Printable View
Today while browsing through the poetry section in Barnes and Nobles, I came upon the poetry of Octavio Paz. I opened up to a random poem and was utterly mesmerized by his lyricism and surreality. He reminds me somewhat of Borges and Eliot, but has a completely unique style on his own.
So has anyone heard of him? I can't find any sites where I can find his works, so I guess that they are still under copyright (which isn't a suprise really, since he died only eleven years ago).
I have heard of Octavio Paz, but only because his poems have been set to music by a very famous contemporary choral composer Eric Whitacre.
I think Paz happens to be far more famous than Whitacre... although I do like his choral work. To start with, he was a Noble Laureate, for God's sake! He must have done something right. Paz was politically active and like many liberal-thinkers of his time, he had Marxist leanings. With time, however, he became disillusioned with communism and denounced all forms of totalitarianism, including that of Stalin and even Castro's Cuba. This led to open hostility from many of Latin-America's leftist intellectuals but earned him the respect of many others. He won the Jerusalem Peace Prize in 1977 for his contributions to literature on the theme of Freedom.
Paz was quite probably Mexico's greatest poet. He is also a fascinating writers of criticism. His adaption of Rapaccini's Daughter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne formed the basis of Daniel Catan's opera of the same name... one of my favorite works of contemporary music. Paz' poetry does indeed make great use of lyrical, visionary, Surrealist/Magic Realist imagery... not uncommon for a great deal of Latin-American poetry. I own several volumes of Paz' poetry, including The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz. I remember being quite enthralled, especially, with the book-length poem, The Sunstone, which was structured in part upon an ancient Inca (Aztec, Olmec, Toltec, Mayan?) calendar. I need to look at his work again, myself.
Well, all of my friends are musicians, so maybe that's why I was exposed to Whitacre first.