By John M. Fein
The undisputed highbrow management of Octavio Paz, not just in Mexico yet all through Spanish the USA, rests on achievements within the essay and in poetry. within the box of the essay, he's the writer of greater than twenty-five books on matters whose diversity―esthetics, politics, surrealist paintings, the Mexican personality, cultural anthropology, and japanese philosophy, to quote just a few―is surprising. In poetry, his creativity has elevated in energy over greater than fifty years as he has explored the various probabilities open to Hispanic poets from many alternative resources. The bridge that joins the halves of his writing is a priority for language usually and for the poetic approach in particular.
Toward Octavio Paz defines this strategy of construction via a detailed exam of the books that signify the summit of the poet's improvement, 3 lengthy poems and 3 collections. it really is meant for readers of assorted poetic event who're impending Paz's paintings for the 1st time.
By learning the connection of the elements of the poem, fairly constitution and subject matter, Fein lines the poet's development via techniques to the reader, each one embodied in a separate paintings. From the divided circularity of Piedra de sol throughout the intensification of the topic of Salamandra, the a number of meanings of Blanco, the polarities of Ladera este, and the literary solipsism of Pasado en claro, to the silences of Vuelta, Paz has formed his audience's responses to his paintings via recommendation instead of keep an eye on. the result's not just a brand new poetry yet a brand new receptivity.
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Extra info for Toward Octavio Paz: A Reading of His Major Poems, 1957-1976
Sample text
The poet gives a list of sins, a select list of crimes against the social order (suicide, incest, murder, adultery, sodomy) that are preferable to the tedium of time. Repugnant though they are, they are better than the monotony, emptiness, and bonds of linear time, characterized as "mierda abstracta. After a brief, puzzling, and unexpected view of God, not attained through love, the poet resumes the quest. The novelty of the stanza headed by verse 408 lies in its return to the elements of the poem's first half: "sigo mi desvario 11 [I continue my delirium], "camino a tientas por los corredores I del tiempo 11 [I grope through the corridors I of time], "vuelvo adonde empece" [I return where I began], "camino por las calles de mi mismo 11 [I walk through the streets of myself].
By bearing the main weight of the poem's meaning, the remaining pre-Columbian cardinal point, the center, compensates for the absence of North and South. In Aztec cosmology the center has a symbolic meaning that is lacking in the decorative compass rose of European geography: 28 Toward Octavio Paz C'est le lieu de croisement des autres directions, le lieu de rencontre du haut et du bas. Les particularites des espaces s'y totalisent .... Tan tot le centre est considere comme la synthese des autres espaces, participant de leurs qualites diverses, et comme le lieu stable, ou repose le foyer divin de Xiuhtecutli, prototype et source de taus les foyers; tan tot il n'est plus que le lieu inquietant des apparitions et des presages, le point de rencontre de mondes etrangers.
This symbolic center in the first half is characterized by the reduction of the poet's consciousness to its simplest element, the awareness of his own effort to understand. It is preceded by a disintegration of the perception of the "real" world, involving the surrealistic dismemberment of the poet himself. This is the first of three subclimaxes in the first half that represent the ultimate experience: Piedra de sol 29 y a la salida de tu blanca £rente mi sombra despenada se destroza, recojo mis fragmentos uno a uno y prosigo sin cuerpo, busco a tientas, [72-75] [and at the exit of your white brow my fallen shadow is destroyed, I pick up my fragments one by one and go on, bodiless, searching and groping,] Although it is defined in negative terms, the progressive elimination of objective reality in an effort to define life's essence, it is the first of three moments of transcendence in the first half, for the poet has gone beyond himself to a new awareness.