Octavio Paz
Octavio Paz
Octavio Paz Lozano; March 31, 1914 – April 19, 1998) was a Mexican poet and diplomat. He is considered by many as one of the most influential writers of the 20th century and one of the greatest poets of all time...
NationalityMexican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth31 March 1914
CityMexico City, Mexico
CountryMexico
bourgeois content manifest poetry society violation whatever
Poetry, whatever the manifest content of the poem, is always a violation of the rationalism and morality of bourgeois society.
poetry
Surrealism is not a poetry but a poetics, and even more, and more decisively, a world vision.
fated poet
To the poet fated to be a poet, self-expression is as natural and as involuntary as breathing is to us ordinary mortals.
abstract attempts essential forms meanings pictorial pure seeks shared signs thus
Abstract painting seeks to be a pure pictorial language, and thus attempts to escape the essential impurity of all languages: the recourse to signs or forms that have meanings shared by everyone.
art destroys inherent obey returns
Art for Duchamp, all the arts, obey the same law: meta-irony is inherent in their very spirit. It is an irony that destroys its own negation and, hence, returns in the affirmative.
certain despite essays illusory itself nature people periods question revealing seems
Despite the often illusory nature of essays on the psychology of a nation, it seems to me there is something revealing in the insistence with which a people will question itself during certain periods of its growth.
human reflects totally
Human writing reflects that of the universe; it is its translation, but also its metaphor: it says something totally different, and it says the same thing.
abroad carried flourish foreign land root
Literatures, like trees and plants, are born of a land and in it flourish and die. But literatures, also like plants, may be carried abroad to take root in a foreign soil.
abstract alone citizens fellow great high inhabited insatiable man moral north plateau solitude stone wanders
Man is alone everywhere. But the solitude of the Mexican, under the great stone night of the high plateau that is still inhabited by insatiable gods, is very different from that of the North American, who wanders in an abstract world of machines, fellow citizens and moral precepts.
mechanism poems reproduce rotary
Poems - crystallizations of the universal play of analogy, transparent objects which, as they reproduce the mechanism and the rotary motion of analogy, are waterspouts of new analogies.
activity concerned object poetic whatever
The object of poetic activity is essentially language: whatever his beliefs and convictions, the poet is more concerned with words than with what these words designate.
discord experience faces great modern monologue poet seem universal walt whitman
Walt Whitman is the only great modern poet who does not seem to experience discord when he faces his world. Not even solitude - his monologue is a universal chorus.
accomplice aware call creates devours nature neither nor surrounds totality
Yes, I am well aware that nature - or what we call nature: that totality of objects and processes that surrounds us and that alternately creates us and devours us - is neither our accomplice nor our confidant.
sleep mexican toys
The Mexican...is familiar with death. [He] jokes about it, caresses it, sleeps with it, celebrates it. It is one of his favorite toys and his most steadfast love.