Octavio Paz Books

Examines the Pre-Columbian, Colonial, Nineteenth Century, and Twentieth Century periods of Mexican art and artifacts

A Tree Within  ( Arbol Adentro ), the first collection of new poems by the great Mexican author Octavio Paz since his  Return  ( Vuelta ) of 1975, was originally published as the final section of  The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1957-1987 . Among these later poems is a series of works dedicated to such artists as Miró, Balthus, Duchamp, Rauschenberg, Tapies, Alechinsky, Monet, and Matta, as well as a number of epigrammatic and Chinese-like lyrics. Two remarkable long poems ––”I Speak of the City,” a Whitmanesque apocalyptic evocation of the contemporary urban nightmare, and “Letter of Testimony,” a meditation on love and death––are emblematic of the mature poet in a prophetic voice.

Octavio Paz launches a far-ranging excursion into the "incestuous and tempestuous" relations between modern poetry and the modern epoch. From the perspective of a Spanish-American and a poet, he explores the opposite meanings that the word "modern" has held for poets and philosophers, artists, and scientists. Tracing the beginnings of the modern poetry movement to the pre-Romantics, Paz outlines its course as a contradictory dialogue between the poetry of the Romance and Germanic languages. He discusses at length the unique character of Anglo-American "modernism" within the avant-garde movement, and especially vis-a-vis French and Spanish-American poetry. Finally he offers a critique of our era's attitude toward the concept of time, affirming that we are at the "twilight of the idea of the future." He proposes that we are living at the end of the avant-garde, the end of that vision of the world and of art born with the first Romantics.

Octavio Paz, the 1990 Nobel Laureate, has won distinction as an anthropologist, philosopher and critic of art and literature. But it is as a poet that he is most celebrated. Configurations was his first major collection to be published in this country, and includes in their entirety Sun Stone (1957) and Blanco (1967). Paz himself translated many of the poems from the Spanish. Some distinguished contributors to this bilingual edition include, among others, Paul Blackburn, Lysander Kemp, Denise Levertov, and Muriel Rukeyser.

A collection of essays examines the themes of love and sex in literature, from Plato to modern fiction.

As well as the nine essays on his country's psyche and history that make up The Labyrinth of Solitude, this highly acclaimed volume also includes The Other Mexico, Paz's heartfelt response to the government massacre of over three hundred students in Mexico City in 1968, and Return to the Labyrinth of Solitude, in which he discusses his famous work with Claude Fell. The two final essays contain further reflections on the Mexican government.

Octavio Paz (1914-1998) ofrece en La estación violenta una obra que pertenece a una de las mejores etapas creativas. Este libro recoge los " Himno entre ruinas", "Máscaras del alba", "Fuente", "Repaso nocturno", "Mutra", "¿No hay salida?", "El río", "El cántaro roto", y "Piedra de sol".

In seven elegant essays that range across centuries and literatures, Paz offers his thoughts on how modern poetry came to be, what makes it "modern," and what it may become. Translated by Helen Lane.

Los hijos del limo , el libro más extenso e importante que con posterioridad a El arco y la lira ha dediado el autor a la evolución de la lírica contemporánea desde el romanticismo hasta nuestros días, está constituida por las Charles Eliot Norton Lectures dictadas en el curso 1971-72 en la Universidad de Harvard por Octavio Paz, como anteriormente por T. S. Eliot, e. e. cummings, Igor Stravinsky, Jorge Luis Borges y Jorge Guillén. En palabras del propio autor, el hilo central de la obra es "la doble y antagónica tentación que ha fascinado alternativa y simultáneamente a los poetas modernos: la tentación religiosa y la tentación política, la magia o la revolución. Frente al cristianismo la poesía moderna se presenta como la otra religión; frente a las revoluciones del siglo XIX y del XX, como la voz de la revolución original. Una doble heterodoxia, una doble tensión que está presente lo mismo en el romántico William Blake que en el simbolista Yeats o el vanguardista Pound; lo mismo en Baudelaire que en Breton, en Pessoa que en Vallejo".

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz o Las trampas de la fe es un estudio dedicado a una figura central de la literatura de la Nueva España en el s.XVII, sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, y es, también, uno de los títulos fundamentales de la obra de Octavio Paz. No se trata sólo del examen de un personaje concreto y apasionante, de una obra espléndida y singular es también el magnífico enmarcamiento que realiza Octavio Paz de este personaje en el mundo de la Nueva España del s. XVII.