Octavio Paz

Mexican poet and diplomat

• Born: March 31, 1914
• Birthplace: Mexico City, Mexico
• Died: April 19, 1998
• Place of death: Mexico City, Mexico

Paz produced an enormous body of work that included poetry, essays, and political tracts. He traveled and lived around the world, founded and edited numerous literary reviews, and helped to define the evolution of contemporary poetry and political thought through his intellectually rich and linguistically evocative thought and writing.

Early Life

Octavio Paz (ok-TAH-vee-oh pahs) was born in Mexico City. His mother was a blue-eyed Spaniard named Josefina Lozano; his father, also named Octavio Paz, was a lawyer and journalist who had defended the famed revolutionary Emiliano Zapata. Because of his father’s activities in the volatile capital, Paz was moved as an infant to the suburb of Mixcoac, where he grew up under the tutelage of his grandfather, soldier and novelist Ireneo Paz. As a boy, Paz lived a short while with his father in Los Angeles, California, where he was taunted by schoolmates for his lack of skills in speaking English.

Returning to Mixcoac, Paz attended El Zacatito, a French school, and versed himself in grammar, arithmetic, geography, religion, and Mexican history. He was a prankster who loved baseball and football and spent hours at the local library among its rich collection of classic and modern Spanish literature. After several years at El Zacatito, Paz finished his primary education at Williams College, where he learned English and read poetry, philosophy, and political tracts.

In 1931, Paz discovered and delighted in T. S. Eliot’s modern poetic masterpiece The Waste Land (1922). That same year, Paz’s poem “Cabellera” (head of hair) was published in the literary review Barandal. In 1933, he published his first book of poems, Luna silvestre, an anthology of lyrical, apolitical verse that he later refused to republish.

Paz took a post in a secondary school in Mérida in 1936. There, in Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula, he was fascinated by the mix of Spanish and Mayan influences. He spent a week among the ruins at Chichén Itzá to complete a poem, “Entre la piedra y la flor” (between stone and flower), about the ill effects of capitalism. He then received a message inviting him to attend the International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers in Spain.

Life’s Work

Paz, accompanied by fellow Mexican poet Carlos Pellicer, went to Spain to attend the conference and befriended other rising literary figures, including Chilean poets Pablo Neruda and Vicente Huidobro, Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén, Mexican artist Diego Rivera, French novelist André Gide, Peruvian poet César Vallejo, British writer Stephen Spender, and Spanish poet José Bergamín. During the Spanish Civil War, Paz visited the leading Spanish poet of the time, Antonio Machado. He traveled with Mexican playwright and novelist Elena Garro, and they married in 1937.

Paz returned to Mexico in 1938 and founded the literary magazine Taller and worked with Spanish exiles in support of the Spanish Republic. He helped to found the leftist newspaper El Popular, but left it, disillusioned with communism because of the pact between Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin aligning Russia with Nazi Germany. In 1939, Garro gave birth to her and Paz’s only child as a couple, Helena Paz.

The 1940’s marked a period of cynicism for Paz. The German-Russian pact and the 1940 assassination of communist ideologue Leon Trotsky in Mexico replaced Paz’s idealism with a sense of futility. In 1941 he almost got into a fistfight with Neruda, who was then the Chilean consul general in Mexico; the two feuded publicly for over two decades, mending their rift only in 1967, at the First Poetry International in London.

In 1943, Paz left Mexico for a decade, spending the first two years on a Guggenheim Fellowship in the United States. He lived in San Francisco and New York, spent a summer in Vermont and visited Robert Frost in the poet’s shack, and visited Washington, D.C. He read American poets and started writing poetry free of rhetoric. He was present at the founding of the United Nations.

In December, 1945, Paz moved to Paris, where he engaged in philosophical and political debates, mingled among cosmopolitan society, and assumed a post at the Mexican embassy. He felt distance from the philosophy of French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, but he had an affinity for Albert Camus, whom Paz met at an event commemorating Antonio Machado. In 1946, Paz formed a deep friendship with Greek Marxist thinker Kostas Papaioannou, based primarily on their shared love of art, literature, philosophy, and politics.

Living abroad, Paz’s growing awareness of his Mexicanness, and thus his foreignness, gave him a sense of isolation and historical angst. The late 1940’s in postwar Paris define a claustrophobic and depressive surrealist period for him. He was shocked, like many others, by the revelation of the Nazi concentration camps and was moved by the writings of camp survivor David Rousset. In 1949, the revelation of the Soviet gulag bred doubts about communism, and he authored a report on Soviet practices. That same year, he was installed as Mexico’s cultural attaché in Paris. In 1950, he published one of his central works, the book-length essay El laberinto de la soledad (The Labyrinth of Solitude , 1961), a criticism of both free market capitalism and communism, among other things.

In 1951 at Cannes, France, Paz met a founder of surrealism, André Breton, and met Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset in 1953 in Geneva. Paz spent almost all of 1952 in India and Japan. His poems of the period were published in 1958 in the collection La estación violenta (the violent season). Paz returned to Mexico in 1953. His 1956 collection of essays, El arco y la lira (The Bow and the Lyre , 1971), was a defense of his art conveyed in a nationalistic voice and with somewhat subversive prose poetry. That same year, he penned his only play, La hija de Rappacini (Rappacini’s Daughter, 1980). Another work, Piedra del sol (1957; Sun Stone , 1963), is a historically dense reflection on his personal experience with Aztec symbolism and culture.

Paz returned in 1959 to Paris and to India in 1962 as a Mexican ambassador. During his six years in India, his regional travels to Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Nepal, Burma, Thailand, Singapore, and Cambodia sharpened his awareness of the tribalism of ancient peoples and cultures, and, conversely, of the ahistoricity of the Western construct of nationalism.

Paz’s 1962 collection Salamandra (Salamander, 1987) featured short lines and spatially constructed verse that explored poetry as a visual, and not just a verbal, art form. In 1964, he had a memorable meeting with Breton in Paris that confirmed Paz’s commitment to the art of surrealism as a necessary alternative to political revolution. His 1967 poem Blanco (English translation, 1971) included experimentation with sound, wordplay, and verbal eroticism. During the late 1960’s, he was influenced by poet Stéphane Mallarmé and anthropologistClaude Lévi-Strauss.

On October 2, 1968, just before the Olympic Games in Mexico City, government repression of student activists at a rally in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas left 350 people dead. For Paz, it was a pivotal moment in Mexican history, and he left the diplomatic service in protest. Over the next three years he led an itinerant life based in Mexico City. He taught at universities in Europe and North America, delivering an Eliot Norton Lecture at Harvard University. He published the major collection Ladera este (East Slope , 1987) in 1969, which consists of meditations on love, nature, and exile in Asia.

In 1971, Paz returned to Mexico to edit the newspaper Plural, overseeing its first fifty-eight issues. After the government shut down the paper in 1975, he founded the literary magazine Vuelta. He used these two publications to defend democracy and to attack regimes in Russia, Cuba, and Nicaragua. The evocatively autobiographical poem Pasado en claro (A Draft of Shadows, and Other Poems , 1979) was published in 1975; four years later came a volume of his complete poems. In 1982, he published a biography of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a seventeenth century Mexican writer, philosopher, and advocate for the rights of women.

For his enormous body of work, Paz was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1990. On April 19, 1998, nearly eight years after receiving the Nobel, he died in Mexico City after a long illness.

Significance

Paz was a well-traveled intellectual who, for more than half of the twentieth century, wrote significant works on art, self-identity, philosophy, indigenous culture, and politics, particularly communism and capitalism. He abandoned communism, which he first embraced, after his disaffection with Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, and became deeply critical of Western imperialism after his travels in Asia. He helped shape the international literary scene with his further development of contemporary poetry. His commitment to surrealist art revealed his belief in alternatives to political revolution. Finally, he was a diplomat, a political thinker, and a symbol of an emerging Mexican nationalism.

Bibliography

Bloom, Harold, ed. Octavio Paz. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2002. Part of the Modern Critical Views series, this work includes eleven essays by scholars on Paz’s poetics, surrealism, irony, and other topics. Includes a chronology, a bibliography, and an index.

Chantikian, Kosrof, ed. Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet. San Francisco, Calif.: Kosmos, 1980. An anthology of diverse pieces, including poems and a play by Paz, essays and poems about his writings, an interview, and more. Contributors include John Cage and Carlos Fuentes. Includes an exhaustive list of Paz’s writings.

Paz, Octavio. Itinerary: An Intellectual Journey. Translated by Jason Wilson. New York: Harcourt, 1994. This volume consists of two essays containing Paz’s characteristically thoughtful and erudite reflections on his intellectual and philosophical development. With useful explanatory endnotes from the editor.

Quiroga, José. Understanding Octavio Paz. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999. An exploration of Paz’s oeuvre, organized around his major poetic collections. Includes a chronology, notes, bibliography, and an index.

Wilson, Jason. Octavio Paz. Boston: Twayne, 1986. Wilson, a leading scholar on Paz and modern Spanish-language literature, offers a chronological examination of Paz’s life and work. Includes notes, a bibliography, and an index.