⁶

In 1941 Paz coedited with Xavier Villaurrutia, Emilio Prados, and Juan Gil-Albert an anthology of modern poetry in Spanish entitled Laurel. This anthology reflected Paz's and that period's perception that the Spanish language and tradition was one, a fraternity of poets whose true nationality was a common language. Paz recently returned to the editing of this anthology in a long essay entitled “Poesía e historia” (Poetry and history). This intellectual autobiography describes some of the minor scandals of that time, especially Pablo Neruda's refusal to allow his poems to appear. But Laurel's purpose was still political: solidarity with the fallen Republic (S, 47-93).

Over those years following his return from Spain Paz published essays on Rilke, poetry and mythology, history and philosophy, and a series of semidiary but impersonal jottings on art, metaphysics, myth, desire, religion in a Nietzschean, and aphoristic form that owes something also to the apocryphal philosophers / teachers Abel Martín and Juan de Mairena invented by Antonio Machado. These began in Taller (1938) as “Vigilias” (Night work), subtitled “Diary of a dreamer” and continued in other magazines—Tierra nueva, El hijo pródigo—up to 1945. Here Paz meditated in prose what he worked on in verse, an overlapping that has continued throughout his life. For example, on the pressing question What is poetry in the context of a world war?, Paz wrote in prose: “Poetry is innocence, but the poet is not innocent. Thus his anguish; poetry is a grace, a gift but also a thirst and a suffering. Poetry springs from pain like water from earth. With poetry the poet recovers his innocence, remembers a Lost Paradise and bites into the old apple. But what tough waste-lands, what deserts he must cross to get to the front!”⁵⁷ In Mexico in 1940 Paz wrote a poem “La poesía” dedicated to Luis Cernuda (this dedication was removed in 1979) where “Poetry” is a purifying force that invades the poet, makes him “naked, stripped” (that is, innocent). Poetry is a burning truth, an “avidity” (a thirst) and is indestructible. It arises from his depths, his being, and makes the poet prophetic. Poetry is the “unity of his soul and body” (a Lost Paradise). This poem harks back to Paz's “Oda al sueño.” When poetry, the muse, touches the poet he recognizes his true nature, his identity, his link with nature, mother, reality: “unta mis ojos con aceite, / para que al conocerte me conozca” (anoint my eyes with oil, / so that on recognizing you I recognize myself, P, 106). Paz's stress on innocence during a foul world war becomes his metaphor for a state outside history, ideology, and language that resolves guilt and alienation yet affirms a belief in human potential and the poet's role. This innocence has a Nietzschean ring.⁵⁸

In Taller Paz had affirmed that the poet “is the conscience of existence.”⁵⁹ This phrase underscores the notion that Paz's questionings go beyond the forms of poetry or prose to find their origins in an ethical stance. Paz's first article was tellingly titled “Ética del artista” (Artist's ethics, 1931). His dialogue with the history of those days lies inside his poems, invisibly, in his desperate insistence on innocence.⁶⁰

Paz's meditational fragments “Vigilias” continued in 1941 with further thoughts on man's double or triple nature, a self-dialogue between history and poetry within the poet. Here Paz began his exploration of soledad (solitude) that culminated in his appendix to El laberinto de la soledad (1950). This exploration of soledad became the driving force of Paz's thinking over the next eighteen years. Paz: “I want to find the deepest voice inside me … the insoluble solitude of a creature, evidence of man's eternal solitude.”⁶¹ This concept and experience of soledad, fruitfully studied by one of Paz's earliest and best critics, Ramón Xirau,⁶² obsessed the Contemporáneos poets, but derives from Paz's thorough reading of Nietzsche—Paz: “Only Nietzsche is capable of comfort”⁶³—also indicates the beginning of the poet's isolation from a political collaborative role fighting the nightmare of history. During this period following the Civil War (1941 on) Paz became marginalized and disillusioned with his earlier political enthusiasm about changing man and society.

This burgeoning crisis concerns what Paz calls the “moral sense,” man's sixth sense, equated with guilt. Paz explored this sense in relation to freedom, nature, integrity, and sexuality. He defined this sense in D. H. Lawrence terms as a religion. Much of his later thinking develops from these crucial years. He saw left-wing politics as a disguised religious longing but as yet was not critical of this: “Its end is communion: thus it does not aim to create a morality but a religion (this is nothing other than the deep aim of communism, which seeks fraternity, the active communion of desperate people, as well as of the disinherited).”⁶⁴ Still, in 1941 left-wing fraternity held a positive connotation in Paz's personal quest for communion, resolving his own guilt and emptiness as a poet. Paz identified with the “desesperados” of those war years.

In these 1941 fragments Paz included a lyrical paragraph about his muse's or lover's eyes. During those same years he also wrote a poem “Tus ojos” (“Your eyes”) published in Libertad bajo palabra (Liberty under parole, 1949), undated, in the section “El girasol” (Sunflower, 1943-48). The poem is one long conceit. It opens with “Tus ojos son” (Your eyes are) and continues with sixteen lyrical analogies for “her” eyes, as if poetry can only approximate the reality of her eyes. There are crucial overlaps with the prose piece that help date the poem.

In the prose “her” eyes open and devour the poet. He plunges into these eyes and sinks into a magical world, like a sea, where he experiences such intensity that life and death, solitude and company fuse. He loses his name, his illusory individuality, and becomes naked but full of life. He has experienced “our deepest, most ungraspable condition.”⁶⁵ The poem also has her eyes drawing the poet into a marvelous inscape with a sea (watery eyes). Here eyes are “puertas del más allá” (doors to the beyond, P, 125), an absolute. The difference between the pieces is that the prose explains while the poem enthuses through images. For abstract “plenitude” in the prose, we read in the poem “pájaros presos, doradas fieras adormecidas, / topacios impíos como la verdad” (trapped birds, golden sleeping beasts, / topazes pitiless as the truth, P, 125). In the prose the revelation is awkwardly “unsayable,’ in the poem it is sayable: “pulsación tranquila del mar a mediodía” (the sea's midday tranquil pulsation, P, 125). Both prose and poem create a passionate edifice of words around an erotic experience, both affirm love as the only alternative to politics, history, and the corrupt world. Both are secret tributes to Paul Eluard (cf. “L'Amoureuse,” 1924; “Avec tes yeux”).⁶⁶

Historical events began to sour Paz's belief in the efficacy of political idealism. The 1940 Hitler-Stalin pact, the totalitarian nature of the Soviet regime (but not its gulags, nor its persecutions of dissidents) and the 1940 assassination of Trotsky (Paz: “it horrified me,” S, 110) increased Paz's despair about the world situation. The squabbles between rival splinter groups about socialist realism or the duties of the writer and friendship with dissidents like Victor Serge (who put Paz on to the revelatory work of Henri Michaux; Paz to Ríos: “a discovery of capital importance for me”) forced Paz to retreat from active politics and “history” as the stage for social change. Paz: “I could break the spell” (that Marxist revolutions held over him, S, 108). He began a period of intense isolation. He told Scherer about this break: “I was left very alone” (O, 328). Paz turned inward and from late 1943 left Mexico for over eleven years. Over these years of self-imposed exile and search for new horizons poetry came more and more to represent the only moral value in a world in ruins.

One incident summarized Paz's break with party politics and concerned Pablo Neruda. Similar to many of his generation, Paz's discovery of Neruda was a revelation. Whether Paz obtained the books (he still owns a first edition of Residencia en la tierra [Residence on earth], 1933) or read individual poems in Contemporáneos in 1931, does not alter his shocked thrill of reading a poet from his own culture and continent. Paz to Ríos: “For me Neruda was the great destructer-creator of Hispanic poetry.”

We suggested that Paz's 1937 “El barco” (“Los viejos”) owes its topic—a boat—and its buildup of sensual, approximate images to Neruda. But Neruda's stylistic influence is not visible until some of Paz's 1940s poems. Paz met Neruda in Paris in 1937. Neruda had invited him over to the Congress on the strength of Paz's first book of 1933.⁶⁷ As well as his poems Paz had also avidly read Neruda's literary magazine Caballo verde para la poesía (Green horse for poetry), sharing his attack on Juan Ramón Jiménez's pure poetry. On his return from Spain in 1938, in an uncollected piece “Pablo Neruda en el corazón” (“P. N. in the heart”) Paz confessed that Neruda had excitingly reintroduced lo real (reality) into a poetry that had become overpurified.⁶⁸ Paz identified with this attack on a poetry that expressed “horror for all nonessential reality.”⁶⁹ Paz labeled these idealistic poems “beautiful refrigerators” while Neruda's poetry was a “living conquering flow,” that is, life, a plunging into the depths of sonorous matter itself. Neruda had created not a mimetic poetry, but a poetry whose images and metaphors had become as solid as reality. Paz praises Neruda's Civil War poems (España en el corazón [Spain in the heart]; cf. the title of Paz's piece) because it tapped the same sources as Marx, but poetically: “the purest spring of human work.”⁷⁰ This “purest,” a moral concept, shows that Paz and Neruda shared values (in 1938), and these values coalesced in Spain, not only a political/historical issue but the “decisive fact of our moral history” where man touched his roots, his essence, the great metaphysical drama of time and nothingness.⁷¹ Neruda's poetry incited to continued action in order to defend this value from the subhuman cloaca (sewer) of fascism. It is evident why Paz refused to collect this “document” of his political ambitions of then.

But in 1941 Paz feuded with Neruda who was consul general for Chile in Mexico. The feud began with Neruda's refusal to let his poems be published in Paz's coedited anthology Laurel. It involved Neruda's antipathy to José Bergamín, a meal in honor of Neruda's departure, and how Neruda and Paz nearly came to blows and did not speak to each other until they met in London in 1967 (S, 54-56). In many ways, Neruda's person and poetry came to embody all the dogmatic partisanship that began to embitter Paz. Paz's response to Neruda was virulent. And Neruda blamed this vitriolic quality as endemic to Mexican literary life. In his memoirs Neruda wrote: “Woe to anybody who from the outside takes side in favor of or against one or other group.”⁷² It is true that Paz (like Neruda) has been involved in other public feuds, due perhaps to his moral stance but never as intransigently as André Breton.

Paz's “Respuesta a un cónsul” (“Answer to a consul”), which appeared in Letras de México in 1943, accused Neruda's friends in Mexico of being “lackeys” and Neruda's poetry of being “contaminated” by politics, of being confused and possessing a “titanic” vanity. Paz lists three points of attack on Neruda. The first concerns the ineptitude of political poetry: poetry cannot cause a political change, better a text by Lenin than bad poems by Mayakovsky or Neruda. Paz repeated his attack on Neruda's vanity, bitterness, and access to “money” that allowed him to give dinners to the jauría (pack of hounds) of Mexican intellectuals that adulated him. All this because Neruda had dared accuse Mexican poets of a lamentable “lack of civil morality.”⁷³ By 1943 Paz had clearly separated the poet from the political activists, resisting the attempt to unite both under the banner of revolution. His attack on Neruda was equally directed against Mexicans. In 1959 Paz told Couffon: “From the moral point of view [Neruda] seems to me to be the living example of the poet degraded by a party.”⁷⁴

Paz published “La poesía” (“Poetry,” 1940), dedicated to Luis Cernuda, in A la orilla del mundo (On the world's shore, 1942), which collected most of his poems up to that date. As stated, the 1979 Poemas deleted both date and dedication. Paz's first reading of Cernuda's poetry in Civil War Spain hinted at his later development away from politics but remaining firmly faithful to an ethic (like Cernuda). What most impressed Paz about Cernuda (as he said to Ríos) was that Cernuda's “moral subversion was united with a poetic subversion and that it was impossible to identify a social revolution with a poetic subversion.” Paz has always acknowledged his debt to Cernuda, especially in his magnificent essay “La palabra edificante” (“The edifying word”) written in 1964 and published in Cuadrivio (Quadrivium, 1965), exploring this moral, dissident dimension. Cernuda settled later in Mexico and befriended Paz. In 1958 Paz highlighted Cernuda's consciousness of his position in the world as a poet. Cernuda's work challenged orthodox values, and Paz had discovered in Cernuda something absent in all the other poets of that generation (i.e., Neruda): “The consciousness of the poet's destiny as being a person apart and who only affirms his self by negating the abject world that surrounds him.”⁷⁵ In 1962 Paz commemorated his friend in a poem “Luis Cernuda 1902-1963” (the dates added in 1979) where Cernuda becomes prototypic, “el poeta” (the poet, P, 323-25).

The 1940 dedicated poem describes poetry as an inner value, activity, and experience that gives the poet his identity: “Entre mis ruinas me levanto, / solo, desnudo, despojado” (Among my ruins I raise myself, / alone, naked, stripped, P, 104). This purifying experience from the ruins and collapse of Paz's political faith in change is linked to Cernuda's deseo (desire), the title of his collected poetry La realidad y el deseo (Reality and desire); the poet's inner avidity or thirst that is never quenched. Only through this burning integrating experience can Paz open his eyes on to the world and reality. Man without “poetry” (desire) would become a puppet of history, a hollow man. Poetry had become a faith (a fate), an “ardiente balbuceo” (burning stuttering, P, 105), his “madre mía” (my mother, P, 106), a muse that obliges the poet to remain faithful to her vision. This was Cernuda's exemplary quality, just the direction that Paz sought in his confusions of the 1940s. In war ravaged Europe there can be no political revolution. The poet is a loner.

In the poem “Delicia” (“Delight,”) dedicated to José Luis Martínez, a critic who supported Paz's attack on Neruda with a note, published in A la orilla del mundo (1942), Paz inserted poetry into a bureaucratic, party political context:

Entre conversaciones y silencios,
lenguas de trapo y de ceniza,
entre las reverencias, dilaciones,
las infinitas jerarquías,
los escaños del tedio,
los bancos del tormento,
naces, delicia, alta quietud.

(P, 40)

(Between conversations and silences, / tongues of rag or ash, / between reverences, delays, / the benches of torment, / you are born, delight, high stillness.)

In earlier editions Paz explicitly wrote “naces, poesía” (“you are born, poetry,” not “delicia”). He also deleted the last lines of the stanza, which read: “y danzas, invisible, frente al hombre. / El presidio del tiempo se deshace” (“and you dance, invisible, before man / The prison of time is undone,” Li, 33). The poem has shed an explicitness (1979) necessary in 1942. It articulates an alternative “lost paradise” that redeems the poet from fawning party politics and its corrupt dead language, the nontranscendental banalities of such meetings. Poetry had become the only experience able to liberate man from the tyranny of history (time).

During the 1940s, as Paz moved away from the spell of left-wing politics, a critical myth about Paz emerged. It stated that Paz had betrayed his lucidly clear lyrics. The more he became involved with surrealism as the only viable moral stance to take in the middle of the twentieth century, the more critics vociferated against the rising obscurity in his poetry. Paz knew that moral idealism need not of necessity flow into party politics, but his poetry is only political if we separate the poetry from the lucid self-conscious moral contexts that he has elaborated in his dialogue with his age.

From being the darling of the left-wing poets (cf. Alberti's and Neruda's early admiration), Paz had drifted into obscurity. In 1941 Abreu Gómez had praised Paz's Entre la piedra y la flor as one of the most deeply felt, human, responsible poems ever written in Mexico.⁷⁶ In 1958 Salazar Mallén wrote of Paz's early promise claiming that Paz became exhausted by 1940, a poet of works of inferior quality.⁷⁷ In 1965 Raúl Leiva contrasted the early clear, naked, distant poems with the illogicality and hermeticism of Paz's 1950s work.⁷⁸ Finally, E. Carballo (with whom Paz feuded in 1959) wrote in 1967 that Paz who knew how to separate poetry from propaganda had silenced himself and become deaf and blind to what happens socially and politically in the world.⁷⁹ But all these Mexican critics confused party politics with an ethical stance.

Notes

1. See Rita Guibert, Seven Voices (New York: Vintage Books, 1973); Alfredo Roggiano, “Persona y ámbito de Octavio Paz,” in Octavio Paz (Madrid, 1979), 5-33.

2. See Henry C. Schmidt, The Roots of Lo Mexicano: Self and Society in Mexican Thought 1900-1934 (College Station: Texas A. & M. Press, 1978), Martin Stabb, In Quest of Identity: Patterns in the Spanish American Essay of Ideas, 1890-1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967), and A. P. Debicki, Antología de la poesía mexicana moderna (London: Tamesis Books Ltd., 1976).

3. “Constante amigo,” Taller 4 (July 1939):53.

4. El arco y la lira (Mexico City, 1967), 172; hereafter cited in the text as A.

5. Las peras del olmo (Mexico City, 1965), 76; hereafter cited in the text as Pe.

6. El ogro filantrópico: Historia y política 1971-78 (Mexico City, 1979), 20; hereafter cited in the text as O.

7. El laberinto de la soledad (Mexico, 1964), 24; hereafter cited in the text as L.

8. Hombres en su siglo y otros ensayos (Barcelona, 1984), 37; hereafter cited in the text as H.

9. See Jason Wilson, Octavio Paz: A Study of his Poetics (Cambridge, 1979), 30.

10. “Respuesta y algo más,” México en la cultura 569 (February 1960):7.

11. Hugo Verani, “Octavio Paz y el primer poema,” Revista de la universidad de México 12 (April 1982):3.

12. See M. Forster, An Index to Mexican Literary Periodicals (New York: Scarecrow Press, 1966).

13. Dolores de la Mora, “¿Cómo nace un poeta?” El Gallo ilustrado 68 (13 October 1963): 1; Luis Mario Schneider, “Historia singular de un poema de Octavio Paz,” in Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. Angel Flores, (Mexico City, 1974), 113-17.

14. Prosas profanas (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1964), 13.

15. X. Villaurrutia, Obras (Mexico City: F.C.E., 1966), 46-47. See Wilson, Octavio Paz, 10-13 and Paz, Xavier Villaurrutia en persona y en obra (Mexico City, 1978); hereafter cited in the text as X.

16. Guibert, Seven Voices, 232.

17. See M. Forster, Los Contemporáneos 1920-1932: Perfil de un experimento vanguardista (Mexico City: Ediciones de Andrea, 1964).

18. Julián Ríos, Solo a dos voces (Barcelona: Editorial Lumen, 1973), unpaged.

19. Villaurrutia, Obras, 641-59, 773-83. See Allen Phillips “Octavio Paz: Critic of Modern Mexican Poetry,” in The Perpetual Present: The Poetry and Prose of Octavio Paz, ed. I. Ivask, (Norman, 1973), 61.

20. “El testimonio de los sentidos,” Romance 3 (March 1940):9.

21. “Razón de ser,” Taller 2 (April 1932):32.

22. Sombras de obras: Arte y literatura (Barcelona, 1983), p. 104; hereafter cited in the text as S.

23. Villaurrutia, Obras, 772.

24. Poesía en movimiento: México 1915-1966 (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1966), 16; hereafter cited in the text as Po.

25. Libertad bajo palabra: Obra poética (1935-1957) (Mexico City, 1968), 87; hereafter cited in the text as Li.

26. See R. Phillips, The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz (Oxford, 1972), 8-10; C. Magis, La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz (Mexico City, 1978), 19-23.

27. Ríos, Solo a dos voces.

28. “Rafael Alberti, visto y entrevisto,” El país, 4 June 1984, 9.

29. El nacional, 4 October 1936, 7.

30. Cited by K. Muller-Bergh, “La poesía de Octavio Paz en los años treinta,” in Octavio Paz, ed. A. Roggiano, 67.

31. Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965), 631; Valentine Cunningham, ed., Spanish Civil War Verse (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1980), 47; Juan Gil-Albert, Memorabilia (Barcelona: Tusquets Editor, 1975), 229-32, 252.

32. Guibert, Seven Voices, 212.

33. Ibid., 213.

34. C. Couffon, “Entrevista con Octavio Paz,” Cuadernos 36 (May-June 1959):80.

35. S. Spender, World within World (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1951), 242.

36. C. Connolly, “The Pen and the Sword,” Sunday Times, 13 April 1969, 3.

37. Elena Poniatowski, “Octavio Paz: Roca solar de la poesía,” México en la cultura 450 (3 November 1957):3.

38. Cunningham, Spanish Civil War Verse, 59.

39. Published in Hora de España 9 (September 1937):39, 41.

40. “Oda al sueño,” first published in Taller 4 (July 1939):36-39.

41. “Oda a España,” first published in Letras de México 30 (1 August 1938):3.

42. “Oda al sueña,” 36.

43. Ibid., 38.

44. Ibid., 39.

45. Noted by Muller-Bergh, “La poesía de Octavio Paz,” 69.

46. Published in Poesía 3 (May 1938):16.

47. Published as a supplement to Tierra nueva 9-10 (January-April 1942), unpaged.

48. See Judith Goetzinger, “Evolución de un poema: Tres versiones de Bajo tu clara sombra,” in Octavio Paz, ed. A. Roggiano, 73-106.

49. Couffon, “Entrevista,” 80.

50. Juan Gil-Albert, “Octavio Paz,” Hora de España 11 (November 1937):76.

51. R. Solanas, Las revistas literarias de México (Mexico: I.N.B.A., 1963), 98; E. Abreu Gómez in Ruta 8 (January 1939):54.

52. In Taller 3 (May 1939):42.

53. Ibid., 42-43.

54. Published in Taller 10 (March-April 1940):29.

55. Laus, “Octavio Paz hoy: la crítica de la significación,” Diorama de la cultura, 16 April 1967, 1.

56. Voces de España: Breve antología de poetas españoles contemporáneos (Mexico City: Ediciones Letras de México, 1938); letter in Letras de México 31 (15 September 1938):11.

57. In Taller 7 (December 1939):19.

58. Puertas al campo (Mexico City, 1966), 212; hereafter cited in the text as Pu.

59. Taller 7 (December 1939):19.

60. Cited in H. Verani, Octavio Paz: Bibliografía crítica (Mexico City: U.N.A.M., 1983).

61. Tierra nueva 7-8 (January-April 1941):34.

62. R. Xirau, Tres poetas de la soledad (Mexico City: Antigua Librería Robredo, 1955) and Octavio Paz: El sentido de la palabra (Mexico City, 1970).

63. Tierra nueva 7-8 (January-April 1941):34.

64. Ibid., 37-38.

65. Ibid., 39-40.

66. “Avec tes yeux je change comme avec les lunes / Et je suis tour à tour et de plomb et de plume, / Une eau mystérieuse et noire qui t'enserre …” (Eluard, Capitale de la douleur [Paris: Gallimard, 1966], 79). Paz translated Eluard in Versiones y diversiones (Mexico City: Joaquín Mortiz, 1974).

67. Pablo Neruda, Confieso que he vivido: Memorias (Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, 1974), 177-78.

68. “Pablo Neruda en el corazón,” Ruta 4 (15 September 1938):25.

69. Ibid., 25.

70. Ibid., 31.

71. Ibid., 33.

72. Neruda, Confieso, 223.

73. Letras de México 8 (15 August 1943):5. For a commentary on this feud see E. Rodríguez Monegal, El viajero inmóvil: Introducción a Pablo Neruda (Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, 1966), 106.

74. Couffon, “Entrevista,” 80.

75. “Apuntes sobre ‘La realidad y el deseo,’” in Corriente alterna. (Mexico City, 1967), 15; hereafter cited as C in the text. Paz has returned to his friendship with Cernuda in “Juegos de memoria y olvido,” Vuelta 108 (November 1985):27-32.

76. Abreu Gómez, “Entre la piedra y la flor,” Tierra nueva 9-10 (May-August 1941):174.

77. R. Salazar Mallén, Las ostras o la literatura (Mexico City: Porrúa y Obregón, 1958), 49.

78. Raúl Leiva, “Un nuevo libro de Octavio Paz: Semillas para un himno,” México en la cultura 298 (5 December 1954):2.

79. E. Carballo, Diecinueve protagonistas de la literatura mexicana del siglo XX (Mexico City: Empresas Editoriales, 1965), 446.