Seed

Lucidity: The Key to the Poem

From the first poems that Octavio Paz recognizes completely as his own – those that opened Libertad bajo palabra in 1935 – to the last poem he published in 1996, they all share an unusual common feature. They are separated by more than sixty years as well as many experimentations, mutations and discoveries, in the poet's life as much as in his work. But they are joined by the same notion of the poet as a witness to the fleeting epiphany of life: the sudden apparition of a clarity that vanishes one instant later. And the poem is a language for this exceptional moment in which "thought sees, while eyes think" as life continues its journey toward silence. For Paz, the poet moves through the world with an exceptional degree of lucidity.

Octavio Paz subtitled his final poem "Diálogo con Francisco de Quevedo" ("A Dialogue with Francisco de Quevedo"). But in his first youthful reflections on poetry there was already an indirect dialogue with Quevedo. This was especially true in "Lágrimas de un penitente" ("Tears of a Penitent") in which Paz saw a kind of existentialism avant la lettre and also an early breath of Baudelaire, with the idea of having been born in a state of evil with no chance at salvation. In Quevedo, Paz identifies the seed of modern angst and rebellion.

Between the day "made of time and emptiness" that in 1939 appears filled with light and nothingness, and the time and space that in 1996 "fall dizzyingly toward silence," we can observe one of the most singular poetic adventures of the twentieth century.

As a young writer Octavio Paz found himself torn between a purist poetry (which was upheld by the previous generation of poets, whom Paz admired) and a socially engaged poetry (in accord with the messianic idea of a future society that Paz believed was being forged in Latin America). As neither of these two poetic approaches left him completely satisfied, he began to formulate a paradoxical solution: the poem as a black light calling for an awareness of being in the world, of living among others and inside of history. The poem as a synthesis of opposites: the bow of the warrior and the lyre of the singer. Neither opposed nor subordinated to history, the poet burns with the passionate awareness of moving within it.

However, the poem is also the deepest presence of life, its miracles and disasters. A perpetual search: "And I dive into life and grasp at nothing." Meanwhile, a ritual search for the body of the beloved: "singular land that I know, that knows me, the only nation I believe in, the only door to the infinite."

In this way, the poetry of Paz is forged between the abyss of existential solitude and a transcendent communion with others, especially the beloved: "Beyond us, at the border between change and constancy, a life more alive comes to claim us."

In the postwar era Paz lived in Paris and was drawn to surrealism. "It was a group of free poets in a city intoxicated by theories and ideologies that heightened the passions but did not illuminate the soul." The prose poems of Águila o sol? (Eagle or Sun?) bear a trace of this fascination. And the long poem Piedra del Sol (Sunstone), from 1957, a centrepiece of Paz's work, is a synthesis of all his concerns up to that point. A crucible of his formal explorations and poetic thought. Abyss and erotism, history and personal memory, symbol and material, sensation and idea, all come together at last in a poetic form that is an echo of tradition and a challenge to that same tradition. A summation and rebirth of the poet.

Later, starting in 1962 in India, his poetry convulses and a protracted erotism becomes the cornerstone of his search. The encounter with Marie José Paz, from whom he would not separate for a single day from 1964 to his death in 1998, marks this new way of being: "Sometimes poetry is the frenzy of bodies and the frenzy of delight and the frenzy of death." His poetry becomes an expression of erotism.

The long poem Blanco (White) and the narrative poem El mono gramático (The Grammarian Monkey) synthesized the double trace of otherness in his world: that of the Orient and that of his beloved. But all too soon, an expulsion from paradise would occur. A poem on the murder of students in Mexico in 1968 would accompany his refusal to serve as an ambassador of the government responsible for that crime. This gesture would be remembered upon his receipt of the Nobel Prize in 1990.

In "Nocturno de San Ildefonso" ("San Ildefonso Nocturne") as well as "Pasado en claro"("A Draft of Shadows") and other poems from the 70's, we see a rebirth of his concerns for personal memory interlaced with history. Paz reformulates his poetic solution, giving poetry the function of greatest lucidity.

Poetry is a critique of modernity – in the realm of the passions rather than the intellect, in the name of realities denied by the modern age. It is what Octavio Paz calls "the other voice": that of the human who sleeps in the background of every human. The one who, through poetry, is not explained or analyzed but revealed, evoked and inspired. Poetry is fed by the imagination and is, according to Paz, "the antidote to technology and the market," those new empty idols of the masses, which replaced the previous ones: religious dogmas and totalitarian ideologies.

Octavio Paz wrote many fundamental essays on art, society, history, international politics and Mexican politics; with these his work already forms a cornerstone of contemporary culture. But it is his poetry that contains this lucid axis that nourished his thought and his peculiar way of being in the world. The poetry is the master key to his oeuvre as a whole. Thus, those who comment on his political ideas without understanding the poetic rebellion that underlies them only understand the shadow of what he is saying. Octavio Paz is faithful to a reading of Aristotle's poetics that makes a radical distinction between the historian and the poet. The first writes what happened; the second questions what happened...