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Octavio Paz Edit Profile

Diplomat author poet

Octavio Paz was a Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat, recognized as one of the major Latin American writers of the 20th century. He wrote more than twenty books of poetry and as many book-length essays about such topics as literature, eroticism, politics, anthropology, and painting.

Background

Ethnicity: Octavio's family had Spanish and indigenous Mexican roots.

Octavio Paz was born on March 31, 1914 in Mixcoac, now part of Mexico City. His mother's family had emigrated from Spain and his father's ancestors traced their heritage to early Mexican settlers and indigenous peoples. Paz's paternal grandfather was a journalist and political activist, and his father was an attorney who joined Emiliano Zapata's farmer-backed revolution in the early 1900s. During the Mexican Civil War, a conflict led by Fransisco I against the dictator Poririo Diaz, Paz's family lost their home and relocated to a nearby suburb of Mexico City, where they lived under financially unstable conditions.

Education

Paz received his secondary education at a French Catholic school and later attended the National Autonomous University of Mexico. While in his late teens, he founded Barrandal, an avant-garde journal, and published his first volume of poems, Luna silvestre (1933).

In 1943, Paz received a Guggenheim Fellowship and used it to study at the University of California at Berkeley in the United States.

Career

Paz abandoned his legal studies in 1937 to visit Yucatán, where he helped establish a progressive school for workers and discovered Mexico's pre-Columbian past. That same year he went to Republican Spain to attend the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers, where he met most of the great poets writing in Spanish, as well as English and French writers, including André Breton, the founder of surrealism. As a result of this trip, he developed a philosophy of poetry that sought to create language anew, with the dual purpose of revealing human fragmentation and solitude and demonstrating how language prevents the modern world from understanding itself and its "real reality." In this way Paz tried to resolve the tension between pure poetry and art committed to social progress.

In 1938 Paz returned to Mexico and helped found the journal Taller (Workshop) to explore his new ideas. When that magazine folded, he helped found El Hijo Pródigo (The Prodigal Son) in 1943, a periodical representing the Mexican vanguard, poets who believed that writing had a special mission. The same year Paz was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and spent the next ten years of his life away from Mexico. He went first to San Francisco and then to New York City, where he studied the life and work of José Juan Tablada and published an important critical essay on that poet. Tablada's influence led him to his lifelong fascination with Asian literature and culture. In 1944 he taught at the Middlebury College Spanish Summer School in Vermont, where he met the poet Robert Frost and became reacquainted with Jorge Guillén. In 1945 he joined the Mexican diplomatic service and went to Paris, where he was strongly influenced by the surrealist movement. In 1952 he served as Mexican ambassador in India and Japan, furthering his interests in Eastern art and architecture and in the classics of Buddhism and Taoism, influences felt subsequently in his poetry. He returned to Mexico in 1953.

Paz's work reached maturity in the late 1940s. Appearing in 1949 was his Libertad bajo palabra (Freedom on Parole), championing the Latin American critical avant-garde. In 1950 he published a classic analysis of the Mexican people, El laberinto de la soledad (The Labyrinth of Solitude). These works inaugurated his most productive and complex period. He published poetry and essays, lectured on and presented new poets and painters, founded journals and a theatrical group, translated ancient and modern poetry, and participated in literary and political polemics. In 1956 he published El arco y la lira (The Bow and the Lyre), an important work examining the function of poetry itself. Paz returned to Paris in 1959 and subsequently was renamed ambassador to India in 1962, a post he resigned in 1968 in protest over the 2 October massacre of students in Tlatelolco Square. He displayed his outrage in Posdata (1970; Postscript), a critical reevaluation of the Labyrinth of Solitude. He expanded on the ideas in El ogro filantrópico (1979; The Philanthropic Ogre). During the 1970s, he founded two significant magazines, Plural (1971) and Vuelta (1977), which he continued to edit in the 1990s, demonstrating his strong commitment to cultural journalism and his anticipation of the "postmodern."

Paz was primarily important as a poet and essayist, but he also wrote unpublished short stories and a play. His published works in Spanish include nearly thirty volumes of poetry, over thirty volumes of essays, numerous anthologies of poetry in Spanish, as well as anthologies of poetry in translation from French, English, Portuguese, Swedish, Chinese, and Japanese. His own poetry and essays have been translated into English, French, Italian, and numerous other languages. Paz was also important as an art critic and promoter.

Paz taught at major universities in the United States and Europe.

Achievements

  • Octavio Paz was among the prominent literary figures of the 20th century. He wrote more than thirty collections of poetry over the course of fifty years. His essays almost equaled his poetry in quantity, thoughtfulness, and influence. Paz was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1990. Octavio also won the International Prize for Poetry, the Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and the Menéndez Pelayo Prize.

Works

All works

Politics

Originally Paz supported the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, but later, after learning of the murder of one of his friends by the Republicans, he became gradually disillusioned. In the early 1950s, Octavio started publishing his critical views on totalitarianism in general, and particularly against Joseph Stalin. Octavio also criticized the Mexican government and the leading party that dominated the nation for most of the 20th century.

Politically, Paz was basically a social democrat. He became increasingly supportive of liberal ideas without renouncing to his initial leftist and romantic views.

Views

Paz was introduced to literature in his grandfather's personal library. Later, he read authors who influenced his work including Gerardo Diego, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Antonio Machado, and D. H. Lawrence. In addition, his philosophical stance was influenced by his exposure to the writings of David Rousset, André Breton, and Albert Camus. His works reflect his knowledge of the history, myths, and landscape of Mexico as well as his interest in surrealism, existentialism, romanticism, Eastern thought, and diverse political ideologies.

In his early verse, Paz experiments with such diverse forms as the sonnet and free verse, reflecting his desire to renew and clarify Spanish language by lyrically evoking images and impressions. In many of these poems, Paz employs the surrealist technique of developing a series of related or unrelated images to emphasize sudden moments of perception, a particular emotional state, or a fusion of such polarities as dream and reality or life and death. Topics of Paz's formative verse include political and social issues, the brutality of war, and eroticism and love. Eagle or Sun? (1951), one of his most important early volumes, is a sequence of visionary prose poems concerning the past, present, and future of Mexico. Selected Poems, published in 1963, and Early Poems: 1935-1955 (1973) contain representative compositions in Spanish and in English translation.

The variety of forms and topics in Paz's later poems mirror his diverse interests. Blanco (1967), widely considered his most complex work, consists of three columns of verse arranged in a chapbook format that folds out into a long, single page. Each column develops four main themes relating to language, nature, and the means by which an individual analyzes and orders life. In Ladera este: 1962-1968 (1968), Paz blends simple diction and complicated syntax to create poems that investigate Asian philosophy, religion, and art. In his long poem A Draft of Shadows (1975), Paz examines selfhood and memory by focusing on poignant personal moments in the manner of William Wordsworth's autobiographical poem The Prelude.

The influence of Paz is vast and continues to grow. Writers that have been influenced by Paz include but are certainly not limited to Samuel Beckett, Charles Tomlinson, Elizabeth Bishop, Mark Strand, and Mexican author Carlos Fuentes. The work of Paz continues to be translated into numerous languages, thus increasing the scope of his enduring influence.

Quotations: "There can be no society without poetry, but society can never be realized as poetry, it is never poetic. Sometimes the two terms seek to break apart. They cannot."

"To fight evil is to fight ourselves."

"I remember my loves, my conversation, my friendships. I remember it all, see it all, see them all."

"No use going out or staying at home. No use erecting walls against the impalpable."

"It is not the sword that shines in the confusion of what will be. It is not the saber, but fear and the whip. I speak of what is already among us."

"Already many carry the purple insignia in their flesh. The light wind rises from the meadows of the past, and hurries closer to our time."

Membership

Octavio Paz was a member of the Colegio Nacional and the Consejo Superior de Cooperación Iberoamericana.

Personality

Octavio Paz spoke several languages, including English and Hindi.

Physical Characteristics: Octavio Paz died of cancer.

Quotes from others about the person

  • Ramón Xirau: "The poetry of Octavio Paz does not hesitate between language and silence; it leads into the realm of silence where true language lives."

Connections

In 1937, Octavio Paz married Elena Garro, a famous Mexican writer. The couple had a daughter named Helena Laura Paz Garro. Their marriage broke up in 1959. However, Elena always claimed that they were not officially divorced and if any such paper existed, it was fraudulent. In 1965, Octavio married Marie-José Tramini, a French lady, with whom he lived until his death.

Father:
Octavio Paz

(born November 20, 1883)

Mother:
Josephina Lozano

Spouse:
Marie José Tramini

ex-spouse:
Elena Garro
Elena Garro - ex-spouse of Octavio Paz

(December 11, 1916 - August 22, 1998)

Elena Garro was a Mexican screenwriter, journalist,

playwright, short story writer, and novelist. She was a recipient of the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize.

Daughter:
Helena Paz Garro

(December 12, 1939 - March 30, 2014)

References

  • Octavio Paz: A Study of his Poetics Jason Wilson, in this study, approaches Paz's poetics through his close relationship with André Breton, the surrealist leader. This is a "spiritual biography" of a poet-thinker; a study of a fertile relationship (Paz and Breton); a re-evaluation of surrealism itself and, finally, a coping with those acute problems that all poets and readers of poetry must face in an age lacking an acceptable cultural tradition: Why write? What is a poem? Who are the genuine poets? Who am I? Wilson analyses Paz's reaction to these related concerns in the poet's examination of 'the values of poetry' in terms of a liberating poetics.
    1979