OCTAVIO PAZ AND T. S.
ELIOT
MODERN POETRY AND THE TRANSLATION OF INFLUENCE
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Professor Malcolm Cook, University of Exeter (Fren)
Professor Robin Fiddian, Wadham College, Oxford (Spanish)
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Professor Suzanne Rai, William and Mary College, Virginia (English)
Professor Ritie Robertson, e een’s College, Oxford (German)
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Octavio Paz and T. S. Eliot
Modern Poetry and the Translation of Influence
TOM BOLL
Modern Humanities Resear Association and Routledge
2012
First published 2012
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Contents
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction
PART I: MEXICAN CONTEXTS
1 Eliot in Spanish
2 Precursors and Contemporaries
PART II: ME ACOMPAÑA, ME INTRIGA, ME IRRITA, ME
CONMUEVE
3 ¿Arte de tesis o arte puro?
4 Two Excursions
5 Taller
6 North America
7 Surrealism
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
FOR MY MOTHER AND FATHER
Anowledgements
I would like to thank the AHRB whose financial support made this book
possible in its earlier form as a PhD. I am extremely grateful to my
supervisors, Jason Wilson and Peter Swaab, for their encouragement,
sensitivity and tact; also to my examiners Edwin Williamson and Robert
Havard who offered constructive advice. eo Hermans and Elinor Shaffer
gave me valuable opportunities to discuss different aspects of this study at
their respective Comparative Literature and European Reception of British
Authors Seminars. John Lyon, Tim Webb, David Henn and Stephen Hart
gave advice and support at various stages of the study’s development.
A number of people were generous with their time and their opinions in
Mexico City. Anthony Stanton provided me with valuable information from
his conversations with Paz about T. S. Eliot. Homero Aridjis helped me to
articulate some of my own murkier thinking about Paz. Víctor Manuel
Mendiola also provided stimulating discussion, as did Christopher
Domínguez Miael. María Enriqueta González Padilla kindly introduced
me to an MPhil thesis on Paz and Eliot that I had not been aware of
previously. Rosa María Villareal provided me with invaluable introductions.
My understanding of Mexican poetry has been greatly enhanced by
conversations with Coral Brao, Marcelo Uribe and David Huerta.
Staff at various libraries have offered invaluable assistance. In particular, I
would like to thank the University of London and University College
London libraries, the Institute of Latin American Studies, the Taylor
Institution Library in Oxford, the British Library, the Biblioteca Daniel
Cosío Villegas at the Colegio de México, and the Biblioteca Nacional de
México.
Valerie Eliot has kindly provided me with copies of correspondence
between T. S. Eliot and Ángel Flores. I would like to thank the Eliot Estate
for permission to quote from Eliot’s works. I am also grateful to Marie-José
Paz who has allowed me to quote from the works of Octavio Paz.
is book could not have been published without the financial support of
the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at
King’s College London. I am also grateful for the moral support of
colleagues at King’s, in particular to Catherine Boyle.
Finally, I owe many personal debts of gratitude and affection: to Bet
Daurella, who first introduced me to Paz’s poems with a present for Sant
Jordi’s day, to Alice Bree, Sarah Maguire, Diego Flores-Jaime, Cecilia
Treviño, Margaret Boll, and to my wife, Jane, without whom none of this
would have been possible.
T.B., London, December 2011
Abbreviations
e following abbreviations are used in bibliographical references in the
text. I have, where possible, referred to the Obras completas of Octavio Paz,
published between 1994 and 2003 by the Círculo de Lectores in Spain and
the Fondo de Cultura Económica in Mexico. While this edition is a faithful
record of the legacy that Paz wished to leave, it incorporates late revisions of
the earlier work whi present the literary historian with a troublesome
combination of original impulse and retrospection. In su cases I have
referred to the earliest available edition of the work, directing the reader to
the relevant point of the Obras completas in the notes.
I have translated Spanish secondary sources directly into English. Spanish
primary sources appear in both Spanish and English. All translations in the
text are my own unless otherwise stated. ey are intended merely as a
guide and make no pretence to literary merit.
Octavio Paz:
Arco1 El arco y la lira (1st edn, 1956)
Arco2 El arco y la lira (2nd edn, 1967)
EPF Entre la piedra y la flor (1941)
LBP1 Libertad bajo palabra (1st edn, 1949)
OC1, OC2 Obras completas, vol. 1, vol. 2
T. S. Eliot:
An Anabasis: A Poem by St.-John Perse
CPP The Complete Poems and Plays
EP 'El paramo', trans, by Enrique Munguia Jr.
HH 'Los hombres huecos', trans, by Leon Felipe
Li, Lz The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. i, vol. 2
MS VE Private Collection, Mrs Valerie Eliot, London
OPP On Poetry and Poets
SE Selected Essays
sw The Sacred Wood
TCC To Criticize the Critic
TSEP 'Poemas', supl. of Taller (1940)
UPUC The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism
Introduction
In 1988, as he came to the end of his career, Octavio Paz was awarded the T.
S. Eliot Prize. His acceptance spee to the Ingersoll Foundation in Chicago
wasted lile time over the formalities — anowledging the worth of
previous recipients, Borges, Ionesco, Naipaul — before striking a more
confessional tone:
La circunstancia de que el Premio ostente el nombre del poeta angloamericano tiene para mí un
alcance primordial, a un tiempo íntimo y simbólico. Es algo más que un premio: es una
contraseña, un signo de pase. Era un adolescente cuando lo leí por primera vez y esa lectura me
abrió las puertas de la poesía moderna.1
[e fact that this prize bears the Anglo-American poet’s name has a special significance for me,
at once intimate and symbolic. It is something more than a prize: it is a secret sign, a password. I
was a teenager when I read Eliot for the first time and that reading opened the doors of modern
poetry for me.]
at teenage discovery was made in the Mexican periodical
Contemporáneos [Contemporaries], whi in 1930 published one of the first
Spanish translations of The Waste Land — a prose version by Enrique
Munguía Jr., titled ‘El páramo’.2 Paz describes the encounter in terms of
ritual — ‘un alcance primordial, a un tiempo íntimo y simbólico’ — with the
prize now ‘una contraseña’ or ‘un signo de pase’: an initiation rite the other
side of whi was not adulthood so mu as the world of modern poetry.
Eliot is closely bound to Paz’s sense of both poetic self and historical
moment. Yet just as initiation rites are traumatic events, Paz registers
ambivalence. He recalls that as well as ‘curiosidad’ [curiosity] and
‘seducción’ [seduction], he experienced ‘azoro’ [sho] (OC2, 290); and in a
separate article on Enrique Munguía, whi he published alongside the
acceptance spee in Vuelta, Paz confesses that ‘Eliot contradecía todo lo
que yo pensaba que era moderno y todo lo que yo creía que era poético’
[Eliot contradicted everything that I thought was modern and everything
that I thought was poetic].3 Eliot did not fit straightforwardly into the world
inhabited by the young Mexican poet, in spite of his clear impact, and Paz is
open about the anxiety this generated. He talks about ‘daring’ eventually to
read Eliot in English: ‘finalmente, cuando progresé en el aprendizaje del
inglés, me atreví a leerlo en su idioma original’ [eventually, when I made
progress with my English, I dared to read him in the original] (OC2, 290).
at reading probably occurred around 1943, when he was living in the
United States, a period that ushered in a fresh engagement with Eliot’s work.
Yet Paz also expresses determined resistance to certain aspects of his
forerunner: ‘Mi fascinación ante The Waste Land nunca me hizo cerrar los
ojos ante la incompatibilidad entre mis convicciones y las ideas y esperanzas
que inspiran a ese poema’ [My fascination with The Waste Land never
blinded me to the incompatibility of my convictions and the ideas and hopes
that inspire that poem] (OC2, 293). Paz recalls his first reading of Eliot as
decisive, yet nevertheless contradictory: both seduction and sho, promise
and fear, acceptance and resistance. is rite of passage was no graceful
admission to the world of modern poetry, and its fault lines run throughout
Paz’s ensuing career.
eories of Literary Relation
Yet how can one most productively approa and narrate this literary
relation? How can one account for both the enthusiasm and the ambivalence
that Paz expressed in his spee to the Ingersoll Foundation? In the decades
since Paz first read Eliot, various theories have appeared whi aempt to
account for the ways that authors relate to ea other in terms of influence,
intertextuality and reception. I propose in this introduction to consider how
far these different approaes can be applied to the case of Paz and Eliot.
e most notorious theorist of the hostilities and contradictions bred by
literary influence is Harold Bloom. His first theoretical study, The Anxiety of
Influence (1973), has itself been read as heir to a slightly earlier work by
Walter Jason Bate, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (1971).
Bate talks of ‘an accumulating anxiety’ of influence whi, like Bloom, he
views as a psyological phenomenon that becomes particularly acute
towards the end of the eighteenth century.4 eir awareness of anxiety is
promising for an exploration of the trepidation that is evident in Paz’s
account of his initial response to Eliot. eir psyological approa also
seems appropriate given the rhetoric of ritual — the physical enactment of a
psyic event — that Paz employs. In spite of the resemblances, however,
Bloom and Bate are driven by different preoccupations. Although Bate sees
intimidation from earlier writers as a perennial worry, he is most interested
in the historical progression from neoclassical theory of the eighteenth
century to the romantic period, when an anxiety of influence presses with
new urgency. He describes a considerable latitude in eighteenth-century
concepts of imitation, and traces the process by whi they gradually
succumb to the burden imposed by a new exaltation of originality. Although
Bloom agrees, in The Anxiety of Influence, that the modern poet ‘is the
inheritor of a melanoly engendered in the mind of the Enlightenment’, he
has lile patience for gradual historical process, and finds an individual,
Descartes, on whom to blame the poet’s anxiety.5 Once Descartes had
separated mind as intensiveness from the world as extensiveness, poets
could no longer be influenced by the stars, the outer world from whi they
were now isolated: ‘Instead of the radiation of an aetherial fluid we received
the poetic flowing in of an occult power exercised by humans, rather than
by stars upon humans’ (p. 39). We must now seek influence from other
minds, other poets, breeding an anxiety of competition. is shi of
emphasis goes some way to close Bate’s historical perspective, opening
another. It allows Bloom to escape the restrictions of Bate’s process, in whi
various conceptions of imitation and influence ange their configuration
over time, to a more clearly grasped moment when an individual in
possession of a single idea anges everything, cataclysmically. While the
reference to Descartes does imply some concern for a historical succession of
ideas, Bloom’s rhetoric drives away from historical process to a mythical,
atemporal fall from grace. In fact when, in a later preface to his book, Bloom
rejects Bate’s oice of the late eighteenth century as an identifiable period
for the birth of anxiety (p. xxiv), the revision does very lile to damage his
theory, implying that history didn’t contribute that mu to it in the first
place.
ere is also considerable divergence in the psyological approa of the
two books. For Bate, we suffer from a taboo on boldly facing up to what we
admire and desire to imitate: ‘To reduce that taboo to size, to get ourselves
out of this self-created prison, to heal or overcome this needless self-
division, has been the greatest single problem for modern art.’6 is is a
psyological problem that can be redeemed; it is even ‘needless’. Bloom, for
whom Freud’s psyology ‘is not severe enough’ (p. 9), will allow no su
optimism. e awful presence of what we admire, the precursor poet, and
the anxiety generated by this presence, cannot be escaped: ‘A poem is not an
overcoming of anxiety, but is that anxiety’ (p. 94). Where Bate’s psyology
is, for an aspiring poet, a malleable orientation towards the past, Bloom’s is
an unnegotiable given. Su an uncompromising view of the psyology at
work provides Bloom with a clearly delineated premise: ‘creative
interpretation’ is ‘necessarily a misinterpretation’ (p. 43). He is consequently
able to elaborate a mu more thorough taxonomy of the influence relation
— his six revisionary ratios of clinamen, tessera, kenosis, daemonization,
askesis, and apophrades — than Bate can provide. Bloom is, then, a more
cursory historian than Bate but, on the face of it at least, a more systematic
psyologist.
Bloom’s revisionary ratios have been aractive to critics who wish to
impose some order on an area of literary studies that commonly owes more
to conjecture than to science. Paz’s objection, whi I cited earlier, to the
‘ideas y esperanzas’ [ideas and hopes] that inspired The Waste Land could
be explained as both clinamen, a misreading of Eliot, and tessera, an
explicative completion of a lacuna in the precursor’s vision. To follow Bloom
thus, however, one must make a large assumption about the way that Paz
generates his work out of the relationship with Eliot. e Bloomian reading
is predicated on a belief that any difference between the two poets is by
necessity evidence of Paz’s evasion, or wilful misinterpretation, of his
precursor rather than an allegiance to the practice of other writers. Paz’s
‘convicciones’ [convictions] react against Eliot rather than conforming to
more immediate influences who were active in 1930s Mexico. Critics
commonly get round the limitations of this assumption by employing
Bloom’s terminology without pressing too hard the theory of evasion that
underpins it. is practice excuses Bloom’s theory the rigour of close
examination but also does his theoretical ambition, whi is considerable, a
disservice. He declares at the outset that his book offers not merely a theory
of influence but ‘a theory of poetry by way of a description of poetic
influence’ (p. 8). He does not intend the ratios to stand alone, and one cannot
apply them without also considering the project of whi they are a part.
at project is a revision of ‘“humane leers”’ (p. 86), a ‘newer and starker
way of reading poems’ (p. 58). Bloom aims ‘to de-idealize our accepted
notions of how one poet helps to form another’ (p. 5). e idea of creative
collaboration between poets, the dignity of literary tradition is a sham:
e main tradition of Western poetry since the Renaissance, is a history of anxiety and self-saving
caricature, of distortion, of perverse, wilful revisionism without whi modern poetry as su
could not exist.
(p. 30)
A reader hoping to grasp the theory may feel disoriented by a rhetoric that
can jump so readily from awe at ‘the terrible splendor of cultural heritage’
(p. 32) to contempt for ‘the squalor of our timeless human fear of mortality’
(p. 58). e impulse is doubtless prophetic, but the effect of Bloom’s style is
more oen one of rumbustiousness: from the bluster of ‘various fiercenesses’
(p. 33), ‘enormous curtailment’ (p. 125) and ‘fearful strength’ (p. 131) to the
martial drama of art ‘menaced by greater art’ (p. 70). Frank Lentricia is
alert to the way that expression hinders exposition, informing the reader
misievously that in Poetry and Repression Bloom’s rhetoric is ‘employed
without mercy’.7 By the end of his account, however, he has relented and,
while he holds Bloom’s faulty presentation responsible for some of the
theory’s more hostile reception, he concludes that ‘the problems of the
theory are not so mu problems of principle as they are of tone, rhetoric,
and scope’.8 As Bill Nye said of Wagner’s music, it is beer than it sounds.
Yet Bloom is a serious enough writer for his tone and rhetoric to articulate
an important juncture of the theory. ‘Caricature’, ‘distortion’, ‘squalor’ and
the like suggest a personal investment that carries his de-idealizing project
beyond a disinterested uncovering of superstition. e term ‘de-idealizing’
masks a more hostile and insecure response to his subject. In itself this
hostility might be discounted as a maer of shaky rhetoric not principle; but
su a relentless paern of denigration does usually operate in the service of
some ba-door ideal. For the misprision and indirection of literary tradition
will only seem squalid, rather than simply inevitable, to an observer who is
comparing literary works to an idealized standard. With Bloom this ideal is
the precursor poet, who has replaced God: ‘e Protestant God, insofar as
He was a person, yielded His paternal role for poets to the bloing figure of
the Precursor’ (p. 152). While the poets who come late must anxiously
scrabble around in a perverse parody of literary tradition, the precursor
shines with the aributes of a deity. Bloom thus places the imaginative
vision of precursor poets out of rea; for all the misreadings of latecomers,
their aievements stand entire.
Paul de Man is sympathetic to this claim and states that Bloom has
rejected the imagination–nature dualism adopted by Geoffrey Hartman in
favour of ‘asserting the absolute power of the imagination to set norms for
aesthetic, ethical and epistemological judgement’.9 De Man continues that
su a view of the imagination moves beyond the categories where nature
and critical rhetoric normally operate. us, ‘in this difficult philosophical
predicament, Bloom’s perhaps unconscious strategy has been to rea out
for a new definition of the imagination by means of near-extravagant
overstatement’.10 Yet Bloom has not found a new category so mu as
idealized an old one — the poetic imagination, whi now sets its own
norms. For de Man, Bloom is exploring new territory, yet the emotional
range of Bloom’s exposition can be curiously monotonous. is is the
insidious effect of any idealization; it forecloses response to the particularity
of the not-ideal. e reader is thus forced to contemplate an obsessional
bale in whi a supposedly idealizing humanism is denigrated in the name
of an imagination whi has itself become an ideal.
With priority granted so completely to the precursor poet, and the history
of Western poetry reduced to ‘self-saving caricature’, detractors have argued
that Bloom’s theory allows no room for the agency of the influenced author.
Although not directed at Bloom, Miael Baxandall’s ‘Excursus against
influence’ is a classic plea for a recognition of the room for manoeuvre in
artistic relations:
‘Influence’ is a curse of art criticism primarily because of its wrong-headed grammatical prejudice
about who is the agent and who the patient: it seems to reverse the active/passive relationship
whi the historical actor experiences and the inferential beholder will wish to take into account.
If one says that X influenced Y it does seem that one is saying that X did something to Y rather
than that Y did something to X. But in the consideration of good pictures and painters the second
is always the more lively reality […] If we think of Y rather than X as the agent, the vocabulary is
mu rier and more aractively diversified: draw on, resort to, avail oneself of, appropriate
from, have recourse to, adapt, misunderstand, refer to, pi up, take on, engage with, react to,
quote, differentiate oneself from, assimilate oneself to, assimilate, align oneself with, copy, address,
paraphrase, absorb, make a variation on, revive, continue, remodel, ape, emulate, travesty, parody,
extract from, distort, aend to, resist, simplify, reconstitute, elaborate on, develop, face up to,
master, subvert, perpetuate, reduce, promote, respond to, transform, tale… — everyone will be
able to think of others.11
Bloom would nevertheless resist this criticism. He does grant agency to the
influenced poet; his theory is one of revision, and the shower of revisionary
terms that Baxandall offers would make a helpful supplement to Bloom’s
own ratios. Yet a significant difference still remains between the focus of
their respective approaes. Baxandall wishes to direct aention to the
agency of the later artist (or writer), for him ‘the more lively reality’. It is not
an easy focus to maintain, and he concedes that to talk of influence at all
threatens his enterprise, concluding, ‘influence I do not want to talk about’.12
Bloom’s ratios also focus on the agency of the later writer, or ephebe as he or
she is described; but this focus gives way to a further perspective that results
from his idealization of the poetic imagination, or vision, whi is then
made the possession of a few precursor poets, su as Milton and Keats. e
ephebe can revise the precursor endlessly, but he or she still depends upon a
vision that the precursor has already possessed. In order to gain access to
that vision the ephebe must not court influence, therefore, so mu as
identify with the precursor. us, in the revisionary success stories of
Bloom’s final apter, ‘Apophrades or the Return of the Dead’, influenced
poets do not rea a form of individuation, but ‘aieve a style that captures
and oddly retains priority over their precursors, so that the tyranny of time
almost is overturned, and one can believe, for startled moments, that they
are being imitated by their ancestors’ (p. 141). Bloom insists on an identity
between poets in whi the position of authority is reversible.
Yet identification cannot account for the whole of the influence relation; it
is but one aspect of it. Bloom’s elision of the two concepts is widespread,
and when Riard Sieburth aims for a broader understanding of the literary
relationship between Ezra Pound and Remy de Gourmont, he is forced to
plead a stance outside conventional influence studies:
In relating Gourmont to Pound the intention has been to elicit affinities rather than stress debts,
for Gourmont did not influence Pound in the usual sense of the term: he provided, both by his
personal example and his works, something far more important — a range of instigations, a series
of incitements to experiment and discovery.13
Sieburth’s concept of instigations — the interests, su as Flaubert’s prose
style, that Pound discovered through Gourmont — is mu closer to the
influence that one might say a teaer has exerted, when one doesn’t mean
that one tried to be like him or her. is approa suggests a route beyond
Bloom’s jurisdiction to understand the ways that Eliot’s influence manifests
itself variously in Paz’s work without betraying a constant identification.
Sieburth offers an awareness that connections between works cannot always
be reduced to a head-on bale for priority of vision.
Bloom’s theory never escapes its conflation of identification with
influence. e confusion is essential, in fact, to facilitate the ‘bloing’ figure
of the precursor (p. 99); and to argue, as the ratio of Apophrades argues, that
all poets, in spite of their self-saving pretence to the contrary, are writing the
same poem. Yet can a writer repeat the works of the past? In his short story
of 1939, ‘Pierre Menard, autor del ijote’ [Pierre Menard, Author of the
ixote], Jorge Luis Borges suggests a different view. Menard, the story’s
fictional protagonist, is a minor Fren writer who aempts to rewrite
Cervantes’s Don Quixote word for word in Spanish. e story reaes a
climax as the narrator considers the result of Menard’s labours. He quotes a
passage from Cervantes that begins ‘La verdad, cuya madre es la historia…’
[Truth, whose mother is history…], and whi he describes as ‘un mero
elogio retórico de la historia’ [merely rhetorical praise of history]. He then
quotes an identical passage wrien by Menard in the twentieth century and
concludes:
La historia, madre de la verdad; la idea es asombrosa. Menard, contemporáneo de William James,
no define la historia como una indagación de la realidad sino como su origen.14
[History, the mother of truth; the idea is astounding. Menard, a contemporary of William James,
does not define history as an investigation into reality but as its origin.]
Where Bloom argues that later writers cannot escape earlier ones, Borges
suggests the opposite, that in fact the later writer cannot even copy a
precursor: the ange of context has anged the work. Bloom must
aenuate the capacity of a anging context to alter meaning; otherwise the
relationship between precursor, text and the meaning of that text becomes
over-complicated. Once a text is allowed to move through a succession of
readerships, it will inevitably become separated from its author; the
‘bloing’ figure of the precursor is consequently aenuated. Bloom
responds to this problem by contracting the transition from one historical
period to another, arguing, for example, that modernism still operates within
the context of romanticism rather than exploring the complex affinities and
discontinuities that span the two periods. Wallace Stevens, who
accommodates this seme, earns high praise. e more awkward case of
Eliot’s ambivalent relation to the romantic poets is barely explored by
Bloom who, in a separate essay, impatiently forces him into ‘the main
Romantic tradition of British American poetry’.15 Bloom must insist upon
continuity between authors of a single tradition in order to maintain his
vision of influence as identification. He ooses his authors judiciously to
this end, and with troublesome cases like Eliot he is not averse to a bit of
trimming to get an acceptable fit.
A theory that is already overstreted coping with the relationship
between a select handful of romantic and modernist authors in English will
struggle to comprehend the relationship between Paz and Eliot — two poets
from different countries and languages. Borges’s short story allenges
Bloom’s theory by drawing aention to the way that a temporal
transposition will ange the meaning of a literary text. Although the
temporal distance between Paz and Eliot is not great — their writing careers
involve a considerable overlap — the cultural and linguistic transposition
that Eliot’s works undergo in order to become available to Paz is
inescapable. Paz does not read Eliot within ‘the main Romantic tradition of
British American poetry’, nor even within Anglo-American modernism, but
in relation to a whole range of writers from competing traditions: Mexicans
su as Ramón López Velarde, Carlos Pellicer, Salvador Novo and Xavier
Villaurrutia; continental theorists and philosophers su as Paul Valéry and
Martin Heidegger; and Arthur Rimbaud, Saint-John Perse and Pablo Neruda
as variously experimental poets. is picture is further complicated by the
Francophile inclination of Spanish American culture of the time, whi
alerted Mexican writers to Eliot’s own affinities with poets su as Jules
Laforgue and Stéphane Mallarmé. e Fren Symbolists were a significant
influence on modernismo at the turn of the century, and Jules Laforgue’s
poems became available in Enrique Díez-Canedo and Fernando Fortún’s La
poesía francesa moderna. Antología in 1913. Mexican writers were also avid
readers of the Nouvelle Revue Française in the 1920s where they could read
Eliot’s ‘Note sur Mallarmé et Poe’ (1926). Eliot’s presence is not so mu
‘bloing’, therefore, as negotiable in relation to a number of other
presences. Indeed, Eliot is called upon by Paz to take part in debates with a
range of Mexican and Fren authors.
Eliot’s influence is translated in its broadest sense, transferred and then
mediated through the context of Mexico in the 1930s. Yet the Eliot that Paz
first reads is also translated in the more restricted sense of linguistic transfer:
he is the author of two separate Waste Lands — Enrique Munguía’s ‘El
páramo’ (1930) and Ángel Flores’s Tierra baldía (1930) — of Rodolfo Usigli’s
‘El canto de amor de J. Alfred Prufro’ (1938), and of Bernardo Ortiz de
Montellano’s ‘Miércoles de ceniza’ (1938). Eliot is not simply one presence
among many but a multiple, textual presence. Frequently, these translations
are produced by writers with considerable reputations of their own, whi
further subjects Eliot’s identity to complex forms of transposition and
dispersal. e Mexican tradition that Eliot enters becomes less a maer of
awful presences than of Chinese whispers. Eliot simply doesn’t have a single
identity upon whi to construct a Bloomian idealization of his imaginative
vision.
In a critique of Bloom’s theory, Geoffrey Hartman identifies this slippage
as a aracteristic of all literary traditions. He pleads for an
anowledgement of the indirections by whi tradition moves, and asserts
the
concept of error whi Bloom narrows to misprision. Error formally separates a beginning and an
end: it determines the narratable line, or process of discovery, as a wonder-wandering that is
valuable in itself rather than being merely a delayed, catastrophic closure.16
is ‘wonder-wandering’ is an inescapable aspect of Paz’s relationship to
Eliot. Hartman’s critique of Bloom is broadly deconstructive; it allenges
the idea of precursor-as-origin, and aims to celebrate openness and play in
literary relations rather than closure. One might then expect Julia Kristeva’s
theory of intertextuality, itself born from a reading of Derrida and Lacan, to
provide an alternative to the theory of influence formulated by Bloom. In
‘Word, Dialogue, and Novel’, Kristeva declares:
Any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of
another. e notion of intertextuality replaces that of intersubjectivity, and poetic language is read
as at least double.17
Her approa promises to replace the one-to-one agon of Bloom with a
recognition of the sheer textual variousness of the Eliot that Paz configures
in relation to other available influences. Yet Kristeva’s metaphor suggests a
markedly inert relationship between the quotations that constitute the
literary text. In a mosaic the relationships between parts are fixed, and they
have lile autonomous function; the parts serve the whole. It is difficult to
see what kind of dialogue, or negotiation, would occur between the different
quotations of a text that behaved according to this analogy, or how they
might resist the intention of the mosaic’s constructor. I have myself used the
metaphor of dialogue here, and the related metaphor of negotiation, in an
aempt to suggest a dynamic and motivated relationship between part and
whole within a text. is metaphor is Mikhail Bakhtin’s, and Kristeva’s
theory of intertextuality is in fact formulated as both an explication and a
revision of Bakhtin’s writings on dialogism. e revision aempts to marry
Bakhtin with her theoretical peers in France. She thus aims to excise the
notion of authorial agency that ‘dialogue’ implies in favour of ‘textuality’.
Bakhtin, for Kristeva,
born of a revolutionary Russia that was preoccupied with social problems, does not see dialogue
only as language assumed by a subject; he sees it, rather, as a writing where one reads the other
(with no allusion to Freud). Bakhtinian dialogism identifies writing as both subjectivity and
communication, or beer, as intertextuality. Confronted with this dialogism, the notion of a
‘person-subject of writing’ becomes blurred, yielding to that of ‘ambivalence of writing’.18
Kristeva’s exposition shis beguilingly between a Bakhtin whom she wishes
explicitly to revise, and a Bakhtin whom she has already surreptitiously
revised so that she can claim his authority to validate her own thinking. At
one stage she refers repeatedly to Bakhtin’s ‘word’ but qualifies it with the
Derridean ‘text’ in parentheses.19 However, by the end of the passage quoted
above (whi also concludes a section of her argument), it is clear that
Kristeva has deserted the dual vision of writing ‘as both subjectivity and
communication’, whi she aributes to Bakhtin, in favour of ‘“ambivalence
of writing”’.
Kristeva aims for a clearly defined position in the debate between subject-
centred and language-centred theories of writing. Harold Bloom jumps
roundly onto the opposite scale and in A Map of Misreading (1975), his
follow-up to The Anxiety of Influence, pronounces upon the folly of
continental theory. Seemingly careless of his earlier role as anti-humanist
de-idealizer, he bewails ‘the great humanistic loss’ we sustain if we yield ‘to
those like Derrida and Foucault who imply […] that language by itself writes
the poems and thinks’: ‘Influence remains subject-centered, a person-to-
person relationship, not to be reduced to the problematic of language’, he
insists.20
Bloom’s approa is cavalier about the textual aspect of influence,
particularly with regard to the kind of relationship that obtains between Paz
and Eliot, in whi translation is su an important factor. Kristeva’s
‘“ambivalence of writing”’, on the other hand, leaves lile room for the
motivated activities that Baxandall describes: resistance, alignment,
appropriation, subversion, transformation and the like. Paz and Eliot occupy
both sides of this debate. ey both owed mu to the Symbolist tradition
exemplified by Stéphane Mallarmé’s description in ‘Crise de vers’ [Crisis in
Poetry] of ‘l’œuvre pure’ [the pure work], whi ‘implique la disparition
élocutoire du poète, qui cède l’initiative aux mots, par le heurt de leur
inégalité mobilisés’ [implies the illocutionary disappearance of the poet,
who cedes the initiative to words, whi are mobilized by the collision of
their difference].21 Yet they also preserved a belief, however compromised,
in some form of authorial intention. Paz’s ambivalence is typified by the
statement that for his generation ‘el lenguaje era, simultánea y
contradictoriamente, un destino y una elección. Algo dado y algo que
hacemos. Algo que nos hace’ [language was, simultaneously and
contradictorily, a destiny and a oice. Something given and something that
we make. Something that makes us].22
Mu of the drama of the post-romantic lyric derives from an open
awareness of the competing claims of subjectivity and language. Yet Bloom
and Kristeva are impatient to close this debate. Kristeva’s theory, like
Bakhtin’s discussion of epic and novel before her, displays lile interest in
the lyric poem as a form with specific preoccupations and ways of
operating. Miael Worton and Judith Still anowledge that Kristeva has
been criticized ‘on the grounds that the literary examples whi she cites are
too particular and even inappropriate for her argument’, although they
conclude that ‘the importance of Kristeva’s work is not so mu her reading
of particular poets, or even of particular poetic genealogies, as her
formulation of a theory of the subject and of language’.23 e reputation of
the theory is thus secured at the expense of its practical application in the
study of specific literary relations.
Kristeva’s theorizing is not concerned with the lyric poem as a specific
form; nor is she concerned with the ways that literary forms ange over
time. Her energy is directed towards a general theory of language whi can
apply to all forms of writing. As I have argued, although a poetry specialist,
Harold Bloom also displays a paty sense of literary history, whi is more
mythical than strictly historical. Both theorists offer approaes that have
limited applicability to the case of Paz and Eliot. Walter Jason Bate offers a
more nuanced view, whi recognizes that conceptions of poetic influence
have anged over time, and that those anging conceptions in turn affect
the relations between writers. In the light of this awareness, it seems
pertinent to consider briefly some of the aitudes that Paz and Eliot
expressed towards literary influence.
In a revealing passage of the prologue to volume xiii of his Obras
completas (1999), Paz described his poetic apprenticeship with direct
reference to Aristotle and a neoclassical vocabulary of imitation:
El hombre, decía Aristóteles, es imitador por naturaleza y el aprendizaje comienza con la
imitación […] Nos identificamos con aquello que admiramos y entonces brota el deseo de
imitación. Por la imitación nos apropiamos de los secretos del hacer […] Los poetas, sin excluir a
los más grandes, recurren sin cesar a la tradición y en sus obras se encuentran siempre pasajes que
son tejidos de alusiones a las obras del pasado […] La originalidad es hija de la imitación.
(OC13, 16)
[Aristotle said that man is by nature an imitator and learning begins with imitation […] We
identify with what we admire and from that springs the desire to imitate. rough imitation we
take possession of the secrets of creation […] Even the greatest poets resort constantly to tradition
and in their works one always finds passages woven from allusions to works from the past […]
Originality is the ild of imitation.]
Paz singled out identification as part of the process of learning from a
previous writer. However, he did not allow this one aspect of the process to
stand for the whole; nor was Paz’s identification so purely a psyological
phenomenon, a ‘person-to-person’ relationship, as in Bloom. We identify
with aquello, ‘what’ we admire not ‘whom’. Paz coincided with Bloom but
also thought beyond him. Indeed, in ‘Razón de ser’ (1939), he declared that
‘los jóvenes heredan, de los inmediatamente anteriores, no una obra sino un
instrumento’ [the younger generation inherits from its immediate
predecessors not a work but an instrument] (OC13, 200). He suggested that
the heightened awareness of literary form, whi was typical of the modern
period, did mu to aenuate the Bloomian preoccupation with poetic
vision.
In one of his major meditations on influence, ‘What Dante Means to Me’
(1950), Eliot expressed a similar preoccupation with literary form as he
looked ba at his early influences:
Su early influences, the influences whi, so to speak, first introduce one to oneself, are, I think,
due to an impression whi is in one aspect, the recognition of a temperament akin to one’s own,
and in another aspect the discovery of a form of expression whi gives a clue to the discovery of
one’s own form. ese are not two things, but two aspects of the same thing.
(TCC, 126)
Eliot recognized the affinity of temperament at work in influence whi Paz
would describe as ‘adhesión’ [adherence] (OC13, 16). Yet he also insisted that
the process involves a ‘form of expression’ whi is distinct from, although
related to, the temperament that is being expressed. Paz’s own thoughts
about influence were undoubtedly themselves influenced by Eliot. His
reference, in the prologue quoted above, to ‘pasajes que son tejidos de
alusiones a las obras del pasado’ immediately brings The Waste Land to
mind.
Eliot’s youthful assertion in ‘Philip Massinger’ (1920) that ‘immature
poets imitate; mature poets steal’ provides a licence for poets to parade their
literary sources (SW, 105). Bloom describes Eliot’s statement as a
‘shibboleth’, although he might just as easily have interpreted its
aggressiveness as a symptom of anxiety, and thus as confirmation of his
theory.24 Bloom’s theory of influence experiences its own anxieties when
confronted with an Eliot who anticipates its broadest perspectives. Bloom is
happy to cite the Borges of ‘Kaa y sus precursores’ [Kaa and his
Precursors] (1951) more than once: ‘cada escritor crea a sus precursores. Su
labor modifica nuestra concepción del pasado, como ha de modificar el
futuro’ [ea writer creates his precursors. His work modifies our conception
of the past, as it must modify the future].25 Yet he fails to anowledge that
in a footnote Borges refers this observation ba to Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the
Individual Talent’ (1919): ‘what happens when a new work of art is created
is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art that
preceded it’ (SW, 41).
Paz shared Eliot’s and Borges’s insight that the present interprets the past
from its own interest, and he made it the guiding principle of the anthology
of twentieth-century Mexican poetry, Poesía en movimiento, whi he edited
with Alí Chumacero, José Emilio Paeco and Homero Aridjis: ‘la
modernidad construye su pasado con la misma violencia con que edifica su
futuro’ [modernity constructs its past with the same violence that it builds
its future].26 Poesía en movimiento was an effort to establish a younger
generation of poets like Paeco and Aridjis alongside Paz in a Mexican
tradition that reaed ba to 1915 and the first stirrings of the avant-garde.
Following the logic of Eliot and Borges, Paz read the ronology of literary
history in reverse: ‘Si el presente es un comienzo, la obra de Pellicer,
Villaurrutia y Novo es la consecuencia natural de la poesía de los jóvenes y
no a la inversa’ [If the present is a beginning, the work of Pellicer,
Villaurrutia and Novo is the natural consequence of the poetry of the
younger generation and not the other way around].27 Paz anticipated
Bloom’s ratio of Apophrades, in whi the ephebe appears to influence the
precursor. However, he did not lo the two generations into an identity
where either one or the other claims the position of authority. eir works
are not the same; they can be read as engendering ea other whilst
maintaining discrete identities. He also anticipated Bloom’s understanding
of influence as a revisionary relationship in his pronouncement that ‘la
tradición moderna es la tradición de la ruptura’ [the modern tradition is the
tradition of rupture].28 Both Paz and Eliot suggest a way of exploring the
broader outlines of Bloom’s thought without accepting his polemic that all
poems are based upon an essential sameness of vision.
Poesía en movimiento describes a flexible literary tradition that can be
negotiated by an aspiring poet. Eliot did oen coincide more nearly with
Bloom in a recognition that some influences are insurmountable:
Milton made a great epic impossible for succeeding generations; Shakespeare made a great poetic
drama impossible; su a situation is inevitable, and it persists until the language has so altered
that there is no danger, because no possibility, of imitation.
(OPP, 150)
Bloom would approve of Eliot’s oice of personnel. Yet Eliot also admied
Borges’s insight that time will ange the reader’s relation to the work, and
will diminish its presence. He demonstrates an ambivalent aitude towards
this process: ‘no danger’ is clearly positive, yet the appended ‘no possibility’
implies that something has been lost as well as gained. In an early essay,
‘Modern Tendencies in Poetry’ (1920), whi was intended as a companion
to ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, Eliot stated that ‘the capacity of
appreciating poetry is inseparable from the power of producing it, it is poets
themselves who can best appreciate poetry. Life is always turned toward
creation; the present only, keeps the past alive.’29 For Bloom, the aspiring
poet’s problem lies in escaping the awful presence of the past. Eliot, with a
keener sense of loss, saw an effort in keeping the past alive. ‘Modern
Tendencies in Poetry’ suggests that, in spite of his de-idealizing claims,
Bloom’s ahistorical vision is also reluctant to accept the experience of loss
whi pervades Eliot’s work.
When Eliot described a time in whi the presence of Shakespeare and
Milton would be diminished he was projecting a long way into the future,
an indication of just how persistent the elegiac strain of his thinking could
be. His own experience as a young poet felt their presence:
When I was young I felt mu more at ease with the lesser Elizabethan dramatists than with
Shakespeare: the former were, so to speak, playmates nearer my own size
(TCC, 127)
e strongest precursors could not be allenged, and so Eliot avoided them.
He could find playmates nearer his own size, or seek out authors whose
distance, whether temporal or linguistic, le ‘no danger, because no
possibility, of imitation’. His assertion in ‘Philip Massinger’ in fact ends, ‘A
good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in
language, or diverse in interest’ (SW, 106). It is perhaps Eliot’s willingness to
evade bales with the strongest precursors that most allenges Bloom.
However, the distance that Eliot describes between the two protagonists of
the influence relation applies more closely to the case of Paz and Eliot than
does Bloom’s extended romantic tradition. Eliot’s pragmatism troubles
Bloom’s theory but it provides useful insights into the meanics of
influence. He contradicts Bloom’s insistence on the individual strong figure
— one finds in poetry as in science that ‘when a new discovery is made, it
has been preceded by a number of scaered investigators who have
happened to be groping […] in the same direction’ (TCC, 58). He was also
more relaxed than Bloom about the need for a poet to allenge the
precursor’s main aievement: ‘there are the poets from whom one has
learned some one thing, perhaps of capital importance to oneself, though not
necessarily the greatest contribution these poets have made’ (TCC, 126).
Eliot dus the fight, whi denies him the status of strong poet within the
Bloomian seme. Yet his resigned sense of the ways that an author will
oose his precursors accords more readily with Paz’s trading of numerous
literary influences, Eliot among them.
Both Eliot and Paz share an awareness of the ways that writers will
manipulate the past to suit their current interest. ey both looked to poets
who could serve the historical moment in whi they found themselves. For
Eliot, it was Laforgue who ‘showed how, [sic] mu more use poetry could
make of contemporary ideas and feelings, of the emotional quality of
contemporary ideas, than one had supposed’.30 For Paz this role was
frequently supplied by Eliot, who ‘abrió las puertas de la poesía moderna’
[opened the doors of modern poetry] (OC2, 290). Both Bloom and Kristeva
fail to account, in their different ways, for this understanding of influence as
a relation that occurs in the particular conditions of a given historical
moment. Neither Paz nor Eliot is as systematic a thinker about the influence
relation as these two theorists, yet their insights are more various and more
aentive to the local contingencies of poetic production than either the
coiner of the revisionary ratios or of intertextuality.
Yet without some form of theoretical method, there are obvious pitfalls
for an account of literary relation. When Christopher Ris produced notes
for his edition of T. S. Eliot’s early poems, aempting ‘to put down only the
parallels […] and to leave it to the reader to decide what to make of what the
poet made of this maer’,31 he drew harsh criticism from Louis Menand:
e decision to observe a solarly decorum that prohibits critical judgement or interpretation has
led to a wildly indecorous piece of solarship. e book would not only be a lot shorter, it would
be a lot more readable and useful, if Ris had eated on his principles and just gone ahead and
interpreted.32
Ris’s aversion to ‘exegesis, critical elucidation, explication or judgement’ is
excusable, even laudable, as an editorial policy.33 A narrative of influence
su as the present study, however, does require a method that will save it
from what Bloom describes as the ‘wearisome industry of source-hunting’.34
Hans Robert Jauss’s Rezeptionsästhetic is content to leave aside the larger
theoretical claims of Bloom and Kristeva. In his introduction to Jauss’s
Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, Paul de Man describes the interests of the
Konstanz Sool as ‘methodological rather than […] cultural and
ideological’, and one of the essays included in the volume is polemically
titled ‘Literary History as a Challenge to Literary eory’.35 Jauss aims to
clear a path that avoids the objectivism of positivist literary history on the
one hand, whi ‘allowed source study to grow to a hypertrophied degree,
and dissolved the specific aracter of the literary work into a collection of
“influences” that could be increased at will’ (p. 8); and, on the other, the
‘arbitrary subjectivism’ (p. 68) that he sees as the danger of an approa
whi asserts ‘the theory of the “plural text” with its notion of
“intertextuality” as a limitless and arbitrary production of possibilities of
meaning and of no less arbitrary interpretations’ (p. 147).36
In its broadest outlines, Jauss’s approa shares with Bloom, and with
Eliot before him, a concern with ‘the ever necessary retelling of literary
history’ (p. 20). He even makes use of the Bloomian ratio of tessera in a
reading of Goethe’s and Valéry’s versions of the Faust myth (p. 114).
However, his use of the ratio is casual, and he does not argue, as Bloom’s
theory would argue, that Valéry is evading the bloing presence of Goethe.
Jauss is not interested in the psyo-drama of literary relations, but in the
way that different interpretations of literary works succeed ea other over
time. He provides an approa to the way that Paz’s Eliot appears in a
Mexican context mediated through Spanish translation, read not as an
Anglo-American but as a Spanish American, a Mexican, and even a Fren
writer.
Jauss aims to account for these interpretive operations. He describes the
context through whi one writer, or a reader, interprets another writer as
the ‘horizon of expectations’. e more speculative psyological territory of
Bloom’s theory is deserted in favour of a different approa:
e analysis of the literary experience of the reader avoids the threatening pitfalls of psyology if
it describes the reception and the influence of a work within the objectifiable system of
expectations that arises for ea work in the historical moment of its appearance, from a pre-
understanding of the genre, from the form and themes of already familiar works, and from the
opposition between poetic and practical language.
(p. 22)
Jauss describes a process in whi the ‘horizon of expectations’ guides
interpretation of a text whi then modifies that horizon:
e new text evokes for the reader (listener) the horizon of expectations and rules familiar from
earlier texts, whi are then varied, corrected, altered, or even just reproduced.
(p. 23)
As it alters the old horizon the new text comes to constitute a new horizon
whi then engages future texts (and future readings of old texts). Jauss thus
arrives at a view of ange in literary tradition whi is driven by the
interests of readers and writers but is not subsumed into an overall telos or
sense of progress.
While he concedes that ‘literary tradition […] is always kept going —
though this is oen not admied — from the present interest’ (p. 65), Jauss
also aends consciously to the way that interpretations have been
constructed from specific historical circumstances. Su an approa
prevents the text from the past from being naively assimilated to the prejudices and expectations
of meaning of the present, and thereby — through explicitly distinguishing the past horizon from
the present — allows the poetic text to be seen in its alterity.
(p. 146)
Jauss’s claims might not stand up to persistently sceptical analysis. Prejudice
can still infiltrate understanding of past horizons. e nub of his argument
lies in ‘naively’. A reader may not escape subjectivism in absolute terms, but
a less rather than a more naive version of subjectivism is still preferable.
Unlike the theories of Bloom and Kristeva, Jauss’s methodology is content to
operate at the level of su distinctions. In fact, his concern for the historical
development of understanding has affinities with the kind of care that
Walter Jason Bate brings to his study of influence. Jauss provides guidance
for a narrative that wishes to anowledge both the role of translation in
Paz’s reading of Eliot and a context that is alien to the Anglo-American
world of Eliot studies to whi English, and many Spanish, readers are
accustomed.
Methodology of the Present Study
e following study adopts a reception methodology that is indebted to
Jauss. It is divided into two parts. e first establishes the Mexican context,
or horizon of expectations, in whi the earliest translations of Eliot
appeared. e opening apter, ‘Eliot in Spanish’, takes translations of The
Waste Land and The Hollow Men, by Enrique Munguía Jr. and León Felipe
respectively, and aempts to situate them in relation to the English poems
they translate. It asks how they allenge certain tendencies of Eliot Studies,
and suggests the Anglo-American readings of Eliot that are most helpful for
an understanding of his Mexican reception. e next apter, ‘Precursors
and Contemporaries’, inserts Eliot into the ‘“literary series”’ that comprises
poets who were read in Mexico before and in conjunction with him.37 Part ii
then follows the history of influence proper as Paz adopts and adapts Eliot in
his own work. Eliot anges throughout this history as Paz reads him in
different translations and then in English; the context in whi he is
assimilated also anges as Paz encounters other writers, and his own prose
thinking and poetic practice develop. As is perhaps inevitable with a study
of literary reception and influence, the account is biased towards the early
stages of Paz’s career where the paern of the relationship is established. It
effectively ends with the works that secured his international reputation: El
laberinto de la soledad [The Labyrinth of Solitude] (1950), El arco y la lira
[The Bow and the Lyre] (1956) and Piedra de sol [Sunstone] (1957). e
conclusion considers the way that Four Quartets comes to replace The Waste
Land as an active, if fainter, presence in the later poems.
e relationship between Paz and Eliot is not my own discovery. I was
first alerted to it in Charles Tomlinson’s brief introduction to his Penguin
selection of Paz’s poems. Paz reads The Waste Land as analogous to
Mallarmé’s Un Coup de dés ‘with its spatial and musical structure’,
according to Tomlinson, although he warns against too close an
identification of Eliot’s ‘moments in and out of time’ with Paz’s own
meditations.38 Other isolated observations followed: Henry Gifford in an
introduction to The Penguin Book of Latin American Verse found eoes of
Burnt Norton in ‘Cuento de dos jardines’,
39 and when Miael Smidt
presented Paz’s last public reading in London he compared the criticism of
the two poets before describing Paz’s progress from Piedra de sol (1957) to
Pasado en claro [Clean Draft of the Past] (1975) in terms of the trajectory of
Eliot’s own career.40 But Smidt was drawing an analogy rather than
describing an actual relationship in whi Paz had read Eliot. is can be a
productive method, and a politic one, since it avoids the perplexities of
influence study that have taxed this introduction. Essays by Miael
Edwards and Pablo Zambrano oose this route. Zambrano observes
‘coincidences’ whi are suggestive but also frustrating when they decline to
anowledge that Paz did read Eliot and that similarities between them are
oen more than ance.41 Similarly, Judith Myers Hoover cannot decide, in
spite of a number of close readings of poems by the two writers, if Eliot is a
‘precursor’, or whether different works simply ‘converge’ or ‘share’
aracteristics.42 Two unpublished theses on the relationship between Paz
and Eliot share this uncertainty. Irma González Pelayo veers between
notions of influence and a vaguer sense of ‘convergence’ or ‘parallels and
divergences’; while Pedro Serrano clearly wanted to escape what he
describes as the ‘traditional definitions’ of influence studies, but tends to fall
ba on ‘coincidences’ and ‘parallel cases’.43 I have sympathy with their
caution and in the ensuing study I will be careful not to force a causal
connection between Paz and Eliot when I feel that the relationship is one of
analogy or coincidence. Nevertheless, there is a reception history available.
Serrano does make use of this history in a apter devoted to the early
translation of T. S. Eliot in Mexico with some astute observations on Ramón
López Velarde. Jason Wilson, whose Octavio Paz lists a number of Eliotic
eoes in Paz’s work, also suggests something closer to the approa of the
present study in a brief article of 1991.44 He refers to the Enrique Munguía
version of The Waste Land that was Paz’s first encounter with Eliot, and
raises questions about the role of translation in literary relations. By
adopting the Jaussian methodology of Reception Studies I aim to develop his
prompting.
Both Serrano and González Pelayo identify modernity as a key element of
the relationship between Paz and Eliot, and I have followed suit. e
exemplary status of modern poet that Paz grants Eliot in his spee to the
Ingersoll Foundation is symptomatic of a reading that he applies throughout
his career. I have osen to frame this aspect of the study as an investigation
of ‘modern poetry’ rather than the more loaded ‘modernism’. In part, the
oice is dictated by a desire to avoid confusion with the earlier Spanish
American modernismo, whi was then followed by a vanguardia that
divided into a host of further -isms: creacionismo, ultraísmo, estridentismo
and the like; it also arises from a reservation about -isms tout court. While
they remain a useful critical shorthand, and I do not dispense with them
entirely, I am wary of pre-empting su an important, and contestable, area
of the relation between Paz and Eliot. One of the ief benefits to literary
history of the Jaussian approa is that it encourages the critic to build up
inductively from an account of individual authors and their reading to the
larger generalizations of period and tradition.
If the blander ‘modern poetry’ is less pre-emptive than ‘modernism’, as
Paz’s own favoured terminology it does present difficulties, nevertheless. In
‘e Music of Poetry’ (1942), Eliot drew aention to this issue:
I believe that the critical writings of poets […] owe a great deal of their interest to the fact that the
poet, at the ba of his mind, if not as his ostensible purpose, is always trying to defend the kind
of poetry he is writing, or to formulate the kind he wants to write.
((OPP, 26)
When, in an interview of 1989, Charles Tomlinson suggested that ‘Eliot said
you have with your criticism to create your own audience,’ Paz replied: ‘at
is it. I have tried without knowing it following Eliot.’45 e strategy is
understandable, but it creates problems for the unwary. Anglo-American
readings of Eliot in the 1930s and beyond tied The Waste Land to a theory of
‘impersonality’ that was derived from a highly selective reading of a handful
of his essays. An analogous situation has occurred with critics who rely
heavily on Paz’s own statements for their accounts of his poetry. In a bold
article of 1978, Enrico Mario Santí asked if any other approa were possible:
How can one afford to write about Paz without making use of his criticism as a primary source?
How can one explicate his poetry without eoing issues discussed in his essays? How can one
write about Paz without becoming Paz, or without turning criticism into a surrogate form of
autobiography?46
is allenge has been accepted in more recent years by Rubén Medina,
who aempts to demonstrate that the relationship between Paz’s poetry and
prose ‘is not merely complementary […] but complex, contradictory and
strategic’.47 He credits mu of his approa to Anthony Stanton, whose
detailed resear into the relation between Paz and poets su as Francisco
de evedo and Luis Cernuda has guided my own work.48 e present
study aims to continue the debate that was initiated by Santí and taken up
by Stanton and Medina.
Paz wagers mu of his poetic output on prose assertions about the need
for a historical witness of whi Eliot is the exemplar. It is a wager that does
not always pay off, revealing a gap between critical claim and poetic
realization. In a leer to Pere Gimferrer of 31 October 1988, Paz confessed
that ever since reading ‘El páramo’ in 1930, Eliot ‘me acompaña, me intriga,
me irrita, me conmueve’ [has accompanied, intrigued, irritated and moved
me].49 Eliot is a constant yet elusive presence. He betrays an unresolvedness
that has commonly been obscured by the authority and abundance of Paz’s
own essayistic pronouncements. I propose now to examine that encounter of
1930 with Enrique Munguía’s prose translation of The Waste Land. It would
introduce Paz to an influence that was to be both companion and irritant.
Notes to the Introduction
1. Paz, ‘T. S. Eliot’, Vuelta, 142 (Sept 1988), 40–41; repr. as ‘T. S. Eliot: Mínima evocación’ in OC2,
290–94 (p. 290).
2. Eliot, ‘El páramo’, trans. with intr. by Enrique Munguía Jr., Contemporáneos, 26–27 (Jul–Aug
1930), 7–32. e very first translation, by Ángel Flores and titled Tierra baldía (Barcelona:
Editorial Cervantes, 1930), appeared slightly earlier the same year.
3. Paz, ‘Rescate de Enrique Munguía’, Vuelta, 142 (Sept 1988), 42–43 (p. 42). is article first
appeared in La letra y la imagen, 46 (10 Aug 1980). e passage that recounts Paz’s first
encounter with ‘El páramo’ was excised from the version that appears in OC14, 118–21.
4. Walter Jason Bate, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (London: Chao & Windus,
1971), p. 3.
5. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, 2nd edn (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1997), p. 8. Further references to this edition are given aer quotations in the
text.
6. Bate, The Burden of the Past, p. 133.
7. Frank Lentricia, After the New Criticism (London: Athlone Press, 1980), p. 339.
8. Ibid., p. 343.
9. Paul de Man, ‘Review of Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence’, in Blindness and Insight, 2nd edn
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), pp. 267–76 (p. 269).
10. Ibid., p. 270.
11. Miael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1985), pp. 58–59.
12. Ibid., p. 62.
13. Riard Sieburth, Instigations: Ezra Pound and Remy de Gourmont (Cambridge, MA, and
London: Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 26.
14. Jorge Luis Borges, Obras completas, ed. by Carlos V. Frías, 2 vols (Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores,
1989), I, 449.
15. Harold Bloom, ‘Reflections on T. S. Eliot’, Raritan, 8 (Fall 1988), 70–87 (p. 70).
16. Geoffrey Hartman, The Fate of Reading and Other Essays (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press, 1975), p. 50.
17. Julia Kristeva, ‘Bakhtine, le mot, le dialogue et le roman’ Critique, 23, 239 (Apr 1967), 438–65 (pp.
440–41); ‘Word, Dialogue, and Novel’, in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to
Literature, trans. by omas Gora, Alice Jardine and Leon S. Roudiez (Oxford: Blawell,
1982), pp. 64–91 (p. 66).
18. Kristeva, ‘Bakhtine, le mot, le dialogue et le roman’, pp. 443–44; trans., Desire in Language, p. 68.
19. Ibid., p. 440; trans., p. 66.
20. Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 60 & 77.
21. Stéphane Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, ed. by Bertrand Maral, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1998–
2003), II, 211.
22. Paz, ‘El ocaso de la vanguardia’, in Los hijos del limo (1974), OC1, 461.
23. Intertextuality: Theories and Practices, ed. by Miael Worton and Judith Still (Manester and
New York: Manester University Press, 1990), p. 17.
24. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 31.
25. Borges, Obras completas, II, 90. See Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, pp. 19 & 141.
26. Paz, ‘Prólogo’, in Poesía en movimiento: México, 1915–1966, ed. by Octavio Paz, Alí Chumacero,
José Emilio Paeco and Homero Aridjis (México: Siglo XXI, 1966), pp. 3–34 (p. 6).
27. Ibid., p. 7. Paz was also aware of Borges and eoes him directly in ‘El cómo y el para qué: José
Ortega y Gasset’ (1980): ‘cada generación inventa a sus autores’ (OC3, 298); see also La otra voz
(1990): ‘La mayoría de los poetas escogen a sus antepasados: Eliot a los “poetas metafísicos” y a
Laforgue…’ (OC1, 562).
28. Paz, Poesía en movimiento, p. 5.
29. Eliot, ‘Modern Tendencies in Poetry’, Shama’a, I, 1 (Apr 1920), 9–18 (p. 12).
30. Eliot, ‘Modern Tendencies in Poetry’, p. 13.
31. Christopher Ris, ‘Preface’, in T. S. Eliot, Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917 (New
York: Harcourt Brace, 1996), pp. xi–xxxiii (p. xxv).
32. Louis Menand, ‘How Eliot became Eliot’, New York Review of Books, 15 May 1997, pp. 26–29 (p.
27).
33. Ris, Inventions of the March Hare, p. xxvi.
34. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 31.
35. Paul de Man, ‘Introduction’, in Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. by
Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), vii–xxv (p. vii).
36. Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, pp. 8, 68 & 147. Further references to this edition are
given aer quotations in the text. Jauss aas the intertextual approa of Roland Barthes
rather than Julia Kristeva. While Kristeva aempts to account objectively for the transposition
from one ‘système signifiant’ [signifying system] to another (La Révolution du langage
poétique (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1974), p. 60), Barthes locates the meaning of a text in the
interpretation of the reader: ‘a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures
and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place
where this multiplicity is focused, and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the
author […] a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination’, ‘La Mort de l’auteur’, in
Essais critiques IV: Le Bruissement de la langue (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1984), pp. 61–67 (p.
66); trans. by Stephen Heath, ‘e Death of the Author’, in Barthes, Image-Music-Text
(London: Fontana, 1977), pp. 142–48 (p. 148).
37. Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, p. 32.
38. Charles Tomlinson, ‘Introduction: A Note on Octavio Paz’, in Paz, Selected Poems, trans. by
Charles Tomlinson and others (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), pp. 13–14 (p. 13).
39. Henry Gifford, ‘Introduction’, in The Penguin Book of Latin American Verse, ed. by Enrique
Caracciolo-Trejo (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), xxxvii–xlv (p. xliv).
40. Octavio Paz at the een Elizabeth Hall, London, 10 June 1996, presented by Miael Smidt
(Poetry Library).
41. Miael Edwards ‘“Renga”, Translation, and Eliot’s Ghost’, P.N. Review, 7, 2 (1980), 24–28; Pablo
Zambrano, ‘Paz, Borges, Eliot: Tres recreaciones del eterno retorno’, in Las formas del mito en
las literaturas hispánicas del siglo XX, ed. by Luis Gómez Canseco (Huelva: Universidad de
Huelva, 1994), pp. 181–201 (p. 199).
42. Judith Myers Hoover, ‘e Urban Nightmare: Alienation Imagery in the Poetry of T. S. Eliot and
Octavio Paz’, Journal of Spanish Studies, 6, 1 (1978), 13–28 (pp. 13, 14 & 21).
43. Irma González Pelayo, ‘Octavio Paz y T. S. Eliot: Un diálogo en la tradición de la ruptura’
(unpublished master’s thesis, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1991), pp. 131 & 140;
Pedro Serrano, ‘e Rhetorical Construction of the Modern Poet in T. S. Eliot and Octavio Paz
in Poetry and Criticism’ (unpublished MPhil theses, King’s College London, 1995), pp. 8, 7 &
10.
44. Jason Wilson, ‘Tradición y traducción: Acerca de las relaciones de Octavio Paz con la poesía
anglosajona’, Ínsula, 46, 532–33 (Apr–May 1991), 34–35.
45. ‘Octavio Paz Talks to Charles Tomlinson’, recorded at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, May 1989
(Keele University, 1989). Paz’s ‘without knowing it’ is surprising as he knew ‘e Music of
Poetry’ well. He cites Eliot as an example of one of a number of writers who marry poetry and
criticism in both OC3, 62 and OC8, 456, where he admits that ‘Yo he seguido un poco a estos
maestros’.
46. Enrico Mario Santí, ‘e Politics of Poetics’, Diacritics, 8 (Winter 1978), 28–40 (p. 34).
47. Rubén Medina, Autor, autoridad y autorización: Escritura y poética de Octavio Paz (México: El
Colegio de México, 1999), p. 26. Medina regrets that ‘Santí later abandoned this line of
analysis’ (p. 18).
48. See Anthony Stanton, Inventores de tradición: Ensayos sobre poesía mexicana moderna (México:
El Colegio de México, 1998). Stanton also provides a brief account of Eliot’s influence on Paz in
‘Octavio Paz y la poesía moderna en lengua inglesa’, in Homenaje a Octavio Paz, ed. by
Ignacio Durán and Hugo Hiriart (New York: Institutos Culturales Mexicanos de Washington y
Nueva York, 2001), pp. 67–78 (pp. 69–70).
49. Paz, Memorias y palabras: Cartas a Pere Gimferrer 1966–1997, ed. by Pere Gimferrer (Barcelona:
Seix Barral, 1999), p. 330.
PART I
Mexican Contexts
CHAPTER 1
Eliot in Spanish
Paz was sixteen years old when Enrique Munguía Jr.’s translation of The
Waste Land appeared in Contemporáneos, a magazine that he bought ‘cada
mes tan pronto como salía’ [ea month as soon as it came out].1 He
responded with ‘asombro, desconcierto y fascinación’ [sho, disturbance
and fascination] (OC2, 290). Paz’s discovery occurred at a decisive moment.
He had started at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria in the old Colegio de
San Ildefonso in the centre of Mexico City earlier that year. Guillermo
Sheridan has described the political and artistic ferment of the sool at that
time: ‘e preparatoria was more a way of life than a sool, a scale model
of the turbulent Mexico of the coming decade: art, leers and learning
mated by solidarity, friendship, debate.’2 Literary magazines like
Contemporáneos provided the young students with ‘numerous examples of
current writing and a spur to create their own publication’.3 Paz would
publish his first poems in the middle of the following year.
Yet how does a contemporary reader assess the encounter between this
world and Eliot’s Waste Land? e problem is not so mu one of distance
as of the extensive critical history that now intervenes, bloing the view.
Frank Lentricia has commented on the difficulty of approaing The
Waste Land ‘without passing through solarly mediation’. From the
4
baffled responses of early reviewers, through the sometimes misleading
praise of the New Critics and the ideological critique of Marxists, to
readings that discover Freud and an ur-text of deconstruction, a whole
industry of professional comment competes for the reader’s aention. e
mediations that brought the poem to Paz in 1930 were of a different order:
Munguía’s translation into Spanish prose, accompanied by a substantial
introduction; and various other writers published in Mexico at the time,
many of whom shared the pages of Contemporáneos with Eliot. e next
apter will explore this Mexican context of precursors and contemporaries,
whi generates the fault lines of Paz’s subsequent career. First, however, I
wish to establish a sense of the texts that formed Paz’s first encounter with
Eliot: ‘El páramo’ and a translation of The Hollow Men, ‘Los hombres
huecos’, whi appeared in Contemporáneos six months later.5 Conscious of
the interference that a knowledge of the professional critical history may
cause, I will also suggest the Anglo-American readings of Eliot whi can
best help to map out the range and aracter of Mexican response.
If ‘El páramo’ disturbed Paz, it also troubled Ángel Flores whose own
translation, Tierra baldía, had appeared in Spain a few months previously.6
He wrote to Eliot to ask if Munguía had sought authorization, as Flores
himself had done, adding:
e thing is so pitifully done that I am inclined to believe that you have not been informed about
it at all. At all events, this so-called prose translation will harm you and the circulation of the
Spanish edition whi, incidentally, has been warmly received in Spain.7
Eliot replied that he had indeed given permission to Munguía, who ‘had
some claim upon me, being introduced by a mutual friend’, but that he was
not presented with the version for approval before publication.8 Flores was
himself fastidious about su consultation. In his original leer requesting
permission to publish Tierra baldía, he asked Eliot to clarify the meaning of
certain lines, and when Eliot then eed the translation it was with
enough care to ask if the rendition of ‘burning’ in ‘e Fire Sermon’ as
consumiéndome would work simply as consumiendo.
9
‘El páramo’ suffers from having by-passed this process: ‘musing upon the
king my brother’s wre’ (CPP, 67), for example, becomes ‘rememoré al rey
que fue destruido por mi hermano’ [I remembered the king who was
destroyed by my brother]; and ‘Mrs Equitone’ becomes ‘la señora del tono
igual’ [the woman of the similar tone] (EP, 23 & 17), the prepositional
construction classing her syntactically alongside ‘la dama de las peñas’ [the
Lady of the Ros] — another card in the Tarot pa rather than a person.
Confronted with lapses that have more to do with grammatical competence
than any question of interpretation, Flores’s censure is understandable. Paz’s
sho and disturbance is also understandable, and he would later describe
the Flores translation as ‘hasta la fea, la mejor versión’ [the best version to
date] while admiing of the Munguía that ‘no acertó ni con el tono del
poema ni con el título (El páramo no es exactamente The Waste Land)’ [he
did not get the tone or the title of the poem right (El páramo isn’t exactly
The Waste Land)].
10 However, it was the Munguía, not the Flores
translation, that offered Paz his first encounter with Eliot: ‘lo leí y releí
muas veces hasta que, poco a poco, comencé a comprender’ [I read it and
re-read it many times until, lile by lile, I began to understand].11 Without
the English poem or a more competent translation as condemnatory points
of comparison, those repeated readings were productive if, in retrospect,
partial. When he received the T. S. Eliot Prize in 1988 and looked ba at
what Eliot had meant to him, it was Munguía rather than Flores whom Paz
recalled: ‘nunca lo conocí y hoy repito su nombre con gratitud y con pena’ [I
never met him and now I repeat his name with gratitude and with sadness]
(OC2, 290).12
e sho that Paz experienced when he first read ‘El páramo’ cannot be
blamed solely on Munguía’s incompetence. Readers in England had also
been raled by Eliot’s poem. Charles Powell in The Manchester Guardian
lamented that ‘meaning, plan, and intention alike are massed behind a
smokescreen of anthropological and literary erudition, and only the pundit,
the pedant, or the clairvoyant will be in the least aware of them’.13 Powell
was reviewing the first English book edition of The Waste Land (1923),
whi included Eliot’s notes.14 e notes oscillate curiously between an
anonymous record of sources and the authoritative critical voice that Eliot
was cultivating in his literary journalism. ey refrain from elaborating on
the meaning of references at the same time as they assert the author’s
control over proceedings. His note on the tarot cards, for example, informs
the reader that he is ‘not familiar with the exact constitution’ of the pa,
and that he departs from it for his own ‘convenience’ and ‘purpose’ (CPP,
76); yet that purpose is not articulated. He cannily withholds information
that he implies is within his grasp, just out of rea of the reader. Like
Powell, Harold Monro clearly felt got at by these tactics and parodied Eliot’s
allusion to Marvell: ‘But at my ba I always hear / Eliot’s intellectual
sneer.’15
At the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria in Mexico City, Paz may well have
been less vulnerable to su insecurity. He was unlikely to have felt culpably
ignorant when faced with the erudition of a North American poet resident
in London. He was thus excused the judgement of F. R. Leavis that the
allusions could ‘fairly be held to be common to the public that would in any
case read modern poetry’.16 Leavis was writing as an academic, for whom
su knowledge was a professional necessity. Paz was sharing his reading
with his peers, discovering Eliot’s poem not in its authoritative book form,
but in a literary journal.17 In his history of the group that contributed to
Contemporáneos, Guillermo Sheridan describes the way that, as ‘generators
of literary history, magazines are the vehicles of the most intriguing
anxiousness, and permit the exercise of adventure more reliably than does
the book’.18
Paz also encountered a different text from the English reviewers. Munguía
selects from Eliot’s notes, and places them at the boom of the page rather
than at the end of the poem. He consistently excises the kind of authorial
presence that provoked Powell and Monro. e notes are less numerous, less
conspicuous, and they no longer suggest an author-approved reading of the
poem. In fact, the guiding role that the notes play in the English book
version is taken over by Munguía’s own ‘inteligente prólogo’ [intelligent
introduction], as Paz would later describe it, whi accompanied ‘El páramo’
(OC2, 290). e notes that Munguía does provide read as an extension of this
substantial introduction — they provide the help of another reader, rather
than a reminder from the author of whose poem this is.19
e excision of Eliot’s notes removes Paz from the cause of mu hostile
early response, whi saw the poem as a ‘pompous parade of erudition’;20 it
also distances him from the readings that established Eliot’s academic
reputation during the 1930s. Inspired by Eliot’s own pronouncement in
‘Ulysses, Order, and Myth’ that the ‘mythic method’ is ‘a way of controlling
and ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama
of futility and anary whi is contemporary history’, Cleanth Brooks
would argue that the allusions amount to a ‘predetermined seme’, in
whi ‘aotic experience’ can be ‘ordered into a new whole’.21 Critics who
failed to detect this ‘unified whole’, focusing their aention instead on the
more disparate effects of an apparently fragmentary form, ‘misconceive
entirely the theme and structure of the poem’.22
More recently Lawrence Rainey has drawn on the dras of The Waste
Land to argue that there is no evidence of
an order being aieved as the realization of a plan or a program, dictated by some predetermined
notion of mythic structure or ritual paern; what The Waste Land aieves are always relative and
incremental orders of coherence that are local, contingent, and retrospective in nature.23
Brooks’s reading set the parameters for decades of academic comment (both
sympathetic and hostile), but one can now appreciate a different tendency in
the early reviews of the poem. In 1923, Eliot’s friend Conrad Aiken
complained about ‘the use of allusions whi may have both intellectual and
emotional value for Mr. Eliot, but (even with the notes) none for us’.24 He
rejected this aspect of the poem but could still ‘ “accept” the work as we
would accept a powerful, melanoly tone-poem’.25 Writing in 1930 before
the New Critics came to dominate the horizon of Eliot Studies, Munguía is
closer to the focus of these early reviews. When he does refer to the purpose
of allusion in the poem it is not to describe a controlling seme:
La cita en Eliot no es, como sí suele serlo en otros, decoración o aderezo sino más bien, por la
tradición que lleva implícita, algo subordinado a él que al mismo tiempo es parte integrante de sí
mismo: una función y un modo, su modo de ser.
(EP, 14)
[Eliot’s use of allusion is not, as is oen the case with other poets, decoration or embellishment,
but rather something whi, owing to the tradition that the poet carries within himself, is both
separate from the poet and at the same time an integral part of his self: an operation and a mode,
his mode of being.]
e allusions are a part of the speaker’s ‘modo de ser’; that is, they are
symptomatic of a particular consciousness, not redemptive of it. eir
content is not as important as the habit of mind that they typify. at mind
belonged to ‘el hombre cultivado de nuestra época’:
Nos sorprende Eliot con un tema nuevo, de nuevo característico, muy suyo —¿o muy nuestro?—: el
del agotamiento afectivo, el de la desolación allá en los círculos más espesos y oscuros de la
conciencia del hombre cultivado de nuestra época.
(EP, 11)
[Eliot surprizes us with a new theme, whi once more is typical, very mu his own — or very
mu ours? — the theme of affective exhaustion, of desolation in the densest and darkest corners
of the consciousness of the cultivated man of our age.]
Munguía advertises ‘un tema nuevo’, a phrase that would alert a reader like
Paz, poring over Contemporáneos for examples of the new and the modern.
Eliot’s poem portrays the emotional failure of the cultured mind, a theme
that Munguía reinforces with reference to Mallarmé’s weary ‘ “hélas, [sic] la
air est triste et j’ai lu tous les livres” ’ [Alas, the flesh is sad and I have
read all the books] from ‘Brise marine’ (EP, 9). Munguía’s expression, ‘la
conciencia del hombre cultivado de nuestra época’, adds a further
significance to the psyological reading, however. is consciousness is
itself symptomatic of the historical moment.
Munguía may well have known Aiken’s review, whi described Eliot’s
portrayal of ‘an intensely modern, intensely literary consciousness’.26
Aiken’s reading illustrates two complementary yet distinct tendencies in the
early reviews. e one concentrates on the poem’s portrayal of affect:
according to Edmund Wilson, it conveys ‘intense emotion’ and ‘a strange
poignancy’; or (Aiken again) it is ‘a powerful emotional ensemble’.27 Yet
these interpretations also push in another direction, seeking to discover a
more representative significance in the portrayal. ‘It captures us’, Aiken
concluded, whi tentatively suggests that the link between writer and
reader may have a broader social expansion.28 Wilson is more explicit: ‘And
sometimes we feel that he is speaking not only for a personal distress, but
for the starvation of a whole civilization.’29 In his otherwise hostile piece,
Louis Untermeyer grudgingly conceded that ‘as an analyst of desiccated
sensations, as a recorder of the nostalgia of his age, Mr. Eliot has created
something whose value is, at least, documentary’.30 Gilbert Seldes was
willing to generalize further, declaring that the poem ‘expressed something
of supreme relevance to our present life’, although that ‘something’ is still
le fairly vague.31 In the early academic criticism, one can witness the
elevation of this perception to more strident claims about the poem’s social,
or historical, relevance: for I. A. Riards the poem ‘captured the plight of a
whole generation’; while for F. R. Leavis it reflected ‘the present state of
civilisation’.32 Aiken felt that The Waste Land captured ‘us’, the poem’s
individual readers; now it captures a ‘plight’ or reflects a ‘state of
civilization’. e personal, affective response has given way to a more
generalized language of social analysis.
Munguía’s ‘conciencia del hombre cultivado de nuestra época’ sits on the
cusp of these two readings.33 He does, in fact, go into some detail on the
composition of the sensibility that operates in the poem. Eliot
se demuestra la imposibilidad de dar cabida dentro de un solo marco, en forma orgánica, a la
imaginación, a la intuición, a la emoción y a la razón. Y aún con más claridad: sin que exista la
posibilidad de reunir armoniosamente en un todo sistematizado a estos elementos psicológicos que
son la base imprescindible de la personalidad, el hombre cultivado se percata, sin poder evitarlo,
de una discontinuidad subjetiva y periódica.
(EP, 11)
[demonstrates the impossibility of containing within the one frame, in organic form, imagination,
intuition, emotion and reason. And even more clearly: without there existing a possibility of
harmoniously reuniting those psyological elements that are the necessary basis of the
personality in a systematized whole, the cultivated man becomes inescapably aware of a
subjective, recurrent discontinuity.]
Munguía displays familiarity with Eliot’s own prose discussions of affect.
Earlier, he describes the role of ‘la conjunta sabiduría de los nervios y del
tacto para transformar, en el momento de la recreación poética, la palabra
escondida y dispersa en una unidad sensual’ [the combined knowledge of
nerves and tou to transform, at the moment of poetic recreation, the
hidden, scaered word into a sensual unity] (EP, 8). e rhetoric of ‘nerves’
and the physical sense of tou eo the injunction of ‘e Metaphysical
Poets’ (1921) that ‘one must look into the cerebral cortex, the nervous
system, and the digestive tracts’ (SE, 290), and the reference in ‘Philip
Massinger’ (1920) to ‘a period when the intellect was immediately at the tips
of the senses’ (SW, 109). ese statements were consolidated by Eliot in ‘e
Metaphysical Poets’ as his theory of the ‘dissociation of sensibility’, a
moment in the seventeenth century aer whi ‘the language became more
refined’ but ‘the feeling became more crude’ (SE, 288). Munguía does not
mention the theory by name, but his identification of ‘agotamiento afectivo’
[affective exhaustion] does imply that his reading of affect in the poem also
accommodates a sense of historical process. Munguía entertains the two
readings, personal and historical, and Paz’s own account registers this
double-edgedness. ‘é me unía a The Waste Land?’ [What drew me to The
Waste Land?], he asks in ‘T. S. Eliot: mínima evocación’, ‘El horror ante el
mundo moderno’ [Horror at the modern world] (OC2, 293). It is a shared
emotional response to the historical situation that aracts him to the poem.
Like Munguía and the poem’s early reviewers, his reading compacts the
psyological and historical:
La fusión del yo subjetivo y el nosotros histórico, mejor dio, la intersección entre el destino
social y el individual, fue y es la gran novedad de The Waste Land.
(OC2, 292)
[e fusion of the subjective I and the historical we, or rather, the intersection between social and
individual destiny, was and is the great aievement of The Waste Land.]
Yet these readings can be antagonistic as well as complementary, a problem
that will emerge in Paz’s own use of Eliot as a broadly lyric, expressive and
meditative tradition comes into conflict with an ambition for the poem as a
political act whi can mitigate ‘the present state of civilisation’.
For Paz, ‘la gran novedad’ [the great innovation] of Eliot’s poem was a
historical relevance whi corrected the Symbolism that had preceded it: ‘El
simbolismo había expulsado a la historia del poema; con The Waste Land
regresa al poema el tiempo histórico, concreto’ [Symbolism had expelled
history from the poem; with The Waste Land historical, concrete time
returns to the poem] (OC2, 292). Paz’s admiring reference to ‘history’
indicates a loosely Marxist allegiance whi, though persistently
unorthodox, exerts a strong influence on his early career. Yet the influence of
the Symbolists cannot be easily separated from The Waste Land nor, as I will
argue in the next apter, from its Mexican reception. Paz was himself alert
to a formal innovation that owed mu to these precursors:
La forma del poema era inusitada: las rupturas, los saltos bruscos, y los enlaces inesperados, el
carácter fragmentario de cada parte y la manera aparentemente desordenada en que se enlazan
(aunque dueña de una secreta coherencia) […] El poema no se parecía a los que yo había leído
antes.
(OC2, 291)
[e form of the poem was strange: the ruptures, the sudden leaps, the unexpected connections,
the fragmentary aracter of ea part and the apparently disordered manner in whi they are
connected (although governed by a secret coherence) […] the poem was not like the ones I had
read before.]
Paz accumulates a vocabulary of fragmentation whi recreates a pressing
sense of the confusion that the poem’s form generated. Conrad Aiken
provided an exception among early readers when he identified the formal
confusion of The Waste Land as part of its point rather than as a problem
that the notes could tidy away: ‘e poem succeeds — as it brilliantly does —
by virtue of its incoherence, not of its plan; by virtue of its ambiguities, not
of its explanations.’34
Fren Symbolism, and in particular the works of Stéphane Mallarmé,
mark a decisive moment in this formal experiment with fragmentation.35
Aention has been more commonly directed, however, to the links between
Eliot and the minor Fren Symbolist Jules Laforgue. Edmund Wilson
denied Eliot a meaningful relationship with Mallarmé, insisting that he
remain in the company of Laforgue: ‘It is from the conversational-ironic,
rather than from the serious-aesthetic, tradition of Symbolism that T. S. Eliot
derives.’36 Yet Eliot did write about Mallarmé both before and aer the
publication of The Waste Land; and while Munguía’s introduction concedes
the primacy of Laforgue’s influence, it does not exclude the ‘serious-
aesthetic tradition’ when it notes the importance of ‘los simbolistas
franceses: Corbiére [sic], Mallarmé, y, especialmente, Laforgue’ (EP, 9).
Ángel Flores, too, in his mu more cursory introduction to Tierra baldía,
suggests Apollinaire, a prominent modern inheritor of Mallarmé’s formal
experiment, as an example of the lineage to whi Eliot belongs, a
suggestion that Paz will follow.37
In a pair of essays published in The Poet in the Imaginary Museum,
Donald Davie offers a detailed reading of Eliot’s poems as an expression of
the ‘serious-aesthetic’ Symbolism of Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Valéry.38
Davie’s interest lies in the analogy that the Symbolists drew between music
and poetry, in their awareness that ‘poetry, like music, erects its structures in
the lapse of time’.39 is focus on the temporal aspect of the poetic line
places a particular emphasis on syntax and on interpretation as a process.
e reader is never granted a complete view of the poem as a ‘unified
whole’, but must construct meaning in a dual action of anticipation and
retrospection. Davie’s approa helps to articulate the modus operandi of a
form whi constantly disrupts anticipated continuities and diverts the
reader’s aention in unexpected directions.
One of Davie’s key examples is the grammatically ambiguous ‘troubled,
confused…’ in ‘A Game of Chess’:
her strange synthetic perfumes,
Unguent, powdered, or liquid — troubled, confused
And drowned the sense in odours;
(CPP, 64)
He notes that as ‘troubled, confused’ end the line they are most naturally
read as adjectival past participles; it is only as the reader commences the
ensuing line — ‘And drowned’ — that they become, retrospectively, past
indicative. ere is no resolution to this ambiguity: they function differently
as the reader crosses the line. e white space of the page generates a ange
of meaning.40 Su effects reveal one of the central insights of the Symbolist
movement: ‘the discovery that words may have meanings though they don’t
have referents’.41 But what are their meanings here? One response to a
breakdown of external reference is to turn towards the speaker: rather than
delineating the object, words express an aitude towards it. is is the
reading performed by William Empson, who first spoed the ambiguity,
when he notes that ‘it gives a sense of swooning or squinting […] to think of
troubled and confused as verbs’.42 Davie, however, does not describe the
effect as expressive, but reflexive: the ambiguity foregrounds the way that
the language of the poem operates ‘powerfully to drive the reader on from
line to line, forcing home to him just how poetry moves and must move
always forward through time’. Eliot is thinking, he concludes, like recent
philosophers about ‘how far language can be trusted’.43
e two readings evince different aspects of an epistemological turn: the
one focuses on the way that the self processes the world; the other
introduces the medium of language as a further route to knowledge. Both
readings can be found in Mallarmé’s own writings. In ‘Sur l’évolution
liéraire’ [On the Evolution of Literature], he performs the move from a
descriptive to an expressive aesthetic:
Nommer un objet, c’est supprimer les trois quarts de la jouissance du poème, qui est faite de
deviner peu a peu: le suggérer, voilà le rêve […] évoquer petit à petit un objet pour montrer un
état d’âme, ou, inversement, oisir un objet et en dégager un état d’âme, par une série de
déiffrements.44
[To name an object is largely to destroy poetic enjoyment, whi comes from gradual divination.
e ideal is to suggest the object […] An object must be gradually evoked in order to show a state
of soul; or else, oose an object and from it elicit a state of soul by means of a series of
decodings.]
Yet his description of the pure work, whi ‘implique la disparition
élocutoire du poète, qui cède l’initiative aux mots’ [implies the illocutionary
disappearance of the poet, who cedes the initiative to words], adumbrates a
poetry that has become unmoored from the speaking subject to reflect upon
its own process.45 If the Symbolist interest in language and the
discontinuities of syntax can be made to serve an art of psyological
presentation, it need not be confined exclusively to this purpose. e
workings of language have an interest all their own.
Eliot was aware of Mallarmé as a prime exponent of this language
consciousness before he wrote The Waste Land. In ‘Modern Tendencies in
Poetry’ (1920), he praised him as a poet who ‘called aention to the fact that
the actual writing of poetry, the accidence and syntax, is a very difficult part
of the problem’, adding that ‘Mallarmé gets his modernity, his sincerity,
simply by close aention to the actual writing’. His influence, ‘though it has
not been powerful here, has been beneficial’, he concluded.46 en in an
article of 1926, ‘Note sur Mallarmé et Poe’, he elaborated further on this
project:
L’effort pour restituer la puissance du Mot, qui inspire la syntaxe de l’un et de l’autre et leur fait
écarter le sonore pur ou le pur mélodieux (qu’ils pourraient tous les deux, s’ils le voulaient, si bien
exploiter), cet effort, qui empêe le lecteur d’avaler d’un coup leur phrase ou leur vers, est une des
qualités qui rapproent le mieux les deux poètes.47
[e effort to restore the power of the word, whi inspires the syntax of the one and of the other,
and their isolation of the pure resonance or pure melody (whi they could both, when they
wanted, exploit so well), this effort, whi prevents the reader from swallowing in one gulp their
phrase or their line, is one of the qualities whi brings the two poets closest together.]
Eliot describes the way that the two poets exploit the temporal aspect of
language, aiming to prevent the reader ‘d’avaler d’un coup leur phrase ou
leur vers’. He focuses on the experiential drama of reading and also on the
way that this awareness can vitiate continuities and foreground the word as
a discrete, though powerful, unit.
Both the expressive and the reflexive strands of this poetics appear in
Eliot’s writings: he praised Tennyson’s In Memoriam for its ‘logic of the
emotions’;48 but he also argued provocatively in ‘Tradition and the
Individual Talent’ that the poem is ‘a medium and not a personality’ (SW,
46). ese tendencies appear in the disturbing motions that open ‘e Burial
of the Dead’:
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain
(CPP, 61)
e disturbance is generated by Eliot’s use of lineation, whi isolates the
present participles at the end of ea line. e new momentum that the
participle initiates aer the comma reaes into a blank space that separates
verb from the noun that is its object, the ground of its action: ‘breeding /
Lilacs’; ‘mixing / Memory’; ‘stirring / Dull roots’. Eliot exploits that
disjunction, the blank space into whi the generative force of the verbs
seems to expand before the subsequent line retrospectively reins them in to
the normal run of predication.
Davie quotes Mallarmé as a theorist, and practitioner, of this conception
of white space: ‘significatif silence qu’il n’est pas moins beau de composer
que les vers [meaningful silence whi gives no less pleasure in its
composition than the verses themselves].49 Eliot demonstrated a similar
concern when he wrote to Flores to advise: ‘I should be very glad if you
could see that the same spacing is observed in the translation as in the
original; for I aa great importance to spacing.’50 In the opening passage
of ‘e Burial of the Dead’, the space between the lines disturbs the relation
between the present participles and the subsequent phrases that tie them to
the description of an outer event. For a moment at the end of ea line the
reader is confronted with a pure action — ‘breeding’, ‘mixing’, ‘stirring’ —
whi projects its energies alarmingly. at disruption lends itself to the
psyological, expressive reading of Symbolist disjunction. An anxious sense
of natural processes in transformation reads as the correlative of a fear of
inner transformation. It is a fear that manifests itself in the repeated
occurrence of the verb ‘to dare’ in Eliot’s early poems, from ‘Do I dare /
Disturb the universe?’ in ‘Prufro’ to ‘the awful daring of a moment’s
surrender’ in ‘What the under Said’ and the ‘Eyes I dare not meet in
dreams’ of The Hollow Men (CPP, 14, 74, & 83). Yet the psyological theme
depends on the strategic use of syntax and lineation that Eliot adopts from
the purer formal strand of Symbolism.
Munguía’s introduction gives prominence to the theme of affect, and he is
aware of anxiety at work in Eliot’s poem, claiming that while the animistic
lapse of modern life is accepted by a Proust,
para Eliot, poeta y no novelista, puritano y, por ende, anglosajón, lo aterran y atormentan. Este
terror y este tormento son la esencia de su mejor poema: The Waste Land.
(EP, 12)
[for Eliot, a poet rather than a novelist, puritan and therefore Anglo-Saxon, they terrify and
torment him. is terror and this torment are the essence of his best poem: The Waste Land.]
ere is lile evidence of this anxiety, however, in the opening lines of ‘El
entierro de los muertos’:
Abril es el mes más cruel: arbustos de lilas engendra sobre yermos muertos, mezcla al deseo con el
recuerdo, agita incoloras raíces con las lluvias de primavera.
(EP, 15)
[April is the cruellest month: it breeds lilac bushes on waste ground, mixes memory with desire,
stirs colourless roots with the rains of spring.]
e startling present participles of ‘breeding’, ‘mixing’, ‘stirring’ are
transformed to present simple verbs: engendra, mezcla, agita. Activity that
unfolds in the present is thus distanced, framed in a tense that describes
either aracteristics or repeated actions. Davie refers to the ‘perpetual
present tense’ of the Symbolist poem in whi ‘words do not stand for
events but are those events’.51 Eliot’s participles telescope the time of the
event described into the time of the poem’s unfolding. Munguía’s present
simple verbs, however, refer to a time spread out beyond the present
moment. ey establish the standpoint of an observer where Eliot’s
participles involve a troubled identification between speaker, reader, and the
processes being both described and enacted on the page. Here that
disjunction between predication and lineation has been smoothed over, and
the psyological portrayal all but disappears.52
Munguía’s introduction provides sophisticated discussion of the
sensibility that is portrayed in The Waste Land. He also registers an
awareness of the ‘fragmentario y criptográfico’ [fragmentary and cryptic]
(EP, 13) form that realizes this portrayal. He was unable, however, to register
the implications of this insight in his prose translation. Syntactic effects
present the translator with an incommensurable problem since they reside in
the structures that are particular to a given language. Spanish grammar
simply does not permit the example that Davie cites, for example, of
‘troubled, confused’, although Munguía clearly spoed the effect and
ingeniously hedged his bets, translating ‘troubled’ as adjectival and
‘confused’ as verbal: ‘se escondían sus raros perfumes sintéticos —
ungüentos, polvos, líquidos—, desarmado, confundiendo, ahogando los
sentidos en olores’ [italics added] (EP, 19). Yet his decision to translate into
prose imposed further constraints, whi inevitably aenuated the poem’s
formal texture. It le Paz from the outset with an excess of interpretative
comment, represented by Munguía’s introduction, whi was occasioned by
a poem whose composition was barely visible.
‘El páramo’ offers a compromised knowledge of The Waste Land,
suggesting its themes, but offering faint evidence of the formal innovations
that manifest and develop those themes. In the February 1931 edition of
Contemporáneos, however, a verse translation by the Spanish poet León
Felipe appeared of The Hollow Men (1925). Eliot’s poem follows a paern in
whi presences are carefully voided:
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
(CPP, 83)
ese voices are already diminished as ‘dried’, but the ‘when’ at the end of
the line introduces the promise of a circumstance where they will have some
purpose. ‘When we whisper together’ suggests concealment, a private
confidence to whi the ensuing line will admit the reader. Yet the
anticipated revelation is confounded. Even in conspiratorial exange, the
voices ‘are quiet and meaningless’ aer all. Eliot uses the line breaks to
dramatize this movement of anticipation and deflation. Felipe replicates the
strategy:
Y nuestras voces ásperas
cuando cuieamos
no tienen timbre ni sentido
(HH, 132)
Hugh Kenner declared that the hollow men ‘speak an admirably disciplined
prose, rather closer to distinction than that of a Times leader’, and argued of
the passage cited above that ‘only once, with that dangling “when,” does the
lineation venture to evade the grammatical structure’.53 His comparison of
lineation and sense unit is insightful and, incidentally, signals a point where
Felipe dampens Eliot’s effect. However, he does not oose to develop his
insight. Kenner wishes instead to make a point about the hollow men
themselves: they ‘epiphanize the flaccid forbearance of an upper-middleclass
twentieth-century community, where no one speaks loudly’.54 His satirical
reading allows lile room for the arc of feeling that is traced as one line
confounds the expectation generated by its predecessor. It is this dramatic
progression that Felipe replicates and that Paz takes from the poem, as I will
argue in Chapter 3. The Hollow Men provides a formal model for a poetry
that can e its own aspirations. It thus dramatizes a sear for meaning
that cannot be found, or a desire that is never satisfied. Eliot’s disjunctive
form allows Paz to write a sense of constriction into a poetry that aspires for
freedom, and thus enables him to connect Eliot with both a Marxist sear
for liberty and an emerging Mexican tradition of antipoesía [antipoetry].
e final section of Eliot’s poem provides a more conceptual articulation
of the experience that its lineation enacts:
Entre la idea
y la realidad
entre el movimiento
y el acto
cae la sombra
(HH, 135–36)
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
(CPP, 85)
Ea entre suggests a point of connection, or relation, only to be revealed as
division, a lesson whi is neatly structured by the line breaks. Felipe
replicates Eliot’s lineation exactly, and the inversion ‘falls the Shadow’
seles naturally in Spanish syntax. e entre of the passage is highly
suggestive, with multiple applications whi correspond in part to its
multiple source in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Paul Valéry’s Le
55
Cimetière marin. It can apply to a fissure within consciousness, or between
consciousness and world, between thought and action, feeling and response
or between moments of an individual’s experience. It can be applied beyond
The Hollow Men to the experience of The Waste Land, and it is as strong a
presence in the early Paz as any single detail from Eliot’s longer poem.
Paz never differentiates very strongly between The Hollow Men and The
Waste Land, and Eliot’s later poem may well have grown from stray dras
for the earlier one. e desert landscape of The Hollow Men revisits the
scenery of ‘What the under Said’. Yet it also moves closer to Paz and to
Mexico. e landscape of Eliot’s ‘cactus land’ was, if not truly domestic for a
Paz living on the outskirts of Mexico City, at least familiar to the Mexican
imaginary. Manuel Durán, editing ‘Los hombres huecos’ in 1973, assumed
when he encountered ‘No damos más que vueltas al nopal’ (HH, 135) [‘Here
we go round the prickly pear’ (CPP, 85)] that it was not Eliot who had
anged ‘mulberry bush’ to ‘prily pear’ (CPP, 85) but Felipe who
‘Mexicanizes [mexicaniza] the text most appropriately’.56 Paz himself would
ask in ‘El ogro filantrópico’ [e Philanthropic Ogre] (1978): ‘Como en el
poema de Eliot, ¿México es “la tierra muerta, la tierra de cactos”, cubierta de
ídolos rotos y de imágenes apolilladas de santos y santas? ¿No hacemos sino
“dar vueltas y vueltas al nopal”?’ [As in Eliot’s poem, is Mexico ‘the dead
land, the cactus land’, covered with broken idols and the moth-eaten images
of saints? Do we just ‘go round the prily pear’?] (OC8, 348). Paz identifies
a landscape of specifically Christian broken images, yet in this Mexican
context, Felipe’s inadvertently capitalized ‘Valle [sic] de estrellas
moribundas’ (HH, 135) [‘valley of dying stars’ (CPP, 84)] would naturally
extend its reference to the Valley of Mexico, the home of ancient Aztec
civilization with its now departed astrological beliefs.57 e poem thus
comes to overlay ancient and modern civilizations mu as The Waste Land
had done, complementing the formal aspect with a historical theme.
Paz does not mention ‘Los hombres huecos’ by name in his spee to the
Ingersoll Foundation. However, he does cite ‘Between the idea / And the
reality’ as an example of ‘el horror ante el mundo moderno’ [horror at the
modern world] whi he shared with Eliot (OC2, 293). He commonly refers
to The Hollow Men as if it were a part of The Waste Land, rather than a
separate poem. e Eliot he first encounters is an odd composite. From
Munguía’s introduction he learns of a poem that is both individual portrait
and historical exemplar: the product of the failed sensibility of ‘el hombre
cultivado de nuestra época’ [the cultivated man of our age] (EP, 11). Yet
Munguía’s actual translation gives an indistinct sense of the form that
embodies the poem’s portrayal of affective experience. Paz’s early
understanding of The Waste Land can seem more indebted to Munguía’s
introduction than to his translation. ‘Los hombres huecos’ does then provide
a formal model whi Paz can imitate as well as, in the entre passage, a
conceptual articulation of both that form and the psyological
disjointedness that Munguía’s introduction to ‘El páramo’ had described.
Felipe’s translation exemplifies the content of Munguía’s introduction whi
the text of ‘El páramo’ fails to realize. Paz cannot simply pi and oose
different elements of these translations, however, to suit his own purpose. If
Munguía gives encouragement to the loosely Marxist view that ‘con The
Waste Land regresa al poema el tiempo histórico, concreto’ [with The Waste
Land historical, concrete time returns to the poem] (OC2, 292), the influence
of Symbolist poetics on the writers of Contemporáneos will suggest a
different perspective.
Notes to Chapter 1
1. Paz, ‘La evolución poética de Paz’, interview with William Ferguson, Diorama de la Cultura
(supl. of Excélsior), 2 Jul 1972, pp. 7–9 (p. 8).
2. Guillermo Sheridan, Poeta con paisaje: Ensayos sobre la vida de Octavio Paz (México: Ediciones
Era, 2004), p. 95.
3. Ibid., p. 97.
4. Frank Lentricia, Modernist Quartet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 269.
5. Eliot, ‘Los hombres huecos’, trans. by León Felipe, Contemporáneos, 33 (Feb 1931), 132–36.
6. Paz would come to read Flores’s version aer ‘El páramo’. In ‘T. S. Eliot: Mínima evocación’, he
recalls that ‘me procuré otra traducción publicada en Madrid’ (OC2, 290), whi must refer to
Tierra baldía, although it was in fact published in Barcelona. Further evidence of his first Eliot
reading can be found in interviews with Edwin Honig, ‘Conversación con Octavio Paz’ (1975)
(OC15, 172); and William Ferguson, ‘La evolución poética de Paz’, p. 8.
7. 20 November 1930, MS VE.
8. 9 December 1930, MS VE. Eliot assured Flores that ‘I shall write to protest’, yet there is no
evidence that he did, and he allowed Charles K. Colhoun in the ‘Foreign Periodicals’ section of
the Criterion to mention the publication in Contemporáneos of ‘a translation from the works
of Mr. T. S. Eliot (‘El páramo’, by Enrique Munguía, Jr.), prefaced by a general survey of Mr.
Eliot’s work’, ‘Spanish Periodicals’, Criterion, 10, 41, (July 1931), 782–84 (p. 783).
9. 30 January and 22 February 1928, MS VE. Flores obliged with abrasando, Eliot, Tierra baldía, p.
30. Emilio Barón Palma lists the occasional error in Flores’s version su as ‘jamón curado’ for
the ‘hot gammon’ of ‘A Game of Chess’, T. S. Eliot en España (Almería: Universidad de
Almería, 1996), p. 18.
10. Paz, ‘Rescate de Enrique Munguía’, p. 42; OC14, 118. A páramo is, in its restricted sense, an
upland plateau, but it can be applied more generally to waste ground. e word would acquire
strong associations with Mexican culture and identity aer the publication of Juan Rulfo’s
Pedro Páramo (1955). In ‘Cuatro o cinco puntos cardinales’, an interview with Roberto
González Eevarría and Emir Rodríguez Monegal of 1972, Paz stated that the Flores
translation ‘es muy superior a la de Munguía’ (OC15, 39).
11. Paz, ‘Rescate de Enrique Munguía’, p. 42; passage excised from OC14. Paz probably did not read
Eliot thoroughly in English until he travelled to the United States in 1943. In ‘Conversación
con Octavio Paz’, he recalls that ‘Cuando llegué a Estados Unidos por primera vez, me dije:
“Debo mejorar mi inglés, para leer a los poetas americanos e ingleses” ’ (OC15, 40).
12. e pena that Paz expresses refers obliquely to Munguía’s suicide in Geneva only a few months
aer the publication of ‘El páramo’. Paz describes this series of events in ‘Cuatro o cinco
puntos cardinales’ (OC15, 40).
13. Charles Powell, ‘Review of The Waste Land’, Manchester Guardian, 31 October 1923, p. 7; repr. in
T. S. Eliot: The Critical Heritage, ed. by Miael Grant, 2 vols (London: Routledge, 1997), I,
194–95 (p. 194).
14. Eliot, The Waste Land (Rimond: Hogarth Press, 1923).
15. Harold Monro, ‘Notes for a Study of “e Waste Land”: An Imaginary Dialogue with T. S. Eliot’,
Chapbook, 34 (February 1923), 20–24; repr. in Grant, ed., T. S. Eliot: The Critical Heritage, I,
162–66 (p. 165).
16. F. R. Leavis, New Bearings in English Poetry: A Study of the Contemporary Situation, exp. edn
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), pp. 80–81.
17. The Waste Land did itself first appear, without notes, in Criterion, 1, 1 (October 1922), 50–64; and
almost simultaneously in the Dial, 73, 5 (November 1922), 473–85.
18. Guillermo Sheridan, Los Contemporáneos ayer (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1985), p.
365.
19. Paz was not himself hostile to Eliot’s allusive habits, perhaps in part because he was spared them
during his first encounter. In ‘Agustín Yáñez, Archipiélago de mujeres’ (1943), he compared
Yáñez’s work unfavourably to Eliot’s, in whi the allusions ‘forman parte de la materia
verbal, dejan de ser meras referencias y se conviertan en vida’ (OC13, 327). By this stage he
would certainly have known the translation of The Waste Land by Ángel Flores, whi
included the notes.
20. Louis Untermeyer, ‘Disillusion vs. Dogma’, Freeman, 6 (17 January 1924), 453; repr. in Grant, ed.,
T. S. Eliot: The Critical Heritage, I, 151–53 (p. 151).
21. Eliot, ‘Ulysses, Order and Myth’, Dial, 75, 5 (November 1923), 480–83 (p. 483); Cleanth Brooks,
Modern Poetry and the Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1939), p.
167.
22. Brooks, Modern Poetry and the Tradition, p. 136.
23. Lawrence Rainey, Revisiting ‘The Waste Land’ (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University
Press, 2005), p. 43.
24. Conrad Aiken, ‘An Anatomy of Melanoly’, New Republic, 33 (7 February 1923), 294–95; repr. in
Grant, ed., T. S. Eliot: The Critical Heritage, I, 156–61 (p. 158). For Ronald Bush, the New
Critical line ‘was anticipated and pilloried in advance’ by Aiken’s review. See Bush, ed., T. S.
Eliot: The Modernist in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 196–97.
Bush himself argues elsewhere that ‘e title of The Waste Land and what now seems to be its
controlling myth (the Grail legend) had been late additions to the poem: Eliot used them to
frame and unify his fragments, and in the process introduced a “spurious plot” that long
obscured The Waste Land’s lyrical center’, T. S. Eliot: A Study in Character and Style (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 96.
25. Aiken, ‘An Anatomy of Melanoly’, p. 161.
26. Aiken, ‘An Anatomy of Melanoly’, p. 160.
27. Edmund Wilson, ‘e Poetry of Drouth’, Dial, 73 (December 1922), 611–16; repr. in Grant, ed., T.
S. Eliot: The Critical Heritage, I, 138–44 (pp. 143 & 144). Aiken, ‘An Anatomy of Melanoly’,
p. 161.
28. Ibid.
29. Wilson, ‘e Poetry of Drouth’, p. 144.
30. Untermeyer, ‘Disillusion vs. Dogma’, p. 153.
31. Gilbert Seldes, ‘T. S. Eliot’, Nation (New York), 115 (6 December 1922), pp. 614–16; repr. in Grant,
ed., T. S. Eliot: The Critical Heritage, I, 144–51 (p. 150).
32. I. A. Riards, The Principles of Literary Criticism, 2nd edn (London: Kegan Paul, Tren,
Trubner & Co, 1926), p. 295; F. R. Leavis, New Bearings in English Poetry, p. 71.
33. When Ángel Flores wrote to Eliot to ask for permission to publish Tierra baldía, he similarly
described a poem that had found its historical moment: ‘e youth of the Spanish-speaking
world is in sear of new values, and I believe that The Waste Land in its Spanish avatar will
be a welcomed gi from the English language’ (30 January 1928, MS VE).
34. Aiken, ‘An Anatomy of Melanoly’, p. 161.
35. As Tzvetan Todorov argues, Mallarmé’s poetics can themselves be traced ba to an earlier
period: ‘Mallarmé lived aer Baudelaire, who admired Poe, who absorbed Coleridge — whose
theoretical writings were a condensed version of the writings of the German romantics, and
thus of Novalis. Mallarmé presented to his Fren […] readers a synthesis of romantic ideas on
poetry’, Theories of the Symbol, trans. by Catherine Porter (Oxford: Blawell, 1982), pp. 272–
73. An illuminating discussion of the romantic interest in the fragment, as both symbol and
form, can also be found in Charles Rosen, ‘Fragments’, in his The Romantic Generation
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 41–115.
36. Edmund Wilson, Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870–1930 (New York:
Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1942), p. 96.
37. Eliot, Tierra baldía, p. 8.
38. Donald Davie, ‘e Relation between Syntax and Music in Some Modern Poems in English’ and
‘Pound and Eliot: A Distinction’, in The Poet in the Imaginary Museum: Essays of Two Decades
(Manester: Carcanet, 1977), pp. 93–103 & pp. 191–207.
39. Davie, The Poet in the Imaginary Museum, p. 95.
40. Davie, The Poet in the Imaginary Museum, p. 101.
41. Ibid., p. 204.
42. William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), p. 78.
43. Davie, The Poet in the Imaginary Museum, pp. 101 & 102.
44. Mallarmé, Œuvres, II, 700; trans. by Bradford Cook in Mallarmé, Selected Prose Poems, Essays
and Letters (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1956), p. 21.
45. Mallarmé, Œuvres, II, 211.
46. Eliot, ‘Modern Tendencies in Poetry’, p. 14.
47. Eliot, ‘Note sur Mallarmé et Poe’, Nouvelle Revue Française, 14, 158 (1 Nov 1926), 524–26 (p. 526).
48. Eliot, ‘ “e Voice of his Time” ’, Listener, 27, 683 (12 February 1942), 211–12 (p. 212).
49. Leer to Charles Morice (n.d.), in Mallarmé, Propos sur la poésie (Monaco: Ed. du Roer, 1953),
p. 208; trans. by Bradford Cook in Mallarmé, Selected Prose Poems, p. 105. If Mallarmé’s theory
can be traced ba the German romantics, it is even harder to find even a notional point of
origin for the practical poetic effects that illustrate the theory. Davie finds ‘grammatical pause
played off against metrical pause’ in Spenser’s Prothalamion and concludes that ‘the
specifically Symbolist version of this ancient resource is yet to be inquired for’, The Poet in the
Imaginary Museum, p. 96.
50. 22 February 1928, MS VE.
51. Davie, The Poet in the Imaginary Museum, p. 196.
52. Although he preserved Eliot’s lineation, Flores also ose present simple verbs: ‘Abril es el mes
más cruel; engendra / Lilas de la tierra muerta, mezcla […]’, Tierra baldía, p. 13.
53. Hugh Kenner, The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot (London: Methuen, 1965), pp. 157 & 158.
54. Ibid., pp. 161–62.
55. Eliot remarks that Valéry’s ‘ “Entre le vide et l’événement pur…” […] suggests so strongly though
accidentally Brutus’s […] “Between the acting of a dreadful thing…” ’, ‘A Brief Introduction to
the Method of Paul Valéry’, introduction to Le Serpent by Paul Valéry, trans. by Mark Wardle
(London: Criterion, 1924), pp. 7–15 (p. 10).
56. Antología de la revista Contemporáneos, ed. by Manuel Durán (México: Fondo de Cultura
Económica, 1973), p. 55n. e Spanish word nopal is derived from the Nahuatl nopalli.
57. Paz refers to similarly capitalized ‘tardes de verano en el Valle de México’ in ‘Notas’, El Nacional,
8 May 1937, 2nd section, pp. 1 & 3 (p. 1).
CHAPTER 2
Precursors and Contemporaries
Paz declared of ‘El páramo’ that ‘contradecía todo lo que yo pensaba que era
moderno y todo lo que yo creía que era poético’ [it contradicted everything
that I thought was modern and everything that I thought was poetic].1 Yet
Eliot’s poem did not appear in a vacuum. A number of literary groups had
already raised many of the questions that Paz would apply to The Waste
Land: questions about the role of the poet, of poetic form and of terms su
as history and modernity. Modernismo, the Spanish American movement
that emerged in the 1880s with the publication of José Martí’s Ismaelillo
(1882) and Rubén Darío’s Azul [Azure] (1888), had lost its novelty by the
1920s, condemned for a perceived escapism and ‘el amor a lo decorativo por
lo decorativo’ [the love of decoration for its own sake].2 It received a
significant blow in Mexico in 1911 when Enrique González Martínez
published his wiy, and unaracteristically aggressive, aa on Darío’s
favoured symbol: ‘Tuércele el cuello al cisne de engañoso plumaje’ [Wring
the ne of the swan of deceitful plumage].3 Yet as Paz would argue,
‘González Martínez no rompe con el lenguaje modernista: atenúa sus
excesos, vela sus luces, pero se sirve de sus mismas palabras para advertirnos
de su falsedad’ [González Martínez doesn’t break with modernista language:
he tones down its excesses, veils its lights, but he uses its own words to warn
us of its falsity] (OC4, 157). Although it was supplanted by other
movements, modernismo continued to be a part of the young Paz’s literary
awareness. It was also an active context for the reception of Eliot. As Paz
points out in an aempt to distinguish modernismo from the later Anglo-
American modernism, the Spanish American movement is ‘hasta cierto
punto, un equivalente del Parnaso y del simbolismo francés’ [to a certain
extent, an equivalent of the Parnassians and Fren Symbolism].4 It
therefore established a link, however submerged, between Paz’s reading and
some of the key sources of Eliot’s poems. Guillermo Sucre credits the verbal
luxuriance of the modernistas with the emergence of a general ‘conciencia
del lenguaje’ [consciousness of language] that opens new avenues for
Spanish American poetry: ‘With the pleasure of language, does not the
consciousness that one has of it simultaneously arise?’5 Looking ba at the
movement in 1964, Paz would concede that ‘la vanguardia de 1921 y las
tentativas de la poesía contemporánea están íntimamente ligadas a ese gran
comienzo’ [the avant-garde of 1921 and the experiments of contemporary
poetry are intimately linked to that great beginning].6
In 1930, however, these debts were less visible as more recent Spanish
American versions of the European avant-garde competed for aention. As
early as 1916 Vicente Huidobro had travelled from his native Chile to Paris
where he edited Nord-Sud with Pierre Reverdy and Guillaume Apollinaire,
outlining his creacionismo in a series of manifestoes whi enjoined poets to
create rather than imitate. His ‘Arte poética’ (1916) declares:
Por qué cantáis la rosa, ¡oh Poetas!
Hacedla florecer en el poema;
Sólo para nosotros
Viven todas las cosas bajo el Sol.
El poeta es un pequeño Dios.7
[Why do you sing the rose, O Poets!
Make it flower in the poem;
Only for us
Do all things under the Sun live.
e poet is a small God.]
His rose that blooms in the poem, a creation of language rather than an
object in the world, may well recall Mallarmé’s flower, ‘l’absente de tous
bouquets’ [the one whi is absent from all bouquets].8 Huidobro expresses
a revised theory of imitation, whi predates Mallarmé in the thinking of
the German romantics. Tzvetan Todorov finds its earliest articulation at the
end of the eighteenth century in the work of Karl Philip Moritz:
Imitation in the arts resides, if anywhere, in the activity of the creator. e artist, not the work,
copies nature, and he does this by producing works. But the meaning of the word ‘nature’ is not
the same in the two instances. e work can only imitate the products of nature, whereas the artist
imitates nature inasmu as the laer is a productive principle. ‘e born artist’, Moritz writes, ‘is
not content to observe nature, he has to imitate it, take it as his model, form (bilden) and create as
nature does.’9
is shi from products to productive principle grants the poet huge powers.
It gives rise to a work whose natural mode is exaltation since the poem is no
longer a response to the world so mu as a creative outpouring with
natural or even divine origins. Creacionismo was certainly not an immediate
help for Paz as he aempted to express the ‘horror ante el mundo moderno’
[horror at the modern world] (OC2, 293) that he found in Eliot; nor did it
illuminate the particularly urban experience that is recounted in The Waste
Land. Huidobro tends to take nature as his model, as in Non serviam (1914):
‘Hemos cantado a la Naturaleza (cosa que a ella bien poco le importa).
Nunca hemos creado realidades propias, como ella lo hace’ [We have sung to
Nature (something that concerns her lile). We have never created our own
realities, as she does].10 Yet the celebratory mode is always a temptation for
Paz as an answer to Eliot’s world, and Huidobro’s version of romantic
poetics also provides a foundation for two movements that do aempt to
express a modern, urban experience: ultraísmo and estridentismo.
Founded in Madrid, ultraísmo was endorsed by Huidobro who travelled
to the Spanish capital in 1918 and launed a magazine titled Ultra (1921–
22). With roots in creacionismo, Futurism and Dada, ultraísmo was taken to
Argentina by a young Jorge Luis Borges who helped to distribute a poster-
manifesto, Prisma, around the streets of Buenos Aires in December 1921.
Almost simultaneously, Manuel Maples Arce was plastering the walls of
Mexico City with Actual, the mouthpiece for estridentismo, his own version
of these avant-gardes. Estridentismo combined a Dadaist taste for public
provocation with a celebration of the modern urbs. Actual declares that ‘es
necesario exaltar en todos los tonos estridentes de nuestro diapasón
propagandista, la belleza actualista de las máquinas’ [One must exalt the
modernistic beauty of maines with all the strident tones of our
propagandistic voice] along with other features of the modern, urban
landscape, su as ‘el humo de las fábricas’ [the smoke of the factories] and
‘el régimen industrialista de las grandes ciudades palpitantes’ [the
industrialist regime of our great palpitating cities]; in short, ‘toda esta
belleza del siglo’ [all this beauty of the century].11 is exultant strain sits
uncomfortably with Paz’s reading of Eliot’s poems, as does the belief of the
estridentistas in art ‘not only as a desire for freedom in the creative process,
but also as the only liberating system of the human race’.12 at faith in the
power of artistic experiment to liberate maintains the optimism of
Huidobro’s creacionismo; yet it runs counter to the sceptical awareness,
more a testing of limits than a celebration, of Eliot and the writers who
contributed to Contemporáneos.
Contemporáneos (1928–31) appeared shortly aer the estridentistas were
forced to disperse, having lost their political patronage. e writers who
took their name from the new magazine had already begun to acquire a
collective identity even before it appeared.13 In a lecture of 1924 Xavier
Villaurrutia referred to them as a ‘grupo sin grupo’ [a group without a
group], and they contributed to, and edited, a number of different literary
magazines in Mexico throughout the decade.14 As Guillermo Sheridan points
out in his exhaustive history, ‘the membership of the group […] tends to be
elastic’, and he ooses to follow Merlin H. Forster’s identification of a core
whi is divided by age into sub-groups comprising first Jaime Torres Bodet,
Bernardo Ortiz de Montellano, Enrique González Rojo and José Gorostiza,
followed by a second formed of Xavier Villaurrutia and Salvador Novo, then
a third of Jorge Cuesta and Gilberto Owen.15 e publication of
Contemporáneos was announced by what Torres Bodet, one of the group’s
most prolific members, described as ‘una selección-manifiesto y una
antología-declaración’ [a manifesto-selection and an anthology-
declaration],16 the Antología de la poesía mexicana moderna (1928) edited
by Jorge Cuesta. e Antología included poems by Manuel Maples Arce, but
tartly observed in an accompanying note that ‘el marco de socialismo
político en que ha sabido articularse le ha sido […] de la mayor utilidad’ [the
framework of political socialism he has used to express himself has been […]
of the greatest use].17 e Contemporáneos would aempt to promote an
apolitical version of recent European literary developments, whi set them
in opposition to the estridentistas and the wider pressure to deal with
questions of national identity that followed the Mexican civil war of 1910 to
1920.18 Jorge Cuesta described the common trait shared by the group as an
‘actitud crítica’ [critical aitude]: ‘Nacieron en crisis y han encontrado su
destino en esta crisis: una crisis crítica’ [ey were born in a crisis and they
have found their destiny in this crisis: a critical crisis].19 at critical aitude
le scant room for the optimism, political or otherwise, of creacionismo and
estridentismo.
Paz would aa the Contemporáneos for the la of explicit political
commitment in their work and, animated by a later allegiance to the
Surrealists, he declared that estridentismo ‘representó de todos modos una
saludable y necesaria explosión de rebeldía’ [represented in any case a
welcome and necessary explosion of rebellion].20 It remained, nevertheless,
‘abortado’ [abortive], and Armando González Torres argues that one should
not inflate the earlier movement’s importance. Although ‘mu of the
subsequent misfortune of estridentismo arose from its lost duel’ with the
Contemporáneos, ‘there is simply no comparison with the quality of the
subsequent work that their rivals produced’.21 Paz was responsive to that
artistic quality and, moreover, enjoyed personal relationships with a number
of the Contemporáneos. José Gorostiza and more peripheral members of the
group, Samuel Ramos and Carlos Pellicer, all taught at the Colegio de San
Ildefonso in Mexico City where Paz was studying for his bachillerato when
‘El páramo’ appeared.22 Paz’s subsequent reading of modern poetic tradition,
in whi Eliot would enjoy a privileged place, was determined not only by
the works of the Contemporáneos but by their reading of recent Mexican
literary history and by the other writers whom they imported through
translation. is apter will consider in turn some of the key precursors and
contemporaries who provided a context for Paz’s reading of Eliot: Ramón
López Velarde, Salomón de la Selva, Salvador Novo, Paul Valéry and Saint-
John Perse. ese figures do not provide an exhaustive account of Eliot’s
Mexican reception, but they do reveal the complexity of the tradition he was
entering — a complexity that would both animate and frustrate Paz’s own
efforts to use Eliot in his work.
Poetry and History
When Paz admired The Waste Land’s aievement as a return to the poem
of ‘el tiempo histórico, concreto’ [historical, concrete time] (OC2, 292), he
was expressing a general tendency of the modern period. Malcolm Bradbury
and James MacFarlane have described the defining aracteristic of
modernism as ‘the historicist feeling that we live in totally novel times, that
contemporary history is the source of our significance […] that modernity is
a new consciousness, a fresh condition of the human mind’.23 Whether that
history is social, economic, political, military or, indeed, aesthetic is an open
question, as it tends to be in Paz. Yet Paz’s reaction of ‘horror ante el mundo
moderno’ does suggest a consciousness of the succession of specifically
military conflicts that shadowed his life.
While removed from the direct impact the First World War in Europe,
Mexicans suffered their own bloody decade of civil conflict from 1910 to
1920.24 Luis Mario Sneider describes ‘the physical and spiritual violence
that the Mexican Revolution had given rise to in society’ as one of the key
motors of the literary avant-garde in the 1920s.25 A debate about poetry’s
relation to historical events was already well established before ‘El páramo’
appeared, as the following anecdote of 1920 from Ricardo Arenales indicates.
He describes Enrique González Martínez:
Bajo los fuegos de la decena trágica, y cuando México ardía en las fétidas llamas de la discordia —
palacios en ruinas, estatuas pata arriba, muertos podridos en las calles—, el autor glorioso de La
muerte del cisne cantaba
Sobre el dormido lago está el saúz que llora...
Una bala, que parecía tener enemistad personal con la Musa, penetra por la ventana, rompiendo
los cristales y el poeta se ve obligado a retirarse a un paraje repuesto: ¡Por el dormido lago se oía el
agudo silbido del máuser!26
[Amid the fire of the tragic ten days, as Mexico City burned amid the rank flames of discord —
palaces in ruins, statues upturned, dead bodies roing in the streets — the glorious author The
Death of the Swan was singing
By the sleeping lake is the willow that weeps...
A bullet, whi seemed to bear a personal grudge against the Muse, bursts through the window,
breaking the glass, and forcing the poet to take cover: by the sleeping lake the rale of the
maine gun was heard!]
It is a rily metaphorical account: the interior space of self, or a privileged
aesthetic, is invaded by historical events. In spite of his earlier injunction to
wring the swan’s ne of modernista eloquence, González Martínez’s own
idiom is revealed as inadequate for the world it now occupies. Mexicans had
experienced the bare ferocity of historical events, and the old literary
dispensation would no longer serve.
Yet other poets in the late-modernista tradition were developing a
colloquial idiom that could register some of the disjointedness of recent
experience. Gwen Kirkpatri describes this as modernismo’s ‘dissonant
legacy’:
While Darío lamented the discordant elements that disturb the harmonic universe, other poets
seize upon them and generate a new poetics, a process that parallels early twentieth-century
music’s fascination with dissonance and atonality.27
Darío had himself introduced what Paz describes as this ‘nota irónica,
voluntariamente antipoética’ [ironic, purposefully anti-poetic note] in his
Cantos de vida y esperanza [Songs of Life and Hope] (1905).
28 ‘Augurios’
[Auguries] answers a series of elaborate apostrophes to birds whi carry
strong literary associations — eagle, owl, dove, falcon and nightingale —
with a bleak final stanza:
Pasa un murciélago.
Pasa una mosca. Un moscardón.
Una abeja en el crepúsculo.
No pasa nada.
La muerte llegó.29
[A bat passes.
A fly passes. A blowfly.
A bee in the twilight.
Nothing happens.
Death arrived.]
In a mere five lines, six sentences — two of them verbless — introduce a
maer-of-fact succession of bat, fly, and blowfly. e abstraction ‘La muerte
llegó’ falls all the more effectively for fiing into the artless syntax that
precedes it. Darío introduces a new feeling to his ‘harmonic universe’ and a
new sense of the way that reality can impinge upon poetic reverie.
is dissonant, ‘antipoetic’ tendency was developed further by the
Argentine Leopoldo Lugones and in Mexico by Ramón López Velarde. López
Velarde’s ‘El retorno maléfico’ [e Ill-omened Return], published in
Zozobra [Anxiety] (1919), brings a contemporary, colloquial idiom into
contact with recent historical events. e poem describes a return home to a
town blasted by the effects of the Mexican civil war:
Mejor será no regresar al pueblo,
al edén subvertido que se calla
en la mutilación de la metralla.30
[Beer not to return to the village,
to the subverted Eden that is quiet
in the mutilation of the shrapnel.]
e war has not simply damaged the external world but entered the
intimate space of memory — ‘edén subvertido’ — and ultimately the poem’s
rhetoric itself. e political register of subvertido invades the religious,
mythical edén, a rhetorical action that is recapitulated in the ‘íntima tristeza
reaccionaria’ [intimate reactionary sadness] of the poem’s final line.31 e
register of ‘metralla’ is similarly invasive, an effect that is accentuated since
it completes a rhyming couplet that is initiated by ‘se calla’ in the preceding
line. is use of bathetic rhyme recurs intermiently throughout the poem:
Y la fusilería grabó en la cal
de todas las paredes
de la aldea espectral,
negros y aciagos mapas,
porque en ellos leyera el hijo pródigo
al volver a su umbral
en un anoecer de maleficio,
a la luz de petróleo de una mea
su esperanza deshea.32
[And gunfire engraved on the whitewash
of all the walls
of the spectral town,
ominous bla maps,
on whi the prodigal son can read
as he returns to the threshold
in a malign twilight,
by the light of a petroleum wi
his hopes undone.]
e delay here between the opening of the clause ‘porque en ellos leyera el
hijo pródigo…’ and its conclusion in the final line generates expectation: the
interposing qualifications predicate an object of enough complexity and
importance to justify their inclusion. Yet that object turns out to be a
negation: ‘su esperanza deshea’. e sense of let-down is reinforced by the
rhyme — mecha / deshecha. One expects the second half of a couplet to
enforce some kind of relation, whether it be a form of accord or antithesis.
Here, however, the line capitulates to an action of undoing. López Velarde
uses the expectations that the formal qualities of the poem create —
parenthetical intrusion and rhyming couplet — but then pulls the meaning
from under them.
ere is a similarly deflating action in The Hollow Men, but López
Velarde’s use of the bathetic rhyming couplet is closer to ‘e Love Song of
J. Alfred Prufro’: ‘I grow old… I grow old… / I shall wear the booms of
my trousers rolled’ (CPP, 16). Stephen Spender remarked of the effect, ‘How
completely the form will flop, if flopping suits Eliot’s purpose.’33 ere are
further eoes. e later, purposefully clumsy repetition of ‘El amor amoroso
/ de las parejas pares’ [the loving love of coupley couples] has a familial
relation to the feeling of ‘prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet’
(CPP, 14) of ‘Prufro’. Yet López Velarde did not know Eliot’s work. e
link between the two poets is provided by Jules Laforgue, one of the Fren
writers without whom Eliot doubted he ‘should have been able to write
poetry at all’.34
López Velarde absorbed Laforgue’s influence at one remove through
Lugones’s Lunario sentimental (1909) and also through translations in
Enrique Díez-Canedo and Fernando Fortún’s La poesía francesa moderna.
Antología (1913). Paz was fascinated by this unconscious link, and in
‘Literatura y literalidad’ (1970) he dwells on the coincidence of the
Bostonian and Zacatecan versions of Laforgue:
En 1919 López Velarde publica Zozobra, el libro central del ‘posmodernismo’ hispanoamericano, es
decir, de nuestro simbolismo antisimbolista. Dos años antes Eliot había publicado Prufrock and
other observations. En Boston, recién salido de Harvard, un Laforgue protestante; en Zacatecas,
escapado de un seminario, un Laforgue católico […] El poeta mexicano murió poco después, en
1921, a los 33 años de edad. Su obra termina donde comienza la de Eliot… Boston y Zacatecas: la
unión de estos dos nombres nos hace sonreír como si se tratase de una de esas asociaciones
incongruentes en las que se complacía Laforgue. Dos poetas escriben, casi en los mismos años, en
lenguas distintas y sin que ninguno de los dos sospee siquiera la existencia del otro, dos
versiones diferentes e igualmente originales de unos poemas que unos años antes había escrito un
tercer poeta en otra lengua
(OC2, 74)
[In 1919 López Velarde publishes Zozobra, the central collection of Spanish American post-
modernismo, that is, of our anti-Symbolist Symbolism. Two years earlier, Eliot had published
Prufrock and Other Observations. In Boston, just out of Harvard, a protestant Laforgue; in
Zacatecas, escaped from a seminary, a Catholic Laforgue […] e Mexican poet died a lile later,
in 1921, aged 33. His work ends where Eliot’s begins… Boston and Zacatecas: the conjunction of
these two names makes us smile as if it were one of those incongruous associations that so pleased
Laforgue. Two poets write, at almost the same time, in different languages, and without either
being aware of the other’s existence, two different, and equally original versions of some poems
that some years earlier a third poet had wrien in another language.]
Paz describes the specific qualities of ‘ironía’ [irony] and ‘oque entre el
lenguaje coloquial y el literario’ [clash between colloquial and literary
language] (OC2, 74) that the Mexican poet derived from Laforgue, yet the
implications of the influence are broader still. In a passage that Eliot marked
in his own copy of The Symbolist Movement in Literature, Arthur Symons
described the disruptive tendencies of Laforgue’s style as self-denying:
e old cadences, the old eloquence, the ingenuous seriousness of the poetry, are all banished, on a
theory as self-denying as that whi permied Degas to dispense with recognisable beauty in his
figures.35
López Velarde could thus provide the model for a poetry that denied its
foundations, questioning its own purpose and efficacy. His poems play off a
critical consciousness against lyric effusion, and so provide an alternative to
the generally celebratory poetics of creacionismo, ultraísmo and
estridentismo, opening a route to The Waste Land.
When Paz describes the Laforgue connection between Eliot and López
Velarde he is writing retrospectively.36 Confronted with ‘El páramo’ in 1930,
the connection may not have been so obvious. Munguía does signal the
influence of Laforgue on the early Eliot in his introduction to ‘El páramo’,
and illustrates it with quotations, in English, from ‘Prufro’ and ‘Portrait of
a Lady’ (EP, 10); yet it is not until 1938 that Rodolfo Usigli’s translation of
‘Prufro’ appears in Spanish.37 When, in later essays, Paz describes the
nexus that runs between Laforgue, Eliot and López Velarde, one could argue
that he is reading the Mexican poet ba through his later knowledge of
Eliot, rather than reading López Velarde as precursor. Nevertheless, one can
assume that Paz did read López Velarde before Eliot, and that he was aware
of the Contemporáneos’ aempts to rescue the Mexican poet for the avant-
garde aer the nationalists had taken possession of ‘La suave patria’ [e
Sweet Fatherland]. e recurrence of Eliot in Paz’s writings on López
Velarde certainly testifies to a persistent association.
López Velarde’s ironic, colloquial vision was not an isolated instance.
Other poets found new inflections for this experiment during the 1920s. e
Nicaraguan Salomón de la Selva, who lived in Mexico City at the time,
recounted his experience of fighting for the allies in World War I in El
soldado desconocido [The Unknown Soldier] (1922). Paul Fussell has argued
that the ‘blasted landscapes and ruins’ of literature from the Great War
provide an active connotation for Eliot’s Waste Land,38 and when the
Mexican poet José Emilio Paeco, himself a translator of Eliot, described de
la Selva’s war poems in 1979, he eoed the standard Spanish title of Eliot’s
poem — Tierra baldía:
El panorama que observa El soldado desconocido es el arquetípico del siglo xx: ‘Esta villa en
escombros, / estas casas quemadas, / estas ruinas de muros’ […] Y en la tierra baldía se levanta ‘el
dug-out hermético, / sonoro de risas y de pedos’, donde un soldado pronuncia su ‘Oda a Safo’: ‘—A
mi mujer le apestan los sobacos.’39
[The Unknown Soldier observes the aretypal panorama of the twentieth century: ‘is town
turned to rubble, / these burnt houses, / these walls in ruins’ […] And in the waste land, ‘the
enclosed dug-out, / resonant with laughter and farts’ appears, where a soldier recites his ‘Ode to
Sappho’: ‘— My wife’s armpits stink.’]
e ‘escombros’ and ‘ruinas’ of de la Selva’s war eo the ‘stony rubbish’ of
Eliot’s poem (CPP, 61). e juxtaposition of Sappho and stinking armpits
also has its parallel in the ironic perspectives that are opened up in The
Waste Land. Paz could find in these poems both historical event and a use of
colloquial language as a register of contemporary experience. Paeco
describes this as the ‘other avant-garde’, ‘realist and not Surrealist’, whi
led in the 1960s to the movement of antipoesía [antipoetry].40 Yet de la
Selva’s realism is not straightforward; it is more a form of dramatic
naturalism, whi does not simply refer to the world of the trenes but
inhabits the verbal form through whi they were experienced.
De la Selva belonged to a group of writers and intellectuals gathered
together in Mexico City by the solar Pedro Henríquez Ureña, whi
included Salvador Novo who would later become a member of the
Contemporáneos. Novo never made any direct admission of de la Selva’s
influence, but both Paeco and Guillermo Sheridan are convinced of the
connection. For Paeco:
What the eighteen-year-old adolescent Novo learns from de La Selva is the possibility of
incorporating Anglo-American poetic diction within his own language, with his own stamp. 41
e harsh idiom of de la Selva’s El soldado desconocido coincided with North American
experiment with colloquial verse. In 1923 a short ‘Antología norte-americana moderna’ appeared
in La Falange. e collection included what Paz describes as a ‘pulcra traducción’ [neat
translation] by Salvador Novo of Ezra Pound’s ‘N.Y.’.42 Pound’s poem follows an apostrophe to the
city, ‘Listen to me, and I will breathe into thee a soul’, with a stanza in italics that undermines this
voice: ‘This is no maid. / Neither could I play upon a reed if I had one.’43 e rival claims of poetic
and prosaic, pastoral and contemporary urban realities are played off within the poem, even if the
italicized stanza still employs poetic syntax: ‘Now do I know that I am mad / For here are a million
people surly with traffic.’ ‘Surly with traffic’ is still a literary construction, though applied to a
banal reality. Novo’s translation, however, accentuates the colloquialism of the passage, oosing
more idiomatic alternatives in Spanish for constructions su as ‘Now do I know that’:
Ahora sé que estoy loco
porque aquí hay un millón
44
de gente aturdida del tráfico.
Novo translated and introduced an expanded anthology, La poesía
norteamericana moderna, the following year, an experience whi fed into
his own XX poemas (1925), according to Anthony Stanton.45 e anthology
included no mention of Eliot, but Ezra Pound and other Imagists su as
John Gould Fleter and Amy Lowell were represented, and Novo’s
introduction presents a list of rules that are practically lied from the
‘Imagist Manifesto’ of 1915.46
Novo’s Pound prepares the ground for the interpretation that Munguía
applies to Eliot’s own use of colloquial language. e idiomatic register of
Munguía’s translation of the Albert and Lil and I dialogue, whi concludes
‘A Game of Chess’, is one of the few successes of ‘El páramo’: ‘Lo que pasa
es que eres una buena tonta, dije. Si no te deja Alberto por la paz, pa qué
diablos te casaste si no querías hijos’ (EP, 22) [‘You are a proper fool, I said. /
Well, if Albert won’t leave you alone, there it is, I said, / What you get
married for if you don’t want ildren?’ (CPP, 66)]. Munguía’s introduction
noted a contrast in Eliot’s poem between ‘las expresiones más vulgares del
diálogo callejero’ [the coarsest street slang] and ‘las metáforas refinadas de
un cerebro en bonanza’ [the refined metaphors of a prolific mind] (EP, 9).
His description is in fact closer to Pound’s ‘N.Y.’ than to the Albert and Lil
and I dialogue itself. Where Eliot allows his aracters to speak without
framing them, Pound alternates elevated diction with a more prosaic
register. When Paz himself experiments with colloquial verse in the 1940s,
he tends to favour this ironic contrast of poetic with spoken diction rather
than the unqualified spee of ‘A Game of Chess’. Not only do Novo and
Munguía provide a context in whi Eliot can be understood, but they
annel that understanding in a particular direction. ey suggest the
reflexive possibilities of a form that can offer a meditation on contrasting
poetic languages.
De la Selva and Novo’s use of colloquial idiom as a register of
contemporary consciousness displays an awareness of language as well as
history. López Velarde’s poems accentuate this language consciousness and
so pull away from the historicist tendency of Paz’s reading of The Waste
Land. In ‘El retorno maléfico’, Laforguian repetitions are accompanied by
more startling effects:
el lloro de recientes recentales
por la ubérrima ubre prohibida
de la vaca, rumiante y faraónica,
que al párvulo intimida;
campanario de timbre novedoso;
remozados altares;
el amor amoroso
de las parejas pares.47
[the cry of newly calved calves
for the withheld munificent udder
of the ruminant pharaonic cow,
whi intimidates its offspring;
belfry of novel clang;
renovated altars;
the loving love
of the coupley couples.]
‘El amor amoroso / de las parejas pares’ can be read as an expression of
playful disdain, whi fends off the feelings of isolation that the observer
experiences as he returns to his home town. e wordplay of ‘la ubérrima
ubre prohibida’, however, is more difficult to assimilate, foregrounding the
materiality of the words themselves. Torres Bodet noted the effect in an
essay of 1930 on López Velarde whi described certain moments of
conversation when ‘las palabras ya no tienen otro valor que el plástico y
gratuito de su volumen, de su sonoridad, de su peso’ [words no longer have
any other value than the plastic and gratuitous one of their volume, their
sonorousness, their weight].48 Although he relates the effect to colloquial
spee, it militates against the realist and historicist reading of López
Velarde’s ‘simbolismo antisimbolista’. While ‘edén subvertido’ [subverted
eden] and ‘la mutilación de la metralla’ [mutilation of the shrapnel] bring a
historical reality into the poet’s meditations, ‘la ubérrima ubre prohibida’
asserts language as a presence independent of its referential function. It
prolongs rather than negates the earlier modernista discovery of the ‘palabra
plástica’ [plastic word], as Saúl Yurkievi describes it:
e modernistas discover that language is not a transparent medium, an obedient and mimetic
conductor of subjective experience; they discover that it has its own materiality, its autonomous
colouring, its specific expressivity, and that it is impossible to bend it entirely to the designs of the
poet.49
While Paz’s leist reading of The Waste Land places it within an anti-poetic,
broadly realist tradition, he is also aware, oen reluctantly, of the
Contemporáneos’ preoccupation with the plastic value of the poet’s
medium. As Pedro Serrano asserts, it was through the Contemporáneos that
the Laforguian López Velarde could act as a precursor of Eliot:
López Velarde’s own poetry, his influence on those younger poets [the Contemporáneos
generation], and their effort to make him known, laid the basis for a very qui, and at the same
time smooth, introduction of Eliot into Mexico. When the Contemporáneos began to translate
Eliot, it was because some of his poetic discoveries were already there, thanks to a poet who
followed a parallel and very close poetic path.50
Yet López Velarde was a more ambivalent precursor than Serrano’s ‘smooth
introduction of Eliot’ would imply; and the group whi presented both the
Bostonian and Zacatecan versions of Laforgue to the young Paz also held
their own views about where the significance of poetry lay.
Paul Valéry and the Nouvelle Revue Française
For Paz ‘el simbolismo había expulsado a la historia del poema’ [Symbolism
had expelled history from the poem] (OC2, 292); yet history’s return could
not entirely dispel the consciousness of language and artistic process that the
Symbolists and modernistas had bequeathed. e group that brought Eliot to
Mexico was itself notorious for what Salvador Novo described as an
‘esteticismo militante’ [militant aestheticism].51 is militant aestheticism
found expression in a preoccupation with poesía pura [pure poetry] (a term
whi they both entertained and contested), and an enthusiasm for the Juan
Ramón Jiménez of Eternidades [Eternities] (1918) and Piedra y cielo [Stone
52
and Sky] (1919) whi was subsequently transferred to Paul Valér y. As the
most prominent living representative of Fren Symbolism, Valéry was a
talismanic figure for the group. He was also closely associated with Eliot.
Munguía’s introduction to ‘El páramo’ declared that ‘disciplinado como Paul
Valéry en la observación de métodos y formas, posee Eliot una rebuscada
esterilidad’ [disciplined like Paul Valéry in the observation of methods and
forms, Eliot possesses a studied sterility] (EP, 7). ‘El páramo’ was in fact
immediately preceded in the July–August 1930 issue of Contemporáneos by
a translation of two passages from Paul Valéry’s ‘Propos sur la poésie’
[Remarks on Poetry] of 1927, translated by Bernardo Ortiz de Montellano
and gathered under the title ‘Conversación sobre la poesía (fragmentos)’.
Valéry effectively prefaces The Waste Land with a meditation on the
artistic preoccupations that the Contemporáneos found in Eliot.
‘Conversación sobre la poesía (fragmentos)’ makes a distinction between
two definitions of poetry:
Sabemos que la palabra poesía tiene dos sentidos, es decir, dos funcione distintas. Designa,
primero, cierto género de emociones; un estado emotivo particular que puede ser provocado por
los objetos o las circunstancias más diversos. Decimos de un paisaje que es poético, lo decimos de
una circunstancia de la vida y, en veces, también de una persona. Pero, además, en su segunda
acepción y en un sentido más estreo de la palabra poesía nos lleva a pensar en un arte: en esa
extraña industria que tiene por objeto reedificar la emoción señalada por el primer sentido de la
palabra.
Restituir la emoción poética a voluntad, fuera de las condiciones naturales en que
espontáneamente se produjo y por medio de los artificios del lenguaje, es tanto el designio del
poeta como la idea inherente a la palabra poesía tomada en su segunda acepción.53
[We know that the word poetry has two meanings, that is, two distinct functions. First, it refers to
a certain class of emotions; a particular emotive state that can be aroused by the most diverse
objects and circumstances. We say of a landscape that it is poetic, we say the same of a situation
in life, and sometimes also of a person. But in its second sense, and with a mu narrower
meaning, the word poetry also makes us think of an art: of that strange industry that aims to
reconstruct the emotion indicated by the first meaning of the word.
e wilful recreation of the poetic emotion, outside the natural conditions in whi it was
spontaneously produced and by means of the artifice of language, is both the aim of the poet and
the implicit idea of the word poetry taken in its second sense.]
Valéry insists on a division between the natural conditions in whi a poetic
emotion is spontaneously produced and another world of ‘los artificios del
lenguaje’. e rhetoric of the passage stresses the conscious effort of artistic
labour — ‘industria’, ‘reedificar’, ‘restituir […] a voluntad’ — whi he goes
on to intensify with a scientific analogy comparing poetic composition to ‘la
operación del químico dedicado a reconstruirle en todas sus partes’ [the
emical operation designed to reconstruct it in all its complexity] (p. 4).
While Valéry does believe that conscious industry can recreate the same
emotion that an experience of the world arouses in the observer, he
nevertheless asserts a division between the two realms — natural and
cultural. A confusion of these two spheres leads to ‘opiniones, teorías y
obras viciadas en principio’ [opinions, theories and works vitiated in
principle] (p. 4).
Valéry’s explicit concern with a specifically artistic process tends to
relegate any consideration of Paz’s history to the baground: the poem
becomes the site of a private, epistemological reflection on self and language.
Yet he does not claim a com plete autonomy for art. In the second of the two
passages he adopts Malherbe’s com parison of prose to walking and poetry
to dancing:
La mara, como la prosa, tiene siempre un fin preciso. Es el acto dirigido hacia algún objeto, cuya
separación es nuestra finalidad. Son, constantemente, circunstancias actuales —la naturaleza de mi
propósito, la necesidad que tenga de él, el impulso de mi deseo, el estado de mi cuerpo y la
situación del terreno— las que ordenan a la mara su paso, prescribiéndole su dirección, su
velocidad y su término
…]
La danza es cosa diferente. Sin duda es, también, un sistema de actos pero tienen éstos su fin en sí
mismos. La danza no va a ninguna parte y si persigue algo no es más que un objeto ideal, un
estado, una voluptuosidad, un fantasma de flor, el éxtasis de sí misma, un extremo de vida, una
cima, un punto supremo del Ser…
(pp. 4–5)
[Walking, like prose, always has a definite end. It is an act directed towards some object, whose
location is our purpose. e actual circumstances — the nature of my objective, the need I have of
it, the impulse of my desire, the state of my body, and the conditions of the surrounding terrain —
order my step, prescribing its direction, speed and termination […]
Dancing is a different maer. Doubtless, it is also a system of acts but these have their end in
themselves. Dancing does not go anywhere, and if it pursues anything it is only an ideal object, a
state, a sensuality, the ghost of a flower, some transport out of one’s self, an extreme of life, a peak,
a supreme point of Being…]
He elaborates on Malherbe’s analogy, contrasting a functional prose with a
poetry whose end resides within itself; but then he undermines it: dancing
‘usa de los mismos miembros’ [uses the same limbs] as walking just as the
poet, like the prose writer, is forced to use ‘una fabricación de uso corriente
y práctico (el lenguaje) para fines excepcionales y no prácticos’ [a
construction of daily and practical use (language) for exceptional, non-
practical ends] (p. 6). Poetry is not transcendent or pure; like other activities
it is contingent upon the world in whi it operates.54 Valéry thus suggests a
potential point of contact between the aestheticism of the Symbolists and
the historicist vision of Marx that would aract Paz. Yet he will trouble
Paz’s reading of Eliot. His sense of contingency remains largely abstract: he
is not concerned with registering the specific experience of modern war or
life in the contemporary metropolis. He opens questions that complicate
Paz’s tidy opposition of a Symbolist, or purist, tradition and a poetry of
history, but leaves them tantalizingly unanswered.
e association of Eliot and Valéry is not an unnatural one. Eliot
corresponded with the Fren poet and kept a picture of him on the wall of
his office at Faber.55 He also wrote about him a number of times.56 Several of
the Contemporáneos who took an interest in Valéry’s work would go on to
read and, in the case of Ortiz de Montellano, to translate Eliot. According to
Guillermo Sheridan, Jorge Cuesta was reading Valéry from the mid-1920s,
and Xavier Villaurrutia was also an admirer, as Paz recounts in Xavier
Villaurrutia en persona y en obra (1978) (OC4, 262).
57 e first mention of
Eliot to occur in Contemporáneos, in Villaurrutia’s ‘Guía de poetas
norteamericanos’ [Guide to North American Poets], describes Eliot in terms
that bring him close to Valéry:
Como Edgar Poe, omas Stearns Elliot [sic] es, al mismo tiempo que un poeta, un teórico de la
composición. A menudo, sus conclusiones son exactas de claridad y síntesis. isiera Elliot, en el
momento de la creación, separar el hombre y sus pasiones de la mente que crea, con el objeto de
que ésta aprovee con mayor lucidez y trasmute las pasiones que la alimentan… Y añade, ‘no es
la magnitud, la intensidad de las emociones, los componentes, lo que importa, sino la intensidad
del proceso artístico, la presión, por decirlo así, bajo la cual tiene lugar la fusión.’ Su poesía está
llena de la lucidez que exige al espíritu que crea, y de una ironía que impide a la pasión, siempre
presente, desbordar.58
[Like Edgar Poe, omas Stearns Elliot [sic] is both a poet and a theorist of composition. At times
his conclusions display a precise clarity and synthesis. Elliot wishes, in the moment of creation, to
separate the man and his passions from the mind that creates, so that the mind can remain lucid
and transmute the passions that feed it… And he adds, ‘it is not the greatness, the intensity, of the
emotions, the components, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under
whi the fusion takes place, that counts’. His poetry is full of a lucidity that governs the creative
spirit, and an irony whi never allows the ever-present passion to brim over.]
e comparison with Poe places Eliot in that Symbolist line of artistic
consciousness whi runs through Baudelaire to Mallarmé and Valéry. As in
‘Conversación sobre la poesía (fragmentos)’, Eliot separates artistic process
from the emotions of the artist. In the first of the passages translated by
Ortiz de Montellano, Valéry insisted on just su a separation between ‘un
estado emotivo particular’ [a particular emotive state] and ‘esa extraña
industria’ [that strange industry], the writing of the poem. e rhetoric of
scientific process favoured by Valéry is indeed eoed in the quote taken
from Eliot, whi refers to ‘fusión’, quite possibly in direct imitation of the
Fren poet.59 Eliot is viewed as a conscious, critical poet: the terms
‘claridad’ and ‘lucidez’ are used to describe his work, whi displays ‘una
ironía que impide a la pasión presente, desbordar’. is movement of feeling
eed by irony recalls the paern of aspiration and negation in López
Velarde whi provides a Mexican precursor of Eliot. López Velarde himself
maintained that ‘el sistema poético se ha convertido en sistema crítico’
[poetic system has become critical system], and he belongs in that line that
runs through Valéry to the ‘actitud crítica’ [critical aitude] of the
Contemporáneos.60
One cannot be sure at this stage how well Villaurrutia knew the work of
Eliot (whose name he misspelled). In a leer to Villaurrutia of 29 November
1929, Gilberto Owen declared that ‘después de todo prefiero a Valéry sobre
T. S. E.’ [at the end of the day I prefer Valéry to T. S. E.], implying that the
two poets were by now familiar with Eliot’s writing.61 Some of the phrasing
of ‘Guía de poetas norteamericanos’ does also eo the rhetoric of ‘Tradition
and the Individual Talent’ (1919). e mind whi transmutes ‘las pasiones
que la alimentan’ [the passions whi feed it] even preserves some of the
Eliotic taste for digestive metaphors: ‘the more perfect the artist, […] the
more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions whi are its
material’ (SW, 45). e one direct quotation that Villaurrutia takes from the
essay also occurs, however, in an article that appeared in the Nouvelle Revue
62
Française by Ramon Fernandez, ‘Le Classicisme de T. S. Eliot’. Jaime Torres
Bodet declares that Contemporáneos was based on the Nouvelle Revue
63
Française. European magazines were sold in the Librería Porrúa in Mexico
City and Guillermo Sheridan notes that the Revue was ‘read and commented
on rigorously by the group from at least 1920’.64 Villaurrutia places Eliot
explicitly in this European rather than a North American context, observing
that ‘viajes diversos llevan a Pound y Elliot a preocupaciones poéticas que
no están lejos de las europeas’ [different journeys lead Pound and Elliot to
poetic preoccupations that are similar to the European ones].65 It therefore
seems safe to assume that Villaurrutia would have known the article by
Fernandez. He could also have encountered a number of Eliot’s own articles
in the pages of the Fren magazine. André Gide invited Eliot to contribute
to the Nouvelle Revue Française in 1921 on Lyon Straey’s
recommendation (L1, 490–01). Although, to his frustration, Eliot did not
manage to gain coverage for his poems, over the next six years he would
produce four ‘Leres d’Angleterre’ and the ‘Note sur Mallarmé et Poe’
(1926).66 e picture that the Revue creates is of a poetic thinker as mu as a
practitioner, an impression reinforced by the Fernandez article, whi
explicitly signals the common preoccupation of Eliot and Valéry with ‘la
théorie de la création poétique’ [the theory of poetic creation].67
Fernandez insists on that separation of personal and aesthetic that
Villaurrutia observes in Eliot: ‘Je crois qu’on ne saurait assez souligner les
pages où il établit une distinction radicale entre les valeurs personnelles et
les valeurs esthétiques’ [I think that one can’t overemphasize the pages
where he establishes a radical separation between personal and aesthetic
values] (p. 250). As the essay opens, this insight appears with a distinctly
polemical slant: ‘Eliot s’aaque d’abord et surtout au primat de la vie
affective’ [First and above all Eliot aas the primacy of the affective life];
and ‘En un temps où le sentimentalisme’ [In a time when senti mentalism]
triumphs, ‘T. S. Eliot nous propose un classicisme sévère’ [T. S. Eliot suggests
a severe classicism] (pp. 247 & 246).68 Fernandez draws on ‘Tradition and the
Individual Talent’, one of the key essays to inspire the New Critics with their
own doctrine of impersonality, whi would come to eclipse earlier
responses to The Waste Land as a register of affective experience. Yet
Fernandez does not restrict his account to this one essay. He refers to a
number of articles from The Sacred Wood — ‘Hamlet and his Problems’,
‘Dante’ and ‘Blake’ — whi offer a more nuanced account of the
relationship between affect and art. All three essays turn on a problem,
whi is condensed in the objective correlative of ‘Hamlet and his Problems’,
‘“d’exprimer l’émotion sous une forme artistique”’ (p. 248) [of expressing
emotion in the form of art (SW, 85)].
One should beware of allowing the subsequent Anglo-American reception
of ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ to eclipse the breadth of Eliot’s
thinking about self and art, and the aracter of the Contemporáneos’
reading. At its most insistent, Eliot’s essay does mu to incite the more
polemical thrust of the New Critics: ‘Poetry is not a turning loose of
emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality,
but an escape from personality’ (SW, 48–49). Put thus, one can understand
the kind of denial, of the self and its experience, that Cleanth Brooks reads
into ‘e Fire Sermon’: ‘e moral of all the incidents whi we have been
witnessing is that there must be an asceticism — something to e the
drive of desire.’69 Yet the asceticism of ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’
is also an aestheticism; not simply an abnegation of affective experience, it is
one of numerous aempts by Eliot to think about the consequences of that
separation between language and life whi confronts Valéry and the
Contemporáneos.
In ‘Modern Tendencies in Poetry’, whi was intended as a companion
piece to ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, this awareness of artistic
process takes a less insistent form. Contentions su as ‘the poet has, not a
“personality” to express, but a particular medium’ (SW, 46) give way to
measured praise of Mallarmé, who ‘called aention to the fact that the
actual writing of poetry, the accidence and syntax, is a very difficult part of
the problem’.70 e reader is presented with a ‘part of the problem’ rather
than a straight assertion of ‘not… but…’. In the company of writers who
share a preoccupation with the artistic medium, his argument tends to relax:
e insistence, in Valéry’s poetics, upon the small part played, in the elaboration of a poem, by
what he calls le rêve — what is ordinarily called the ‘inspiration’ — and upon the subsequent
process of deliberate, conscious, arduous labor, is a most wholesome reminder to the young poet.
It is corrective of that romantic aitude whi, in employing the word ‘inspiration,’ inclines
consciously or unconsciously to regard the poet’s role, in the composition of the poem, as
mediumistic and irresponsible.71
ere is a comic as well as an admonitory side to that ‘mediumistic’,
recalling Mme Sosotris the ‘famous clairvoyante’. As in ‘Tradition and the
Individual Talent’, Eliot looks for an alternative to that ‘romantic aitude’
that would neglect artistic labour. Yet his position is no longer articulated as
a point of doctrine but as a piece of practical advice: a ‘corrective’ and ‘a
most wholesome reminder for the young poet’.
More thoroughly immersed in these ideas through Valéry and the
Nouvelle Revue Française than were Eliot’s Anglo-American readers in the
1930s, Villaurrutia is less inclined to adopt the polemical stance of the New
Critics. While his Eliot exercises an irony whi prevents passion from
brimming over, that passion is nevertheless ‘siempre presente’ [always
present]. He allows room for the powerful affective current that runs
through ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, and whi counters its explicit
aim to aa what Eliot viewed as a romantic cult of personality:
the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and
the mind whi creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions whi
are its material
(SW, 45)
Even without the benefit of biographical hindsight, that ‘man who suffers’
reads as a curious provocation. If he is ‘completely separate’ from the ‘mind
whi creates’ why allow him to introduce su an unwelcome note of
pathos to the argument? Eliot invites consideration of a plight that the
argument simultaneously fends off. e doctrine of ‘impersonality’ then
becomes less a truth about art than a quite personal desire to contain, or
control, suffering. Indeed, it is oen the plight, rather than the theory that
denies it, to whi readers of The Waste Land have responded. Edmund
Wilson declared that it is the ‘acuteness of Eliot’s suffering from this
starvation that gives su power to his art’.72 Frank Kermode also modifies
the asceticism of Cleanth Brooks, arguing that Eliot and his peers ‘desired to
create a world by decreasing the self in suffering; to purge what, in being
merely natural and human, was also false’.73
Valéry manages to allow for both the ‘extraña industria’ of poetic
composition and an aempt to ‘restituir la emoción’ of a lived experience.
is openness to the possibilities of art typifies mu of the discussion from
the Contemporáneos. In what amounts to a personal manifesto, ‘Notas de un
lector de poesía’ [Notes from a Reader of Poetry], Bernardo Ortiz de
Montellano aempts to find common ground between Valéry and the
Surrealists. us Valéry’s awareness of language — ‘el instrumento siempre
impreciso pero consciente de las palabras’ [the conscious yet imprecise
instrument of language] — becomes wedded to a further purpose: the
illumination of ‘la zona oscura de adumbración interior’ [the darkly
perceived outlines of the interior world].74 e poem has a goal that lies
beyond ‘su técnica propia’ [its own tenique] as it delves ‘en el misterio
más allá de la realidad conocida’ [in the mystery beyond known reality].75
e preoccupation with artistic form carried its dangers, however. In ‘La
poesía actual de México’ [Contemporary Mexican Poetry] (1937), José
Gorostiza took issue with the arge that ‘poesía pura signifique poesía
inhumana o deshumanizada, pues el mundo poético se edifica precisamente
en las zonas más vivas del ser: el deseo, el miedo, la angustia, el gozo’ [pure
poetry should mean inhuman or dehumanized poetry, since the poetic world
is built precisely on the most animated areas of the self: desire, fear, anguish,
pleasure].76 Yet he also identified ‘un ideal de forma’ [an ideal of form]
among the Contemporáneos whi ‘empieza por eliminar de la poesía sólo
los elementos patéticos, pero que acaba, cada vez más ambicioso, por
eliminar todo lo vivo’ [starts by eliminating only pathetic elements from the
poem, but whi ends up, ever more ambitious, eliminating all the life].77
e Contemporáneos articulate the two sides of the epistemological turn
inherited from the Symbolists: the one whi focuses on the way that the
self processes the world; and the other whi introduces the medium of
language into the picture. e two aspects can be co-dependent, as Eliot’s
parenthetical self-correction — a realization in the act of writing that the one
implies the other — in ‘From Poe to Valéry’ (1948) aests: ‘is process of
increasing self-consciousness — or, we may say, of increasing consciousness
of language — has as its theoretical goal what we may call la poésie pure’
(TCC, 39). Yet ea perspective also contains the potential to eclipse its
companion. One cannot separate the psyological and the aesthetic aspects
of the poem without creating some uncertainty about where the precise
meaning of the poem lies, and Eliot refers to a malleable set of
preoccupations rather than a defined project. La poésie pure is a ‘theoretical’
rather than an actual aim, as it remained ‘un type inaccessible’ for Valéry.78
Although they referred frequently to poesía pura and its aendant poesía
desnuda [naked poetry], the Contemporáneos are equally open about the
possibilities, and problems, of an art that can both explore the hidden
recesses of the self and reflect on its own artistic process.
eir Eliot is a companion of Valéry: conscious of art and preoccupied
with the three-way interactions of mind, world and language. While this
figure does not actively disdain Paz’s historical injunction, the wider social
sphere tends to recede when epistemological questions aieve su
prominence. Paz was certainly aware of Valéry, and read ‘Conversación
sobre la poesía (fragmentos)’ closely enough to traduce it in his first
published essay, ‘Ética del artista’ [Ethics of the Artist] (1931), whi will be
discussed in the next apter. His earliest prose resists the reading of Eliot
that his immediate forebears developed in the light of Valéry and the
Nouvelle Revue Française. He did, however, enthuse over, and associate Eliot
closely with, one of the late Symbolist writers who crossed the Atlantic
through the Fren periodical: Saint-John Perse.
Saint-John Perse
In the February 1931 edition of Contemporáneos, a translation appeared by
Octavio G. Barreda of Perse’s Anabase.79 ‘El páramo’ had been published six
months earlier in the July–August edition of 1930, yet more than once Paz’s
memory placed the two translations in the same issue:
El mismo día, la misma tarde en mi casa, en ‘Contemporáneos’, que compraba cada mes tan
pronto como salía, leí ‘e Waste Land’ y ‘Anábasis’. La experiencia fue devastadora… quedé
deslumbrado, anonado durante meses. Fue aterrador, terrible, maravilloso…80
[the same day, the same aernoon at home, in Contemporáneos, whi I bought every month as
soon as it came out, I read The Waste Land and Anabase. e experience was devastating… I was
shoed, overwhelmed for months. It was terrifying, astonishing, marvellous…]
e confusion over dates testifies to a strong association of the two poems in
Paz’s mind; they provoke the same ambivalent response of sho and
enantment. e association between the two poems is not merely fanciful,
however. Perse translated the first part of The Hollow Men into Fren, and
Eliot himself published a translation of Anabase in 1930, with a short
preface, from whi Barreda borrows freely.81 Both ‘El páramo’ and
‘Anábasis’ were examples of long poems with history in them, and both,
crucially, were difficult poems. Paz describes his initial reaction to them as a
sho that passed understanding.
e question of where the meaning of Anabase resides is a problem for
Paz, as it was for Eliot. In the introduction to his translation, Barreda
addresses the question of the poem’s apparent la of coherence:
Sin duda, esta oscuridad e inconsistencia aparentes débense en parte a una deliberada supresión de
nexus, de descripciones superfluas, de lazos de unión, o lo que Lucien Fabre llama con este motivo
‘eslabones de la cadena’.82
[Without doubt this apparent obscurity and inconsistency is due in part to the deliberate
suppression of nexus, of superfluous descriptions, of connecting maer, or what Lucien Fabre
describes as ‘links in the ain’.]
e ‘eslabones de la cadena’ that would structure the poem have been
suppressed, and the reader is le with ‘meras descripciones casi objetivas’
[mere descriptions that are almost objective] (p. 4). Perse described his aim
as a ‘jeu, très allusif et mystérieux […] à la limite du saisissable’ [an
extremely allusive, mysterious play […] at the limits of the perceptible].83
e potentially negative aspect of disjointedness is turned round to
accentuate the positive, Symbolist aesthetic of suggestion. Eliot also referred
in his own preface to the ‘missing links in the ain’ (An, 8), and the poem’s
indeterminacy clearly appealed to him, although he oen struggled to
reproduce Perse’s carefully articulated aention to the etymology and
connotation of the Fren, as the correspondence between poet and poet-
translator reveals.84 Eliot was not entirely comfortable with indeterminacy
and suggestion as principles of organization. He still felt the need to provide
a principle of coherence, whi he described as ‘a logic of the imagination’
(An, 8). Barreda refers directly to this concept in his introduction: ‘T. S. Eliot,
a propósito del poema, se aventura a afirmar que existe una lógica de la
imaginación de igual manera que existe una lógica de conceptos’ [T. S. Eliot
asserts of the poem that a logic of the imagination exists in the same way
that there exists a logic of concepts] (p. 2). e explanation is worded
paradoxically, marrying the rigorous ‘logic’ to a term that is popularly
regarded as its opposite. Eliot’s mitigation of the amorphous with a form of
order replays the paern of Wordsworth’s classic definition of imagination
as ‘Reason in her most exalted mood’.85 Both definitions bring accepted
terms into new relations as a means of anowledging a phenomenon whi
operates beyond the conventions of available rhetoric.
Eliot thus demonstrates ambivalence about a desire for order that takes
more strident, and notorious, form earlier in his career. In ‘Ulysses, Order,
and Myth’ the ‘mythic method’ was ‘a way of controlling and ordering, of
giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and
anary whi is contemporary history’.86 Not only is the ‘logic of the
imagination’ a more tentative formulation, it also shis the focus of
aention from the effect of work on world to the relationship between mind
and work. It thus communicates with the Contemporáneos’ reading of Eliot
and Valéry as theorists of artistic process. In an essay of 1961, however, ‘Un
himno moderno: Saint-John Perse’, Paz directs his aention to history:
Hoy la historia no sólo ocupa todo el espacio terrestre —ya no hay pueblos ni tierras vírgenes—
sino que invade nuestros pensamientos, deshabita nuestros sueños secretos, nos arranca de
nuestras casas y nos arroja al vacío público. El hombre moderno ha descubierto que la vida
histórica es la vida errante. Saint-John Perse lo sabe mejor que nadie. Pero aquello que la historia
separa, lo une la poesía.
(OC2, 145)
[Not only does history now occupy the whole world — there are no longer any untoued peoples
or lands — but it also invades our minds, unhouses our secret dreams, drags us from our houses
and casts us into the public void. Modern man has discovered that the historical life is the
wandering life. Saint-John Perse knows this beer than anybody. Yet that whi history separates,
poetry unites.]
Artistic disjunction — the missing links of the ain — is replaced by a
different form of division, outside the poem in a history whi ‘invade’,
‘deshabita’, ‘nos arranca’, ‘nos arroja’. e poem then mitigates that conflict:
‘aquello que la historia separa, lo une la poesía’. Paz’s claim is a bold one,
and it does in part indicate his thinking of the early 1960s rather than his
initial response to Barreda’s translation of Anabase. His grandest statements
about the value of poetry appear aer his contact with André Breton and
Surrealists in Paris during the 1940s. Nevertheless, his praise of a poetry
whi expresses a particular aitude to history does correspond to the
broadly leist rhetoric that he employs in the early 1930s.
Paz does not explain precisely how the poem can act upon society. As the
essay continues, however, he specifies the poetic image rather than poetry in
general as a unifying force: ‘La dispersión de nuestro mundo se revela al fin
como viviente unidad. No la unidad del sistema que excluye la contradicción
y es siempre visión parcial, sino la de la imagen poética’ [e dispersion of
our world is at last revealed as a living unity. Not the unity of system whi
excludes contradiction and is always a partial vision, but that of the poetic
image] (OC2, 145). His rejection of ‘la unidad del sistema’ provides a way of
maintaining respect for the indeterminacy of Perse’s poetry while holding
on to the concept of a unifying force that his reading of poem and history
demands. It may even carry a veiled criticism of the Eliot who praised Dante
for operating within ‘a framework of mythology and theology and
philosophy’ (SW, 134). Eliot insists too rigidly on a systematic belief, Paz
implies. Yet by the time he came to translate Anabase, Eliot had moved
away from the assertions of The Sacred Wood to less insistent theories of
poetic organization: his ‘logic of the imagination’ tactfully sidesteps the
issue of belief in favour of a less tangible principle of coherence, a move he
would confirm in 1942, as he was composing the Four Quartets, when he
observed ‘a logic of the emotions’ in Tennyson’s In Memoriam.87
If Eliot is the intended object of Paz’s criticism, then Paz uses the author
of The Waste Land to stand in for an aspect of his own poetic self from
whi he hopes to gain some distance. In 1930 systematic belief was viewed
as desirable by the young Paz, and ‘la imagen poética’ would have seemed a
poor substitute for more explicit political commitment. Yet Perse does not
lend himself readily to this form of aention, and Paz’s later singling out of
the poetic image may well refer ba to the germ of his original response. It
is this imagistic aspect of Anabase that exerts the strongest inf luence on
Eliot, according to Riard Abel, who observes an ‘increasing use of natural
and sensuous imagery’ in the poems aer 1930.88 Eliot finds a form of
response to his own earlier work, and one can imagine Paz experiencing a
similar araction to ‘the natural and sensuous imagery’ of Perse aer
reading The Waste Land. If Eliot’s poem presents a self whi experiences
disconnection from the dispersed human and natural world, ‘Anábasis’
offers a contrasting repertory of images whi express sensual connection, a
form of unity, or coherence. e poem ranges from the simplicity of ‘el que
gusta inmensamente del estragón’ (p. 34) [he who fancies the flavour of
tarragon (An, 67)], to the startling perception, ‘ah! cómo el cuerpo ácido de
una mujer sabe manar una túnica en el lugar de las axilas!’ (p. 11) [and
how well the acid body of a woman can stain a gown at the armpit (An,
25)].89 e robust sensuality of Perse is distant from the vision of sexual
disjunction that runs through The Waste Land. Paz would later declare that
‘el erotismo de Eliot es muy poco erótico y la imagen que nos da del amor
físico es sórdida’ [the eroticism of Eliot is not very erotic and the image of
physical love that he gives us is sordid].90 Perse, by contrast, is celebratory:
‘—Mujeres jóvenes! Y la naturaleza de un país se perfuma toda’ (p. 29)
[Young women! And the nature of a land is all scented therewith (An, 57)].
Sexual appeal spreads into the natural world and is savoured as sensual
experience: ‘se perfuma toda’ . His images praise a world of ‘abundancia y
bienestar, felicidad!’ (p. 20) [Plenty and well-being, happiness! (An, 43)].
Like Eliot, Perse employs a form of inner landscape, whi reveals a
constant interaction between the mental and physical world; the difference
in Perse is that an inner exuberance meets an outer abundance, where in The
Waste Land depression finds dearth. Perse offers a whole series of images in
whi the inner world communes happily with the outer: ‘Tanta dulzura en
el corazón del hombre, es posible que no llegue a encontrar su medida?’ (p.
25) [Su mildness in the heart of man, can it fail to find its measure? (An,
51)]. e problem, however, for Paz’s reading of Perse — and it is a problem
that he encounters as he aempts to redeem the vision of The Waste Land —
is that the equanimity of Perse’s world seems to be a given. Inner and outer
have by some form of grace been granted accord, just as in the early Eliot
they have been denied it. e reader is not given any hint, however, of how
one might progress from one state to the other. He or she is not given that
point of leverage between poem and society that Paz’s ‘aquello que la
historia separa, lo une la poesía’ implies.
Although Perse’s narrator finds accord in the world, the destructive aspect
of historical events, expressed in Paz’s string of verbs — invade, deshabita,
nos arranca, nos arroja, separa — is not entirely absent from Anabase.
Natural destruction appears: ‘Después vino un año de vientos de occidente,
y en nuestros teos lastrados de piedras negras, todo un tema de telas vivas
flotando en la delicia de la amplitud’ (p. 21) [en came a year of wind in
the west, and on our roofs weighted with bla stones, a whole business of
bright cloths abandoned to the delight of wide spaces (An, 43)]. As does
human destruction:
‘Id y decidles: un inmenso peligro está próximo a correr entre nosotros! Heos incontables e
infinitos, destructoras y potentes voluntades y el poder del hombre consumido como la uva en la
vid…’
(p. 22)
[‘Go say to them: a great risk to run with us! Deeds innumerable unmeasured, puissant and
destructive wills, and the power of man consumed like the grape in the vine…
(An, 45)]
e perspective adopted by Perse’s narrator is distanced from the immediate
experience of destruction, however, so that potential distress is resolved into
unconditional admiration for movement, or energy — ‘flotando en la delicia
de la amplitud’ — irrespective of its consequences at an individual level. He
does not resolve the destructive aspect of history; he is immune to it. López
Velarde had viewed the historical events of the Mexican civil war — ‘la
mutilación de la metralla’ [the mutilation of the shrapnel] — as an irruption
that placed the now subverted Eden of ildhood within an ironic
perspective. Perse manages to hold the vision of historical process in a
lyrical tone of praise, rather than an ironic one. As a vision it is fascinating
yet amoral, and distant from Paz’s model of a destructive history alleviated
by a unifying poetry. It is difficult to imagine Paz resolving horror at a
history that invade, deshabita, separa by regarding these actions as ‘potentes
voluntades’.
Action is a key element of the poem. Perse described its theme as that of
‘la solitude dans l’action. Aussi bien l’action parmi les hommes que l’action
de l’esprit envers soi-même’ [the loneliness of action. Action among men
quite as mu as the action of the human spirit upon itself].91 His narrator
can admire the actions of history rather than feel a victim of them. History
does not evoke feelings of horror, the term that Paz uses to express his
affinity with the Eliot of The Waste Land. Anabase stresses agency, whether
it is the agency of senses encountering pleasure, feelings finding their
measure in the world, or actions expressing an amoral potency. Su an
active disposition is partly enabled by the myth that Perse has osen, the
myth of conquest and foundation. The Waste Land, by contrast, portrayed a
civilization in crisis, possibly in terminal decline. Where Eliot finds himself
in a desert waiting for rain, Perse describes ‘aquellos trabajos de captación
de aguas vivas en las montañas’ (p. 15) [these operations of annelling the
living waters on the mountains (An, 33)]. Paz was aracted to the myth of
The Waste Land, but his leist inheritance also demanded a utopian myth,
what he described as ‘las geometrías del futuro’ [the geometries of the
future], that could redeem historical decline.92 Perse provided a version of
this myth. Yet the agency in Perse remains largely one of feeling; it seems a
given rather than something won from the position in Eliot, and it is
aieved at the expense of the ethical aitude towards the destructive aspect
of historical events that Paz would normally insist upon.
In an interview I conducted with the Mexican poet Homero Aridjis in
2002, he declared that ‘Anabase and The Waste Land were important
examples of the long poem in Mexico in the 1930s […] Anabase was the
great model of lyric exaltation [exaltación lírica]’.93 e Mexican response is
shared by other commentators. Alain Bosquet has described ‘a discourse
that is suited to perpetual celebration’, a phenomenon for whi Arthur
Knodel provides the following explanation: ‘For Saint-John Perse the work
of art is an accidental by-product; what maers is the creative élan and not
the result of that élan.’94 Knodel describes that shi of aention from
product to productive principle that underpins Huidobro’s creacionismo, and
it results in a similarly celebratory tone as the imaginative powers of the
poet are unleashed. Paz is aracted to this tone and he will accommodate
Perse alongside Carlos Pellicer, the prime Mexican exponent of
creacionismo, in his earliest poems. Yet this poetic experience, more an
expression of momentary feeling than a political project, is hardly capable of
carrying the burden that Paz imposes on it in ‘Un himno moderno’. During
the 1930s it remains an unaainable vision of exaltación lírica, tantalizingly
deferred as a more importunate sense of crisis calls on The Waste Land for
historical witness.
Paz first discovered Eliot in the pages of Contemporáneos, and his initial
reading of this translated Anglo-American poet was inevitably dominated
by the group of Mexican writers who contributed to the magazine. ey
provided him with routes ba to Hispanic precursors, Ramón López
Velarde, Salomón de la Selva and Salvador Novo, as well as relating Eliot to
international contemporaries su as Paul Valéry and Saint-John Perse. Yet
their dominance also bred antagonism, and Paz’s aempt to promote Eliot
and Perse as poets of history is in part an aempt to wrest potential
influences from the ‘esteticismo militante’ [militant aestheticism] and
‘actitud crítica’ [critical aitude] of his immediate Mexican forebears. For a
poet so intimately connected to the Contempáraneos, however, that
sceptical, artistic awareness was not so easily dismissed.
Notes to Chapter 2
1. Paz, ‘Rescate de Enrique Munguía’, p. 42; passage excised from the version in OC14.
2. Xavier Villaurrutia, ‘Prólogo’, in Ramón López Velarde, El león y la virgen, 2nd edn (México:
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1971), pp. vii–xxvi (p. xvii).
3. Enrique González Martínez, Preludios, Lirismos, Silenter, Los senderos ocultos (México: Editorial
Porrúa, 1946), p. 238.
4. Paz, Los hijos del limo, in OC1, 410.
5. Guillermo Sucre, ‘Poesía hispanoamericana y conciencia del lenguaje’, Eco, 198–200 (Apr–Jun
1978), 608–33 (p. 620).
6. Paz, ‘El caracol y la sirena: Rubén Darío’ (1964), in OC3, 138.
7. Vicente Huidobro, Obras completas, intr. by Hugo Montes, 2 vols (Santiago: Andres Bello, 1976),
I, 219.
8. Mallarmé, Œuvres, II, 213.
9. Todorov, Theories of the Symbol, p. 153. As Todorov points out, Shaesbury, Herder, and even
Empedocles had situated ‘imitation between creator and Creator, not between two creations’
before Moritz (p. 153). ‘Moritz’s ideas taken one by one are not new, but his synthesis is,’ he
concludes (p. 155).
10. Huidobro, Obras completas, I, 715.
11. Actual No.1: Hoja de vanguardia (Dec 1921); repr. in Las vanguardias literarias en
Hispanoamérica (manifiestos, proclamas y otros escritos), ed. by Hugo J. Verani, 4th edn
(México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2003), pp. 97–103 (p. 99).
12. Luis Mario Sneider, El estridentismo: México 1921–1927 (México: Universidad Nacional
Autónoma de México, 1985), p. 35.
13. roughout the present study ‘Contemporáneos’ in italics will be used to refer to the literary
periodical and ‘the Contemporáneos’ to refer to the group of writers who contributed to it.
14. Villaurrutia, ‘La poesía de los jóvenes de México’, in his Obras, ed. by Miguel Capistrán, Alí
Chumacero and Luis Mario Sneider, 2nd edn (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1966),
pp. 819–35 (p. 828). e magazines included Gladios (1916), San-Ev-Ank (1918), México
Moderno (1920–23), La Falange (1922–23), Antena (1924) and Ulises (1927–28). For a concise
account of this pre-history see Edward J. Mullen, Carlos Pellicer (Boston, MA: Twayne
Publishers, 1977), pp. 20–21.
15. Sheridan, Los Contemporáneos ayer, pp. 17–18.
16. Jaime Torres Bodet, Memorias, 2nd edn (México: Editorial Porrúa, 1981), p. 159.
17. Antología de la poesía mexicana moderna, ed. by Jorge Cuesta (México: Contemporáneos, 1928;
repr., with intr. by Guillermo Sheridan, México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1985), p. 157.
18. For the baground of Mexican debate in the 1920s about a nationalistic ‘literatura mexicana
viril’ [virile Mexican literature], whi was oen directed against the Contemporáneos, see
Luis Mario Sneider, Ruptura y continuidad (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1975), pp.
159– 89. e Contemporáneos’ own position is well summarized in three essays by Bernardo
Ortiz de Montellano: ‘Notas de conversación’ (under the pseudonym Marcial Rojas),
Contemporáneos, 5, 18 (Nov 1929), 335–36; ‘Literatura de la revolución y literatura
revolucionaria’, Contemporáneos, 7, 23 (Apr 1930), 77–81; and ‘Esquema de la literatura
mexicana moderna’, Contemporáneos, 10, 37 ( Jun 1931), 195–210.
19. Jorge Cuesta, ‘¿Existe una crisis en nuestra literatura de vanguardia?’, El Universal Ilustrado (14
April 1932), p. 14; repr. in Verani, ed., Las vanguardias literarias en Hispanoamérica, pp. 117–
19 (p. 117).
20. Paz, ‘Poesía mexicana moderna’ (1954), in OC4, 65.
21. Armando González Torres, ‘El canon tranquilizador: Una inquisición sobre la poesía
experimental y vanguardista en México’, Ínsula, 707 (Nov 2005), 3–5 (p. 4).
22. See Paz, ‘Itinerarios de un poeta’, El Nacional, 29 Nov 1990, p. 14. Although Pellicer ‘was only
tangentially involved in the publication of Contemporáneos’ according to Edward J. Mullen, he
did participate in a number of the group’s earlier publications (Carlos Pellicer, p. 22). Samuel
Ramos produced one of the most extended statements of aesthetic theory to appear in the
magazine: ‘El caso Strawinsky’, Contemporáneos, 15 (Aug 1929), 1–32.
23. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890–1930
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), p. 22.
24. e Mexican civil war ended in 1920 and was then officially designated the ‘Mexican
Revolution’, although ‘a self-perpetuating one-party state legitimized by a transcendent
Revolution was to take a further decade of bloody struggle to create’, Edwin Williamson, The
Penguin History of Latin America (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), p. 392.
25. Sneider, Ruptura y continuidad, p. 160.
26. Ricardo Arenales, ‘Antología de poetas modernos de México’, México Moderno, I, 2 (1 Sept 1920),
125–28 (pp. 125–26).
27. Gwen Kirkpatri, The Dissonant Legacy of Modernismo: Lugones, Herrera y Reissig, and the
Voices of Modern Spanish American Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p.
49.
28. Paz, Los hijos del limo, in OC1, 416.
29. Rubén Darío, Poesías completas, ed. by Alfonso Méndez Plancarte, 2 vols (Madrid: Aguilar, 1967),
II, 675.
30. Ramón López Velarde, Obras, ed. by José Luis Martínez, 2nd edn (México: Fondo de Cultura
Económica, 1990), p. 206.
31. Ibid., p. 207.
32. Ibid., p. 206.
33. Stephen Spender, The Destructive Element: A Study of Modern Writers and Beliefs (London:
Jonathan Cape, 1938), p. 136.
34. Eliot, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1996), p. 287. Eliot
describes Laforgue’s influence in terms that add a personal inflection to the historicist
tendency of Paz’s reading: the Fren poet ‘showed how, mu [sic] more use poetry could
make of contemporary ideas and feelings, of the emotional quality of contemporary ideas,
than one had supposed’, ‘Modern Tendencies in Poetry’, p. 13.
35. Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature, 2nd edn (London: Aribald Constable,
1908), p. 104.
36. See ‘El lenguaje de López Velarde’ (1950) (OC4, 169–70), ‘El camino de la pasión’ (1963) (OC4,
183), and ‘Literatura y literalidad’ (1970) (OC2, 74).
37. Eliot, ‘El canto de amor de J. Alfred Prufro’, trans. by Rodolfo Usigli, Poesía (suplemento),
México, 2 (Apr 1938), 1–10.
38. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), p.
326.
39. José Emilio Paeco, ‘Nota sobre la otra vanguardia’, Revista Iberoamericana, 106–07 (Jan–Jun
1979), 327–34 (p. 331).
40. Paeco, ‘Nota sobre la otra vanguardia’, p. 327. Fernando Alegría, in his Literatura y revolución
(México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1971), aempts to separate poets su as López Velarde
and Salvador Novo from a true antipoesía, whi for him begins with Pablo de Rokha and
César Vallejo (p. 203). While there are clearly distinctions that can be made between these
poets, his aempt to seal off antipoesía from trends in Spanish American poetry that are
evident as early as Darío’s Cantos de vida y esperanza (1905) is unconvincing.
41. Paeco, ‘Nota sobre la otra vanguardia’, p. 328. See also Sheridan, Los Contemporáneos ayer, pp.
116–17.
42. Paz, ‘Ezra Pound: Galimatías y esplendor’ (1972), in OC2, 283.
43. Ezra Pound, Collected Shorter Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), p. 62.
44. Ezra Pound, ‘N.Y.’, trans. by Salvador Novo in ‘Antología norte-americana moderna’, La Falange,
7 (1 Oct 1923), pp. 381–85 (p. 384).
45. Stanton, Inventores de tradición, p. 155.
46. Guillermo Sheridan describes Novo’s anthology as practically ‘unobtainable and unconsultable’,
Los Contemporáneos ayer, p. 172. Anthony Stanton quotes his rules in Inventores de tradición,
p. 154 .
47. López Velarde, Obras, p. 207.
48. Torres Bodet, ‘Cercanía de López Velarde’, p. 112.
49. Saúl Yurkievi, Celebración del modernismo (Barcelona: Tusquets Editores, 1976), p. 55.
50. Pedro Serrano, The Rhetorical Construction of the Modern Poet, p. 170.
51. Leer to Merlin H. Forster, published in Forster, Los Contemporáneos 1920–1932: Perfil de un
experimento vanguardista mexicano (México: Ediciones Andrea, 1964), p. 117.
52. For an account of this aspect of the group, see ‘Los Contemporáneos y el debate en torno a la
poesía pura’ by Anthony Stanton in his Inventores de tradición, pp. 127–47.
53. Paul Valéry, ‘Conversación sobre la poesía (fragmentos)’, trans. by Bernardo Ortiz de Montellano,
Contemporáneos, 26–27 (Jul–Aug 1930), pp. 3–6 (pp. 3–4). Further references to this translation
are given aer quotations in the text. e passages are taken from Valéry’s ‘Propos sur la
poésie’, a lecture given at the Université des Annales, 2 December 1927, and published in
Conférencia (5 November 1928).
54. is theme of a transcendence revealed as a contingency recurs in Valéry’s ‘Pequeños textos:
Comentarios de grabados’, translated by Gilberto Owen in Contemporáneos, 4 (Sept 1928), 34–
39 (p. 36): ‘Mayor envidia aún sentimos por los seres que se mueven en los aires, donde,
creemos, serán tan diosos. Su necesidad es nuestro caprio. El modo obligatorio de su vida
es cabalmente el tipo de nuestro sueño.’
55. For Eliot’s correspondence with Valéry, see L2, 264–67 & 276–77.
56. e articles spanned Eliot’s career: from ‘Dante’ (1920) in The Sacred Wood, to ‘A Brief
Introduction to the Method of Paul Valéry’ (1924), ‘Leçon de Valéry’ (1946), an ‘Introduction’
to a collection of Valéry’s essays, The Art of Poetry (1958), and ‘From Poe to Valéry’ (1948), in
To Criticize the Critic. The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933) also includes sustained
discussion of the question of ‘Pure Poetry’. His assessment was not always uncritical. In a
leer of 5 October 1923 to Riard Aldington, Eliot declared: ‘Read Valery’s ‘L’Ame et la
Danse’ and it is rubbish. He knows nothing whatsoever about dancing, not mu about the
soul, and very lile about Socrates. It is the usual Fren bluff. (Monsieur Teste is also rubbish)
[…] I venture the idea that Valery’s poetry has merit, but the man cannot think’ (L2, 246).
57. Sheridan, Los Contemporáneos ayer, p. 158.
58. Xavier Villaurrutia, ‘Guía de poetas norteamericanos’, Contemporáneos, 4 (Sept 1928), 91–96 (p.
94).
59. e quotation is taken from ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (SW, 46).
60. oted by Paz in OC4, 181; Cuesta in Verani, ed., Las vanguardias literarias en Hispanoamérica,
p. 117.
61. Gilberto Owen, Obras, ed. by Josefina Procopio, 2nd edn (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica,
1996), p. 266.
62. Ramon Fernandez, ‘Le Classicisme de T. S. Eliot’, Nouvelle Revue Française, 12, 137 (1 Feb 1925),
246–51 (p. 250). e son of a Mexican diplomat, Fernandez was educated in France and
contributed regularly to the Nouvelle Revue Française.
63. Jaime Torres Bodet, Tiempo de arena (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1955), pp. 252–53.
64. Sheridan, Los Contemporáneos ayer, p. 247.
65. Villaurrutia, ‘Guía de poetas norteamericanos’, p. 54.
66. In a leer of 7 May 1924 to Virginia Woolf, Eliot declared: ‘I have just taxed and faced the
Nouvelle Revue Francaise with never having reviewed The Waste Land. With specious palaver,
and filthy Fren knavery, they say they never received a copy. Would the Hogarth press try
the experiment of sending them another copy? If advised of its despat, I will aempt my
Arts and Browbeating ways on the Frenmen again’ (L2, 413). For details of Eliot’s
engagement with the Nouvelle Revue Française, see William Marx, ‘Two Modernisms: T. S.
Eliot and the Nouvelle Revue Française’, in The International Reception of T. S. Eliot, ed. by
Elisabeth Däumer and Shyamal Bagee (London and New York: Continuum, 2007), pp. 25–35.
67. Fernandez, ‘Le Classicisme de T. S. Eliot’, p. 251. Eliot admired Fernandez’s article. In a leer of
13 Mar 1925 to E. R. Curtius, he declared: ‘By the way, Fernandez (whom I like, and you
would like, very mu, he is one of the most intelligent of that group) has wrien an essay in
the February Nouvelle Revue Francaise on my prose, whi I like very mu. But I aa more
value to my verse’ (L2, 603).
68. Mexican writers had already been prepared for the classicism that Fernandez describes in Eliot
by the likes of Valéry and André Gide. Eliot himself was not wholly commied to the
opposition. In a leer to the TLS of 28 October 1920, titled ‘A Fren Romantic’, he suggested
that ‘it would perhaps be beneficial if we employed both terms [classicism and romanticism]
as lile as possible, if we even forgot these terms altogether, and looked steadily for the
intelligence and sensibility whi ea work of art contains’ (p. 703).
69. Brooks, Modern Poetry and the Tradition, p. 157.
70. Eliot, ‘Modern Tendencies in Poetry’, p. 14.
71. Eliot, ‘Introduction’ to The Art of Poetry by Paul Valéry (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1958), pp. VII–XXIV (p. XII).
72. Edmund Wilson, ‘e Poetry of Drouth’, p. 143.
73. Frank Kermode, ‘A Babylonish Dialect’, in T. S. Eliot: The Man and his Work, ed. by Allen Tate
(London: Chao & Windus, 1967), pp. 225–37 (p. 235).
74. Bernardo Ortiz de Montellano, ‘Notas de un lector de poesía’, Contemporáneos, 26–27 (Jul–Aug
1930), 91–95 (p. 92).
75. Ibid., p. 94.
76. Gorostiza, Prosa, p. 166.
77. Ibid., p. 170.
78. Valéry, ‘Poésie pure: Notes pour une conférence’ (1928), in Œuvres, ed. by Jean Hytier, 2 vols
(Paris: Gallimard, 1957–1960), I, 1463.
79. Saint-John Perse, ‘Anábasis’, trans. with intr. by Octavio G. Barreda, Contemporáneos, 33 (Feb
1931), 1–37. ‘Anabase’ had appeared in the Nouvelle Revue Française, II, 124 (1 Jan 1924), 44–
62. Valéry Larbaud’s ‘Préface pour une traduction Russe d’Anabase’ was also published in
NRF, 13, 148 (1 Jan 1926), 64–67.
80. Paz, ‘La evolución poética de Paz’, interview with William Ferguson, p. 8. Paz made the same
error in interview with Rita Guibert in 1970: ‘e magazine Contemporáneos gave me an
unforgeable jolt: I read in it and in the same issue the first Spanish translations of The Waste
Land and Saint-John Perse’s Anabasis’, ‘Paz on Himself and his Writing: Selections from an
Interview’, trans. by Frances Partridge, in Ivar Ivask, ed., The Perpetual Present: The Poetry and
Prose of Octavio Paz (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1973), pp. 25–34 (p. 32). In the
Spanish version of the interview published in OC15, ‘the same issue’ has been excised (p. 440).
81. Eliot, ‘Poème’, trans. by Saint-John Perse, Commerce, 3 (Winter 1924/25), 9–11.
82. Barreda, ‘Anábasis’, pp. 1–2. Further references to Barreda’s introduction and translation are
given aer quotations in the text.
83. Perse, ‘Une lere de St.-John Perse’, Berkeley Review (Winter 1956), p. 40; quoted in Bush, T. S.
Eliot: A Study in Character and Style, p. 125.
84. e correspondence can be found in Saint-John Perse, Œuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1972),
pp. 1141–47. Ronald Bush criticizes a tendency of Eliot’s translation to ‘heighten the opacity of
the verse and emphasise the exoticism and otherworldliness of Perse’s central images’, T. S.
Eliot: A Study in Character and Style, p. 126. Roger Lile also claims that ‘Eliot indulged in a
kind of King James Version of it [Anabase], imposing abundant araisms where there are few
in the Fren’, Saint-John Perse (London: Athlone, 1973), p. 96.
85. William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1850) (XIV. 192), in Poetical Works of Wordsworth (London:
Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 585.
86. Eliot, ‘Ulysses, Order and Myth’, p. 483.
87. Eliot, ‘ “e Voice of his Time” ’, p. 212.
88. Riard Abel, ‘e Influence of St. John Perse on T. S. Eliot’, Contemporary Literature, 14, 2
(Spring 1973), 213–39 (p. 232). is shi is also noted by J. Hillis Miller and A. Walton Litz,
although it is not aributed directly to Perse. See Hillis Miller, Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth-
Century Writers (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1966), pp. 184–85; and A. Walton Litz, ‘ “at
strange abstraction ‘Nature’”: T. S. Eliot’s Victorian Inheritance’, in Nature and the Victorian
Imagination, ed. by U. C. Knoepflmaer and G. B. Tennyson (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1977), pp. 470–88. Walton Litz declares that ‘today, with the advantage of a
longer perspective, we can see the suppressed “Nature poet” lurking in the early verse’ (p. 478).
Sensory experience was also a basic criterion of Eliot’s early criticism, whether the ‘external
facts’ of the ‘objective correlative’, ‘whi must terminate in sensory experience’ (SW, 86), or
his critique of ideas, whi ‘evade sensation and thought’, ‘In Memory of Henry James’, Egoist,
I, 5 (January 1918), 1–2 (p. 2).
89. All English versions of Perse’s poem are taken from Eliot’s Anabasis.
90. Paz, ‘Cuatro o cinco puntos cardinales’ (1973), in OC15, 41.
91. Interview with Pierre Mazars, Le Figaro littéraire, 5 Nov 1960; quoted in Arthur Knodel, Saint-
John Perse: A Study of his Poetry (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1966), p. 40. e
translation is Knodel’s (p. 186n).
92. Paz, ‘T. S. Eliot: Mínima evocación’, in OC2, 293.
93. Unpublished interview, Mexico City, 9 April 2002. I am grateful to Homero Aridjis for permission
to quote from this interview.
94. Alain Bosquet, ‘Deux formes épiques’, Le Monde, 21 Dec 1963; quoted in Lile, Saint-John Perse
p. 124. Arthur J. Knodel, ‘Marcel Proust et Saint-John Perse: Le Fossé infranissable’, Revue de
Paris, 76, 12 (Dec 1969), 80–92 (p. 84).
PART II
Me acompaña, me intriga, me irrita, me
conmueve
CHAPTER 3
¿Arte de tesis o arte puro?
Paz’s links with the Contemporáneos were maintained in the magazine that
he founded as a seventeen-year-old with his classmates at the Escuela
Nacional Preparatoria, Barandal (1931–32). e magazine was modelled on
Contemporáneos and the young students engaged Salvador Novo to produce
it at his La Razón printing works. Not only did Novo, who took care of the
typography and design of the magazine, ensure a more professional-looking
publication than was habitually produced at the Escuela, he also opened
lines of communication between Paz and the older generation of writers.1 It
was through Barandal that Paz’s earliest works came to the aention of the
Contemporáneos, and Novo, Xavier Villaurrutia and Carlos Pellicer all
contributed poems to the magazine. Indeed, as Guillermo Sheridan notes,
‘the appearance of Barandal coincides to su an extent with the
disappearance of Contemporáneos that the odd article intended for the laer
and bearing its typographic imprint, is recycled in Barandal’.2 Yet when
Paz’s first published essay, ‘Ética del artista’ [Ethics of the Artist], appeared
in the new magazine, it revealed an uneasy relationship with what he
described as the ‘artepurismo’ [artistic purism] of the Contemporáneos.3
Although the essay does not refer to Eliot explicitly, it eoes Enrique
Munguía’s introduction to ‘El páramo’ and ‘Los hombres huecos’ with a call
that ‘Hemos de ser hombres completos, íntegros’ [We must be complete,
integral men] (OC13, 188). It also aas the Valéry who immediately
preceded Eliot’s poem in the pages of Contemporáneos, suggesting an
aempt to wrest this new influence from the custodianship of his immediate
Mexican forebears.
'Ética del artista'
‘Ética’ opens with an apparently straightforward oice between opposing
conceptions of the relationship between art and belief. Should the artist
‘tener una doctrina completa —religiosa, política, etc.’ [hold a comprehensive
belief — whether religious, political etc.]; ‘¿O debe, simplemente, sujetarse a
las leyes de la creación estética, desentendiéndose de cualquier otro
problema? ¿Arte de tesis o arte puro?’ [Or should he simply submit to the
laws of artistic creation, leaving all other questions aside? Art of thesis or
pure art?] (OC13, 185). Paz’s insertion of ‘simplemente’ into his description
of the purist stance clearly tips the scales in favour of an ‘arte de tesis’, and
recalls the polemical thrust of José Ortega Y Gasset’s La deshumanización
del arte (1925), whi criticized the young poet who ‘se propone
simplemente ser poeta’ [proposes simply to be a poet].4
La deshumanización del arte had provoked the Contemporáneos to
organize a dinner where they denounced Ortega’s book and read Juan
Ramón Jiménez’s ‘Vino, primero, pura…’ [She came, pure at first] as an
assertion of their own artistic integrity.5 By the time of ‘Ética del artista’,
Valéry had come to replace Jiménez as a focus for the group’s artepurismo,
and Paz sets out to confront the author of ‘Conversación sobre la poesía
(fragmentos)’:
Hay que separar, dice Valéry, las emociones que pueda suscitar un paisaje, un sucedido, de la
poesía. Lo primero —el estado de alma— es común a todos; lo segundo —la elaboración, la
recreación de un estado poético, con puras palabras— es solamente don del poeta.
(OC13, 185–86)
[One must distinguish, says Valéry, between the emotions that a landscape or event arouses and
poetry. e first — a state of soul — is common to everyone; the second — the elaboration, the
recreation of a poetic state, with pure words — is the exclusive task of the poet.]
Valéry separated the emotions that language arouses from the emotions that
‘los objetos o las circunstancias más diversas’ [the most diverse objects and
circumstances] could provoke.6 Paz subtly anges circunstancias to
sucedidos, circumstances to events. Valéry’s general aa on ideas of poetic
perception that fail to account for the mediating factor of language thus
becomes an aempt to exclude political or historical subject maer from the
poem. In a move that reflects Ortega’s criticism of the vanguardia as a
movement ‘dirigido a una minoría especialmente dotada’ [directed at an
especially gied minority],7 Paz goes on to extrapolate from the Fren
poet’s distinction between word and world a defence of elitism, whi sets
aside what is ‘común a todos’ in favour of what is ‘solamente don del poeta’.
Valéry becomes involved in a debate about political commitment and
intended audience whi was quite alien to his purposes.
Paz wishes to contain that awareness of artistic ‘métodos y formas’
[methods and forms] (EP, 7), whi the Contemporáneos found in both
Valéry and Eliot. In its place, he proposes not only an ‘arte de tesis’ but also
an art that has ‘un valor testimonial e histórico parejo a su calidad de
belleza’ [a testimonial and historical value equal to its beauty] (OC13, 185). It
is precisely this ‘valor testimonial e histórico’ that aracted Paz to The
Waste Land as an answer to the anti-historical bias of Symbolism and
modernismo. Although he is not mentioned by name, Eliot is implicitly
drawn from the ambit of Valéry and the Contemporáneos to a new poetic
project that will reflect the concerns of Paz and his peers.
is historical project has a distinctly Marxist colouring, whi is
enhanced with references ‘al proceso de división del trabajo’ [to the process
of the division of labour] and ‘medios dialécticos’ [dialectical means] (OC13,
186). Yet Paz’s allegiance complicates rather than clarifies the
straightforward question that he poses at the outset: ‘¿Arte de tesis o arte
puro?’. Since Paz adheres to the Marxist view that all art is bound to
historical circumstance, ‘testimonial e histórico’ becomes less a positive
virtue than the inescapable condition of any given art work. His uncertainty
over this question leads him to argue that artepurismo is itself a
consequence of historical conditions:
Desde un punto de vista histórico, la tesis del arte puro es una consecuencia, como la Reforma, la
Revolución francesa, el individualismo económico, de la disgregación del orden católico de la Edad
Media. El hombre ‘pierde toda relación con el mundo’. Es el hombre de Kant. Se pierde todo
sentido de humanidad trascendente. Y es que al hombre de ahora, dice Landsberg, no sólo le falta
una religión interior, sino una exteriorización de su religiosidad.
(OC13, 186)
[From a historical point of view, the thesis of pure art is a consequence, like the Reformation, the
Fren Revolution, and economic individualism, of the disintegration of the medieval Catholic
order. Man ‘loses all relation with the world’. He is the man of Kant. He loses all sense of
transcendent humanity. And as Landsberg says, not only does he la an internal religion, but also
the external means of expressing his religious instinct.]
Precisely because of their indifference to ‘todo sentido de humanidad
trascendente’, the artepuristas reflect their historical moment. Paz struggles
to account for the two imperatives of the Marxist project: the one to
anowledge historical circumstance; and the other to act upon it for
ange.8 An art of historical witness cannot itself compensate for ‘la
disgregación del orden católico de la Edad Media’, but merely reflects its
outcome in the modern period. His ‘arte de tesis’ is therefore called upon to
provide the ‘sentido de humanidad trascendente’ that has been lost. Once
again, the distinctions become blurred: ‘arte puro’ is itself described as a
form of ‘tesis’ in the passage cited above. Yet belief clearly is granted an
importance in Paz’s seme as a form of answer to the Contemporáneos,
whi complicates both his use of ‘history’ as a definition of the poem’s
worth and his broadly Marxist rhetoric.
Paz’s recourse to the Catholic order of the Middle Ages for a belief that
afforded a sense of ‘humanidad trascendente’ might seem odd given his
leist allegiance. In fact, it brings him into an unexpected sympathy with
The Waste Land’s own reading of history, at least as presented by Enrique
Munguía in his introduction to ‘El páramo’:
Una vez extraviada el anima mundi, la vida no posee ya un significado sobrenatural como en el
curso de la Edad Media; el hombre ya no siente unidos sus momentos por medio de esas
milagrosas cadenas de la fe y de la piedad.
(EP, 11)
[Once the anima mundi has been lost, life no longer possesses a supernatural significance as it did
in the Middle Ages; man no longer feels his moments unified by those miraculous ains of faith
and piety.]
Paz’s historical vision shares repeated points of contact with Eliot’s own.
Among the examples that Paz supplies of periods when an ‘arte de tesis’
predominated, he explains that ‘La Edad Media, época en que la misma
Filosofía se hace sierva de la Teología, tiene un arte al servicio de Dios y de
la Iglesia militante’ [e Middle Ages, a period when Philosophy itself
serves eology, has an art in the service of God and the Chur Militant]
(OC13, 187).9 He even draws on Dante as a counter to Góngora, ‘poeta al fin
de y para decadentes’ [ultimately a poet of and for decadents] (OC13, 187).10
It is very unlikely that Paz would have known Eliot’s essays on Dante at this
time, and although Munguía mentions the Italian poet, he gives lile idea of
his importance within Eliot’s seme.11 Nevertheless, George Santayana,
whose Three Philosophical Poets provided a model for Eliot’s own use of
Dante, was well known in Mexico. In a discussion of Walter Lippman, one
of Santayana’s disciples, Enrique Munguía contrasted the contemporary
situation, as both Eliot and ‘Ética’ did, with ‘la edad unificada de Dante y de
Santo Tomás de Aquino’ [the unified age of Dante and Saint omas
Aquinas].12 Although Paz’s knowledge of Eliot was limited at this stage,
Mexican culture was aentive to both the North American and European
contexts that Eliot inhabited. Paz could therefore share some of the
assumptions and vocabulary that had influenced Eliot, allowing him to link
his reading of The Waste Land and The Hollow Men to wider debates.
Paz would declare that, unlike Eliot, ‘no sentía nostalgia por el orden
cristiano medieval ni veía en la vuelta a Roma una vía de salvación’ [I did
not feel nostalgia for the medieval Christian order, nor did I see in the return
to Rome a route of salvation].13 Yet the medieval Christian order held an
araction for him, and his adumbration of an ‘arte de tesis’ blends political
and religious rhetoric with lile apparent discrimination. He groups together
approvingly artists who share ‘motivos religiosos, políticos o simplemente
doctrinarios’ [religious, political or simply doctrinaire intentions] (OC13,
186). He also opposes ‘una posición racionalista y abstracta’ [a rationalist
and abstract position] with one that is ‘mística y combativa’ [mystical and
combative], and enthuses over ‘la fe’ [the faith] and ‘el impulso de elevación
y de eternidad’ [the drive toward elevation and eternity] that drives a
culture towards ‘un fin extrahumano’ [an extrahuman end] (OC13, 186),
concluding, quite startlingly: ‘e hay un destino manifiesto a través de
todos los tiempos, que obliga el hombre a realizar la voluntad de la vida y de
Dios’ (OC13, 187) [ere is a manifest destiny across time, whi obliges
man to realize the will of life and of God].
Paz employs a Marxist rhetoric of historical analysis, but then finds in
that analysis a need for belief that removes him from a conventional Marxist
position. His call for an art with ‘un valor testimonial e histórico’ sits oddly
with references to an ‘arte de tesis’ that push towards ‘un fin extrahumano’
and ‘la voluntad […] de Dios’. e inconsistencies of the argument are bred
by an enthusiasm whi is in part a response to the political environment of
the time. In his account of Paz’s political activities during this period,
Guillermo Sheridan remarks on the general optimism that took hold of the
younger generation of writers: ‘It is not hard to imagine the euphoria of
those current times: those young men formed the first Mexican generation
to live world history as their own, as certainty and will.’14 is sense of
possibility was fed at the Colegio de San Ildefonso by a proximity, both
physical and intellectual, to the centres of power. One of Paz’s occasional
teaers, Samuel Ramos, managed to offend Plutarco Elías Calles, the de
15
facto ruler of Mexico at the time, with his essays on national identity. Paz
and his friends shared a conviction that the Mexican Revolution was not yet
complete, that a communist revolution was required to effect genuine social
ange. Yet this conviction embraced a variety of political standpoints, from
the anarism of José Bos Fonserré to the more rigid ideological positions
of Enrique Ramírez y Ramírez. Paz himself never joined the Communist
Party although he was active in the Unión Estudiantil Pro-Obrero y
Campesino (UEPOC). His reading of Eliot gets drawn into this diverse
atmosphere of political activism. A similar enthusiasm had aaed itself to
The Waste Land in England, as Miael North recounts:
A. L. Morton and other young communists like Edgell Riword were thrilled by the ‘strange and
unexpected transitions of the poem, even by its obscurity; it was in this sense “a liberating
experience” ’. For su readers, Eliot was ‘a standard around whi certain forces of revolt
gathered’.16
e young communists’ willingness to read verbal experiment as a figure of
political action recalls the estridentistas in Mexico. Yet Paz’s own optimism
was complicated by the need for a comprehensive statement of belief that
would both exceed estridentismo and mark out a territory apart from the
Contemporáneos.
e question of belief was one that similarly exercised Eliot in the years
that immediately preceded The Waste Land. In a passage that he added to
his Athenaeum article of 1920 on William Blake for The Sacred Wood, he
concluded that ‘the concentration resulting from a framework of mythology
and theology and philosophy is one of the reasons why Dante is a classic,
and Blake only a poet of genius’ (SW, 134). He also revised his ‘Dante’
(1919), launing an aa on Valéry’s assertion that ‘le poète moderne
essaie de produire en nous un état et de porter cet état excepcional au point
d’une jouissance parfaite’ [the modern poet aempts to produce in us a state
and to carry that exceptional state to the point of a perfect pleasure] (SW,
135). Eliot replied tartly that ‘Dante helps us to provide a criticism of M.
Valéry’s “modern poet” who aempts “to produce in us a state”. A state, in
itself, is nothing whatever’ (SW, 144):
No emotion is contemplated by Dante purely in and for itself. e emotion of the person, or the
emotion with whi our aitude appropriately invests the person, is never lost or diminished, is
always preserved entire, but is modified by the position assigned to the person in the eternal
seme, is coloured by the atmosphere of that person’s residence in one of the three worlds
(SW, 141)
Paz havers in ‘Ética’ between a poetry whi is ‘humano en el buen sentido’
and one that serves ‘un fin extrahumano’ (OC13, 186). Eliot’s ‘position
assigned to the person in the eternal seme’ appears to leave the human
behind, preparing for the later declaration of 1928 that his point of view was
‘classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion’.17
Yet Eliot frames his argument carefully. Although the individual emotion is
‘modified’ by its position in ‘the eternal seme’, it is not ‘diminished’ by it.
His insertion of the parenthetical ‘or the emotion with whi our aitude
appropriately invests the person’ maintains the awareness of the Symbolists
that the poem is not a transparent window onto universal truth, but a
linguistic object whose ‘existence is somewhere between the writer and the
reader’ (UPUC, 30), and whi must be interpreted. It is not entirely certain
whether his ‘appropriately’ refers to the ‘eternal seme’ or to an
‘atmosphere’, something mu less authoritative. Eliot’s diction eoes his
description of Swinburne’s poetry as a ne plus ultra of the Symbolist
tendency, in whi ‘language, uprooted, has adapted itself to an independent
life of atmospheric nourishment’ (SW, 127). Divine decree has given way to
the aura of suggestion that is created by an artistic construction.
Eliot was clearly feeling his way towards the ‘mythic method’ of ‘Ulysses,
Order, and Myth’ (1923) in the revisions of The Sacred Wood; yet the
thinking that would eventually formulate ‘a way of controlling and
ordering, of giving a shape and a significance’ to contemporary history, was
still alert to less firmly grasped aspects of self and art.18 e very effort of
‘Dante’ to frame ‘the emotions of the person’ reveals a contrary tendency of
Paz’s ‘Ética’ to elide the personal standpoint. Although for Paz’s modern
man, ‘no sólo le falta una religión interior, sino una exteriorización de su
religiosidad’, the call for a ‘valor testimonial e histórico’ and an ‘arte de
tesis’ tends to push the debate away from the self and onto exterior factors.
is la of concern for the shape of the individual’s experience surfaces
as a condemnation aimed squarely at the Contemporáneos of ‘la obra
escéptica y corrosiva del hombre individualista, estreamente hombre, sin
sentido religioso’ [the sceptical and corrosive work of the individualist man,
strictly man, without a religious sense] (OC13, 187). Paz astutely senses that
the ‘actitud crítica’ [critical aitude] of the Contemporáneos will tend to
vitiate larger structures of belief as the poem is reduced to a private,
epistemological meditation. Yet this sceptical awareness will persist in his
own poems. Eliot himself remarked on a scepticism in Valéry whi was
rigorous enough to exclude a belief in poetry itself as an ultimate value:
To the extreme self-consciousness of Valéry must be added another trait: his extreme scepticism. It
might be thought that su a man, without belief in anything whi could be the subject of poetry,
would find refuge in a doctrine of ‘art for art’s sake’. But Valéry was mu too sceptical to believe
even in art.19
Eliot’s admiration of Valéry’s scepticism runs deep.20 His article of 1919 on
Henry Adams also suggests that he identified with what he describes as ‘the
Boston doubt: a scepticism whi is difficult to explain to those who are not
born to it’; and there is a personal note to his description of Adams’s
experience in whi ‘the pleasure of demolition turned to ashes in his
mouth’.21 As Eliot’s later praise of this trait in Valéry implies, the experience
of a sceptical intelligence was not expelled by his conversion to the Anglican
Chur of 1928, but co-existed with it.
Eliot grappled with both sides of the debate that ‘Ética del artista’ enters.
On the one hand, he would argue that when criticism occupies itself solely
with ‘implications moral, social, religious or other’ then ‘the poetry becomes
hardly more than a text for a discourse’; while on the other, ‘if you sti too
closely to the “poetry” and adopt no aitude towards what the poet has to
say, you will tend to evacuate it of all significance’ (UPUC, 64). He did
lament the absence of what he described as a ‘criterion of seriousness’ in
Valéry’s work.22 Yet his early praise of Mallarmé for finding ‘his sincerity,
simply by close aention to the actual writing’ suggests that he could also
find an ethical dimension to the concentration on artistic process of the
Symbolists.23 e conflict between human experience, extra-human belief,
and aesthetic awareness is unresolved in Eliot. us he can be
commandeered to support either the more strident claims of ‘Ética’, or the
Contemporáneos: he is either the contemporary of Valéry, or he represents a
need for a more positive assertion beyond Valéry’s scepticism. Paz’s prose
itself opens questions that the more polemical thrust of his argument cannot
entirely control. Anthony Stanton describes ‘Ética del artista’ as a ‘clumsy
aempt to fuse the poetic experience with the religious and the political’; yet
that effort ‘will persist, in a mu more refined form, in the later work’.24
e contradictions and hostilities of ‘Ética’ serve as a point of departure for
Paz’s aempts to bring Eliot into his own poems.
Early Poems
Paz’s earliest poems, published in various magazines and periodicals before
his first book, Luna silvestre, appeared in 1933, sit oddly with the polemic
exercised in ‘Ética del artista’. His essay expressed a cavalier aitude to ‘las
leyes de la creación estética’ [the laws of artistic creation] (OC13, 185), yet
Paz studied these rules fastidiously as part of his own poetic apprenticeship.
He would later declare that ‘el aprendizaje comienza con la imitación’
[apprenticeship begins with imitation], and it was to members of the
Contemporáneos that he turned for models of tenical accomplishment,
most immediately towards Carlos Pellicer, his teaer of Literatura
25
hispanoamericana at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria. Paz’s early studies
of Hispanic literature had been confined to his grandfather’s library, whi
contained lile that was published aer 1900. In the prologue to volume iv
of his Obras completas, he remembers ‘con gratitud’ [with gratitude] the
meetings where Pellicer would read his own poems to his students — ‘los
primeros poemas modernos que oí’ [the first modern poems I heard] (OC4,
17).
Pellicer was accompanied by the poets of the Spanish vanguardia,
discovered in Gerardo Diego’s Poesía española. Antología 1915–1931. In ‘Los
pasos contados’, Paz describes his enthusiasm as a youth for ‘poetas
iluminados por una alegría solar’ [poets illuminated by a sunny joy] su as
Carlos Pellicer, Gerardo Diego and Rafael Alberti.26 Gerardo Diego had
participated with Huidobro in the founding of creacionismo and this playful
strain of the avant-garde would readily provide an alternative to the ‘horror
ante el mundo moderno’ [horror at the modern world] that Paz found in
Eliot. Guillermo Sheridan adds Jorge Guillén to this list, whi also suggests
an alternative to Valéry.27 Diego’s Antología reprinted Guillén’s leer to
Fernando Vela, dated ‘Viernes Santo, 1926’ in whi he expressed admiration
for Valéry but also a growing discomfort with the terminology of poesía
pura — ‘poesía simple prefiero yo’ [I prefer simple poetry].
28 As Robert
Havard argues, his Cántico of 1926 already marks a distance from the Fren
poet: while ‘creation and poetry are always separated in Valéry by the
mediating agency of his mind, his true subject’, in Guillén ‘reflexivity is
tempered by an uncomplicated vitality whi never loses tou with the real
world’.29 Guillén cites ‘Gerardo Diego en sus obras creacionistas’ as an
example of the poesía simple that he favours, thus tracing a link between his
own response to the self-consciousness of Valéry and the creacionismo
whi informed the work of Carlos Pellicer.30
Paz’s first published poem, ‘Juego’ (Game), declares that ‘Jugaré con los
meses y los años’ [I will play with the months and years] (OC13, 32)31 in a
clear imitation of Pellicer’s ‘Estudio’ [Study] from Colores en el mar y otros
poemas [Colours in the Sea and other Poems] (1921):
Jugaré con las casas de Curazao,
pondré el mar a la izquierda
y haré más puentes movedizos.
¡lo que diga el poeta!32
[I will play with the houses of Curazao,
I will place the sea on the le
and I will make more shiing bridges.
Whatever the poet says!]
is playfulness, and delight in the agency of the poet’s own imagination,
owes mu to the celebratory strain of creacionismo.33 It also recalls the
Saint-John Perse of Anabase, and another of Paz’s early poems, ‘Cabellera’
[Hair], carries an epigraph from the Fren poet: ‘Y mi pensamiento no es
ahora extraño al del marinero’ [And my thought is now close to the
sailor’s].34 Although Anthony Stanton argues convincingly that Pellicer,
rather than Perse, is the dominant presence in this poem, its marine
atmosphere of ‘fragancias salinas’ [salty fragrances] and ‘brisas tropicales’
[tropical breezes] (OC13, 34) would be equally at home in Anabase.35 Paz
seems to have associated the two poets as examples of imaginative agency,
or exaltación lírica [lyric exaltation].
As a form of action in, or upon, the world, imaginative agency has a
political aspect. Paz would make this connection when he praised Saint-John
Perse’s work: ‘aquello que la historia separa, lo une la poesía’ [what history
separates, poetry unites] (OC2, 145). Gabriel Zaid describes Pellicer in terms
that blend the political, or historical, with the imaginative, and whi
incidentally bring Anabase to mind:
Pellicer looks outward for the new land, in the primeval freshness of Creation as it begins to be
populated. He has the creative confidence of a founder of cities, the Christian optimism of the
Athenaeum generation, the great flights of Vasconcelos, the ease of a citizen of the world.36
Like Perse, Pellicer looks for a new land and to found new cities; like
Vasconcelos also who, with his injunction to ‘hacer cosas’ [do things], would
act as a guiding example of the politically active intellectual for the
contributors to Barandal.
e exaltación lírica of Pellicer and Perse provides an emotional
correlative for Paz’s ‘arte de tesis’, a way of mitigating the effects of ‘la
disgregación del orden católico de la Edad Media’ [the disintegration of the
medieval Catholic order] (OC13, 186). Yet it tends to by-pass rather than
answer the questions that are raised in ‘Ética del artista’. e creacionismo
that lies behind Pellicer decrees that the poet should act like nature, thus
collapsing the poetic imagination with the object of its aention. e
imagination simultaneously conforms to and acts upon the world. Yet how
does it cope with a world to whi it cannot conform: with objects from
whi it is alienated; with human events whi threaten it? How can it
accommodate an experience of ‘horror ante el mundo moderno’ to aieve
‘un valor testimonial e histórico’ [a testimonial and historical value]? How,
indeed, can su a happy coincidence of mind and object make space for the
intervening tesis, or belief, that will mediate the relation of self and
environment?
Once the spectres have been raised of history and consciously articulated
belief, the eerful accord of Pellicer’s poems comes to seem less a maer of
identification between self and world than of careful exclusion on the part of
the poet. e contrast would seem all the more pronounced in the case of
Pellicer since, outside his poems, he led an active political life that entailed a
considerable degree of personal risk. Yet if poetic vision is based not upon a
natural sanction, but individual oice, an extremely heavy burden falls
squarely upon the poet’s own creative self. As José Gorostiza describes the
operation of Pellicer’s work: ‘El poema […] crece […] por la sola fuerza del
ímpetu lírico’ [the poem grows from the sheer force of the lyric impulse].37
But the self alone is not enough. Once the poem relies solely on the force
of lyric impulse, then the world begins to lose substance. It is a paern that
appears in early poems by Paz whi engage Pellicer directly. ‘Cabellera’, for
example, progresses from a sense of plenitude to unreality:
Cabellera, cambiante de olas,
apenas presentida, irreal,
como deseo de viaje,
como la sombra del rumor del viento
en el corredor del mar.
(OC13, 34)
[Hair, shiing like waves,
barely sensed, unreal,
like a desire for travel,
like the shadow of the murmur of the wind
in the corridor of the sea.]
‘Orilla’ [Shore] of this period also concludes with a vision of absence:
Te amo por el silencio hueco de tu ausencia.
Te amo porque no eres.38
(OC13, 38)
[I love you for the silent emptiness of your absence.
I love you because you are not.]
is sense of absence is the other side of the exaltación lírica found in
Pellicer and Perse. It is the unreality that seeps into a world that has been
too comprehensively imagined.
Pellicer provides a poetic and affective alternative to Eliot, to ‘Ética del
artista’ and to the self-consciousness of Valéry; yet he does not provide an
answer to them. In a review of Camino, Bernardo Ortiz de Montellano
described his world as ‘civilizado, deportivo’ [civilized, playful] and ‘de
bellos tonos plásticos’ [of lovely plastic tones], but ‘sin drama interior’
[without inner drama].39 When Paz came to write on Pellicer in 1955, he
similarly described a poet who esews ‘los páramos de su propia
conciencia’ [the waste lands of his own consciousness] in favour of ‘el
camino del sol’ [the path of the sun].40 e eo of Munguía’s title for The
Waste Land is reinforced as Pellicer is described in terms that cast him as an
anti-Eliot: though his poetry las ‘la angustia’ [the anguish] and ‘el drama
del hombre’ [the drama of man], it is ‘una vena de agua en el desierto’ [an
underground stream of water in the desert] (OC4, 240). Buoyed by his
contact with André Breton and the Surrealists, Paz was trying to find a
response to Eliot in this period that would credit the sensualism and
enthusiasm of Pellicer. In 1931, however, the call of ‘Ética’ for art with ‘un
valor testimonial e histórico’ was more pressing.
e first of Paz’s poems to answer that call, and to show clear evidence of
his Eliot reading, is ‘Nocturno de la ciudad abandonada’ [Nocturne of the
Abandoned City]. Anthony Stanton sees the possible influence of The Waste
Land on both the poem’s form and its allusions to a now defunct mythology:
More than in the avant-garde form (fragmentariness, simultaneous parallelism and col lage in The
Waste Land), the possible influence of Eliot resides in the contrastive intention and in the allusions
to a ruined mythology in an urban locale.41
Yet the form is closer to The Hollow Men than to The Waste Land. e
poem’s opening line mirrors the syntax of ‘is is the dead land. / is is
cactus land’ (CPP, 84) from Eliot’s later poem.42
Ésta es la Ciudad del Silencio.
De la voz amarga de lágrimas.
Ésta es la Ciudad de la Desesperanza.43
[is is the City of Silence.
Of the bier voice of tears.
is is the City of Desperation.]
Paz even replicates the paern of assertion and negation that he could find
in León Felipe’s translation, ‘Los hombres huecos’. As Paz’s speaker observes
the ruins of a pre-Columbian civilization, he presents the reader with a
corresponding movement in ‘Los números mágicos exhaustos’ [the magic
numbers exhausted], and
Las fórmulas y los conjuros,
impronunciables, borrados de los bloques eternos.
(p. 7)
[e formulas and the spells,
unpronounceable, erased from the eternal blos of stone.]
e line break of The Hollow Men dramatized the transition from aspiration
to deflation. Paz adopts the ironic perspective that both Eliot and Ramón
López Velarde had found in Laforgue, in whi an ascending movement is
undermined.
e appearance of pre-Columbian myth in ‘Nocturno de la ciudad
abandonada’ marries a general sense of historical decline that recalls The
Waste Land with the specific form of The Hollow Men. As Stanton points
out, this is the first reference to pre-Columbian mythology in Paz’s poetry;
but the native trope is shaped by Eliot’s influence.44 Paz’s ‘columna rota’ is
different from Pellicer’s ‘tambor pulido / desta columna rota’ [polished drum
/ of this broken column] in ‘Tríptico’, whi beats with the life of an ancient
civilization.45 e poetic form that Paz has adopted from Eliot guides his
aitude to the mythology. Anglo-American critical opinion has itself
divided over the significance of The Waste Land’s ‘mythic method’. For
Cleanth Brooks ‘Eliot’s seme is the rehabilitation of a system of beliefs,
known but now discredited’, yet Ronald Bush argues that it is simply an
aerthought, extraneous to the main interest of the poem.46 In ‘Nocturno’
myth is decidedly inefficacious. Paz follows Munguía’s reading of The Waste
Land’s ‘mythic method’ as a symptom of, rather than a remedy for,
historical decline.
Yet this portrait of historical decline is surprisingly reticent about the
specific aracter of modern, urban experience. Paz would have been
conscious of the overlaying of modern and pre-Columbian civilizations in
Mexico City, and as a ild he even discovered with his cousins what turned
out to be an ancient mound near his home in Mixcoac.47 Yet the máquinas
[maines] and fábricas [factories] of the estridentistas are absent, as are the
tranvías [trams] that recur as a shorthand in poems of the period for
contemporary urban existence. His thoroughly capitalized City of Silence
and Desperation has also been abandoned by the varied human aracters of
The Waste Land. Rather than the narrative vignees of Eliot’s poem, Paz
pis up the incantatory repetition of The Hollow Men and ‘What the
under Said’. It is an element of Eliot’s writing that finds a ready home in
Catholic countries. With its liturgical syntax, Ash-Wednesday would also
become one of the more important poems of Eliot’s Mexican reception, and
Paz related Eliot to poets su as Xavier Villaurrutia and Pablo Neruda for
whom the litany was a habitual form.
Paz’s speaker contemplates ruins, and more specifically a language in
ruins: ‘Las fórmulas y los conjuros / impronunciables…’. is theme of
language modifies The Hollow Men, whi focuses on ‘images’: ‘Here the
stone images / Are raised, here they receive / e supplication of a dead
man’s hand’ (CPP, 84). Paz introduces a ‘metapoetic consciousness’, as
Stanton describes it.48 ‘Ética del artista’ had aempted to separate historical
testimony from the artepurismo of the Contemporáneos, but here Paz
contracts the two concerns: the decline he confronts is simultaneously
historical and linguistic. It is a move that ushers a reflexive consciousness to
the poem, allowing him to test the efficacy of different poetic languages, and
Stanton notes that towards the end of ‘Nocturno’ Pellicer is brought into
dialogue with the more sombre vision that he traces to Eliot:49
(Los viajes azules de los pájaros
jamás escuaron silencio
y sombra muerta tan igual.)
p. 8)
[(e blue journeys of the birds
never heard su silence
and dead shadow.)]
e Eliotic voice does not wholly dismiss the Pellicerian: ‘e other voice
hasn’t been cancelled but made relative.’50 In fact, the poem ends with a
question that invites the return of ‘poetas iluminados por una alegría solar’:
‘¿Cuándo veremos de nuevo al sol?’ [When will we see the sun again?] (p.
8). Yet the new context suggests that Paz’s early araction towards the
playful delight of Pellicer and the Spanish poets of the vanguardia was
being allenged by the historical injunction that he derived from Eliot.
e exaltación lírica of Pellicer and Perse is analogous to the ‘arte de tesis’
of ‘Ética del artista’: both are means of relating to the world, and of
answering an experience of disgregación [disintegration]. e negating
movement of ‘Nocturno de la ciudad abandonada’, whi contemplates the
erasure of pre-Columbian civilization, is then driven by a contrary sear for
a ‘valor testimonial e histórico’ [testimonial and historical value]. Both
historical witness and the deflated realization of ‘Nocturno’ are forms of
consciousness, forms of awareness that militate against the plunge into
feeling or belief that exaltación lírica and an ‘arte de tesis’ require. e
conflict can be approaed at different levels of the poem’s operation as a
bale between connection with and an awareness that one is separate from
the world; or between the creative impulse and the rational consciousness
that impedes that impulse. Paz’s use of Eliot as the vehicle of a negating
consciousness draws him closer to the Valéry that ‘Ética’ had so resisted and
closer, also, to the ‘actitud crítica’ [critical aitude] of the Contemporáneos.
Eliot himself talked of ‘the agony of creation, for a mind like Valéry’s […]
the mind constantly mos and dissuades, and urges that the creative
activity is vain’.51 Munguía had also observed ‘una rebuscada esterilidad’ [a
studied sterility] in the work of the two authors (EP, 7). In ‘Ética’ this
tendency is dismissed as the ‘obra escéptica y corrosiva’ [sceptical and
corrosive work] of the Contemporáneos; yet it is a constant awareness in his
own poems, whi mistrust and qualify the poetics of exaltation to whi
they are nevertheless strongly aracted.
Eliot does in fact converge in ‘Nocturno de la ciudad abandonada’ with
Xavier Villaurrutia, whose article of 1928 had promoted the Nouvelle Revue
Francaise version of The Waste Land’s author. Villaurrutia wrote a series of
‘Nocturnos’ [Nocturnes], two of whi Barandal published as a supplement
to the December 1931 issue. He supplied Paz with both a title and a further
model for a poetry of absences. Villaurrutia was a keen reader of Eliot’s
poems, and in a leer of 1935 to José Gorostiza he declared, ‘He recaído en
los poemas de T. S. Eliot como en una fría y conocida fiebre’ [I have fallen
ba into the poems of T. S. Eliot as into a cold and familiar fever].52 Like
The Hollow Men, Villaurrutia’s Barandal ‘Nocturno eterno’ lists a series of
presences whi are systematically voided:
o cuando de una boca que no existe
sale un grito inaudito
que nos ea a la cara su luz viva
y se apaga y nos deja una ciega sordera53
[or when from a mouth that doesn’t exist
an unheard cry breaks out
whi throws its living light in our face
and then goes out and leaves us a blind deafness]
Villaurrutia does not locate these absences, however, as the symptom of
historical decline, in the manner of Paz’s poem. His conclusion suggests a
different perspective:
porque vida silencio piel y boca
y soledad recuerdo cielo y humo
nada son sino sombras de palabras
que nos salen al paso de la noe54
[because life silence skin and mouth
and solitude memory sky and smoke
are just shadows of words
that come out to meet us at night]
e world is only the shadow of the poet’s medium, language. Villaurrutia
takes a vision of absence that Paz’s own ‘Nocturno de la ciudad abandonada’
entertains and uses it to explore the preoccupation with artistic form that
the Contemporáneos found in Paul Valéry. ‘Nocturno de la ciudad
abandonada’ shares this awareness of language, in spite of the polemic of
‘Ética’, and it is difficult to separate clearly the presence of Villaurrutia from
the presence of Eliot in Paz’s poem.
e sense of vacancy and unreality in Villaurrutia’s ‘Nocturnos’ shares an
obvious kinship with The Hollow Men and The Waste Land. One needn’t
insist, however, on a direct influence of Eliot on Villaurrutia. e Mexican
poet was well read in the Fren authors who had influenced Eliot, and
doubts about the reality of self and world can be understood in more general
terms as a natural consequence of nineteenth-century Idealism. e
significance of the similarities between Eliot and Villaurrutia lies, in the
present context, in the way that this combined influence on some of Paz’s
early poems repositions the debate of ‘Ética’. ere, Paz criticizes the
Contemporáneos for their ‘obra escéptica y corrosiva’, and proposes as an
alternative (in fact, two alternatives) an art with ‘valor testimonial e
histórico’ and an ‘arte de tesis’. Eliot seems aligned with Paz in this critique,
and against the Contemporáneos, as one of the ‘hombres completos,
íntegros’ who are willing to admit history and make assertions of belief. In
‘Nocturno de la ciudad abandonada’, however, Eliot is brought into the
ambit of Villaurrutia precisely for an ‘obra escéptica y corrosiva’. Although
distinctions can be made between the two poets — Eliot brings a sense of
historical decline that Villaurrutia’s poems la, while conversely the sense
of unreality in Villaurrutia’s work accentuates an aspect of Eliot that might
otherwise have been unexploited by Paz — together they provide a poetry
whi vitiates the assertions of political and pseudo-religious belief that
‘Ética’ is directed towards. ey suggest that the true opposition in Paz’s
poems lies not between scepticism on the one hand, and belief allied to
historical witness on the other, but between a scepticism allied to historical
witness and the call of ‘Ética del artista’ for an ‘arte de tesis’. Paz’s
ambivalence towards the scepticism of the Contemporáneos runs
throughout his various comments on them. Yet his desire for assertion and
celebration is constantly aaed by a critical consciousness of the
limitations of poetic activity. Paz’s reading of Eliot is asked to serve
contradictory aspects of the early work: he is used both in conjunction with
the Contemporáneos and in opposition to them.
In ‘Los pasos contados’, Paz groups together as ‘iluminados por una
alegría solar’ [illuminated by a sunny joy] the poets he had discovered in
Gerardo Diego’s Antología. Yet one of their number, Rafael Alberti, provided
a more complex influence on Paz’s earlier poems, whi would be confirmed
when the Spanish poet visited Mexico in 1934. Paz recalled that his
classmates divided into different cliques according to their poetic
preferences for Huidobro, Neruda, García Lorca, or Alberti: ‘Yo pertenecía a
la secta de Alberti’ [I belonged to the Alberti sect].55 Not only was Alberti
one of the most prominent representatives of the peninsular Spanish avant-
garde, but the trajectory of his career encompassed a number of the poetic
options that confronted Paz. e playfulness of Alberti’s early collections
su as Marinero en tierra [Sailor on Land] (1924) had given way to a
disturbing portrait of spiritual suffering in Sobre los ángeles [On Angels]
(1927–28) and eventual membership of the Communist Party. Emilio Barón
Palma argues that Ángel Flores’s translation of The Waste Land arrived too
late in Spain to have a direct influence on poets like Alberti.56 Yet Sobre los
ángeles provided Paz with another example of a disjointed modern poetry
that represented a state of crisis. Verbal coincidences between the poems by
Alberti and Eliot would suggest a confluence of models for Paz. e Spanish
title of The Hollow Men, ‘Los hombres huecos’, is almost a composite of the
exclamation ‘¡Ah, sí! Pasaba un traje / deshabitado, hueco’ [Ah yes! A suit
went past / hollow, uninhabited] from ‘El cuerpo deshabitado’ [e
Uninhabited Body], and ‘en las órbitas secas de los hombres deshabitados’
[in the dried eyeballs of the uninhabited men] of ‘Castigos’ [Punishment].57
Alberti’s Sobre los ángeles participates with Villaurrutia in the broadly
Eliotic aracter of ‘Nocturno de la ciudad abandonada’. Paz’s ‘Silencio’
[Silence] and ‘grandes vientos heroicos / […] inmóviles’ [great heroic winds
/ […] still] (p. 7) eo Alberti’s ‘Paraíso perdido’ [Paradise Lost]: ‘Silencio.
Más silencio. / Inmóviles los pulsos / del sinfín de la noe’ [Silence. More
silence. / Still the pulses / of the endlessness of night].58 Paz’s subsequent
‘Desde el principio’ [Since the Beginning] suggests elements of both Eliot
and Alberti:
Huyendo, en el centro del Universo,
De donde huyeron los ángeles.59
[Fleeing, in the centre of the Universe,
From where the angels fled.]
e gerund — ‘Huyendo’ — brings the present participles that open ‘e
Burial of the Dead’ to mind. However, both the Munguía and the Flores
translations of The Waste Land employ present indicative for Eliot’s more
open syntax.60 Anthony Stanton suggests a more likely source in Sobre los
ángeles, whi employs the verb, if not the grammatical form, repeatedly:
‘huyen de mí los cielos’ [the skies flee from me]; ‘Enemiga era la tierra, /
porque huía’ [e land was hostile, / because it was fleeing]; and ‘¡Centro! /
Y huye, centro’ [Centre! / And it flees, centre].61 Yet Paz may also have
remembered ‘e Fire Sermon’ and ‘las ninfas han huído’ (EP, 22) [‘the
nymphs are departed’ (CPP, 67)]. His angels certainly stand as
representatives of a mythical reality that has now disappeared, perpetuating
the reading of Eliot that appears in ‘Nocturno de la ciudad abandonada’.
Paz aempts to express in poetic form the analysis of ‘Ética del artista’,
whi had identified the need for an ‘arte de tesis’, or a controlling myth. Yet
the poems of Sobre los ángeles arise from a less public concern. Alberti
described their composition as conducted ‘a tientas, sin encender la luz, a
cualquier hora de la noe, con un automatismo no buscado, un empuje
espontáneo, tembloroso, febril’ [hesitatingly, without puing on the light, at
all hours of the night, with an unsought automatism, a spontaneous
pressure, shaking, febrile].62 Leaving aside the precise Surrealist allegiance
that ‘automatismo’ implies, Alberti roots his poems in impulses that create
their own dictates.63 His angels are not a departed, collective belief so mu
as a personal, oen cryptic mythology. ey are, of course, also trans-
personal, reflecting his early, unhappy exposure to Jesuit methods of
education at the Colegio de San Luis Gonzaga in El Puerto de Santa María.
Yet any historical extension of this autobiographical experience, to a sense of
‘la disgregación del orden católico de la Edad Media’, for example, would be
hard to execute.
As a statement about the world, Paz’s vacant centre from whi the
angels have departed is easier to interpret than Alberti’s poems, but the
specific standpoint from whi ‘Desde el principio’ is articulated is less easy
to gauge. e poem’s opening section refers to ‘tu voz’ [your voice], a
recognizably Albertian direct address. Yet in the next section, second person
singular shis to first person plural:
Así caminamos los hombres,
lejos de la eternidad.64
(p. 12)
[Like this we men walk,
far from eternity.]
Paz uses the line break of The Hollow Men to present then undercut an
assertion, dramatizing the speaker’s disappointment at his separation from
eternity. e use of the first person plural also eoes the rhetorical frame of
Eliot’s poem — ‘We are the hollow men’ (CPP, 83) — serving to generalize a
personal state and give it a historical relevance: the reader is not simply
confronted with the individual creative imagination, but the experience of a
group or a society. e use of the first person plural continues with ‘nuestros
propios pensamientos’ [our own thoughts] but it is then curiously
abandoned for the third person of ‘Hombre, lloroso hombre, desventurado
hombre’ [Man, tearful man, unfortunate man], a clear eo of ‘Y el
hombre… Pobre… pobre!’ [And man… Poor… poor man!] of César Vallejo’s
‘Los heraldos negros’ [e Bla Heralds] (1918).65 e poem shis
uncomfortably from the intimate address of tu through the exemplary
nosotros with its historical extension to the pitying observation of the third
person. e oddness of the transition suggests a poet, as one would expect at
this stage of his career, still trading different influences whi do not entirely
cohere. It does also suggest an uncertainty, however, about the perspective
from whi the extended social and historical world is to be perceived and
answered. Stanton detects ‘the desire to write a poetry of metaphysical
dimensions’, but argues that Paz would have to immerse himself in the
religious experience of the Spanish Golden Age poet Francisco de evedo
‘to be able to explore profitably the areas of depth and anguish whi appear
here as regions that are named but not truly inhabited’.66 evedo would
provide Paz with an example of courageous lucidity in the face of death and
alienation. Yet as Stanton suggests, these early poems are limited by an
impatience to work at the level of ‘metaphysical dimensions’, or an ‘arte de
tesis’, rather than the more unruly personal experience of evedo and,
indeed, Alberti.
A general sense of disaffection is clear in ‘Desde el principio’, frequently
articulated with Eliotic images of drought and sterility: Paz refers to ‘el aire
funeral, en lloro estéril’ [the funereal air, in sterile wailing] and ‘la aridez del
sueño’ [the aridity of dream] (p. 11). Munguía had observed of The Waste
Land, elaborating rather, that ‘durante todo el poema, delira el poeta de sed’
[throughout the poem, the poet is delirious with thirst] (EP, 13) and, indeed,
in ‘Desde el principio’ the poet cries out ‘qué sed’ [what thirst] (p. 11). is
image is answered in the final section of the poem with ‘el reino de los
surtidores aéreos’ [the kingdom of the aerial springs] (p. 12), suggesting a
pressing desire to answer and redeem the condition that the images of
drought express. Yet what poetic form could that answer take? Potentially
Pellicerian or Persian coastal landscapes are summoned, yet they have
become hostile: ‘Atravesando países de niebla / y costas duras, / mordidas
por las aullantes olas’ [Crossing lands of mist / and hard coasts, / bien by
the moaning waves]; ‘mientras el viento desterrado grita sobre una roca’
[while the exiled wind screees on the ro] (p. 12). Paz is torn between the
poetic worlds of Pellicer and Perse, whi will continue to hold an
imaginative appeal, and the conscious project adumbrated in ‘Ética del
artista’, whi has yet to find adequate artistic form.
Given this conflict between intention and available form, it is perhaps
unsurprising that Paz’s first collection of poems, Luna silvestre [Rustic
Moon], should mark a temporary retreat. His oice of title recalls the
nocturnal melanoly of the modernistas, whi the declaration of ‘Juego’
that ‘izá asesine a un crepúsculo’ [perhaps I will murder an evening]
(OC13, 33), and the ‘lunas estranguladas’ [strangled moons] of ‘Desde el
principio’ (p. 12) had satirized. e first poem of the collection also
unexpectedly recalls Juan Ramón Jiménez’s ‘Vino, primero, pura…’, whi
had been su a talisman for the Contemporáneos:
Cómo volviste a ser, Poesía,
en la frontera exacta de la luz y la sombra,
cómo volviste a mí, Poesía,
tan casta en tu desnudez, vestida de pudores.67
(OC13, 43)
[How you came ba to me, Poetry,
in the exact boundary between light and shadow,
how you came ba to me, Poetry,
so refined in your nudity, dressed in modesty.]
Where Paz departs from Jiménez is in an aempt to locate his ‘Poesía’
physically, and, significantly, he finds it in states of between-ness: ‘en la
frontera exacta de la luz y la sombra’; and in the previous stanza ‘entre una
estrella y otra’ [between one star and another].
at ‘entre’ could be an eo of the repeated ‘Between…’ that concludes
The Hollow Men, and whi became a recurrent shorthand for Paz to express
states of disjunction. Yet there is not the evidence for a direct influence of
Eliot on Luna silvestre, as can be argued for ‘Nocturno’ and ‘Desde el
principio’. Nevertheless, the theme of absence, and the negating movement
whi Villaurrutia and Eliot bring to Paz, is prominent. An address to the
moon proceeds,
Por el aire de ausencia de mi noe
conduces a los sueños, luna grácil
(OC13, 43)
[rough the air of absence of my night
you make your way to dreams, graceful moon.
An address to his lover also dwells on vacancy:
Mis brazos rodeando el círculo perfecto,
el hueco, lleno de memorias,
que me deja la ausencia de tu cuerpo
(OC13, 46)
[My arms embracing the perfect circle,
the space, filled with memories,
that the absence of your body leaves.]
ere is even a suggestion, as in the Eliot poems, that this sense of vacancy
is the result of a historical process. Present dearth is set against past
plenitude: ‘expulsado de mis antiguos reinos’ [expelled from my former
kingdoms] (OC13, 45); or ‘Amor, quedan las voces agotadas, / el silencio seré
de tu silencio’ [Love, spent voices are what is le, / I will be the silence of
your silence] (OC13, 47).
In spite of their seemingly outmoded rhetoric, these poems respond to the
pressures that beset Paz’s early poetic project. ey explore the experience
of vacancy that Eliot shared with the ‘obra escéptica y corrosiva’ of the
Contemporáneos, and they also display a conscious reflection on the limits
of poetic form. As Stanton describes it: ‘the homage to tradition is an act of
appropriation and a small allenge expressed in the selfsame terms of
traditional rhetoric’.68 at allenge provides a means of protesting the
inadequacy of the rhetoric and beliefs that Paz has inherited. So far,
however, he has not found a way beyond his inheritance; he has not found a
satisfactory means of expressing the impulse that motivated his call for an
‘arte de tesis’, or that drew him towards the exaltación lírica of Pellicer. He
is trapped in a form of negative way.
Cruz y Raya
In an interview of 1972, Paz described Eliot’s Waste Land admiringly as a
poem of negation: ‘Creo que el poema grandioso de Eliot, “e Waste Land”,
es el momento de duda y negación. Creo que es uno de los grandes poemas
de nuestro siglo’ [I think that Eliot’s major poem, The Waste Land, is the
moment of doubt and negation. I think it is one of the great poems of our
century].69 Christopher Ris has also remarked on the prevalence of
negative states in the poem: ‘The Waste Land is a congregation of voids. e
“dead sound” of a ur clo; the tarot card “Whi is blank”; “the violet
hour” whi issues in a “throbbing between two lives”: all of these are
fostered by the encompassing vacuum of silence or rather silences.’70 Paz felt
drawn to this aspect of Eliot in his own poems, whi explored states of
vacancy and silence in the company of Villaurrutia and Alberti. Yet those
poems also sought a corresponding vision of plenitude and in ‘Ética del
artista’ he aas the ‘obra escéptica y corrosiva’ of the Contemporáneos in
an aempt to fill the void with an ‘arte de tesis’.
In September 1933, however, the same month that Luna silvestre was
published, a Spanish translation appeared in Cruz y Raya of Martin
Heidegger’s ‘What is Metaphysics?’, his seminal meditation on the positive
value of the void. In interview with Rita Guibert, Paz remembers the event:
Nos causó mua impresión leer en español un texto de Heidegger, ¿Qué es la nada?, traducido
por Zubiri y publicado en Cruz y Raya, la revista de José Bergamín.71
[A Spanish version of a text by Heidegger, ‘What is the Nothing?’, translated by Zubiri and
published in José Bergamín’s magazine, Cruz y Raya, made a big impression on us.]
Paz significantly misremembers the title of the translation, ‘¿é es la
metafísica?’, in favour of the essay’s content — an interrogation of ‘the
nothing’. Heidegger gives philosophical substance to a use of Eliot and
Villaurrutia that seemed merely negative, or an evasion of artistic
responsibility to the author of ‘Ética del artista’.
Unlike the unwieldy ‘the nothing’ used as a substantive in English for
Heidegger’s das nichts, nada enjoys numerous and distinguished precedents
in Spanish from the poets of the Golden Age to Alberti’s Sobre los ángeles,
where it appears repeatedly in relation to Ignatian forms of meditation.
Heidegger’s appearance in Cruz y Raya also occurred in the broader context
of German Phenomenology, whi had been steadily disseminated in the
Spanish-speaking world by José Ortega y Gasset’s Revista de Occidente.
Joseph Chiari describes Phenomenology as ‘a method of description of the
things themselves and of the world as they appear to the naïve gaze of the
onlooker, freed from all conceptual, a priori constructions’.72 is aempt to
free the self of conceptual cluer provides an explicit justification for the
sceptical tendency of the Contemporáneos whi, following Valéry, aims to
arrive at the basic poetic component by a process of elimination.73
Like Valéry’s poetics, Heidegger’s ‘¿é es la metafísica?’ proceeds from
the contingent perspective of the individual’s experience. Metaphysics is not
so mu a speculation on what is out there but a question posed in a
determinate here and now:
El preguntar metafísico tiene que ser totalitario y debe plantearse siempre desde la situación
esencial en que se halla colocada la existencia interrogante. Nos preguntamos, aquí y ahora, para
74
nosotros.
[Metaphysical enquiry must be posed as a whole and from the essential position of the existence
[Dasein] that questions. We are questioning, here and now, for ourselves.]
estions of metaphysics thus become epistemological questions — not
‘What is it?’, but ‘What, and how, do I know?’. In an extension of this
experiential approa, human emotion then becomes the gateway to
knowledge: ‘la angustia hace patente la nada’ [anxiety reveals the
nothing].75 Yet, as in Valéry, and as in Paz’s early poems, human experience
and knowledge are mediated through language. In response to the question,
‘¿é es la nada?’ [What is the nothing?]:
Toda respuesta a esta pregunta resulta, desde un principio, imposible. Porque la respuesta se
desenvolverá necesariamente en esta forma: la nada ‘es’ esto o lo otro. Tanto la pregunta como la
76
respuesta respecto a la nada son, pues, igualmente un contrasentido.
[Every answer to this question is also impossible from the start. For it necessarily assumes the
form: the nothing ‘is’ this or that. With regard to the nothing, question and answer alike are
inherently absurd.]
At one stage he even asks: ‘¿No caemos con todo esto en una vana disputa
de palabras?’ [But perhaps our confused talk already degenerates into an
empty squabble over words].77 Heidegger’s method inadvertently lends
authority to the Contemporáneos, but it is with his conception of the
nothing as in itself something positive, that a corrosive, eliminatory poetics
is delivered an active goal:
La nada es la posibilitación de la patencia del ente, como tal ente, para la existencia humana.
La
nada no nos proporciona el contracepto del ente, sino que pertenece originariamente a la esencia
del ser mismo.78
[For human existence, the nothing makes possible the openedness of beings as su. e nothing
does not merely serve as the counterpoint of beings; rather, it originally belongs to their essential
unfolding as su.]
e nothing is not viewed as being’s contrary, but as its foundation, an
integral part of being. e states of nullity and the moments of silence or
incoherence that occur in The Waste Land and The Hollow Men can be read
within this seme not as symptoms of historical, social breakdown but as
moments of access to a fundamental aspect of the human condition. Indeed,
Ris argues that in Eliot ‘the void and the vacuum can be positive in their
very negativity’.79
Paz refers to The Waste Land as Eliot’s moment of ‘duda y negación’, and
I have associated that negation with the nothing of ‘What is metaphysics?’.
Heidegger, however, made a distinction between the two terms. Negation, as
an action done to being has to be distinct from ‘nothing’, whi is prior to
being, and its foundation: ‘la nada es más originaria que el no y que la
negación’ [We assert that the nothing is more original than the ‘not’ and
negation].80 Yet the general context of Phenomenology as a movement
whi seeks to arrive at truth by the elimination of false measures would
encourage this conflation, and an argument can still be made for a relation
between Heidegger’s nothing and the positive value that a religious via
negativa would place on negation as part of a wider process. Heidegger’s
rhetoric certainly carries a religious connotation whi justifies the
association: ‘En la angustia hay un retro-ceder ante… que no es ciertamente
un huir, sino una fascinada quietud’ [In anxiety there occurs a shrinking
ba before… that is surely not any sort of flight but rather a kind of
bewildered calm].81 e poetic precedent of nada in Spanish is also mated
by a strong devotional and meditative connotation whi is active in the
poems of Sobre los ángeles. e ‘obra escéptica y corrosiva’ of the
Contemporáneos thus acquires positive value as both a stage of a spiritual
journey, and a means of access to the foundation of being. e sense of
absence and vacuity that Paz’s Pellicerian poems both resist and admit, and
whi his ‘arte de tesis’ aims to dismiss, becomes a necessary aspect of
experience.
In Mar 1934, six months aer Heidegger’s ‘¿é es la metafísica?’
appeared, Cruz y Raya published a translation by A. Marialar, a
contributor to The Criterion, of Eliot’s ‘Lancelot Andrewes’ (1926). It was the
first of Eliot’s prose to appear in Spanish. Although Paz never mentioned the
translation, it seems likely, given that both he and other Mexican writers
were reading Cruz y Raya at this time, that it would have been noticed and
discussed. e essay provides a further, and contradictory, intervention in
the debate between purism, scepticism, and belief — Cruz y Raya was
subtitled Revista de afirmación y negación [Magazine of affirmation and
negation] — that informs Paz’s early work.
Marialar describes The Waste Land, and by implication the pre-
conversion Hollow Men also, in terms that confirm Paz’s description of a
‘momento de duda y negación’: ‘No era tierra de promisión la acre paramera
de Eliot; era, sí, campo raso donde edificarse’ [e barren plain of Eliot was
not the promised land; it was an open space on whi to build]. In 1922 Eliot
es un agnóstico que clama, con árido acento, la amargura de páramo desollados. Mas el yermo
conduce a un paraíso. Poco después, Eliot empieza a descubrir el gozo en el Cristianismo […] Hoy,
Eliot es un converso de la Iglesia Anglicana.82
[is an agnostic who proclaims, with arid voice, the bierness of the bare plain. But the waste land
leads to a paradise. A short while later, Eliot begins to find joy in Christianity […] Now, Eliot is a
convert to the Anglican Chur.]
Eliot himself described religion as a flight from ‘the void’ that he found ‘in
the middle of all human happiness and all human relations, and whi there
is only one thing to fill’.83 Marialar’s introduction both announces his
conversion to the Anglican Chur and confirms The Waste Land as a poem
that confronts a world free of su reassurance.
It is difficult to know quite how Paz would have reacted to this
information. In spite of the strain of religious rhetoric that aracterizes his
prose, he never discovered ‘el gozo en el Cristianismo’; and indeed he
insisted that ‘no sentía nostalgia por el orden cristiano medieval’ [I did not
feel nostalgia for the medieval Christian order] (OC2, 293). Nevertheless,
Eliot’s willingness to expound beyond purely aesthetic problems does
respond to the call of ‘Ética del artista’. Slightly misrepresenting Eliot, who
did not accept that poetry had replaced religion, only that figures su as
Mahew Arnold and I. A. Riards believed that it could, Marialar
provides an Eliot who refuses to accept art as an ultimate value: ‘acepta que
la poesía ha llegado a sustituir a la religión, pero no que pueda salvarnos’
[he accepts that poetry has become a substitute for religion, but not that it
can save us] (p. 64).84 Eliot does not talk about the need for belief simply in
poems, but in society as a whole; his concern is truly political: ‘El mundo,
según Eliot, está tratando de alcanzar una mentalidad civilizada que no sea
cristiana. El experimento fracasará’ [The world, according to Eliot, is trying
to attain a civilized mentality which is not Christian. The experiment will
fail] (p. 62). Paz had called in ‘Ética’ for belief and here he has it: ‘la única
esperanza del mundo había de estar en un renacimiento religioso’ [the only
hope for the world had to lie in a religious renaissance] (Ibid.). Eliot’s
position would be provocative in a country that had tightened restrictions
on the Catholic Chur aer the Cristero revolts of the peasantry in the
1920s, and whi had seen one of its presidents, Álvaro Obregón, murdered
by a Catholic militant in 1928. Yet Paz was never an orthodox member of the
Mexican le, and in his political memoir, Itinerario [Itinerary] (1993), he
justifies the inconsistencies of his own generation with reference to the faith
of Cruz y Raya’s editor: ‘si el católico Bergamín proclamaba su adhesión a la
revolución sin renunciar a la cruz, ¿cómo no perdonar nuestras
contradicciones?’ [if the Catholic Bergamín proclaimed his allegiance to the
revolution without renouncing the cross, how can one not forgive our
contradictions?] (OC9, 20).
Eliot appears in a climate whi is riven with polemic but at the same
time surprisingly tolerant of sympathies and interests that run counter to
explicit statements of allegiance, as Paz’s contradictory relationship to the
Contemporáneos reveals. Although Marialar presents ‘Lancelot Andrewes’
as an example of post-conversion Eliot, and thus, at least partially, as a
justification for an ‘arte de tesis’, the essay itself provides a focus for
discussion whi shares mu with the artepuristas. Like Valéry, Andrewes
concedes a generative power to language:
Andrews toma una palabra y deriva el mundo de ella, estrujando, más y más, la palabra hasta
hacerla exprimir el pleno jugo de su significado hasta un grado insospeable.
(p. 76)
[Andrewes takes a word and derives the world from it; squeezing and squeezing the word until it
yields a full juice of meaning whi we should never have supposed any word to possess
(SE, 347–48)]
His historical period is viewed from the later perspective of the avant-garde
as ‘una época llena de aventuras y experimentos para el lenguaje’ (p. 81) [‘an
age of adventure and experiment in language’ (SE, 349)]; and his method is
also described as experimental, even ludic: ‘No duda, para hacernos llegar al
sentido de una palabra, no vacila en martillarla, doblegarla y hasta jugar con
ella’ (p. 82) [‘He will not hesitate to hammer, to inflect, even to play upon a
word for the sake of driving home its meaning’ (SE, 350)]. ‘Lancelot
Andrewes’ and Marialar’s introduction thus present an Eliot who upsets
the argument that Paz had aempted to make him serve against the
Contemporáneos. ey add support to a reading of The Waste Land that
accommodates Heidegger and the sceptical, eliminatory consciousness of
poets su as Xavier Villaurrutia. At the same time, Eliot is presented as a
troublesome proponent of an ‘arte de tesis’. Yet his discovery of ‘el gozo en
el Cristianismo’ does not exclude but co-exists with an appreciation of the
verbal medium that recalls the artepuristas.
‘Ética del artista’ had tried to draw a line between the Contemporáneos
and Eliot, but the two magazines that Paz ran with his friends, Barandal
then Cuadernos del Valle de México, were themselves a curious blend of
aesthetic sophistication and political stridency. ey published a leer from
Valéry to Juan Ramón Jiménez, the two icons of artepurismo, as well as a
translation of the dialogue between Virag and Bloom in Chapter 15 of
Ulysses.
85 Yet at the same time Enrique Ramírez y Ramírez could conclude
that while the Soviet Union was constructing a new reality, the work of a
writer su as Marcel Proust was feered by a moribund capitalism: ‘no
pudo hacer otra cosa que recordar el pasado, sin ánimos para el porvenir’
[he could only remember the past, without enthusiasm for the future].86
Paz’s generation had great difficulty marrying their aesthetic interests with
their beliefs, as Eliot, for example, had managed to find in the word-play of
Lancelot Andrewes one of the great moments of the Anglican Chur. It was
the visit of Rafael Alberti with his wife on a lecture tour to Mexico with El
Socorro Rojo Internacional in 1934 whi suggested a possible marriage of
the two realms.
For Paz and his peers, Alberti possessed both strong political and poetic
credentials. Paz recalls in ‘Rafael Alberti: visto y entrevisto’ [Rafael Alberti:
Seen and Glimpsed] (1984) that ‘era uno de nuestros poetas favoritos’ [he
was one of our favourite poets] and that his ‘reciente adhesión al
comunismo nos había entusiasmado’ [recent conversion to communism had
excited us] (OC3, 378). Aer his talks, the young Mexicans would meet up
with the visiting poet and read him their own work. Paz recounts Alberti’s
response in Solo a dos voces:
‘no es una poesía revolucionaria en el sentido político —dijo Alberti—, pero Octavio es el único
poeta revolucionario entre todos ustedes, porque es el único en el cual hay una tentativa por
transformar el lenguaje’. Y estas frases de Alberti me impresionaron muo.
(OC15, 631)
[‘it isn’t revolutionary poetry in the political sense,’ Alberti said, ‘but Octavio is the only
revolutionary poet among you, because he is the only one who is trying to transform the
language.’ Alberti’s words made a strong impression on me.]
Alberti unexpectedly validated the Contemporáneos’ stance — ‘El arte […]
es revolucionario por sí mismo y en sí mismo’ [Art is revolutionary for and
in itself]87 — whi ‘Ética’ had been directed so vigorously against. Paz gives
different versions of Alberti’s advice. In an interview with Héctor Tajonar,
he recalls: ‘la poesía —dijo— “está hea de lenguaje y en esos poemas había
el comienzo de un lenguaje” ’ [‘Poetry,’ he said, ‘is made of language and in
these poems is the beginning of a language’];88 while in ‘Rafael Alberti, visto
y entrevisto’ the comment is: ‘ “Tú te propones explorar un territorio
desconocido —tu propia intimidad— y no pasearte por parajes públicos en
donde no hay nada que descubrir” ’ [‘You set out to explore unknown
territory — your own self — rather than public places where there’s nothing
to discover’] (OC3, 377). Alberti identified problems that Paz was
encountering in his own use of the Spanish poet alongside Eliot, in
‘Nocturno de la ciudad abandonada’ and ‘Desde el principio’. Whether the
advice is to look aer the language, or to look to his own self, it is directed
towards the aspects of poetry that ‘Ética’ had resisted. ere, a revolutionary
language was reduced to ‘la sustitución de una retórica por otra’ [the
substitution of one rhetoric for another], and a preoccupation with the self
was the work of ‘el hombre individualista, estreamente hombre, sin
sentido religioso’ [the individualist man, simply man, without a religious
sense] (OC13, 186 & 187).
Alberti suggested to Paz that his political allegiance was not incompatible
with the poems that he was reading, and imitating. Paz notes that at the
same time as advocating a politically commied art, Alberti himself was
writing ‘Dos oraciones a la virgen’ [Two Orations to the Virgin] (OC3, 374).
Alberti and his wife ‘se sentían incómodos entre los intelectuales
revolucionarios mexicanos […] Era natural que les pareciesen un poco
arcaicos, rústicos y estreamente dogmáticos’ [felt uncomfortable among
the Mexican revolutionary intellectuals […] Naturally, they found them a
lile araic, paroial and narrowly dogmatic] (OC3, 376). e Spanish poet
offered a brief period of personal guidance through the competing political,
philosophical and poetic influences that gathered around Eliot in Paz’s
earliest work. He offered Paz a justification of the poems that he was writing
at the time, and an unexpected rejoinder to the frequently dogmatic aitude
of ‘Ética del artista’ towards artepurismo. He did not resolve the conflict,
however, and as Paz recalls: ‘En esos años comencé a vivir un conflicto que
se agravaría más y más con el tiempo: la contraposición entre mis ideas
políticas y mis convicciones estéticas y poéticas’ [At that time I began to
experience a conflict that would get worse as the years progressed: the clash
between my political ideas and my poetic and aesthetic convictions].89
Notes to Chapter 3
1. Sheridan, Poeta con paisaje, p. 127.
2. Ibid., p. 136.
3. Paz, ‘Ética del artista’, Barandal, 2, 5 (Dec 1931), 1–5; repr. in OC13, 185–88.
4. José Ortega y Gasset, La deshumanización del arte, ed. by Luis de Llera (Madrid: Biblioteca
Nueva, 2005), p. 181. In ‘El cómo y el para qué: José Ortega y Gasset’ (1980), Paz declared that
Ortega ‘guió mis primeros pasos y le debo algunas de mis primeras alegrías intelectuales’
(OC3, 299).
5. e event is recounted by Jaime Torres Bodet in Tiempo de arena, p. 227.
6. Paul Valéry, ‘Conversación sobre la poesía (fragmentos)’, p. 3.
7. Ortega y Gasset, La deshumanización del arte, p. 161.
8. Raymond Williams describes this uncertainty as aracteristic of Marxist approaes: ‘Either the
arts are passively dependent on social reality, a proposition whi I take to be that of
meanical materialism, or a vulgar misinterpretation of Marx. Or the arts, as the creators of
consciousness, determine social reality, the proposition whi the Romantic poets sometimes
advanced. Or finally, the arts, while ultimately dependent, with everything else, on the real
economic structure, operate in part to reflect this structure and its consequent reality, and in
part, by affecting aitudes towards reality, to help or hinder the constant business of anging
it. I find Marxist theories of culture confused because they seem to me, on different occasions
and in different writers, to make use of all these propositions as the need serves,’ Culture and
Society 1780–1950 (London: Chao and Windus, 1958), p. 274.
9. is is most probably a direct aa on Bernardo Ortiz de Montellano’s assertion that ‘El arte no
es revolucionario porque hable de o exhiba los fenómenos materiales de la revolución, es
revolucionario por sí y en sí mismo. (¿é en el Renacimiento el tema cristiano define la
calidad artística de los pintores?)’, ‘Notas de conversación’ (under the pseudonym Marcial
Rojas), Contemporáneos, 5, 18 (Nov 1929), 335–36 (p. 336).
10. Paz had probably not read Dante at this stage. In ‘Octavio Paz’ (1970), an interview with Rita
Guibert, he reveals that: ‘El año pasado estuve en Pisburgh y leí a Dante. Fue una gran
experiencia. Descubrí que Dante es el gran poeta de Occidente. Yo no lo sabía’ (OC15, 442).
11. Munguía compares Eliot’s use of metaphor to Dante’s (EP, 10), and also mentions Dante as one
among several authors to whom Eliot alludes in The Waste Land (EP, 13).
12. Paz describes the influence of Santayana and Eliot on the essays of Villaurrutia in OC4, 262;
Munguía, ‘Ética y maquinismo’, Contemporáneos, 28–29 (Sept–Oct 1930), 175–80 (p. 179).
13. Paz, ‘T. S. Eliot: Mínima evocación’, in OC2, 293.
14. Sheridan, Poeta con paisaje, p. 100.
15. Ibid., p. 130.
16. Miael North, The Political Aesthetics of Yeats, Eliot and Pound (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991), p. 105.
17. Eliot, For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order (London: Faber and Faber, 1928), p. 7.
18. Eliot, ‘Ulysses, Order and Myth’, p. 483.
19. Eliot, ‘From Poe to Valéry’ (1948), in TCC, 39.
20. See Eliot, ‘Leçon de Valéry’, in Paul Valéry vivant (Marseilles: Cahiers du Sud, 1946), pp. 74–81
(p. 74), for a sustained homage to Valéry’s sceptical intelligence.
21. Eliot, ‘A Sceptical Patrician’, Athenaeum, 4647 (23 May 1919), 361–62 (p. 361).
22. Eliot, ‘Introduction’ to The Art of Poetry by Paul Valéry, trans. by Denise Folliot (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958), pp. vii–xxiv (p. xxiii).
23. Eliot, ‘Modern Tendencies in Poetry’, p. 14.
24. Anthony Stanton, ‘La prehistoria estética de Octavio Paz: Los escritos en prosa (1931–1943)’,
Literatura Mexicana, 2, 1 (1991), 23–55 (p. 26).
25. Paz, ‘Prólogo: El llamado y el aprendizaje’, in OC13, 16.
26. Paz, ‘Los pasos contados’, Camp de l’arpa: Revista de literatura, 4, 74 (Apr 1980), 51–62 (p. 52).
27. Sheridan, Poeta con paisaje, p. 90.
28. Gerardo Diego, ed., Poesía española: Antología 1915–1930 (Madrid: Editorial Signo, 1932), p. 195.
29. Robert Havard, Jorge Guillén: Cántico (London: Grant and Cutler, 1986), p. 21.
30. Diego, ed., Poesía española: Antología 1915–1930, p. 195.
31. ‘Juego’ first appeared in ‘El Nacional Dominical’ (supl. of El Nacional) (7 Jun 1931), p. 2. It is
reproduced in Stanton, Las primeras voces, p. 22. For a full bibliography of Paz’s poems from
1931–42, see Stanton, pp. 97–99.
32. Carlos Pellicer, Material poético, 1918–1961, 2nd edn (México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de
México, 1962), p. 29.
33. For a full account of the influence of the teniques of creacionismo on Pellicer, see George
Melnykovi, Reality and Expression in the Poetry of Carlos Pellicer (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1979).
34. oted in Stanton, Las primeras voces, p. 27. First published in ‘El Nacional Dominical’ (supl. of
El Nacional) (2 Aug 1931), p. 3; repr. in OC13, 34, without the epigraph.
35. Stanton, Las primeras voces, pp. 29 & 30.
36. Gabriel Zaid, Leer poesía (México: Joaquín Mortiz, 1976), p. 83.
37. Gorostiza, Prosa, p. 173.
38. Paz, ‘Orilla’, first published in Barandal, 2 (Sept 1931), 1.
39. Ortiz de Montellano, ‘Un camino de poesía’, Contemporáneos, 5, 16 (Sept 1929), 150–52 (p. 151).
40. Paz, ‘La poesía de Carlos Pellicer’ (1955), in OC4, 235.
41. Stanton, Las primeras voces, p. 42.
42. Eliot described The Hollow Men in a leer to Riard Aldington of 15 November 1922 as a
departure from The Waste Land — ‘I am now feeling toward a new form and style’ (L1, 787).
However, B. C. Southam speculates that these lines of The Hollow Men ‘probably belong to the
material discarded from The Waste Land’, A Student’s Guide to the Selected Poems of T. S.
Eliot, 6th edn (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), p. 213.
43. Paz, ‘Nocturno de la ciudad abandonada’, Barandal, 4 (Nov 1931), 7–9 (p. 7). Further references to
this poem are given aer quotations in the text. A revised version appears in OC13, 38–40.
44. Stanton, Las primeras voces, p. 38.
45. Pellicer, Material poético, p. 173.
46. Brooks, Modern Poetry and the Tradition, p. 171; Bush, T. S. Eliot: A Study in Character and
Style, p. 96.
47. See Sheridan, Poeta con paisaje, pp. 70–71.
48. Stanton, Las primeras voces, p. 40.
49. Ibid.
50. Stanton, Las primeras voces, p. 40.
51. Eliot, ‘Leçon de Valéry’, p. 74.
52. Gorostiza, Epistolario (1918–1940), ed. by Guillermo Sheridan (México: Memorias Mexicanas,
1995), pp. 327–28. Sheridan describes the presence of ‘un paisaje urbano opresivo, semejante a
los de Eliot’ in Villaurrutia’s collection of 1926, Reflejos (Los Contemporáneos ayer, p. 228).
53. Villaurrutia, ‘Dos nocturnos’, Barandal (suplemento), 2, 5 (Dec 1931), 3–7 (p. 6).
54. Ibid., p. 7.
55. Paz, ‘Rafael Alberti, visto y entrevisto’ (1984), in OC3, 374.
56. Barón Palma, T. S. Eliot en España, p. 19.
57. Rafael Alberti, Obra completa, ed. by Luis García Montero, 3 vols (Madrid: Aguilar, 1988), I, 393
& 439.
58. Ibid., p. 386. Paz could also have found this combination of silence and immobility in ‘Los
ángeles mudos’ [e Mute Angels]: ‘Inmóviles, clavadas, mudas mujeres de los zaguanes’
[immobile, nailed, mute women of the corridors] (p. 418).
59. Paz, ‘Desde el principio’, Cuadernos del Valle de México, 1 (Sept 1933), 11–13 (p. 11). Further
references to this poem are given aer quotations in the text. A revised version appears in
OC13, 40–42.
60. ‘April is the cruellest month, breeding…’ (CPP, 61) appears as ‘Abril es el mes más cruel: arbustos
de lilas engendra sobre yermos muertos, mezcla…’ in Munguía (EP, 15); and in Flores as ‘Abril
es el mes más cruel; engendra / Lilas de la tierra muerta, mezcla…’, Tierra baldía, p. 13. Neither
publishes Eliot’s English text alongside his translation.
61. Stanton, Las primeras voces, p. 48; Alberti, Obra completa, I, 386 & 409.
62. Rafael Alberti, La arboleda perdida: Libros I y II de memorias (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1975), p.
265.
63. In his Multiple Spaces: The Poetry of Rafael Alberti (London: Tamesis, 1985), Salvador Jiménez-
Fajardo argues that ‘especially in the first two parts of Sobre los ángeles, his [Alberti’s] poems
have a polished coherence that André Breton’s “automatisme psyique” does not allow for’
(p. 50). For the autobiographical content of Alberti’s collection, see George W. Connell, ‘Los
elementos autobiográficos en Sobre los ángeles’, in Rafael Alberti, ed. by Manuel Durán
(Madrid: Taurus, 1975), pp. 155–69.
64. Eliot also employs the first person plural — ‘We who were living are now dying’ (CPP, 72) — in
‘What the under Said’, the section of The Waste Land that is closest to Eliot’s later poem.
65. Paz, ‘Nocturno de la ciudad abandonada’, p. 12; César Vallejo, Obra poética completa (La Habana:
Casa de las Américas, 1970), p. 3.
66. Francisco Gómez de evedo y Villegas (1580–1645) was one of the leading poets of the Spanish
Golden Age. His work encompassed satire as well as sonnets on love and death. Stanton, Las
primeras voces, p. 50.
67. e poems of Luna silvestre whi I have quoted from OC13 are unaltered from their original
appearance in 1933.
68. Stanton, Las primeras voces, p. 59.
69. Ferguson, ‘La evolución poética de Octavio Paz’, p. 8. Negación has the double meaning of both
‘negation’ and ‘denial’.
70. Christopher Ris, T. S. Eliot and Prejudice, p. 174.
71. Paz, ‘Octavio Paz’, interview with Rita Guibert, in OC15, 441.
72. Joseph Chiari, Twentieth-Century French Thought: From Bergson to Lévi-Strauss (London: Paul
Elek, 1975), p. 61.
73. Chiari does in fact argue that the aims of Phenomenology ‘meet with Valéry’s ceaseless aempts
to capture the very dawning of consciousness’ (Ibid., p. 67).
74. Martin Heidegger, ‘¿é es la metafísica?’, trans. by X. Zubiri, Cruz y Raya, 6 (15 Sept 1933), 84–
115 (p. 86). Zubiri’s translation appeared earlier in Sur, 5 (Summer 1932), but Paz claims to
have first come across it in Cruz y Raya. e original lecture had been delivered by Heidegger
as recently as 1929, indicating the avidity of Hispanic leers for recent developments in
continental philosophy. Translations are by David Farrell Krell from the German, in Martin
Heidegger, Basic Writings, rev. and exp. edn (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 94.
75. Zubiri, p. 98; Krell, p. 101.
76. Zubiri, p. 91; Krell, p. 97.
77. Zubiri, p. 89; Krell, p. 96.
78. Zubiri, p. 103; Krell, p. 104.
79. Ris, T. S. Eliot and Prejudice, p. 174.
80. Zubiri, p. 93; Krell, p. 97.
81. Zubiri, p. 101; Krell, p. 102.
82. Eliot, ‘Lancelot Andrews’ [sic], trans. with intr. by A. Marialar, Cruz y Raya, 12 (Mar 1934),
59–87 (p. 62). Further references to Marialar’s introduction and translation are given aer
quotations in the text.
83. Eliot, leer dated ‘Shrove Tuesday, 1928 [1929?]’, quoted in John D. Margolis, T. S. Eliot’s
Intellectual Development: 1922–1939 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1972), p. 142.
84. Eliot declared, ‘e most generalised form of my own view is simply this: that nothing in this
world or the next is a substitute for anything else; and if you find that you must do without
something, su as religious faith or philosophic belief, then you must just do without it’
(UPUC, 113).
85. ey appeared respectively in Barandal, 4 (noviembre 1931), 22; Cuadernos del Valle de México, 2
(Jan 1934), 18–25.
86. Enrique Ramírez y Ramírez, ‘Apuntes para un ensayo sobre el significado universal de la Unión
Soviética’, Cuadernos del Valle de México, 1 (Sept 1933), 3–10 (pp. 5 & 7). Guillermo Sheridan
speculates that this comment was probably directed at Paz, who was reading Proust
enthusiastically at the time, Poeta con paisaje, pp. 137–38.
87. Ortiz de Montellano, ‘Notas de conversación’, p. 336.
88. Paz, ‘Con Octavio Paz y España como tema’, interview with Héctor Tajonar, Siempre, 1246 (11
May 1977), 30–34 (p. 30).
89. Paz, Itinerario, in OC9, 21.
CHAPTER 4
Two Excursions
e years between Alberti’s visit to México in 1934 and the founding of the
magazine Taller [Workshop] (1938–41) saw Paz move from youth to the
expanded possibilities and trials of adulthood. He had le the Escuela
Nacional Preparatoria in 1933 and reluctantly entered the Faculty of Law at
the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) under pressure
from his father.1 e UNAM presented a quite different political atmosphere
from the Colegio de San Ildefonso. Although Paz continued to be active in
the Unión Estudiantil Pro-Obrero y Campesino (UEPOC) he was now
studying in what the Mexican President, Lázaro Cárdenas, condemned as
‘an institution whi is the ideological and material enemy of the
proletariat’.2 Paz’s father would die suddenly on 8 Mar 1936, hit by a tram.
e relationship had been difficult between son and the man Paz would later
recall in Pasado en claro (1975) as ‘atado al potro del alcohol’ [tied to the
bole] (OC12, 84). His father’s death was followed by (or perhaps unleashed)
a precipitate courtship with Elena Garro and an enduring friendship with
one of the principal members of the Contemporáneos, Jorge Cuesta. It also
brought financial pressures. Paz was forced to look for work, finding a
position as a typist at the Arivo General de la Nación through the father
of his soolfriend and collaborator on Barandal, Rafael López Malo. e
pair also wrote occasional political speees.3 A year aer his father’s death,
Paz abandoned his law studies and le Mexico City, first to help found a
sool for the ildren of agricultural workers in Mérida in the Yucatan,
then to aend the Second International Congress of Antifascist Writers, in
Spain. ese two excursions would open new artistic and political vistas.
Paz’s poetic output during this period was varied, from a gesture of
support for the Republican troops in the Spanish Civil War, ¡No pasarán!
[They Shall Not Pass] (1936), to a series of neo-baroque sonnets, Primer día
[First Day] (1937), and his first major erotic poems, Raíz del hombre [Root of
Man] (1937) and Bajo tu clara sombra [Beneath your Bright Shadow] (1937).
A number of works that did not receive publication until a later date were
also composed at this time, with Entre la piedra y la flor [Between the Stone
and the Flower] (1941) the most significant for the relationship between Paz
and Eliot. Paz continued to engage Eliot in questions about the role of belief
in poems, a debate whi was configured within his developing relationship
with the Contemporáneos.
¡No pasarán! was a direct response to the outbreak of civil war in Spain. It
thus answered the call of ‘Ética del artista’ for a poetry with historical
relevance that displayed commitment to a specific belief. Yet under the
pseudonym Marcial Rojas, Bernardo Ortiz de Montellano (who had edited
Contemporáneos and was one of the ief objects of aa in ‘Ética’)
dismissed the poem for its ‘superficial dramatismo’ [superficially dramatic
quality].4 Paz seems to have agreed, and ¡No pasarán! does not appear in the
various editions of Libertad bajo palabra, whi gather the poems of this
period. Paz’s poetic output continued to work in directions that coincided
only intermiently with the stated purpose of his prose.
His second collection of poems, Raíz del hombre, summoned a more
intimate scene, and was inspired by his infatuation with Elena Garro, who
would shortly become his wife. Paz later described the collection as ‘mi
nacimiento poético’ [my poetic birth],5 and it was reviewed sympathetically
(just a fortnight aer the Ortiz de Montellano review) in Letras de México by
another member of the Contemporáneos, Jorge Cuesta. Cuesta enthused
that:
Una inteligencia y una pasión tan raras y tan sensibles como las de este joven escritor, son de las
que saben estar penetrantemente pendientes de lo que el porvenir reclama.6
[Su an uncommmon and su a sensitive intelligence and passion as this young writer possesses
know how to anticipate penetratingly what the future demands.]
Raíz del hombre displayed no explicit political intention but traced an erotic
relationship through sixteen poems of moderate extension. Nevertheless,
Cuesta con cluded that the question of belief, or a ‘metafísica’ as he called it,
impinged upon these poems: ‘La nota más característica de su poesía es una
desesperación, que no tardará en precisarse en una metafísica’ [e
distinguishing feature of this poetry is a des per ation, whi will soon
become focused in a metaphysic].7 Paz had in fact worked out a form of
belief for Raíz del hombre, whi he later classed doubtfully as
una suerte de vaga teoría de la sexualidad en la que el abrazo carnal era una repetición
instantánea y en miniatura del proceso cósmico […] La caída erótica era un ascenso, el regreso a
un fin que era un principio: noe de amor, noe de resurrecciones.
(OC13, 28)
[a kind of vague theory of sexuality in whi the sexual embrace was a miniature repetition of the
cosmic process […] e erotic fall was an ascent, the return to an end that was a beginning: night
of love, night of resurrections.]
In ‘La religión solar de D. H. Lawrence’ (1990), he credits Lawrence, along
with Novalis, as the sources for ‘la tonalidad religiosa de esta visión erótica’
[the religious aracter of this erotic vision] (OC10, 101). Yet this vision also
owed a debt to Pablo Neruda, a poet closer to home and, indeed, closer to
Eliot.
Pablo Neruda
Cuesta’s review noted the presence of Neruda in Raíz del hombre along with
the Mexican poets Ramón López Velarde, Carlos Pellicer, and Xavier
Villaurrutia.8 Neruda’s ‘Arte poética’ and ‘Diurno doliente’ had appeared in
Contemporáneos in 1931, but it was the collection that included these poems,
Residencia en la tierra [Residence on Earth], that Paz described as ‘un libro
que me sacudió hondamente cuando lo leí por primera vez’ [a book that
shook me profoundly when I read it for the first time] (OC3, 26) as a twenty-
two year old.9 e sense of sho that Paz describes on reading Neruda’s
Residencia eoes his discovery of The Waste Land. Both books were
testimony to periods of emotional crisis for their respective authors. Robert
Pring-Mill describes Neruda’s time in the East, during whi he wrote many
of the poems that appear in the first part of Residencia, as ‘a period of
virtually total spiritual bleakness — the blaest of his life’.10 Neruda’s own
reading of Eliot informs ‘Caballero solo’ [Single Gentleman], composed in
Colombo in 1929, whi provides a direct version of ‘the typist home at
teatime’ from ‘e Fire Sermon’ (CPP, 68):
El pequeño empleado, después de muo,
después del tedio semanal, y las novelas leídas de noe en cama,
ha definitivamente seducido a su vecina,
y la lleva a los miserables cinematógrafos
donde los héroes son potros o príncipes apasionados,
y acaricia sus piernas llenas de dulce vello
con sus ardientes y húmedas manos que huelen a cigarrillo.11
[e lowly employee, aer so mu,
aer the weekly tedium, and novels read in bed at night,
has definitively seduced his neighbour,
and he takes her to the miserable cinema
where the heroes are horses or impassioned princes,
and he caresses her legs covered in gentle down
with his burning moist hands that smell of cigaree smoke.]
Neruda’s passage, like its equivalent in Eliot, either dramatizes a speaker
suffering from a feeling of overwhelming disgust or exercises a snobbery
that is itself distasteful, depending on one’s point of view. Normally
blameless activities, like reading in bed or going to the cinema, have become
curiously sordid — as Ian Hamilton says of the Eliot, ‘the meal is eaten out
of tins (why should that be so awful?…)’.12 Hamilton’s objection to the
passage in Eliot rests upon an accusation of frigidity:
e most heroic seduction would stand lile ance against the arms-length vocabulary whi
Eliot employs here: ‘endeavours’, ‘encounters’, ‘requires’ assaults’, and so on — this is refrigerating
language, prissily dignified, fastidiously embarrassed.13
It is here that Neruda departs from his source. Instead of the arms-length
‘engage her in caresses’ he ooses the direct acaricia. Neruda registers the
physical sensations of both the man and the woman — the feeling of ‘dulce
vello’ for the one, and of ‘ardientes y húmedas manos’ for the other, as well
as the smell of cigaree smoke.14 e passage is far from a celebration of the
erotic, but Neruda is clearly drawn to a sensual realization of the scene that
is alien to The Waste Land. Paz himself made this distinction in an interview
of 1973:
En Neruda, tan alejado de Eliot, hay […] ciertos ecos. Hablo del Neruda de Residencia en la tierra
y pienso concretamente en ‘Caballero solo’ y en el fragmento erótico de la secretaria y el joven
empleado en The Waste Land. Pero el erotismo de Eliot es muy poco erótico y la imagen que nos
da del amor físico es sórdida. Neruda es verdadera y poderosamente sexual. Ése es uno de los
polos positivos de su poesía: la energía, la irradiación erótica.15
[In Neruda, so very different from Eliot, there […] are some eoes. I am thinking of the Neruda of
Residence on Earth and in particular of ‘Single Gentleman’ and of the erotic passage with the
secretary and the young employee in The Waste Land. But Eliot’s eroticism is not very erotic and
the image that he gives us of physical love is sordid. Neruda is genuinely and powerfully sexual.
at is one of the positive aspects of his poetry: its energy, its erotic radiance.]
Neruda’s route out of The Waste Land begins here, and it is a route that the
Paz of Raíz del hombre is tempted to follow.
Saúl Yurkievi describes Neruda’s conception of the world as erotic in
the broadest sense: ‘Neruda’s vision is fundamentally erotic, it always
displays a tendency to establish with everything that it conceives a bodily,
carnal, sexual relation.’16 The Waste Land had suggested an analogy between
a personal, sexual crisis and an inability to find relation in the world at
large. Neruda accepts Eliot’s analogy but reverses its import by expanding
an active sexual desire into the world. Su an eroticized vision, whi seeks
‘a bodily relation’ with its surroundings, is a material one, and it is in the
Tres cantos materiales [Three Material Songs] at the end of Residencia en la
tierra that Neruda finds some escape from the ‘isolation that leaves him
helpless and overwhelmed’ in the earlier parts of the book.17 He finds
satisfaction in a sensual relation to the physical world: ‘Y ando entre
húmedas fibras arrancadas / al vivo ser de substancia y silencio’ [And I walk
through its moist, torn out fibres / to the living being of substance and
silence].18
In a contemporary review titled ‘Pablo Neruda o el amor de la materia’
[Pablo Neruda or the Love of the Material], María Zambrano praised the
vision of the Tres cantos materiales as an alternative to poesía pura, whi
‘narcisista, llega a reflejarse a sí misma’ [narcissistically comes to reflect
itself], and poems of a Platonic inheritance, whi proceed from ‘un afán de
sobrepasar el aspecto primero de las cosas para buscar su trasunto poético
detrás’ [a desire to go beyond appearances to find their poetic image
19
behind]. Neruda’s poems remain aaed to
amor, terrible amor de la materia, que acaba en ser amor de entrañas, de la oscura interioridad del
mundo. Sobre la superficie del mundo están las formas y la luz que las define, mientras la materia
gime bajo ella.20
[love, terrible love of the material, whi becomes a love of the heart of things, of the dark interior
of the world. On the surface of the world are forms and the light that defines them, while the
material groans beneath.]
Zambrano’s discussion adopts Neruda’s own metaphor of a journey inward
towards the material: ‘entrando oscurecidos corredores, / llegando a tu
materia misteriosa’ [entering dark corridors, / arriving at your mysterious
material].21 Yet it is no less dualistic than the Platonism that it would
replace, relying on an opposition between a surface world and an interior
material one.
Paz, who had been presented with José Bergamín’s separate edition of the
Tres cantos materiales by Rafael Alberti, must have been particularly aware
of the response to The Waste Land that they contained. In the prose pieces of
Vigilias [ Vigils] whi he was composing at the time, and whi Enrico
Mario Santí describes as ‘a compendium of the young poet’s themes’,22 Paz
conflates the detrás [behind] of Platonism with the journey inward that
Zambrano had adopted from Neruda:
Sólo la Poesía, obscura y arrebatada, hiere en el universo y en su secreto; en su oscuridad
subterránea, en su luz de sobre-cielo, en su adivinación o videncia el mundo nos entrega sus
formas y lo que alienta detrás de ellas.
(OC13, 140)
[Only poetry, dark and exhilarated, can wound the universe in its secret; in its subterranean
darkness, in its light of the upper sky, in its prophecy and clairvoyance the world reveals its forms
and what breathes behind them.]
Paz’s readiness to employ a Platonic vocabulary, and the aendant faith this
implies in the worth of metaphysical system, indicates a significant
difference from Neruda. Zambrano’s aempt to excise Platonism from
Neruda’s vision pis up on a hostility towards intellectual systems in the
Tres cantos materiales whi is expressed in the declaration that opens
‘Entrada a la madera’ [Entrance into Wood]: ‘Con mi razón apenas, con mis
dedos…’ [Barely with my reason, with my fingers].23 In a leer to Héctor
Eandi of 24 April 1929, Neruda made this hostility explicit as he explained
the distance between himself and Jorge Luis Borges:
Tengo hasta cierto desprecio por la cultura, como interpretación de las cosas, me parece mejor un
conocimiento sin antecedentes, una absorción física del mundo, a pesar y en contra de nosotros.
La historia, los problemas ‘del conocimiento’, como los llaman, me parecen despojados de
dimensión. Cuántos de ellos llenarían el vacío? Cada vez veo menos ideas en torno mío, y más
cuerpos, sol y sudor.24
[I have a degree of contempt for culture, as an interpretation of things, a knowledge without
antecedents seems beer, a physical absorption in the world, in spite of and against ourselves.
History, the problems ‘of knowledge’, as they are called, seem irrelevant to me. How many of them
will fill the void? I see fewer and fewer ideas around me, and more and more bodies, sun and
sweat.]
Neruda’s materialism simply dismisses out of hand some of the major
preoccupations of Paz’s poetry. History is never far from Paz’s discussion of
Eliot, and ‘los problemas “del conocimiento” ’ are central to both Eliot and
writers su as Villaurrutia, Valéry and Heidegger with whom he is
associated. Although Paz expressed ambivalence about the epistemological
awareness of artepurismo, he was nevertheless drawn to it in his own
poems. Neruda’s ‘conocimiento sin antecedentes’ pre-empts su an
awareness, and relies upon a relation with the physical world to fill the void.
Paz could not entirely accept the earlier poetic antecedents of Neruda’s
materialism, Pellicer and Perse, and he remained aracted to the systems of
knowledge that arose from a consciousness of man as separate from
creation.
e eighth poem of Raíz del hombre gives an indication of where Paz
stops short of Neruda’s erotic, materialist answer to The Waste Land. As in
Neruda, the speaker’s relation to a woman is presented as an analogy for
relation to the world at large and, as in Neruda, that relation is initially
conceived in terms of physical sensation:
Un tacto luminoso me crece de los ojos,
iluminan mis dedos resplandores increados,
recorro superficies, cautivo de las formas.25
[A luminous tou grows from my eyes,
uncreated radiance lights my fingers,
I travel across surfaces, captivated by forms.]
e physical sensation of tacto is disembodied, however, qualified as merely
a metaphorical ‘tou’, related to the sense of sight. Physical contact has
been subordinated to observation, whi implies a speaker separate from the
world that he observes. Into this separation the Platonic language of ‘los
problemas “del conocimiento” ’ issues — the speaker cannot move beyond
surface; he is captive to forms. e Nerudan model, as Zambrano describes
it, would move beyond this world of surface appearance to a sensual relation
with an inner material core, but what Paz finds as he arrives at a Nerudan
raíces is also a Heideggerian nada:
Desde las formas bajo a tus raíces,
desde las proporciones a la nada.
(p. 40)
[From the forms I descend to your roots,
from proportions to the nothing.]
Beyond forms and proportions there is not an inner core of materiality but
nothing. Paz’s use of Heidegger, a thinker engaged with systems of
conocimiento, indicates his distance from the materialism of Neruda. For Paz
there is always structure beyond physical sensation:
palpando mortal carne
y obscuras relaciones.
(p. 41)
[touing mortal flesh
and dim relations.]
He ultimately accepts that his relationship to his lover involves placing an
interpretive grid upon her, an act of understanding, rather than of merging.
It is even suggested that su presence as she has results from the
illumination that his gaze bestows upon her:
Te sitio en proporciones, en medidas,
encadeno tu ser a mis miradas,
con lazos invisibles;
te ilumino, te escuo.
(p. 41)
[I besiege you with proportions, with measures,
I ain your being to my gaze,
with invisible links;
I illuminate you, I listen to you.]
Neruda’s materialism was not assimilable to the kinds of awareness that Paz
had already developed in his poetry and his prose. Neruda depended on a
fusion of the self with the world around it. As Saúl Yurkievi describes it,
‘He makes his personal manifestations natural and anthropomorphizes
nature, as if there were complete identity between creator and what is
created.’26 e experience of merging with nature, of being a part of the
world, permits a great flow of lyric effusion in Neruda — he seems to imitate
the natural processes that he describes. Paz later described him as ‘hombre
de pocas ideas y gobernado por pasiones a un tiempo reconcentradas y
oceánicas’ [A man of few ideas and dominated by passions both intense and
oceanic].27 is identification between poet and world had earlier been
expressed for Paz by Saint-John Perse and Carlos Pellicer. Yet, as the
reservation of ‘pocas ideas’ implies, Paz was also aracted to an Eliotic
conciencia that was twinned with Villaurrutia and Valéry. In an interview in
Unomásuno of 1983, Paz recalled that ‘Xavier Villaurrutia reproaba la
facilidad con que estaba escrita la poesía de Neruda’ [Xavier Villaurrutia
condemned the facility with whi Neruda’s poetry was wrien].28 e
tradition of conciencia stressed not man’s identity with but his separateness
from nature. Paz’s early poems are preoccupied with this sense of excision
from the world, with ‘los problemas “del conocimiento” ’, and he came to be
fairly dismissive of Neruda’s ‘materialismo teñido de animismo’
[materialism tinged with animism].29 His awareness of these questions drew
him away from Neruda’s answer to The Waste Land and into a closer
alignment with the Contemporáneos.
Jorge Cuesta
It was during this period that Paz embarked on a formative association with
Jorge Cuesta. Cuesta’s Antología de la poesía mexicana moderna (1928) had
announced the Contemporáneos to the Mexican public and he was one of
the most intellectually prominent members of the group. Paz was already
familiar with Carlos Pellicer and Xavier Villaurrutia. Taking advantage of a
break in a debate at the Colegio de San Ildefonso on ‘socialist education’, a
fervent topic at that time, Paz approaed the older poet. When Cuesta
asked him ‘ “¿A usted le interesa la literatura? ¿Escribe?” ’ [Are you
interested in literature? Do you write?] (OC4, 72), Paz’s response earned him
an invitation to lun. A relationship ensued in whi they would meet
regularly to read work aloud and discuss ideas (OC4, 73). Paz’s father had
died earlier that month. Cuesta provided both support and guidance as Paz
came to the aention of more established literary circles.
Cuesta was a sympathetic, and rigorous, reader of Paz’s work. He also
provided a new link to Eliot’s thought. His review of Raíz del hombre
arrived at its diagnosis of Paz’s need for a metafísica in terms that would
have been familiar to the author of The Sacred Wood:
La poesía de Octavio Paz no se resiste a una pasión de recomenzar, de repetir, de reproducir una
voz de la que no llega a salir la satisfacción esperada por la impaciencia que la golpea. El efecto de
esta violencia es que sus sentimientos destrocen las formas que lo solicitan, aunque sin apagarse
[…] Pero quizá es más propio que digamos que es su objeto el que renace incesantemente de sus
restos, y el que no deja de absorberlo. Y que la nota más característica de su poesía es una
desesperación, que no tardará en precisarse en una metafísica, esto es, en una propiedad, en una
necesidad del objeto de la poesía y no en un puro ocio psicológico del artista.30
[Octavio Paz’s poetry doesn’t resist a passion to start afresh, to repeat, to reproduce a voice that
never reaes the satisfaction it desires due to the impatience that besets it. e effect of this
violence is that his feelings destroy the forms that aract him, although those forms do not
disappear entirely […] But perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it is the object that is
constantly being reborn from its ruins, and whi never ceases to absorb him. And that the
distinguishing feature of this poetry is a desperation, whi will soon become focused in a
metaphysic, that is, in a quality, in a need for the object of poetry rather than in mere
psyological amusement.]
Paz’s collection is analysed in terms of the relationship between a desiring
self and the objects that it desires. e problem identified by Cuesta is that
desire exceeds the objects whi might satisfy it: ‘El efecto de esta violencia
es que sus sentimientos destrocen las formas que lo solicitan.’ Cuesta’s
reading has a strong affinity to Eliot’s definition of the ‘ “objective
correlative” ’, whi appeared in ‘Hamlet and his Problems’ (1919): ‘Hamlet
(the man) is dominated by an emotion whi is inexpressible, because it is in
excess of the facts as they appear’ (SW, 86). e concept was reiterated in
‘Lancelot Andrewes’, whi had appeared in Cruz y Raya, where Eliot
observed Andrewes’s ‘emotions wholly contained in and explained by its
object’ (SE, 351). e alternative to an objective metaphysic is ‘un puro ocio
psicológico’, a contrast whi underpins Eliot’s objection to Valéry in
‘Dante’ (1920):
No emotion is contemplated by Dante purely in and for itself. e emotion of the person, or the
emotion with whi our aitude appropriately invests the person, is never lost or diminished, is
always preserved entire, but is modified by the position assigned to the person in the eternal
seme.
(SW, 141)
ese similarities are at least partly aributable to direct knowledge of
Eliot’s work. It is most probable that Cuesta encountered an early version of
the distinction between an objective and a psyological poetry in Eliot’s
‘Note sur Mallarmé et Poe’, whi appeared in the Nouvelle Revue Française
in 1926. Eliot contrasts the ‘poète philosophique’ [philosophical poet], su
as Dante, who believes in a certain system, with the ‘poète “métaphysique” ’
[‘metaphysical’ poet], of whi Poe and Mallarmé are exemplars, who
employ theories whi they don’t actually believe ‘pour raffiner et pour
développer leur puissance de sensibilité et d’émotion’ [to refine and develop
their power of sensibility and emotion].31 M. E. González Padilla also claims
that an annotated copy of Stephen Spender’s The Destructive Element (1935),
whi contains separate apters on Eliot’s poetry and criticism, and whi
belonged to Xavier Villaurrutia, was probably read by Jorge Cuesta.32
Certainly, in a review of José Gorostiza’s Muerte sin fin of December 1939
he referred directly to Eliot’s ‘Dante’ of 1929.33
Yet the coincidence between Cuesta’s review of Raíz del hombre and some
of Eliot’s critical thinking may not come from direct contact with Eliot so
mu as with Eliot’s own sources. Cuesta gained notoriety in Mexico as an
advocate of the opposition between classicism and romanticism, a pairing
that he derived from France, just as Eliot had yoked his Fren reading onto
the teaings of Irving Babbi and the writings of T. E. Hulme. Cuesta refers
directly in his essay ‘Clasicismo y romanticismo’ (1932) to one of the Fren
influences on Eliot’s thought, Julien Benda: ‘Julien Benda ya describió la
voluntad de estos románticos, que consiste en pretender para lo temporal, la
categoría de lo espiritual’ [Julien Benda described the aim of these
romantics, whi consists of making spiritual claims for what is temporal].34
If Cuesta did, as seems likely, read the article by Ramon Fernandez, ‘Le
Classicisme de T. S. Eliot’, in the Nouvelle Revue Française in 1925, then a
picture emerges in whi Eliot appears not as the source of Cuesta’s use of
the terms clasicismo and romanticismo but as a companion on the way.
Cuesta shared Eliot’s awareness that a poet’s relation to the world was
not unmediated, but structured, and that problems arose when that structure
was a personal invention:
Esta necesidad de construirse un lenguaje personal para representar el mundo; de improvisar todo
un sistema para coger una impresión aislada, para dibujar laboriosamente un objeto; de adaptarse
diversamente a los aspectos mudables de las cosas, para detener su realidad fugitiva, es
característica del arte contem-poráneo.35
[is need to construct a personal language in order to represent the world; to improvise a whole
system in order to capture an isolated impression, to draw an object laboriously; to adapt oneself
variously to the angeable aspect of things, to capture their fugitive reality, is a aracteristic of
contemporary art.]
And like Eliot, Cuesta’s response to the arbitrariness of an art that relies on
personal improvisation to detain the objective world, that relies on
originality, was to stress tradition and the presentness of the past:
Hay dos clases de románticos, dos clases de inconformes; unos, que declaran muerta a la tradición
y que encuentran su libertad con ello; otros, que la declaran también muerta o en peligro de
muerte y que pretenden resucitarla, conservarla. La tradición es tradición porque no muere,
porque vive sin que la conserve nadie.36
[ere are two types of romantics, two types of dissenter; the one, who declares that tradition is
dead and who finds freedom in that; and the other, who also declares that tradition is dead or in
danger of dying and who aempts to revive or preserve it. Tradition is tradition because it does
not die, because it lives on without anyone having to preserve it.]
In a provocation that would have been familiar to the author of The Sacred
Wood, classicism ‘no es una tradición, sino la tradición en sí’ [is not a
tradition, but tradition itself].37 Cuesta’s preoccupation with tradition
provided an Eliotic counterbalance to D. H. Lawrence’s influence on the
young Paz. Paz, and indeed Eliot, praised Lawrence for his beliefs, but Eliot
also criticized the la of a traditional or orthodox basis in Lawrence’s
thinking:
e point is that Lawrence started life wholly free from any restriction of tradition or institution,
that he had no guidance except the Inner Light, the most untrustworthy and deceitful guide that
ever offered itself to wandering humanity.38
Cuesta provided a Mexican link for Paz to mu of Eliot’s thinking. He had
concluded that Paz’s poems needed to find a metafísica, and it was this need
to formulate an adequately sophisticated belief that led Paz away from
Neruda’s answer to The Waste Land. Paz’s meetings with Cuesta helped him
to develop the more purely theoretical side of his work, and in an interview
in El Financiero of 1994 he remembered the experience with enthusiasm: ‘Es
maravilloso compartir una verdad, grande o pequeña, perseguida durante
horas y horas. El gran premio es la contemplación silenciosa de
constelaciones mentales acabadas de descubrir’ [It is wonderful to share a
truth, whether great or small, sought aer for hours and hours. e great
reward is the silent contemplation of mental constellations that have just
been discovered].39 Neruda wished to pre-empt the need for socially
constructed beliefs with a sensual relation to the physical world. e basic
position of Cuesta’s seminal analysis of Mexican culture, ‘El clasicismo
mexicano’ (1934), asserted that socially constructed, and inherited, beliefs
could not be pre-empted. us even nationalist Mexican literature was a
result of an inherited trend for exoticism:
El mexicanismo en nuestra poesía contemporánea, no es sino un ‘modernismo’ aplicado al paisaje
de México […] En otras palabras, la literatura mexicanista no ha sido una literatura mexicana, sino
el exotismo de una literatura extranjera.40
[Mexicanism in our contemporary poetry is simply a modernismo applied to the landscape of
Mexico […] In other words, Mexicanist literature is not Mexican literature but the product of a
foreign literature’s taste for the exotic.]
Paz adopted this consciousness of the social construction of experience,
exercising it in El laberinto de la soledad [The Labyrinth of Solitude] (1950)
and his ‘Apuntes’ [Notes] of 1943: ‘El nacionalismo mexicano en el arte es
una consecuencia del exotismo europeo’ [Mexican nationalism in art is a
consequence of European exoticism] (OC13, 378).41 e awareness expressed
by Cuesta and Eliot, of the restrictions that bear upon human artistic and
epistemological endeavour, provides a new dimension to Paz’s leist
concern with social and historical factors.
One of the aracteristics that Paz most admired in Cuesta was his critical
intelligence. In the discussion of the relationship between the two writers in
El Financiero, he declares: ‘La pasión crítica no es sino una forma derivada
de lo que a mí me parece que es esencial en la vida del espíritu: la pasión por
la idea’ [A passion for criticism is one form of something that I think is
essential in the life of the spirit: a passion for the idea].42 Eliot entered a
tradition of conciencia crítica in Mexican literature that runs from Ramón
López Velarde to the Contemporáneos. Paz explored this tendency of Eliot
and Villaurrutia in counterpoint to poets of exaltación lírica, su as Saint-
John Perse, Carlos Pellicer and Pablo Neruda. Yet in ‘Ética del artista’, he
expressed great hostility towards the tendency of a critical, sceptical
intelligence to negate belief. Cuesta exercised a political and moral interest
uncommon among the Contemporáneos, whi reassured Paz. He also
argued for the positive value of the critical intelligence, arguing in ‘El
clasicismo mexicano’ that it was in fact the critical aspect of Spanish
literature that was the true inheritance of Mexico: ‘Desde un principio
florecieron en México las formas críticas y reflexivas de la literatura
castellana’ [From the beginning the critical and reflexive forms of Castilian
literature flourished in Mexico].43
Paz’s relationship with Cuesta enabled him to move beyond the polemic
of ‘Ética del artista’ to a closer appreciation of the Eliot whom the
Contemporáneos were reading. Moreover, it was through Cuesta that Paz
was accepted by the group, and so brought into contact with figures su as
Bernardo Ortiz de Montellano and Octavio G. Barreda, who would be
responsible for key Mexican translations of Eliot in the late 1930s and early
1940s. Paz recalled that members of the Contemporáneos had objected to
Cuesta’s sympathetic review of Raíz del hombre because of Paz’s political
views (OC4, 74). en one aernoon in 1937, Paz met up with Cuesta for
what he had expected to be a casual lun with some of his friends. ose
friends turned out to be the Contemporáneos:
De pronto me di cuenta de que se me había invitado a una suerte de ceremonia de iniciación.
Mejor dio, a un examen: yo iba a ser el examinado y Xaxier [Villaurrutia] y Jorge [Cuesta] mis
padrinos.
(OC4, 74)
[I quily realized that I had been invited to a sort of initiation ceremony. Or rather, an exam: I
was going to be examined and Xavier [Villaurrutia] and Jorge [Cuesta] were to be my sponsors.]
In spite of some interrogation on the disparity between his political views
and his poetic tastes, Paz was accepted and invited to aend the group’s
monthly lunes. is productive new intellectual contact was postponed,
however, as in Mar 1937 Paz le Mexico City for the Yucatan.
Entre la piedra y la flor and Spain
Paz had been offered a post, along with his friends Octavio Novaro Fiora
and Ricardo Cortés Tamayo, to help found a sool for the ildren of
agricultural workers in the city of Mérida. e project fell under the broader
policy of Lázaro Cárdenas’s government to implement a nationwide
‘socialist education’. Paz had some experience as an educator from his
previous activity with the UEPOC and the post offered him an opportunity
to participate in the element of government policy that coincided most
closely with his own convictions. Paz’s encounter with the poverty of the
agricultural workers carried a strong personal as well as political resonance.
His father had lived with workers in Morelos, Guerrero and Puebla during
the Mexican Revolution while developing agrarian reform. What Paz saw of
the lives of the workers in Mérida, ‘the friends of my father’ as he described
them in interview, provided stark evidence that those reforms were
incomplete.44 e other striking feature of his experience was the Yucatan
landscape:
Por primera vez vivía en tierra caliente, no en un trópico verde y lujorioso sino blanco y seco, una
tierra llana rodeada de infinito por todas partes. Soberanía del espacio: el tiempo sólo era un
parpadeo.45
[For the first time I was living in a hot climate, not the luxurious, green tropics but a white, dry
land, a flat land surrounded by infinity. Domination of space: time was the blink of an eye.]
Here was an arid landscape that could be found in The Waste Land and The
Hollow Men.
46 It is unsurprising, then, that the poem whi arose from his
encounter with it, Entre la piedra y la flor, provides his most extensive
poetic use of Eliot so far. Just as Cuesta had argued that ‘mexicanismo’ was
‘el exotismo de una literatura extranjera’ [the exoticism of a foreign
literature], so the poem that Paz wrote of a native Mexican landscape and its
indigenous people was strongly guided by his reading of a North American
poet living in London. Paz later described the intention behind his poem:
Se me ocurrió escribir un poema que […] tuviese una proyección a un tiempo histórico y
espiritual: fusión de tiempos y de culturas. Recuerda quizá The Waste Land, cuya lectura me había
impresionado muo en esos años. Escribí mi poema varias veces y nunca quedé satisfeo. De
todos modos, me parece que, por lo menos logré expresar, así haya sido de manera muy
imperfecta, unas cuantas cosas. Una: el paisaje yucateco; otra una visión de los indios nada
sentimental ni ideológico, a igual distancia del realismo superficial y del didacticismo […]
También intenté mostrar la relación extraña entre la sociedad india tradicional y la realidad
desalmada del dinero, el dios moderno.47
[I thought of writing a poem that […] would have both a historical and a spiritual dimension: a
fusion of times and cultures. It possibly recalls The Waste Land, whi had made a deep
impression on me in those years. I wrote several versions of my poem, but was never satisfied. All
the same, it seems to me that I at least managed to express a few things, however imperfectly.
First, the landscape of the Yucatan; second, a vision of the indians that was neither sentimental
nor ideological, free of both supeficial realism and didacticism […] I also tried to demonstrate the
strange relationship between a traditional, Indian society and the soulless reality of money, the
modern god.]
e link to Eliot is repeated in Itinerario with the reservation of ‘quizá’
excised:
Inspirada por mi lectura de Eliot, se me ocurrió escribir un poema en el que la aridez de la planicie
yucateca, una tierra reseca y cruel, apareciese como la imagen de lo que hacía el capitalismo —que
para mí era el demonio de la abstracción— con el hombre y la naturaleza: uparles la sangre,
sorberles su substancia, volverlos hueso y piedra.48
(OC9, 22)
[Inspired by my reading of Eliot, I thought of writing a poem in whi the aridity of the Yucatan
plain, a dry and cruel land, would appear as an image of what capitalism — whi for me was the
demon of abstraction — was doing to man and nature: drinking their blood, suing their
substance dry, leaving them reduced to bone and stone.]
Paz admired Eliot for reintroducing a historical reality to the poem whi ‘el
simbolismo había expulsado’ [Symbolism had expelled]. e coincidence of
the Yucatan landscape with The Waste Land enabled him to bring some of
the meaning that he had found in Eliot to bear on his own experience.
Guillermo Sheridan observes the influence of ‘El páramo’ on Paz’s poem,
describing it as his ‘most ambitious (and poorly realized) young effort to
“insert poetry in history” ’.49 Yet Paz’s poetic use of The Waste Land is still
filtered through The Hollow Men, as in his earlier poems. e desert
landscape of the Yucatan, of whi Paz declared in an article for El Nacional
at the time that ‘la vida toda es el henequén’ [all of life is the agave],50
would certainly recall ‘What the under Said’, but also ‘esta es la tierra del
cactus’ (HH, 134) [‘is is cactus land’ (CPP, 84)]. e original title for the
poem was in fact ‘El henequén’. Sheridan aributes the eventual ange of
title to an article on the Yucatan by Paz’s friend, Efraín Huerta: ‘Entre la
piedra y el cielo’ [Between the Stone and the Sky]; yet it also summons the
final section of The Hollow Men and Paz’s use of entre does aim for some of
Eliot’s liturgical gravity.
e opening section of the poem reiterates a sense of aridity and, located
within that aridity, unsatisfied human thirst: ‘estéril vaho’ [sterile vapour],
‘piedra seca’ [dry stone], ‘círculo sediento’ [circle of thirst], ‘descarnada sed’
[disembodied thirst], ‘el jadeo reseco de la tierra’ [the dry panting of the
earth], and ‘horas áridas’ [arid hours] (EPF, 1 & 2).51 is image of desire
frustrated has a wide extension. It is able to carry the biblical meaning of a
spiritual quest, whi is active in Eliot; but it can also be read, in a leist
context, as an image of a potential for liberty restrained by circumstance.
Paz projects this struggle into the landscape, identifying the growth of the
henequén with human awakening:
Amanecemos ciegas,
desesperadas fibras,
tercas raíces mudas
obstinada ternura de raíces
hundidas en el jadeo reseco de la tierra.
Amanecemos.
(EPF, 1–2)
[We arise blind,
desperate fibres,
stubborn mute roots
obstinate soness of roots
buried in the dry panting of the earth.
We arise.]
e repeated references to roots eo Neruda’s Tres cantos materiales and
the ‘roots that clut’ of ‘e Burial of the Dead’, a line whi Paz almost
translates as ‘Miserables raíces atadas a las piedras’ [Miserable roots
aaed to the stones] (EPF, 2). e struggle for growth is also reminiscent
of the opening to ‘e Burial of the Dead’, as Sheridan observes.52 ere,
however, the speaker’s encounter with new growth is reluctant and fearful.
Here, the identity is confident, and Paz employs the first person plural of The
Hollow Men — ‘amanecemos’ — implying, as in ‘Desde el principio’, that the
experience is not individual but the shared struggle of a community. Paz
aempts to move beyond the individual, psyologizing tendency of Eliot’s
objective correlative in whi objects and situations stand as the ‘formula’
for a ‘particular emotion’ (SW, 85). Instead, he seares for a wider ‘imagen
de lo que hacía el capitalismo’ [image of what capitalism was doing].
A difficulty arises, however, that while the henequén provides an eloquent
image of a life force struggling against constriction, it does not lend itself so
readily to the articulation of a Marxist critique of capitalist economics. As
Paz develops the image it is not in fact towards an analysis of objective
historical circumstance, but to human emotion:
El henequén, inmóvil y rabioso,
en sus índices verdes
hace visible lo que nos remueve,
el callado furor que nos devora.
(EPF, 2)
[e henequén, immobile and enraged,
in its green fingers
it makes what moves us visible,
the silent fury that devours us.]
A portrayal of circumstance has become an emotional response to that
circumstance. e implication, naturally, is that anger is the result of
injustice, and hence it is a moral judgement on a specific political situation.
Nevertheless, the artistic method that Paz has osen — projection of human
meaning onto a landscape — has a limited capacity for the end that he
intends: the demonstration of a historical situation. He is able, through this
method, to express anger, and to suggest a cause for it, but he is not able to
get at that cause, to articulate it in a way that could then provide a release
for his frustration.
e landscape itself cannot express the meaning that Paz is looking for.
e opening of the second section is an eo of the ‘Son of man passage’
from ‘e Burial of the Dead’; but it is also, in its questioning, a recognition
that the previous section has failed to find satisfactory meaning:
¿é tierra es ésta?
¿é extraña violencia alimenta
en su cáscara de piedra?
(EPF, 5)
[What land is this?
What strange violence does it feed
in its stony shell?]
In the ‘Notas’ that Paz wrote at the time of his stay, he described the
landscape as ‘una naturaleza que me reaza’ [a nature that rejects me].53 In
this section of the poem, he anowledges that it resists his desire to find
meaning. e henequén then becomes an image not of human struggle in
the world but of the poet’s solipsism, and his anger: ‘Furiosos años lentos
[…] / en un verdor ensimismado [Slow furious years […] / in a greenness
loed in itself] (EPF, 6).
e third section turns from the projection of meaning onto the
landscape, and considers the agricultural workers directly. is shi to an
indigenist theme still fails to articulate his political intention, however. As
the section progresses he calls upon the entre of The Hollow Men in an
aempt to provide a comprehensive expression of the worker’s situation:
Entre el primer silencio y el postrero,
entre la piedra y la flor,
tú, el círculo de ternura que alimenta la noe.
(EPF, 10)
[Between the first silence and the last,
between the stone and the flower,
you, the circle of gentleness that night feeds]
e final two sections then move into a mode of explicit analysis to explain
‘lo que te mueve por la tierra’ [what moves you on the land] (EPF, 10). is
shi of perspective calls for a different type of poem, and as Manuel Ulacia
points out, evedo’s Letrillas satíricas, ‘La pobreza. El dinero’ and
‘Poderoso caballero es don Dinero’, now provide a model.54 Yet the tone of
satirical condemnation that he adopts from evedo is beer suited to
express indignation at the situation of the peasants than to demonstrate ‘la
relación extraña entre la sociedad india tradicional y la realidad desalmada
del dinero’ [the strange relationship between traditional, Indian society and
the soulless reality of money]. ere is a tendency either towards
overwrought metaphor — ‘Pasas como una flor por este infierno estéril’ [You
move like a flower through this sterile hell] — or sermonizing — ‘Porque el
dinero es infinito y crea desiertos infinitos’ [Because money is infinite and
creates infinite deserts] (EPF, 12 & 13). e final section, in a gesture that
anowledges his anger even as it concedes his impotence, then calls for
annihilation:
Dame, llama invisible, espada fría,
tu persistente cólera,
para acabar con todo,
oh mundo seco,
oh mundo desangrado,
para acabar con todo.
(EPF, 14)
[Give me, invisible flame, cold sword,
your persistent anger,
to put an end to everything,
oh dry world,
oh bloodless world,
to put an end to everything.]
Paz’s accounts of the thinking that lay behind the poem indicate that his
experience of the Yucatan coincided at more than one point with his reading
of Eliot. Yet Eliot proved less amenable to the poem that Paz wanted to write
than these accounts suggest. e merging of past and present that Paz found
in The Waste Land — a tenique that he would later refer to as
simultaneísmo [simultaneism] — while a promising frame for the confluence
of an ancient indigenous people and a modern capitalist economy, actually
finds scant expression in the poem itself. e arid landscapes of The Waste
Land and The Hollow Men provided more productive models for a poem that
was part objective description, part psyological projection. Ermilo Abreu
Gómez, in a contemporary review, praised this aspect of the poem:
La capacidad poética de Paz no radica en una concepción objetiva de los heos (como hace
Othón); ni en una concepción subjetiva de los mismos (como acontece en González Martínez). La
capacidad poética de Octavio Paz se condiciona a la recreación de lo objetivo-subjetivo.55
[Octavio Paz’s poetic ability doesn’t reside in an objective conception of the world (like Othón);
nor in a subjective conception (like González Martínez). e poetic ability of Octavio Paz is
shaped by the recreation of the objective-subjective.]
e problem for Paz, however, was that the projection of feeling onto a
landscape does not lead naturally to an understanding of the relation
between human subjects and economic circumstance. As a method it is too
ambiguous for su a project, as a review by José Luis Martínez unwiingly
aested when it ose to read the henequén as an image not of socialist but
nationalist struggle: ‘el crecimiento sordo y rencoroso de México y lo
mexicano’ [the muted and bier growth of Mexico and the Mexican].56
Entre la piedra y la flor confirms Jorge Cuesta’s analysis of Raíz del
hombre. A forceful emotional disposition, in this case an angry one, is still
searing for an adequate metafísica through whi to understand, and
relate to, the world. Paz admired Eliot for bringing a historical reality ba
into the poem, whi implied an aendantly coherent understanding of
history. Yet Paz’s experiment in the Yucatan demonstrated that Eliot could
not be applied so easily to the kind of political thinking that he hoped to
include in his own poems. In fact, the political aspiration of Entre la piedra y
la flor curtails some of its poetic possibilities. Unlike The Waste Land, whi
encompasses a host of different aracters, Paz’s poem remains a solitary
meditation. When he comes to describe the agricultural workers, it is as an
outsider reflecting on the distance between self and the object of his
aention: ‘Si pudiera cantar / al hombre que vive bajo esta piel amarga!’ [If I
could sing / the man who lives underneath this bier skin!] (EPF, 9). Mu of
the anecdotal variety of the portrait of Mérida in his ‘Notas’ is excluded in
the effort to portray ‘lo que hacía el capitalismo’ [what capitalism was
doing]. is is not simply the exclusion of artistic selection, but the
exclusion of themes and preoccupations that would surface elsewhere in his
poetry. e erotic current of Raíz del hombre is absent from Entre la piedra y
la flor, yet it does appear in the ‘Notas’ in a description of young women in
the town: ‘asomadas a los balcones o en las puertas las muaas conversan
y sus voces son como un hondo río, como el oscuro presentimiento del agua’
[on the balconies and in the doorways the young women talk and their
voices are like a deep river, like the dark presentiment of water].57 In a
similar image of Entre la piedra, ‘El agua intocable en su tumba de piedra’
(EPF, 3) reads as an expression of deferred political hope. Yet the ‘Notas’
suggest that the sear for an encompassing metafísica would need to
accommodate more specific human relations.
Paz was never happy with Entre la piedra y la flor: ‘No quedé satisfeo y
me propuse, vanamente, corregirlo’ [I was not satisfied and I tried, in vain,
to correct it] (OC13, 29). In the revised version of the poem from 1976, mu
of the personal animus that was previously projected into the landscape has
been removed:
Amanecemos piedras.
Nada sino la luz. No hay nada
sino la luz contra la luz.
La tierra:
palma de una mano de piedra.
(OC11, 86)
[We arise as stones.
Nothing but light. ere is nothing
but light against light.
e land:
the palm of a hand of stone.]
In the earlier version, this had been an image of anger, ‘la luz contra la luz
rabiosa’ [the light against the enraged light] (EPF, 3). Similarly, the earlier
‘furiosos años lentos’ [slow furious years] of the agave are now transformed
as the speaker concludes that ‘su violencia es quietud’ [its violence is
quietude] (OC11, 87). e speaker seems less determined to find a specific
meaning in the landscape, and more conscious of his own role as interpreter:
the henequén is associated with language and is described as ‘un signo’ [a
sign] (OC11, 88). He replaces his earlier interrogation with an acceptance of
the physical world’s resistance to interpretation: ‘el agua […] que no dice
nada’ [the water […] that says nothing] (OC11, 86) is no longer a symbol for
the redemption of spiritual aridity, nor for anything else. e satirical final
section remains insistent, and the poem still seems oddly divided between its
different sections. e fact that he maintained the more explicit satirical
content indicates a continuing desire to include a certain form of political
statement in the poem whi never found entirely convincing expression.
Nevertheless, the revised landscape poem displays a growth of self-
consciousness by replacing a particular interpretation with a more
developed awareness of interpretation itself as an act. It suggests that the
reading of Eliot as a poet of history would give way to the artistically
conscious Eliot of the Contemporáneos.
During his stay in the Yucatan, Paz was invited by Pablo Neruda to aend
the Segundo Congreso Internacional de Escritores Antifascistas para la
Defensa de la Cultura along with Carlos Pellicer in a Spain embroiled in
civil war. While the experience of this excursion had no direct bearing on his
relationship with T. S. Eliot, it nevertheless proved a crucial stage in the
development of his political thinking whi, as Entre la piedra y la flor
demonstrates, was an integral part of his reading of Eliot.
Paz arrived in Spain in July 1937. e experience provided him with a
confirmation of his emotional aament to socialist ideals. In a frequently
cited anecdote, he recalled being brought food and wine by local workers
while sheltering from an air-raid outside Valencia: ‘España me enseñó el
significado de la palabra fraternidad’ [Spain taught me the meaning of the
word fraternity] (OC15, 424), he concluded. Yet his experience of the official
le was not so fortunate. In Itinerario, Paz describes the journey by train
from Paris to Barcelona with Pablo Neruda and Ilya Ehrenburg where the
Mexican delegates were quizzed about Trotsky, a pariah among the
company of the Congress at the time:
De pronto, con voz ausente, murmuró [Ilya Ehrenburg]: ‘Ah, Trotski…’ Y dirigié-ndose a Pellicer:
‘Usted, ¿qué opina?’ Hubo una pausa. Neruda cambió conmigo una mirada de angustia mientras
Pellicer decía, con aquella voz suya de bajo de ópera: ‘¿Trotski? Es el agitador político más grande
de la historia… después, naturalmente, de San Pablo.’ Nos reímos de dientes afuera. Ehrenburg se
levantó y Neruda me dijo al oído: ‘El poeta católico hará que nos fusilen…’
(OC9, 25)
[Suddenly, he [Ilya Ehrenburg] mumbled absently: ‘Ah, Trotsky…,’ and turning to Pellicer asked:
‘What’s your opinion?’ ere was a pause. Neruda exanged an anguished glance with me as
Pellicer said in his bass opera singer’s voice: ‘Trotsky? He is history’s greatest political agitator…
aer, of course, Saint Paul.’ We laughed hollowly. Ehrenburg stood up and Neruda whispered in
my ear: ‘at Catholic poet will get us shot…’.]
At the Congress itself, whi moved to condemn André Gide for talking
openly about his visit to the Soviet Union under Stalin in his Retour de
l’URSS, Pellicer spoke in Gide’s favour and abstained from the vote, along
with Paz.58 Neither Paz nor Pellicer was a member of the Liga de Escritores
y Artistas Revolucionarios (LEAR), the Mexican satellite of the Union of
Soviet Writers dedicated to socialist realism — ‘Aquello me repugnaba, me
parecía la muerte del arte’ [it repelled me, it seemed like the death of art to
me] (OC15, 631) — and they were generally mistrusted as a result.
However, there was one group at the Congress whi was sympathetic to
Paz, the writers of the magazine Hora de España. Arturo Serrano Plaja
delivered a collective statement from the group whi insisted that art could
not be dictated to by politics. ey shared Paz’s poetic tastes and his
mistrust of the leist orthodoxy that surrounded them. In Solo a dos voces
(OC15, 677), Paz described his night-time walks in Valencia with one of the
group’s members, Manuel Altolaguirre, who published a collection of Paz’s
poems, Bajo tu clara sombra y otros poemas sobre España (1937). He had
also translated Eliot’s ‘Journey of the Magi’ in 1935.59 Altolaguirre provided
an example of a writer who managed to accommodate a politically
conservative poet su as Eliot with more militant political beliefs. Paz was
distant from Eliot’s politics in Spain, and he wrote an angry piece in El
Popular that castigated the language of ‘order’ that Eliot favoured:
Pero los reaccionarios, los falangistas, los militares, las clases feudales, el Clero Romano, que
tantos crímenes se ha anotado en la historia española, y, en fin, todos los defensores del ‘orden’,
instigaban al desorden y al caos.60
[But the reactionaries, the Falangists, the military, the feudal classes, the Roman Clergy, who have
commied so many crimes during Spain’s history, and, in short, all those defenders of ‘order’,
brought disorder and aos.]
Yet Paz also spent considerable time travelling around Spain with Stephen
Spender, another example of a writer with sympathetic political views who
had nevertheless wrien about Eliot and been published in The Criterion.61
Spain confirmed Alberti’s advice that there was a value in poetic
revolution beyond political allegiance. Paz described reading Luis Cernuda,
another admirer of T. S. Eliot, who would be the first Spanish poet to
accommodate the influence of Four Quartets:
Mi lectura de La realidad y el deseo en plena guerra de España fue decisiva porque en esa
atmósfera de incendio y de lua escuaba una voz profundamente individual, en la cual la
subversión moral se unía a la subversión poética y era imposible identificar a la revolución social
con la subversión poética. El poeta iba más allá, traspasaba, diríamos, la lua revolucionaria y me
mostraba otro mundo.62
[My reading of Reality and Desire during the Spanish Civil War was decisive because in that
atmosphere of struggle and bombardment I could hear a profoundly individual voice, in whi
moral subversion was linked to poetic subversion and it was impossible to identify social
revolution with poetic subversion. His poetry went beyond, passed through, let us say, the
revolutionary struggle to show me another world.]
e significance of these experiences would become apparent in the ensuing
years as Paz’s relationship with the official le worsened.
e mid-1930s saw Paz engaged in a project to articulate beliefs within his
poems, and in Raíz del hombre he flirted with the erotic vision that was
Neruda’s answer to The Waste Land. Paz was too conscious a poet, however,
to surrender entirely to Neruda’s materialism. His own critical intelligence
was fostered by Jorge Cuesta during these years, who was himself a kind of
surrogate for key aspects of Eliot’s thinking in Mexico. e lessons learnt in
this relationship are manifested throughout Paz’s career. Cuesta identified
Paz’s need to elaborate a metafísica beyond his purely political beliefs, and it
was during this period that Paz’s leist commitment began to show signs of
strain. e political ambitions of ¡No pasarán! were dismissed by Ortiz de
Montellano, and Entre la piedra y la flor enjoyed only limited success at
deriving political analysis from the historical relevance of Eliot. A crucial
rupture, whi would worsen as the decade progressed, was also opened in
Spain between Paz and the orthodox le. However, the unorthodox le that
he encountered there, embodied in figures su as Manuel Altolaguirre and
Luis Cernuda, provided an example of politically kindred writers who were
nevertheless able to pursue an interest in T. S. Eliot’s work. eir spirit
would inform Paz’s next major publishing venture, the magazine Taller.
Notes to Chapter 4
1. Sheridan, Poeta con paisaje, p. 115.
2. Ibid.
3. Sheridan, Poeta con paisaje, p. 149.
4. Bernardo Ortiz de Montellano, ‘Poesía y retórica’, Letras de México, 1 (15 Jan 1937), p. 2.
5. Paz, ‘Prólogo: El llamado y el aprendizaje’, in OC13, 28.
6. Jorge Cuesta, ‘Raíz del hombre, Octavio Paz’, Letras de México, 2 (1 Feb 1937), 3 & 9 (p. 9).
7. Ibid.
8. Cuesta, ‘Raíz del hombre, Octavio Paz’, p. 9.
9. e first edition of Residencia en la tierra. 1925–1931 appeared in Santiago, Chile, in 1933. A later
edition in two parts, whi included further poems wrien 1931–35, was published by Cruz y
Raya in Madrid in 1935. Given that Paz was twenty-two in 1936, and that the Residencia
published by Cruz y Raya was the more readily available of the two editions, one can assume
that he was reading the two-part version of Neruda’s work.
10. Robert Pring-Mill, ‘Introduction’ to Pablo Neruda, A Basic Anthology (Oxford: Dolphin, 1975),
pp. xv–lxxix (p. xxi).
11. Pablo Neruda, Obras completas, ed. by Alfonso M. Escudero and Hernán Loyola, 3rd edn, 2 vols
(Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, 1967–68), I, 198.
12. ‘The Waste Land’, in Eliot in Perspective: A Symposium, ed. by Graham Martin (London:
Macmillan, 1970), pp. 102–11 (p. 108).
13. Ibid., pp. 108–09.
14. e ‘piernas llenas de dulce vello’ of the Neruda eo a sexually arged moment in ‘Prufro’:
‘(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)’ (CPP, 15).
15. Paz, ‘Cuatro o cinco puntos cardinales’, in OC15, 40–41. Paz’s early response to the erotic life in
Eliot’s poem may have been given a harsh inflection by a misreading of the ‘typist home at
teatime’ passage. In the first edition of El arco y la lira (1956) he describes ‘la empleada,
violada por un petimetre’ (Arco1, 75). In the second edition (1967), ‘violada’ [raped] has been
revised as ‘poseída’ [possessed] (Arco2, 77).
16. Saúl Yurkievi, Fundadores de la nueva poesía latinoamericana, 2nd edn (Barcelona: Barral
Editores, 1973), p. 194.
17. Ibid., p. 199.
18. Neruda, Obras, I, 233.
19. María Zambrano, ‘Pablo Neruda o el amor de la materia’, Hora de España, 23 (Nov 1938), 35–42
(pp. 35 & 37). Neruda had himself launed an aa on the artepuristas in ‘Sobre una poesía
sin pureza’ (1935).
20. Ibid., p. 38.
21. Neruda, Obras, I, 234.
22. Enrico Mario Santí, El acto de las palabras: Estudios y diálogos con Octavio Paz (México: Fondo
de Cultura Económica, 1997), p. 30.
23. Neruda, Obras, I, 233.
24. Pablo Neruda, Pablo Neruda, Héctor Eandi: Correspondencia durante ‘Residencia en la tierra’, ed.
by Margarita Aguirre (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1980), p. 46.
25. Paz, Raíz del hombre (México: Simbad, 1937), p. 39. A revised version appears as poem IX in
OC13, 64–65. Further references to Raíz del hombre are given aer quotations in the text.
26. Yurkievi, Fundadores de la nueva poesía, p. 171.
27. Paz, ‘Poesía e historia: Laurel y nosotros’ (1982), in OC3, 84.
28. Paz, ‘Neruda veía la realidad de un modo fantástico y maravilloso: Tenía los ojos de sonámbulo’,
Unomásuno, 21 Sept 1983, p. 15.
29. Paz, ‘Variaciones sobre la muerte’ (1977), in OC4, 89.
30. Cuesta, ‘Raíz del hombre, Octavio Paz’, p. 9.
31. Eliot, ‘Note sur Mallarmé et Poe’, p. 525.
32. M. E. González Padilla, Poesía y teatro de T. S. Eliot (México: Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes,
1978), p. 298.
33. Jorge Cuesta, Poemas y ensayos, ed. by Miguel Capistrán and Luis Mario Sneider, 4 vols
(México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1978), III, 327.
34. Cuesta, Poemas y ensayos, II, 108.
35. Cuesta, ‘Notas’, Ulises (Oct 1927), 30–37 (p. 32).
36. Cuesta, ‘La literatura y el nacionalismo’ (1932), in Poemas y ensayos, II, 98. Christopher
Domínguez Miael argues that in this passage, ‘Cuesta summarizes the ideas of T. S. Eliot’,
Tiros en el concierto: Literatura mexicana del siglo V, 2nd edn (México: Ediciones Era, 1999), p.
309.
37. Cuesta, Poemas y ensayos, II, 107.
38. Eliot, After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (London: Faber and Faber, 1934), p. 59.
39. Paz, ‘Me asombra haber llegado a los 80: Octavio Paz’, interview with José Luis Perdomo
Orallana, El Financiero, 30 Mar 1994, pp. 69–70 (p. 69).
40. Cuesta, Poemas y ensayos, II, 192.
41. See also ‘Introducción a la historia de la poesía mexicana’ (1950): ‘Los poetas del siglo XVIII, a
semejanza de los románticos, descubren la naturaleza a través de sus modelos europeos’ (OC4,
36).
42. Paz, ‘Me asombra haber llegado a los 80: Octavio Paz’, p. 69.
43. Cuesta, Poemas y ensayos, II, 181.
44. Paz, ‘Octavio Paz’, unpublished transcript of Bookmark interview broadcast on BBC2 (29
February 1988), p. 5. I am grateful to Jason Wilson for providing me with this material.
45. Paz, Itinerario, in OC9, 22.
46. Frances Chiles notes the ‘stark, elemental imagery (in whi we cat occasional glimpses of
Eliot’s landscape)’ in Octavio Paz: The Mythic Dimension (New York: Peter Lang, 1987), p. 25.
47. Paz, ‘Me asombra haber llegado a los 80: Octavio Paz’, interview with José Luis Perdomo
Orallana, El Financiero, 31 Mar 1994, p. 57.
48. While discussing the composition of Entre la piedra y la flor in interview for Bookmark (p. 5),
Paz contradicts his other statements about the ronology of his Eliot reading: ‘I was very
young and a lile before I have read Eliot — The Waste Land. And I was fascinated
immediately. For me it was one of the great discoveries. I was twenty-two when I read The
Waste Land.’ Paz was twenty-two in 1936. However, in other accounts he consistently
describes reading Eliot in Contemporáneos in 1930, a version of events that is borne out by the
evidence of his early poems. I would speculate, then, that a slip of the memory apart, this
reading of The Waste Land in 1936 either represents his discovery of the Ángel Flores
translation or a return to the poem aer his initial reading, or even his first encounter with the
original in English (although ‘T. S. Eliot: Mínima evocación’ would suggest a later date for this
last possibility). For accounts that place his first encounter with Eliot in 1930, see Paz:
‘Conversación con Octavio Paz’ (1975), OC15, 172; ‘T. S. Eliot; mínima evocación’, OC2, 290;
‘Rescate de Enrique Munguía’, p. 43; and ‘La evolución poética de Octavio Paz’, interview with
William Ferguson, p. 8.
49. Sheridan, Poeta con paisaje, p. 227.
50. Paz, ‘Notas’, El Nacional, 8 May 1937, 2nd section, pp. 1 & 3 (p. 3).
51. Although the poem was not published until 1941, it carries the note ‘Mérida, Yucatán, 1937’ at
the end (EPF, 15). Paz revised the poem repeatedly, and it appears in two separate versions in
the Obras completas: a newly revised version of the poem from 1941 in OC13, 106–13; and
what is described as ‘la versión definitiva’ from 1976 in OC11, 86–92.
52. Sheridan, Poeta con paisaje, p. 229.
53. Paz, ‘Notas’, p. 1.
54. Manuel Ulacia, El árbol milenario: Un recorrido por la obra de Octavio Paz (Barcelona: Galaxia
Gutenberg/Círculo de Lectores, 1999), p. 55.
55. Ermilo Abreu Gómez, ‘Entre la piedra y la flor de Octavio Paz’, Tierra Nueva, 9/10 (May–Aug
1941), 173–74 (p. 174).
56. José Luis Martínez, ‘Octavio Paz: Entre la piedra y la flor’, Letras de México, 15 May 1941, p. 4.
57. Paz, ‘Notas’, p. 1.
58. Sheridan recounts these events in Poeta con paisaje, pp. 282–87.
59. Eliot, ‘Journey of the Magi’, trans. by Manuel Altolaguirre, “1616” (English and Spanish Poetry),
London, 8 (1935), pp. 7–10.
60. Paz, ‘Las enseñanzas de una juventud. El camino de la unidad’, El Popular, 3 Aug 1938, pp. 5 & 6
(p. 5). Eliot had himself responded to the Civil War with an accusation that the English press
were encouraging ‘a deterioration of political thinking […] by simplifying the issues in very
different and very imperfectly understood countries, by resolving emotional tension in the
minds of their readers by directing their sympathies all one way, and consequently
encouraging mental sloth […] As long as we are not compelled in our own interest to take
sides, I do not see why we should do so on insufficient knowledge: and even any eventual
partisanship should be held with reservations, humility and misgiving’, ‘Commentary’,
Criterion, 16, 63 (January 1937), 289–93 (pp. 289–90).
61. Sheridan, Poeta con paisaje, pp. 256 & 261.
62. Paz, Solo a dos voces, interview with Julián Ríos, in OC15, 635.
CHAPTER 5
Taller
When Paz returned to Mexico City from Spain in 1938, he renewed the
contact with the Contemporáneos that his excursion to the Yucatan had
interrupted. He now aended the group’s daily meetings at El Café París,
aer whi he would wander the streets of Mexico City. He later described
this experience and the poem that ensued:
Yo sentía que caminaba entre ruinas y que los transeúntes eran fantasmas. De esos años son los
sonetos que llamé Crepúsculos de la ciudad en homenaje y réplica a Lugones pero, asimismo, a
Xavier Villaurrutia.1
[I felt that I was walking among ruins and that the passers-by were ghosts. e series of sonnets
dates from these years that I called Crepúsculos de la ciudad, in homage to, and imitation of,
Lugones, but also Villaurrutia.]
Although the title anowledges Lugones and Villaurrutia, the vision of
‘ruinas’ and ‘fantasmas’ also recalls Eliot’s ‘unreal city’ (CPP, 62). Paz’s early
poems associate Eliot closely with Villaurrutia, and he is a natural
companion for Lugones, who was Laforgue’s ief heir in Spanish America.
e first sonnet of ‘Crepúsculos’ applies the arid landscape of Eliot, whi
had served as both literal description and metaphorical comment in the
Yucatan, to an urban seing:
Impuro viento sopla sus desiertos;
su estéril lengua torna el cielo fosa;
teje lívida luz yedra ruinosa
sobre los muros calcinados, yertos […]
calles en que la nada desemboca;
tumba del tiempo, páramo de hastío;
multitudes de piedra y de pecado.2
[Impure wind blows its deserts;
its sterile tongue turns the sky into a grave;
pale light weaves a ruinous ivy
on the rigid, blaened walls […]
streets into whi the nothing flows;
time’s tomb, waste land of boredom;
multitudes of stone and sin.]
Judith Myers Hoover finds an eo of the ‘Streets that follow like a tedious
argument’ from ‘Prufro’ (CPP, 13) in these ‘calles en que la nada
desemboca’.3 Paz also introduces the suggestion of a Christian frame —
‘multitudes de piedra y de pecado’ — within whi this world of ‘hombres
paralizados’ [paralysed men] might be understood; or even, to follow the
logic of a Christian analogy, redeemed. Jorge Cuesta had predicted that Paz’s
poetry ‘no tardará en precisarse en una metafísica’ [will soon become
focused in a metaphysic].4 However, the Christian metaphysic that recurs
throughout ‘Crepúsculos’ is simultaneously employed and negated. His
‘nada’ recalls Heidegger, and his God remains ‘un hueco dios’ [an empty
god]. In the fourth sonnet, titled ‘Cielo’ (meaning both ‘sky’ and ‘heaven’),
he employs the entre of The Hollow Men to describe an existence,
sin puertas ni asidero,
entre la tierra, sed de labio fiero,
y el otro cielo prometido, ausente.
[without doors or foundation,
between the earth, thirst of wild lips,
and the other promised, absent sky.]
e sense of entrapment that takes hold of the speaker as he contemplates
this world ‘sin puertas’, and then ‘solitarias fronteras sin salida’ [lonely
frontiers with no exit] reiterates a feeling that was present in Entre la piedra
y la flor, and whi manifested itself as a call for annihilation. Hoover reads
a similar paern in the later poem:
In the final sonnet of ‘Crepúsculos de la ciudad’, all the images of life in the alienated world of the
modern city, evoked throughout the poem, are brought together once more, and the ultimate self-
destruction of this world, as in The Waste Land, is foretold.5
is is a debatable reading of The Waste Land’s tentative conclusion. It is
also a particular reading of ‘Crepúsculos’. Hoover quotes from the version
that appeared in the 1974 edition of Libertad bajo palabra. In the original
version that appeared in Letras de México in 1942, however, another two
sonnets continue the journey ‘hacia la nada, sola certidumbre’ [towards the
nothing, single certainty] of sonnet six. e nada now acquires a more
positive value, as the speaker retreats into a primary self:
En el abismo de mi ser nativo,
en mi nada primera, me desvivo:
frente de mí yo mismo, devorado.
[In the abyss of my native self,
in my primary nothing, I yearn:
in front of me my devoured self.]
e conclusion is then ambivalent:
Y nada queda, sino el goce impío
de la razón, cayendo en la inefable
y helada intimidad de su vacío.
[Nothing remains except the dauntless pleasure
of reason, falling into the unfathomable
and frozen intimacy of its emptiness.]
He has moved beyond earlier constraint, but into a vacuum rather than
freedom. In ‘Poesía de soledad y poesía de comunión’ [Poetry of Solitude
and Poetry of Communion] (1943), whi will be discussed later in this
apter, Paz quotes Francisco de evedo’s ‘Lágrimas de un penitente’
[Tears of a Penitent] for the classic expression of human reason in free-fall:
‘las aguas del abismo / donde me enamoraba de mí mismo’ [the waters of
the abyss / where I fell in love with myself] (OC13, 242). It is a development
of the sceptical, or negating, Eliot that he uses to question belief in his early
poems. Entre la piedra y la flor had struggled to express an understanding of
the world whi it failed to realize. ‘Crepúsculos’ pis up the
epistemological tendency of his earliest Eliotic poems and represents the
speaker engaged in that struggle to find meaning, thus making the struggle
rather than its outcome the subject of the poem. Both in its themes and
seing, ‘Crepúsculos de la ciudad’ anticipates mu of Paz’s poetry of the
ensuing decade. In an interview with Anthony Stanton, he described it as
the precursor, although ‘en una forma más tradicional’ [in a more traditional
form], of his urban poems of the later 1940s.6 Certainly, his syntax and use
of the sonnet form have more in common with the neo-baroque experiments
of Primer día and Bajo tu clara sombra than with his more colloquial later
work. Nevertheless, the degree of self-consciousness with whi
‘Crepúsculos’ presents the aempt to arrive at a metafísica marks a
significant development in Paz’s continuing dialogue with Eliot.
Hoover’s case for the influence of ‘Prufro’ on the urban landscape of
‘Crepú-sculos’ is convincing. Eliot’s poem had appeared in the Mexican
periodical Poesía in 1938, presenting a speaker who declared that ‘fuí por
calles estreas al crepúsculo’ [‘I have gone at dusk through narrow streets’
(CPP, 15)].7 e translator of ‘El canto de amor de J. Alfred Prufro’,
however, the Mexican playwright Rodolfo Usigli, added a further
significance to Eliot’s poem. Usigli was not a member of the
Contemporáneos, but Paz describes him as ‘amigo a medias de Xavier
Villaurrutia’ [a friend of sorts with Xavier Villaurrutia].8 e copy of his
translation in the Biblioteca Nacional in Mexico City is inscribed by the
author ‘A Xavier’ — presumably Villaurrutia — ‘ “que me acompañó en el
descubrimiento” de T. S. E., y con quien a menudo discutí las ideas de Eliot
confundiéndolo un poco con él’ [‘who accompanied me in the discovery’ of
T. S.E., and with whom I would sometimes discuss Eliot’s ideas, confusing
you a lile with him]. Paz takes care to note that Usigli did not believe in
the efficacy of revolution (OC14, 126) — a central issue to divide Paz and the
Contemporáneos. Given that Paz described Usigli’s translation as ‘producto
de una afinidad. No porque Usigli se pareciera a Eliot sino a Prufro’ [the
product of an affinity, not between Usigli and Eliot but between Usigli and
Prufro], Prufro’s own inability to act in a life ‘measured out […] with
coffee spoons’ (CPP, 14) becomes associated with Usigli’s, and by extension
with the Contemporáneos’ refusal to admit broader political action into their
work.9 Usigli’s translation accentuated the sense of vacillation in the poem
by rendering both the ‘Do I dare?’ and the ‘Why should I presume?’ (CPP,
14) of Eliot with the one verb: atreverse [to dare].10 e alternation in the
Eliot between ‘dare’ and the different ‘presume’ with its cushion of ironic
politesse, is replaced by a mu starker litany. e repeated atreverse
presents a steady provocation in the translation whi the speaker is not able
to aenuate with comedy.
If Paz did read Prufro’s inability to ‘force the moment to its crisis’ (CPP,
15) as a critique of the Contemporáneos, it would not be the only example in
his work of Eliotic personae commandeered to serve a polemical purpose.
e injunction of ‘Ética del artista’ that ‘Hemos de ser hombres completos,
íntegros’ [We must be complete, integral men] (OC13, 188) implied an aa
on the Contemporáneos as ‘hollow men’. In an essay of 1938, ‘Pablo Neruda
en el corazón’ [Pablo Neruda in the Heart], Paz made the comparison
explicit:
Y muos de estos poemas, de estos hermosos poemas, impersonales como la misma ‘eternidad’,
no eran más que casas vacías. Ya la poesía, por boca de Eliot, había delatado a sus raptores falsos:
a los hombres huecos, a los hombres embutidos de serrín. A esos hombres que no dan más que
vueltas al nopal, al nopal a las cinco de la mañana. A esos cobardes sin paciencia, sin heroísmo,
que sin usar de su paciencia para que lo sagrado les destruya la carne y les disuelva los huesos,
sino armados de su pura ciencia, de su impura ciencia pura, sin exponer nada, aceaban con
trampas a la poesía. Los hombres huecos no hacían más que trampas: sus poemas, sus hermosos
poemas, no eran sino ingeniosas trampas vacías, casas blandas y huecas, arteras como ellos. Y
como la poesía no acudió a la estéril cita, convirtieron a la cita en la poesía, a la casa en su
habitante, al poema en poesía. Casa de citas. E inventaron que la poesía no existía: dijeron que la
poesía era lo no real, aquello que nadie había visto: una ausencia. La nostalgia de los desterrados
hijos de Adán, el sueño, solamente el sueño, de los hombres.
(Olvidaban que el sueño es otra cosa: que el sueño son los recuerdos, los pecados, los
remordimientos de los hombres: en suma, el hombre).11
[And many of these poems, these beautiful poems, impersonal like ‘eternity’ itself, were no more
than empty dwellings. rough Eliot’s mouth, poetry had already denounced its false kidnappers:
the hollow men, the men filled with straw. ose men who simply go round the prily pear, the
prily pear at five o’clo in the morning. ose cowards without patience, without heroism, who
rather than using their patience to let the sacred destroy their flesh and dissolve their bones
instead, armed with their pure science, with their impure pure science, with nothing to say, snared
poetry. e hollow men only made conjuring tris: their poems, their beautiful poems, were no
more than ingenious empty tris, mild, empty houses, cunning like themselves. And since poetry
did not turn up at this sterile assignation, they turned the assignation into poetry, the house into
its inhabitant, the poem into poetry. A house of assignations. And they came up with the
conclusion that poetry did not exist: they said that poetry was the unreal, that whi nobody had
seen: an absence. e nostalgia of the exiled sons of Adam, the dream, only the dream, of men.
(ey forgot that dream is more than this: that dream is memory, sin, the remorse of men: in short,
man himself).]
Given that Paz was now meeting regularly with the Contemporáneos, this is
a harsh aa whi enlists an unaracteristically militant Eliot — ‘Ya la
poesía, por boca de Eliot, había delatado…’. e reference that Paz makes to
The Hollow Men is extensive, and implies a close reading of León Felipe’s
translation. Could the otherwise peculiar condemnation of ‘cobardes sin
paciencia’ — as if a patient coward would be less blameworthy than an
impatient one — also be misremembered from ‘What the under Said’?
ere, in lines that employ the first person plural of The Hollow Men,
‘Nosotros que vivíamos antes estamos ahora muriendo / con un poco de
paciencia’ [‘We who were living are now dying / With a lile patience’
(CPP, 72)].12 Did Paz remember this as ‘con poca paciencia’, with lile
patience?
In 'Etica', Paz aaed the ‘obra escéptica y corrosiva’ [sceptical and
corrosive work] (OC13, 187) of the Contemporáneos and opposed them with
an ‘arte de tesis’ whi had ‘un valor testimonial e histórico’ [testimonial
and historical value], and whi was closely associated with his reading of
Eliot. Yet in ‘Nocturno de la ciudad abandonada’, he used an amalgam of
Eliot and Villaurrutia to express a consciousness that is sceptical of the
poem’s aempt to construct meaning. Now Paz aims to separate Eliot again
from the Contemporáneos in a difficult operation: a distance is opened up
between Eliot and his ‘hollow men’, whom he has created yet condemns,
while members of the Contemporáneos, su as Villaurrutia, are identified
with, and held responsible for, the worlds of ausencia [absence] and sueño
[dream] that they create. It is a wilful contrast and provides an example of a
recurring paern of Paz’s prose, in whi internal conflicts from his poems
are externalized as Maniean oppositions.
Although Eliot is credited with the diagnosis of the Contemporáneos’
failings, it is Pablo Neruda who is the repository for the virtues that they
la. eir ‘hermosas refrigeradoras, máquinas de lo eterno’ [beautiful
refrigerators, maines of the eternal] (OC13, 269) become fluid process in
Neruda:
No era la conciencia del mundo, era el mundo, la entraña, y la flor del mundo, dándose, creciendo
en un espeso, insistente lenguaje de olas materiales, tiernas, tímidas, arrolladoras.
(OC13, 270–71)
[He wasn’t the consciousness of the world, he was the world, its heart, and the flower of the
world, blooming, growing in a thi, insistent language of material, gentle, timid, overwhelming
waves.]
In his poetic relations with Neruda, Paz remained aaed to a ‘conciencia
del mundo’ that allied him with the more structured vision of Villaurrutia,
Cuesta, and Eliot. Yet in the current polemic, the vision of the
Contemporáneos creates ‘casas blandas y huecas, arteras como ellos’.
Neruda offers a more emotionally blooded experience, displaying the
‘angustia’ [anguish] (OC13, 270) that was at the centre of Heidegger’s
account of human experience. Heidegger’s nada is then introduced as the
counterpoint to the ‘afirmación poética’ [poetic affirmation] (OC13, 273) of
Neruda. Yet it has become strangely politicized:
Con el fascismo, en España, la nada impersonal, subterránea, disgregadora, adquiere imagen,
forma y acción semihumana […] El gran drama metafísico del tiempo y la nada, agudizado en un
instante tremendo y único, en un pedazo de historia, irreparable. Eso es España.
(OC13, 274)
[With fascism in Spain, the impersonal nothing, subterranean, disintegrating, acquires an image, a
form, and a semi-human action […] e great metaphysical drama of time and the nothing,
brought into relief in a unique and terrible moment, in an irreparable fragment of history. at is
what Spain means.]
is is the source of the contrast — Pablo Neruda as a poet prepared to
support the Republican cause in the Civil War, and the Contemporáneos
who were more reserved about political expression. e Contemporáneos
were, in fact, quietly supportive of the Republic, but in an atmosphere of
increasingly discouraging news from Spain, they become drawn into an
accusation against ‘los silenciosos cómplices, los sin partido, más viles que
los asesinos que destruyen España’ [the silent accomplices, without
allegiance, more vile than the murderers who are destroying Spain] (OC13,
275).
e tone of ‘Pablo Neruda en el corazón’ becomes increasingly hectoring
as it progresses. e violence of his aa has a parallel in the feelings that
struggled for expression in Entre la piedra y la flor, and whi eventually
surfaced as a call for annihilation. e ferocity with whi they are turned
here on the Contemporáneos suggests that the emotions at work transcend
this specific polemic, and they will find varied expression in response to the
events of the ensuing years.
Taller
Ruta, the magazine in whi ‘Pablo Neruda en el corazón’ appeared, was a
Mexican periodical dedicated to the defence of culture and a ‘lua firme en
contra de su más enconado enemigo: el fascismo internacional’ [resolute
struggle against its most bier enemy: international fascism].13 No doubt
Paz was writing to a brief, whi allowed him to step outside the literary
arena in whi he felt considerable sympathies for, and owed considerable
debts to, the Contemporáneos. Only a month earlier, in the different
environment of the Argentine periodical Sur, Paz had published a
sympathetic review of Xavier Villaurrutia’s Nostalgia de la muerte
[Nostalgia for Death] that defended him against nationalist criticism as the
first poet to express a ‘conciencia mexicana’ [Mexican consciousness], and
whi also contrasted his ‘contenida dignidad’ [restrained dignity]
favourably with Neruda’s ‘poderosa corriente poética’ [powerful poetic
current] (OC13, 138 & 139). 14 Taller [Workshop] (1938–41), the magazine
that Paz founded with Rafael Solana, Efraín Huerta, and Alberto intero
Álvarez, maintained links with the Contemporáneos. Xavier Villaurrutia,
Jorge Cuesta, Carlos Pellicer, and Bernardo Ortiz de Montellano all
contributed, as did other poets who circled in the orbit of Paz’s relationship
to Eliot: Juan Ramón Jiménez, Rafael Alberti, Pablo Neruda and Luis
Cernuda. Taller drew criticism from the Liga de Escritores y Artistas
Revolucionarios (LEAR), whi accused Paz, according to Guillermo
Sheridan, of preferring ‘secret currents to objective conditions’.15 e
magazine adopted a stance whi was indebted to Hora de España,
maintaining a leist political commitment that nevertheless insisted on the
autonomous claims of literature. Indeed, when exiled members of the
Republican magazine arrived in Mexico in 1939, they were invited by Paz to
join Taller’s editorial board.
Paz published a form of manifesto for the new magazine in April 1939 in
its second issue, titled ‘Razón de ser’ [Raison d’être].16 e criticism of the
Contemporáneos that he had unleashed in ‘Ética del artista’ and ‘Pablo
Neruda en el corazón’ is now less insistent. He adopts Ortega y Gasset’s
‘teoría de las generaciones’ [theory of the generations] (OC13, 197) to
present the bale of his own peers as the result of an inevitable process
rather than the enemy’s deficiencies. He combines censure with admiration:
La inteligencia fue su mejor instrumento, pero jamás la usaron para penetrar lo real o construir lo
ideal, sino para, ligeramente, fugarse de lo cotidiano […] Detrás de esta irresponsabilidad había
una gran conciencia de su propio papel; detrás de la alegría irrespetuosa y del esnobismo, había
disciplina, rigor; más allá de su huída intrascendente, una real preocupación por limitar fronteras y
encontrar el residuo último de las cosas: pintura pura, arte puro, poesía pura.
(OC13, 199)
[Intelligence was their finest instrument. However, they never used it to penetrate the real or
construct the ideal, but to flee gently from daily life […] Behind this irresponsibility there was a
great consciousness of their role; behind their irreverent eerfulness and snobbery there was
discipline and rigour; beyond their insignificant flight, a real concern for defining boundaries and
for finding the basic dimension of things: pure painting, pure art, pure poetry.]
Amid the barbs, Paz manages a respectful anowledgement of the sceptical,
eliminatory intelligence that aracterizes artepurismo. Although he denies
the Contemporáneos the status of revolutionaries ‘en el sentido radical,
último, de la palabra’ [in the radical, final, sense of the word] (OC13, 199), he
nevertheless aempts to afford them some revolutionary credit, perhaps
mindful of Alberti’s earlier advice: ‘La preocupación por un arte intelectual,
sin concesiones sentimentales, ¿es nada más el ejercicio de un rigor
revolucionario?’ [e concern for an intellectual art that esews
sentimentality, isn’t this in itself the expression of a revolutionary rigour?]
(OC13, 199).
e question is now, ‘¿é conquistaron ellos, qué podemos heredar
nosotros?’ [What did they conquer, what can we inherit?] (OC13, 200). Yet
Paz leaves his answer open, framed in terms of the spurs that drive the
project rather than a definition of the project itself: ‘no heredamos sino una
inquietud; un movimiento, no una inercia; un estímulo, no un modelo’ [we
inherit a restlessness; a movement rather than an inertia; a stimulus rather
than a model] (OC13, 201). In ‘Antevíspera: Taller (1938–1941)’ (1983), Paz
discussed ‘Razón de ser’ and made another aempt to define his generation:
‘El tiempo nos hacía una pregunta a la que había que responder si no
queríamos perder la cara y el alma’ [e times were asking us a question to
whi we had to reply if we didn’t want to lose face and soul] (OC4, 103).
e awareness that Paz describes here, of historical events pressing with a
new insistence, was present in the original essay, whi declared, ‘Nosotros
estamos antes de la gran hecatombe próxima; ellos [los Contemporáneos]
después’ [We are in front of the next great slaughter; they [the
Contemporáneos] come aer the previous one] (OC13, 198). Paz explained in
an interview for El Nacional of 1990 that during the 1930s Mexico
experienced a new sensitivity to historical events elsewhere in the world:
‘Fue la primera vez que los acontecimientos del mundo afectaban la vida de
México’ [It was the first time that events elsewhere in the world affected life
in Mexico].17 Yet with those events, the euphoria and sense of political
possibility that Paz had shared with his peers in the early 1930s was
gradually expelled. He needed to find an adequate literary response and
looked to two authors, who were published in supplements to the July 1939
and Mar–April 1940 issues of Taller, Arthur Rimbaud and T. S. Eliot.
Paz declared in ‘Antevíspera’ that ‘Si una generación se define al escoger
a sus antepasados, la publicación de Rimbaud en el número 4 de Taller fue
una definición’ [If a generation defines itself by oosing its predecessors,
the publication of Rimbaud in issue 4 of Taller was a definition] (OC4, 98).
Yet even in hindsight, that definition remains vague: ‘Nuestros afanes y
preocupaciones eran confusos pero en su confusión misma […] se dibujaba
ya nuestro tema: poesía e historia’ [Our desires and preoccupations were
confused but in that very confusion […] our theme was defined: poetry and
history] (OC4, 98). How, precisely, was this conjunction of poetry and
history perceived and articulated? e introduction by Luis Cardoza y
Aragón, whi accompanied José Ferrel’s translation of Une Saison en enfer
[A Season in Hell], described Rimbaud’s poem as an expression of crisis,
wrien ‘en la cima de un dolor’ [at the peak of distress].18 Like The Waste
Land, and Pablo Neruda’s Residencia en la tierra, Rimbaud articulates an
affective state; but does he provide a further response to that state and its
historical context?
Cardoza y Aragón confesses that, in spite of the Christian seme that
infierno implies, ‘nunca he encontrado ese tinte de satisfacción cristiana que
se pretende percibir en él’ [I have never found that tinge of Christian
satisfaction that some people find in his work] (p. 4).19 Yet that very
adoption of a seme to whi the author does not subscribe — belief
rendered as analogy — expresses, indeed anticipates in the case of Rimbaud,
a modern predicament that Frank Kermode has described. In reference to R.
P. Blamur’s Anni Mirabiles 1921–25, he explains, ‘We live, wrote
Blamur, in the first age that has become “fully self-conscious of its
fictions” — in a way, Nietzse has sunk in at last.’20 Rimbaud’s Hell is
similarly fictive: ‘Me creo en el infierno, luego estoy en él’ [I believe I am in
hell, and then I am] (p. 17); yet at the same time, since available fictions are
passed down from the culture at large, that hell remains inescapable: ‘La
verdadera vida está ausente. No estamos en el mundo’ [True life is absent.
We are not in the world] (p. 21).
Rimbaud’s response to a Christian seme whi is both intolerable and
inescapable takes a variety of forms. ere is rebellion: ‘El culto a María, el
enternecimiento para el crucificado despiertan en mí entre mil fantasías
profanas’ [e cult of Mary, feelings of tenderness for the crucifixion
awaken a thousand profane fantasies in me] (p. 12); but there is also scruple
that his rebellion is futile: ‘No puedo comprender la rebeldía; mi raza sólo se
rebeló para saquear: como los lobos al animal que no han matado’ [I do not
understand rebellion; my race has only rebelled in order to pillage: like
wolves with an animal that they have not killed] (p. 12). ere are even
moments of willing capitulation:
Me ha nacido la razón. El mundo es bueno. Bendeciré la vida. Amaré a mis hermanos. Ya no son
promesas infantiles. Ni la esperanza de escapar a la vejez y a la muerte. Dios me da mi fuerza y yo
alabo a Dios..
(p. 15)
[I have come to reason. e world is good. I will bless life. I will love my brothers. ese are no
longer ildish promises. Nor the hope of escaping old age and death. God gives me strength and I
praise God.]
Cardoza y Aragón describes the presence of something beyond these terms:
‘Sus visiones prodigiosas, vertidas por necesidad que se diría fisiológica, nos
dem-uestran la existencia de algo sobrehumano’ [His prodigious visions,
poured out from a necessity whi could be described as physiological,
demonstrate the presence of something beyond the human] (p. 5). However,
as the vagueness of ‘algo sobrehumano’ implies, Rimbaud’s declaration that
‘voy a desvelar todos los misterios’ [I am going to reveal all mysteries] (p.
18) remains a statement of intent. ‘Temporada de infierno’ concludes with an
admission that the time is not propitious: ‘Sí, la hora nueva es, por lo menos,
muy severa’ [Yes, the times are, at the least, extremely harsh]; yet also an
injunction that ‘hay que ser absolutamente moderno’ [one has to be
absolutely modern] (p. 37), that inhabiting the historical moment is in itself
a moral obligation.
Paz described the selection of T. S. Eliot’s poems that appeared in a
supplement to Taller nearly a year later in 1940 as a companion to the
Rimbaud:
La publicación de Eliot tuvo la misma significación que la de Rimbaud; nuestra ‘modernidad’,
quiero decir, nuestra visión de la poesía moderna —sobre todo: de la poesía en y ante el mundo
moderno— era radicalmente distinta a la de la generación anterior. Tierra baldía me pareció —lo
sigo creyendo— como la visión y la versión cristiana y tradicionalista de la realidad que, cincuenta
años antes, con lenguaje entrecortado y extrañamente contemporáneo, había descrito Rimbaud. El
tema de los dos poetas —nuestro tema— es el mundo moderno. Más exactamente: nosotros (yo, tú,
él, ella) en el mundo moderno. Rimbaud lo llamó infierno y Eliot purgatorio: ¿qué importa el
nombre? No es un lugar fuera del mundo ni está en las entrañas de la Tierra; tampoco es una
entidad metafísica o un estado psicológico: es una realidad histórica y así incluye a la psicología y
la metafísica, al aquí y al allá. Es una ciudad, muas ciudades. Es el teatro del progreso, un lugar
en el que, como decía Llull del infierno, la pena es circular.
(OC4, 101)
[e publication of Eliot had the same significance as the Rimbaud supplement; our ‘modernity’,
that is to say, our vision of modern poetry — above all of poetry in and faced with the modern
world — was radically different from the vision of the previous generation. The Waste Land
seemed to me — and still seems — the Christian and traditional vision and version of the reality
whi Rimbaud had described, fiy years earlier, with disjointed and extremely contemporary
language. e theme of the two poets — our theme — is the modern world. More precisely:
ourselves (me, you, him, her) in the modern world. Rimbaud called it hell and Eliot purgatory:
what does the name maer? It isn’t a place outside the world nor in the bowels of the Earth; nor is
it a metaphysical entity or a psyological state: it is a historical reality and so it includes
psyology and metaphysics, the here and the there. It is a city, many cities. It is the theatre of
progress, a place in whi, as Llull said of hell, grief is circular.]
Although Paz establishes a distinction between Rimbaud’s vision and Eliot’s
‘versión cristiana y tradicionalista de la realidad’, he does not hold on to it,
merging the two poets in the theme of ‘el mundo moderno’. Antonio
Marialar’s introduction to ‘Lancelot Andrewes’ in Cruz y Raya, had
clearly placed The Waste Land before Eliot’s conversion, and Paz’s own use
of the poem from ‘Nocturno de la ciudad abandonada’ to ‘Crepúsculos de la
ciudad’ both adopts and rejects available forms of belief in the manner of
Rimbaud. A consciousness of the fictive nature of belief itself becomes an
expression of the historical moment. Yet is that ‘realidad histórica’ enough?
Paz goes on in the same essay to confess ruefully that ‘éramos neófitos de la
moderna y confusa religión de la historia’ [we were converts of the modern
and confused religion of history] (OC4, 104). eir belief in an imminent
revolution offered ‘un mediocre sucedáneo de la antigua trascendencia’ [a
mediocre substitute for the old transcendence] (OC4, 105). As in ‘Ética del
artista’ before, Paz was still torn between a desire for systematic belief and
the sceptical awareness of the Contemporáneos.
Taller was an aempt by Paz and his peers to rival the aievement of
Contem-poráneos, to produce a literary magazine whi would respond to
the political environment in ways that had escaped the earlier publication.
For Paz, the Taller Eliot anthology defined his own generation. Yet it was in
fact largely produced by members of the Contemporáneos and figures
associated with them. Bernardo Ortiz de Montellano compiled and
introduced the selection as well as featuring in the list of translators, whi
included Octavio G. Barreda, León Felipe, Rodolfo Usigli and Juan Ramón
Jiménez. Nevertheless Paz, who was general editor of Taller at the time,
clearly felt aaed to the anthology and described it as ‘la primera que se
publicó en castellano’ [the first to be published in Spanish], adding that
‘sigue siendo, para mi gusto, la mejor’ [it is still, to my mind, the best] (OC4,
100). In ‘Rescate de Enrique Munguía’, whose own translation of The Waste
Land was passed over in favour of Ángel Flores, Paz praises ‘la inteligente
nota de intro-ducción’ [intelligent introductory note] that Ortiz de
Montellano provided for the selection (OC14, 119). e introduction suggests
that if Paz had soened his polemic against his forebears in ‘Razón de ser’,
the Contemporáneos themselves were anging in ways that brought them
closer to the younger generation. For Ortiz de Montellano, ‘representativo de
la cultura y de las inquietudes de nuestra época, T. S. Eliot encarna un límite
y una certidumbre para las interrogaciones del espíritu’ [representative of
the culture and the anxieties of our age, T. S. Eliot embodies both a limit and
a conviction for the questions of the spirit] (TSEP, 63). Eliot is credited with
the historical relevance that Paz describes as a aracteristic of his own
contemporaries, and the introduction brings The Waste Land into the
company of Rilke’s Elegies, and Saint-John Perse’s Anabase as poems that
‘señalan la crisis de la conciencia poética contemporánea’ [indicate the crisis
of contemporary poetic consciousness] (TSEP, 63).21 e phrase ‘las
interrogaciones del espíritu’ also eoes the non-denominational, and
frequently vague, concern with the spiritual that Paz shared with his peers,
and whi Cardoza y Aragón signalled in Rimbaud as ‘algo sobrehumano’.
‘Ética del artista’ had called for a poetry that was ‘mística y combativa’
[mystical and combative] (OC13, 186), a phrase that Ortiz de Montellano
now eoes as he rejects the classicism and romanticism that his own peers,
Villaurrutia and Cuesta, favoured: ‘La poesía moderna no es romántica o
clásica, es poesía y mística’ [Modern poetry is not romantic or classic, it is
poetry and mysticism] (TSEP, 64). e earlier rhetoric of purism that Paz had
opposed is still present nevertheless. Eliot is praised, in a phrase that recalls
Valéry, for the ‘rigor de sus métodos’ [rigour of his methods] (TSEP, 63), and
puro is asked, as it frequently was among the Contemporáneos, to carry a
heavy freight of meaning: ‘se sirve de las palabras en su más puro valor’ [he
uses words in their purest value] (TSEP, 63). Yet this language consciousness,
whi was su a fundamental aspect of the group’s artepurismo, begins to
take on a Pazian colouring. Eliot’s language and prosody
completan el prodigio de un arte nuevo, difícil, complicado y, sin embargo, primordial en que la
palabra vuelve a la pureza del origen o a la magia de la plegaria sin perder su cultivo precioso y
refinado, posterior al ‘Simbolismo’.
(TSEP, 64)
[aieve a new, difficult and complicated art whi is, nevertheless, primordial in that the word
returns to the purity of its origin or to the enantment of prayer without losing the refined and
delicate aracter that is the inheritance of ‘Symbolism’.]
In ‘Poesía mexicana moderna’ (1954), Paz defined Taller’s own project as a
‘búsqueda de la palabra “original” ’ [sear for the ‘original’ word] (OC4,
66). e anthology thus provides a potential meeting point for the
Contemporáneos’ concern with language and artistic form, and Paz’s own
more politico-religious orientation.
e selection itself was a fairly comprehensive gathering of the
translations of T. S. Eliot available in Spanish in the late 1930s, and would
have already been largely familiar to Paz.22 However, the versions of ‘A
Song for Simeon’ by Octavio G. Barreda, and ‘La Figlia Che Piange’ and
Marina by Juan Ramón Jiménez were appearing in Latin America for the
first time.23 Paz never discussed these three later translations in any great
detail. He politely observed of the Jiménez that ‘aunque en prosa y con
pequeños errores […] merecen retenerse’ [although in prose and with some
small errors […] they deserve to be preserved];24 while he refers briefly in
interview to Barreda’s ‘trabajos excelentes’ [excellent work] on Eliot, and
credits his version of ‘A Song for Simeon’ as ‘correcta’ (OC14, 119).25 Yet the
Ariel Poems do provide an indication of the specific aracter that Eliot’s
conversion to the Anglican Chur had taken. William Empson describes
Marina as one of Eliot’s finest expressions of ‘the balance maintained
between otherworldliness and humanism’. ‘A Song for Simeon’ proclaims,
‘No para mí la última visión’ (TSEP, 91) [‘Not for me the ultimate vision’
(CPP, 105)].26 ey confirm a modification that León Felipe’s earlier
translation had introduced to The Hollow Men when he rendered ‘Let me be
no nearer’ (CPP, 84) as ‘No quiero entrar más allá’ (HH, 133) whi, with the
association of el más allá in Spanish as the life beyond death, implies a
rejection of transcendence. e territory that the Ariel Poems inhabit, in
sear rather than in receipt of grace, is still comprehensible in human
rather than otherworldly terms, and so is accessible to the kind of reading
that Paz and Cardoza y Aragón were making of Rimbaud.
Rodolfo Usigli’s ‘El canto de amor de J. Alfred Prufro’ elicited more
enthusiasm from Paz: ‘Gracias a Rodolfo ese intenso poema inglés también
es un poema, no menos intenso, en nuestra lengua’ [anks to Rodolfo this
intense English poem is an equally intense poem in our language] (OC14,
119).27 Yet Usigli’s version differs markedly from its source. Ramón López
Velarde provided the young Paz with a version of the Laforguian Eliot who
appears in ‘Prufro’, and who would not become available in Mexico until
1938, a considerable time aer The Waste Land and The Hollow Men. In ‘El
retorno maléfico’, López Velarde employs the rhyming couplet of Laforgue
for effects of ironic counterpoint: beer not to return to the village, ‘al edén
subvertido que se calla / en la mutilación de la metralla’ [to the subverted
Eden that is still / in the mutilation of the shrapnel].28 However, Usigli’s
version of Eliot’s poem does without the rhyming couplet. us,
Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’
Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Mielangelo.
(CPP, 13)
becomes
Oh, no preguntes ‘é es?’
Vayámonos a hacer nuestra visita.
En la pieza las mujeres vienen y van
hablando de Miguel Ángel.
(TSEP, 65-66)
e humour is gone, leaving an effect that is mu bleaker. e ending of the
poem is particularly desolate once the couplet — ‘By sea-girls wreathed with
seaweed red and brown / Till human voices wake us, and we drown’ (CPP,
17) — is deserted for a different form of conclusion:
al lado de muaas marinas coronadas de algas marinas rojas y cafés
hasta que nos despiertan voces humanas y nos ahogamos.
(TSEP, 69)
Not only is the tidiness of the couplet lost, but Usigli inserts a space before
the final line whi, thus isolated, gains a starker poignancy.
e couplet, and the frequently humorous use to whi Eliot puts it in
‘Prufro’, brings a sense of speakerly control; the reader is aware of a
persona’s presence, that the world his words present is a world of his
perceiving. Take that away and words start to take on a life of their own.
e rhythmical even temper of largely monosyllabic verbs in ‘But though I
have wept and fasted, wept and prayed’ (CPP, 15) adopts a different
aracter: ‘pero aunque he llorado y ayunado, llorado y orado’ (TSEP, 68).
e repeated -ado of ‘llorado y ayunado’ burgeons to become a repeated -
orado in ‘llorado y orado’. at a component of a word — -orado — should
break off to become a word in its own right — ‘prayed’ — is unnerving.
‘Wept and prayed’ gently closes the Eliot line, but Usigli’s seems to grow
with its own verbal generative force. e effect is closer to the litany of ‘e
water-dripping song’ in ‘What the under Said’, to the word-play of Ash-
Wednesday, and to Xavier Villaurrutia’s poems, than to Eliot’s own
‘Prufro’. e translation thus reinforces an element of Eliot’s work that
was present in Paz’s early ‘Nocturno de la ciudad abandonada’.
In a note on León Felipe’s ‘Los hombres huecos’, Manuel Durán draws a
link between the ritual form of the final section of The Hollow Men and
Xavier Villaurrutia:
Las frases transcendentes y rituales (‘porque tuyo es el reino’) quedan envueltas en la sombra y la
angustia del mundo contemporáneo: Eliot y Villaurrutia se dan la mano.29
[e transcendent and ritual phrases (‘for thine is the kingdom’) are embedded in the shadow and
the anguish of contemporary life: Eliot and Villaurrutia join hands.]
is liturgical form found its fullest expression in Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday,
whi in Bernardo Ortiz de Montellano’s version concluded the Taller
collection.30 Miércoles de ceniza opens:
Porque no espero una vez más volver
Porque no espero
Porque no espero una vez más
Deseando el don de éste y el designio de aquél31
(TSEP, 92)
[Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man’s gi and that man’s scope]
(CPP, 89)
ite apart from the poems of Villaurrutia, Eliot’s marriage of Symbolist
incantation and Christian ritual would find a natural home in Spanish and
Spanish American poetry of the period. Even as unlikely a source as Pablo
Neruda’s Residencia en la tierra recalls the Catholic litany in its preference
for list and reiteration. Paz’s own Raíz del hombre adopted some of Neruda’s
tendency towards incantation, and the rhythms of his poems of the 1960s
su as Blanco have a strong ritual aracter.32
Paz described Miércoles de ceniza as ‘una traducción memorable’ [a
memorable translation]: ‘No es inferior a la de Usigli aunque, como poema,
yo prefiero El canto de amor a Miércoles de ceniza’ [It is not inferior to
Usigli’s although, as a poem, I prefer The Love Song to Ash-Wednesday].33
His coolness towards a poem whi had mu to offer formally is most
readily explained by its overtly Christian theme. Eliot described Ash-
Wednesday in a leer to his confessor, William Force Stead, as an aempt to
represent ‘the experience of man in sear of God, and trying to explain to
himself his intenser human feelings in terms of the divine goal’.34 In spite of
Paz’s enthusiasm for a Rimbaud who was presented in sear of ‘algo
sobrehumano’, there was no room in his seme for ‘the divine goal’. Yet
Antonio Marialar’s introduction to ‘Lancelot Andrews’ [sic] in Cruz y
Raya had managed to aenuate God’s presence in Eliot’s poem, describing it
as ‘una lírica metafísica’.35 It is this vocabulary that Paz employs when, in
‘Poesía e historia: Laurel y nosotros’ (1982), he describes Ortiz de
Montellano’s araction to Eliot: ‘sus preocupaciones metafísicas lo
acercaron a la poesía de Eliot’ [his metaphysical preoccupations drew him to
Eliot’s poetry] (OC3, 108).
is re-framing of Eliot’s ‘divine goal’ occurs more extendedly in Paz’s
Xavier Villaurrutia en persona y en obra (1978):
Durante el primer tercio del siglo, la vertiente romántica de esta preocupación universal por la
muerte fueron Dadá, el surrealismo y sus ramificaciones en casi todo el mundo y especialmente en
Hispanoamérica y España. La vertiente opuesta, aunque no menos poseída por la conciencia de la
fragilidad de los hombres y sus obras, fue la poesía de lengua inglesa. Pienso sobre todo en Eliot y
en poemas como Miércoles de ceniza. El centro de esta vasta meditación sobre la muerte fue
Alemania y sus figuras más notables Rilke y Heidegger. El pensamiento y la poesía de nuestra
lengua no fueron insensibles a tantos estímulos.
(OC4, 87)
[During the first third of the century the romantic line of this universal preoccupation with death
appeared in Dada, in Surrealism and its manifestations across the world, especially in Spanish
America and Spain. e opposite line, although no less conscious of the fragility of man and his
works, was poetry in English. I am thinking above all of Eliot and of poems like Ash-Wednesday.
e centre of this great meditation was Germany and its most notable figures were Rilke and
Heidegger. e thought and poetry of our language were not insensible to so many stimuli.]
God is taken out of Eliot’s purpose so that Ash-Wednesday can be read as
one voice in a collective meditation on death whi includes Heidegger and
Rilke. Paz repeatedly aempts to salvage a secular metaphysical
preoccupation in this way from Eliot’s commied religious belief.
is passage was originally prompted by a discussion of death in the work
of Xavier Villaurrutia.36 In his review of Nostalgia de la muerte of 1938, Paz
had described death in Villaurrutia, as in Rilke, as ‘una vivencia, anterior a
todo conocer’ [a living thing prior to all knowledge] (OC13, 266), and
Villaurrutia described Heidegger as ‘mi filósofo’ [my philosopher].37 In spite
of his preference for ‘Prufro’ ahead of Ash-Wednesday, Paz was clearly
still determined to bring the post-conversion poem into a meaningful
relationship with his other reading.
e flexibility of Paz’s reading of Ash-Wednesday is partly indebted to the
epistemological tendency of artepurismo and to poets like Villaurrutia and
Ortiz de Montellano. Eliot himself shared this tendency, and his leer to
William Force Stead describes the starting point of the poem as ‘the
experience of man in sear’ and ‘intenser human feelings’ rather than the
‘divine goal’ itself. Yet political pressures would inevitably exert an influence
on Paz’s reading of Miércoles de ceniza. Eliot’s reputation as a political
reactionary had clearly filtered through to Mexico and Ortiz de Montellano
defended Ash-Wednesday against the arge that it is ‘un poema doctrinario
y fascista’ [a doctrinaire and fascist poem] in a leer to Jaime Torres
Bodet.38 Eliot remained a difficult writer for Paz to assimilate. Although the
Eliot Antología was a defining publication for the Taller group, Paz concedes
that Eliot’s beliefs still presented a barrier:
En lengua inglesa Pound y Eliot habían logrado insertar a la poesía en la historia moderna.
Podríamos habernos inspirado en ellos pero sus ideas, valores y creencias eran precisamente los
opuestos a los nuestros. Sólo unos años más tarde —no tengo más remedio que acudir a mi caso
personal— pude seguirlos por ese camino, aunque en dirección opuesta.
(OC4, 106)
[In English Pound and Eliot had managed to insert poetry in modern history. We could have
turned to them for inspiration but their ideas, values and beliefs were directly opposed to our own.
Only some years later — I can only talk about my own experience — was I able to follow them
down that route, although in the opposite direction.]
ose ‘unos años más tarde’ were not so far away — the years 1944–45 that
Paz spent in the United States. For the moment, the ‘ideas, valores y
creencias’ of his peers, whi stood in the way of Eliot and Pound, were
being tested by historical events. e Mexican le, whose own revolution
partly coincided with the rise of the Bolsheviks, had maintained close
relations with the Soviet Union. An article in one of Paz’s own magazines,
Cuadernos del Valle de México, had in 1933 described ‘el ejemplo soviético
como la única salida a la historia’ [the Soviet example as the only way out of
history].39 Yet Paz’s encounters in Spain with members of the orthodox,
Soviet le, with their condemnation of André Gide at the Congress, and
their general vilification of Trotsky, cooled his aitude. Ba in Mexico, he
le the magazine Futuro over what he described as their ‘sofismo
despreciable’ [despicable sophistry] on Trotsky, and when the Hitler–Stalin
Pact was agreed, on 23 August 1939, he was appalled at the behaviour of
friends who sought to justify Stalin’s action.40 e first aempt on Leon
Trotsky’s life came on 24 May 1940, led by David Siqueiros, an old friend of
Paz’s who was now ghosted out of the country to Chile with Pablo Neruda’s
help. en on 20 August 1940, with Europe at war, Trotsky was assassinated.
e last issue of Taller was dated January–February 1941. When he came
to explain the reasons for its disappearance, Paz concluded that la of
funding was a decisive factor; yet political events had also le its
participants ‘cansados, desilusionados y divididos’ [tired, disillusioned and
divided] (OC4, 109). Taller had aempted to defend ‘la libertad del arte y de
la poesía’ [the freedom of art and poetry], but politics were inescapable.
Although Taller was not a political publication like Futuro and El Popular,
political allegiances still underpinned it. Paz could not separate his sense of
political impasse from his literary relationships, as his worsening relations
with Pablo Neruda confirmed.
Neruda was appointed Chilean consul-general in Mexico City in the
summer of 1940, and Paz maintained a close friendship with him aer they
had met in Spain. Several incidents occurred, however, to sour their
relationship. Neruda contributed an article to Taller in 1941 that referred
scathingly to ‘el mueble juanramonesco con patas de libro’ [the
juanramonesque furniture with books for legs] whi Paz was reluctant to
publish since Jiménez was himself a contributor to the magazine.41 Jiménez
was an influential representative of poesía pura and Neruda’s gibe implied
both preciousness and a la of responsiveness to political events. One
evening the following year, Paz defended the poetas puros, su as
Villaurrutia, and the Trotskyists against ‘los mismos términos de oprobio’
[the same terms of reproa] that Neruda was now raining on the two
groups — ‘me miró con asombro, casi con incredulidad, y después me
respondió con dureza’ [he gave me a shoed look, almost incredulous, and
responded harshly].42 Paz recounts the dinner held in Mexico City a few
days later in Pablo Neruda’s honour. Neruda made a remark on Paz’s shirt —
‘ “más limpia”, agregó, “que tu conciencia” ’ [‘cleaner’, he added, ‘than your
conscience’] (OC3, 86). A scuffle ensued and Paz was ushered away by
Enrique González Martínez, who took Paz and his companions to a
fashionable nightclub where they drank ampagne into the night, González
Martínez eerfully reciting poems. ere is a strong symbolic undercurrent
to the anecdote — as Paz falls out with Neruda over politics he is embraced
by the aged late-modernista who had mourned the willow that weeps by the
lake as a bullet fizzed through his window. ere is a world beyond Neruda,
he seems to suggest. Yet Paz was hurt, and when Neruda le Mexico City in
1943 he published a bier aa on Neruda’s vanity and cronyism.43
Paz’s friendships and artistic allegiances were being sundered by
international events. Eliot, too, had responded to recent political
developments with a sense of foreboding. In The Idea of a Christian Society,
he described being ‘deeply shaken by the events of September 1938, in a way
from whi one does not recover’:
e feeling whi was new and unexpected was a feeling of humiliation, whi seemed to
demand an act of personal contrition, of humility, repentance and amendment; what had
happened was something in whi one was deeply implicated and responsible. It was not, I repeat,
a criticism of the government, but a doubt of the validity of a civilisation. We could not mat
conviction with conviction, we had no ideas with whi we could either meet or oppose the ideas
opposed to us.44
Eliot’s reference to ‘contrition’ has its equivalent in Paz’s own talk of ‘una
falla moral’ [a moral failing] and ‘abdicación’ [abdication] in his discussion
of Taller (OC4, 109). Eliot lamented that his own society amounted to lile
more than ‘a congeries of banks, insurance companies and industries’, a
reminder that Eliot’s conservatism, in economics at least, was not so far
removed from the leist Paz.45 Yet both found that they ‘had no ideas with
whi’ they ‘could either meet or oppose the ideas opposed’ to them. The
Idea of a Christian Society was Eliot’s response to events, borne from a belief
that something now had to ange. As an article he contributed to the
Christian Newsletter put it: ‘e new order cannot be based on the
preservation of privilege, whether the privilege of a country, of a class, or of
an individual.’46 Readers in England clearly agreed: when The Idea of a
Christian Society was published in 1939, just aer the outbreak of war, it
went through three impressions in as many months. It stru a ord in
Spanish America as well and was published simultaneously in Buenos Aires
and Mexico City in 1942 in a translation by Carlos M. Reyles. It was the first
of Eliot’s prose to be published in book form in Spanish.
Paz never mentioned La idea de una sociedad cristiana, although it must
have been discussed when it was published in Mexico City. It may have
provided an unwelcome reminder of Eliot’s conversion. Paz continued to
draw on Eliot as a poet of doubt and disaffection. e immediate aermath
of Taller’s disappearance le Paz at an emotional impasse, whi was
reflected in the 1942 collection of his poems to date. A contemporary review
by Antonio Sánez Barbudo identified the materialism that Paz had found
in Neruda’s Residencia en la tierra: ‘lo que queremos es alma, pero “alma de
bulto y de substancia”, como decía Unamuno’ [what we want is a soul, but a
‘soul of body and substance’, as Unamuno said].47 However, just as Cuesta
had noted a sear for a metafísica in Paz’s Raíz del hombre, Sánez
Barbudo concludes that this alma desires something more than material
substancia:
Sólo en Dios sería satisfea, pero eso no lo sabremos sino después de muertos […] Esto es lo
humano, esto es la poesía, y por eso se escribe: para clamar, para anhelar. Sólo clamor o anhelo es
posible para el hombre: no hay certeza.48
[Only in God would it be satisfied, but we cannot know this until aer we are dead […] is is
what it is to be human, this is poetry, and this is why one writes: to quest, to desire. Man can only
quest and desire: there is no certainty.]
e human philosophies of the le had been found wanting, but what could
fill the vacuum? In ‘Noe de resurrecciones’ [Night of Resurrections], not
only does the material world la meaning but, laing meaning, it begins to
lose substance:
No tiene cuerpo el mundo
y la tierra es estéril.49
[e world has no body
and the earth is sterile.]
Jorge Cuesta had contrasted the order and meaning that a metafísica would
give to Paz’s work with ‘ocio psicológico’ [psyological amusement]. e
la of meaning that now surrounded him led Paz, according to Manuel
Ulacia, into ‘an acute depression’.50 He was le with his solitary
consciousness, vainly calling for relief in ‘Al polvo’ [To Dust]: ‘ítame la
conciencia’ [Take away my consciousness].51 Eliot is clearly an influence on
these poems, whi becomes more pronounced when Paz moves to the
United States in 1944. However, Francisco de evedo, who provided a
model for the solitary consciousness at the end of ‘Crepúsculos de la ciudad’,
is also a presence. evedo features conspicuously, along with Eliot
according to more than one critic, in the last major essay that Paz wrote
before he le Mexico, ‘Poesía de soledad y poesía de comunión’ [Poetry of
Solitude and Poetry of Communion].
Poesía de soledad y poesía de comunión
e essay was originally delivered as a spee to celebrate four hundred
years from the birth of San Juan de la Cruz.52 It is generally considered one
of Paz’s most important prose works, both in terms of ideas and style, and
he described it as ‘el embrión de la mayoría de mis reflexiones sobre la
experiencia poética’ [the germ of the majority of my reflections on the
poetic experience].53 Its starting point is ‘la naturaleza inapresable de la
realidad’ [the ungraspable nature of reality] (OC13, 234), a problem that had
first been raised in Vigilias. Paz identifies two contrasting human responses
to reality, the one disinterested and the other ‘una actitud de dominación’
[an aitude of domination] (OC13, 234), both of whi were present in
primitive societies: ‘La primera, de adoración, se manifiesta en la religión. La
segunda, de poder, en la magia’ [e first, of adoration, is manifested in
religion. e second, of power, in magic] (OC13, 235). is contrast
established, Paz asks on whi side of it does the poet belong? Either, he
replies, and concludes with a new contrast:
El poeta lírico establece un diálogo con el mundo; en este diálogo hay dos situaciones extremas,
dentro de las cuales se mueve el alma del poeta: una, de soledad; otra, de comunión. El poeta parte
de la soledad, movido por el deseo, hacia la comunión
(OC13, 236)
[e lyric poet establishes a dialogue with the world; in this dialogue there are two situations, two
poles between whi the soul of the poet moves: one, of solitude; the other, of communion. e
poet moves from solitude, impelled by desire, towards communion.]
e ease with whi he is prepared to drop one set of oppositions —
adoración–poder, magia–religión — in favour of another — soledad–
comunión — is disconcerting, and typifies his method of argument. Paz does
not proceed with a clear telos in view, but by a succession of dialectical
oppositions. He produces a statement, opposes it and then improvises on
what that opposition might entail. It is a method whi, since it has no
specific end in view, frequently runs up dead ends, or out of momentum.
When this occurs, he simply anges direction and opens a new paragraph
with a question: ‘¿é clase de testimonio es el testimonio poético…?’
[What sort of testimony is poetic testimony…?] (OC13, 237); or a sweeping
statement: ‘La poesía es la revelación de la inocencia que alienta en cada
hombre y en cada mujer’ [Poetry is the revelation of the innocence that
breathes in ea man and ea woman] (OC13, 239). ese questions and
statements then generate new opposing terms, whi propel the argument to
further opportunities for improvisation. e result is simultaneously agile
and sententious.
When Paz does eventually get to San Juan he is not detained long: ‘Los
[poemas] de San Juan de la Cruz relatan la experiencia mística más
profunda de nuestra cultura. Estos poemas no admiten crítica, interpretación
o consideración alguna’ [e [poems] of San Juan de la Cruz relate the
deepest mystical experience of our culture. ese poems do not admit
criticism, interpretation or any form of consideration] (OC13, 241). His
argument quily moves on to an example that is the opposite of mystical
union:
evedo expresa la certidumbre de que el poeta ya no es uno con sus creaciones: está
mortalmente dividido. Entre la poesía y el poeta, entre Dios y el hombre, se opone algo muy sutil y
muy poderoso: la conciencia, y lo que es más significativo: la conciencia de la conciencia, el
narcisismo intelectual.
(OC13, 241–42)
[evedo expresses the certainty that the poet is no longer at one with his creations: he is
mortally divided. Between poetry and the poet, between God and man, something extremely
subtle and extremely powerful is opposed: consciousness, and what is more significant: the
consciousness of consciousness, intellectual narcissism.]
Not only is evedo placed in dialectical opposition to San Juan, but he is
himself an example of dividedness — ‘está mortalmente dividido’. e
conciencia that defines evedo places him in association with Valéry and
Eliot, and Paz employs the entre of The Hollow Men to describe his
condition.
Yet Paz was ambivalent about the scepticism of the Contemporáneos, an
earlier version of the divisive conciencia that so fascinates him in evedo,
and he concludes the essay with an aempt to aenuate evedo’s example.
He offers a list of poets — Novalis, Nerval, Baudelaire, Lautréamont, and Poe
— and proclaims:
La seducción que sobre nosotros ejercen estos maestros, nuestros únicos maestros posibles, se debe
a la veracidad con que encarnaron ese propósito que intenta unir dos tendencias paralelas del
espíritu humano: la conciencia y la inocencia, la experiencia y la expresión, el acto y la palabra
que lo revela.
(OC13, 245)
[e seduction that these masters, our only possible masters, exert on us is due to the integrity
with whi they embodied this project whi aempts to unite two parallel tendencies of the
human spirit: consciousness and innocence, experience and expression, the act and the word that
reveals it.]
Poetry should bring unity where there is division, but this is a ‘propósito’
rather than the ‘certidumbre’ that evedo expresses. Paz is himself divided
between an art that represents an experience of conflict and one that
mitigates it.
Both Manuel Ulacia and Anthony Stanton have suggested that Paz’s use
of the literary past — San Juan and evedo — to define his own project
reveals the influence of Eliot’s essays. One cannot be certain when Paz first
read Eliot’s prose. A translation of Selected Essays appeared in Mexico in
1944, by whi time Paz was living in the United States and probably
reading Eliot’s essays in English.54 It is not improbable, however, that he had
read some of Eliot’s prose by the time he was writing ‘Poesía de soledad y
poesía de comunión’. Manuel Ulacia is confident that ‘Tradition and the
Individual Talent’ (1919) lies behind Paz’s work:
For the first time in his career the poet places his work in a tradition to whi he feels he belongs.
Without doubt, before writing this seminal text for his poetics, whi precedes The Bow and the
55
Lyre, the young poet had read T. S. Eliot’s essay, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’.
In spite of the assertiveness of his argument, ‘sin duda alguna’ implies that
the connection is based on supposition rather than fact. Certainly, Paz’s
reading of San Juan and evedo does reveal an awareness of ‘not only the
pastness of the past, but of its presence’ (SW, 40). Yet Eliot is not the first
writer to express the relativism that underpins su assertions as ‘the past
should be altered by the present as mu as the present is directed by the
past’ (SW, 41). If Paz shares this perspective, it does not necessarily imply a
causal relation between the two works. Leyla Perrone-Moisès argues
convincingly that the tendency of writers su as Eliot, Pound, Borges and
Paz to read the past as a function of their present interests reflects a general
tendency among modern writers rather than the discovery of any one of
them:
One could multiply the examples of similar aitudes towards the literary past in theoretical texts
by modern writers, who prefer to talk of a ‘literary space’ rather than a literary temporality. In
spite of their individual contributions, the writer-critics cited below all coincide in their rejection
of a diaronic, linear literary history.56
Anthony Stanton is more circumspect about Eliot’s influence than Ulacia
and ooses a more convincing essay:
As in ‘e Metaphysical Poets’ (1921), the essay by T. S. Eliot that probably served as a model, a
complete poet is presented, from before the fall or break, Christian in both cases (Dante or Donne
for Eliot; San Juan for Paz). Eliot called this excision ‘the dissociation of sensibility’ and saw it as a
traumatic event that divided the unified sensibility in two discordant parts
(intellect and emotion; reason and feeling).57
Stanton provides a clear summary of the similarities between the semes
laid out in the two essays. e contrast between the reconciliación of San
Juan and the conciencia of evedo certainly relates more closely to Eliot’s
distinction between poetry in whi there is a ‘unification of sensibility’ and
a ‘reflective’ poetry (SE, 288 & 287) than to the discussion of ‘Tradition and
the Individual Talent’.
ere is also an aempt in Paz to situate his central contrast between San
Juan and evedo historically. Just as for Eliot, ‘in the seventeenth century
a dissociation of sensibility set in, from whi we have never recovered’ (SE,
288), so for Paz:
En esa sociedad, donde, quizá por última vez en la historia, la llama de la religiosidad personal
pudo alimentarse de la religión de la sociedad, San Juan realiza la más intensa y plena de las
experiencias: la de la comunión. Un poco más tarde esa comunión será imposible.
(OC13, 240)
[In that society where, perhaps for the last time in history, the flame of personal religiosity could
feed off the religion of society, San Juan realized the most intense and complete of experiences:
communion. A lile later this communion will be impossible.]
And just as Frank Kermode questions the historical value of the ‘dissociation
of sensibility’ as ‘the great and in some ways noxious historical myth of
Symbolism’, so Stanton expresses reservations about ‘Poesía de soledad y
poesía de comunión’:58
e dualistic polarization of this poetic theory reveals the projection, onto the history of poetry, of
the religious principle of the fall: it is a theological seme applied to the history of poetry, of
doubtful objectivity.59
Yet to demonstrate similarities between Paz’s essay and Eliot’s is not to
prove an influence. e distinction that ‘e Metaphysical Poets’ draws
between thought and feeling, and the analogous distinction that Paz makes
between a mystical reconciliación and a consciousness that brings separation
enjoys numerous antecedents in romantic and modern literature.60 Nor was
Eliot the only, or the most conspicuous, example available to Paz of a
modern poet reading poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for
his own ends. e Spanish Generación del 27 [Generation of 1927] had
revived the work of Luis de Góngora; and on a more modest scale,
Contemporáneos published works by and about Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.
Góngora was read as a precursor of poesía pura, but as René de Costa
explains, ‘the more commied writers of the thirties would find in the
radical audacity of a evedo a more complete literary model’.61 Pablo
Neruda was instrumental in this revival-cum-appropriation of evedo. He
published a series of evedo’s sonnets on death with some of the late
correspondence in Cruz y Raya in 1935.62 Neruda’s evedo was not only
the scourge of corrupt politicians but also, according to Robert Pring-Mill, a
salve for deep fears:
In ‘Viaje al corazón de evedo', a lecture given in 1943, Neruda makes it clear that evedo’s
neo-stoicism seemed to offer a way out of his personal horror at the inexorable quality of time and
death, whi dominates many poems of Residencia en la tierra.63
Neruda professed a resolute hostility towards philosophical problems, and
his evedo is broadly materialist: ‘la metafísica es inmensamente física, lo
más material de su enseñanza’ [his metaphysics are immensely physical, the
most material part of what he has to say].64 Yet the lesson that he took from
evedo, that death is not the end of life but an integral part of it, recalls
the more philosophically minded writers whom Paz associated with Eliot’s
Ash-Wednesday — Rilke, Heidegger, and Villaurrutia:
¿Si al nacer empezamos a morir, si cada día nos acerca a un límite determinado, si la vida misma
es una etapa patética de la muerte […] no somos parte perpetua de la muerte, no somos lo más
audaz, lo que ya salió de la muerte? […] evedo me dio a mí una enseñanza clara y biológica […]
Si ya hemos muerto, si venimos de la profunda crisis, perderemos el temor a la muerte.65
[If when we are born we begin to die, if ea day we move closer to a determined limit, if life
itself is one pathetic stage of death […] are we not a perpetual part of death, are we not the most
audacious thing, what has already appeared out of death? […] evedo taught me a clear,
biological lesson […] If we have already died, if we come from the profound crisis, then we lose
our fear of death.]
Paz, for whom evedo was ‘un poeta indispensable’ [an indispensable
poet], must have been aracted by a politically commied alternative to the
artepurista Góngora.
66 He also made the connection with Rilke and
Heidegger whi was implicit in Neruda’s reading, claiming that ‘leí a
evedo desde una perspectiva ajena a su tiempo’ [I read evedo from a
perspective alien to his time] (OC14, 73). Anthony Stanton notes that with
Paz’s evedo, ‘we are very close to the Heideggerian idea of anxiety’.67
Paz’s evedo was partly Nerudan then, political and anguished, consistent
with Paz’s praise of the Chilean poet’s work in ‘Pablo Neruda en el corazón’.
Yet he was also a supreme example of conciencia, of ‘una escisión psíquica
frente a lo sagrado’ [a psyic excision from the sacred], a companion of
Rilke, Valéry, Villaurrutia, Heidegger and Eliot, a poet not only of anguished
emotion, but of absence.68 Paz had aempted in his prose to side with the
certainties and vigour of Neruda against the consciousness and doubtfulness
of the Contemporáneos, a doubtfulness whi had always kept a place in his
poems. Now in evedo he was able to dignify a sceptical stance. ‘Poesía de
soledad y poesía de comunión’ bears most significantly on Paz’s relationship
with Eliot not in its possible use of the literary history of ‘Tradition and the
Individual Talent’ or ‘e Metaphysical Poets’ but in its continuation of a
more populous debate that was present in his earliest poems.
For Stanton the most significant difference between ‘Poesía de soledad y
poesía de comunión’ and ‘e Metaphysical Poets’ is that ‘Paz is fascinated
by the figure of evedo while Eliot shows lile interest in the poets of
excision’.69 is is neither entirely fair to Eliot, who refers to Jules Laforgue
and Tristan Corbière in his essay, and who places the modern poet
categorically in a post-Fall world ‘from whi we have never recovered’ (SE,
288); nor does it recognize Paz’s own ambivalence about the contrast
between the reconciliación of San Juan and a evedo who is ‘mortalmente
dividido’. Paz seems to favour the state represented by evedo, but he
concludes with praise for modern poets who have managed to unify the
divisions that evedo embodies. Paz’s essay expresses more than a single
aitude to dividedness: in evedo division is embraced, while in the poets
of the conclusion it is resolved. Ulacia seles with this laer view and reads
the essay as ‘one of the origins of the theory of the reconciliation of
opposites in Paz’s thought’.70 Yet the example of evedo cannot be tamed
so easily. Stanton finds a third aitude towards division in Paz’s assertion
that, ‘Entre estos dos polos de inocencia y conciencia, de soledad y
comunión, se mueve toda poesía’ [Between these two poles of innocence
and consciousness, of solitude and communion, all poetry moves] (OC13,
243). Hedging his bets rather, he concludes that poetry for Paz embraces
both the earlier standpoints: ‘us there is a dialectical movement between
two poles.’71 Both critics can support their position with individual
quotations from the text, but neither can account for the promiscuity of
Paz’s own different pronouncements. Paz expresses three quite distinct
versions of poetry’s relationship to conflict: poetry can embrace conflict; it
can mitigate it; or it can oscillate between the two. He never resolves these
aitudes in a new whole, however, or seles for any one of them with great
commitment.
is uncertainty reveals the ambivalence of Paz’s relationship to Eliot. His
work of the 1930s performs a constant debate between belonging, or
communion, and excision, or solitude: the sensual disposition of Saint-John
Perse and Carlos Pellicer versus the desolation of Xavier Villaurrutia and
Eliot; the political beliefs shared with his peers and Pablo Neruda versus the
isolated scepticism of the Contemporáneos; San Juan de la Cruz versus
evedo. While these conflicts are productive, there is an understandable
desire, whi is particularly conspicuous in the prose, to tip the scales, to
evade the burden that a consciousness of division imposes and to find some
reconciling belief, usually politico-religious. e disintegration of his
allegiances to the le as the 1930s drew to a close denied him this comfort.
At the end of 1943 he le Mexico City for the United States where his
relationship with T. S. Eliot’s work — in itself both an example of a world
divided by the shadow of consciousness, and also of a potentially consoling,
if unaractive, religious faith — would enter a new stage.
Notes to Chapter 5
1. Paz, Xavier Villaurrutia en persona y en obra (1977), in OC4, 251.
2. Paz, ‘Crepúsculos de la ciudad’, Letras de México, 3, 18 (15 Jun 1942), p. 3. Further references to
this poem are taken from the same page. A substantially revised version appears in OC11, 69–
72.
3. Hoover, ‘e Urban Nightmare’, p. 23.
4. Jorge Cuesta, ‘Raíz del hombre, Octavio Paz’, p. 9.
5. Hoover, ‘e Urban Nightmare’, p. 24.
6. Paz, ‘Genealogía de un libro: Libertad bajo palabra’ (1988), interview with Anthony Stanton, in
OC15, 107.
7. Eliot, ‘El canto de amor de J. Alfred Prufro’, trans. by Rodolfo Usigli, Poesía (suplemento), 2
(Apr 1938), 1–10 (p. 6).
8. Paz, ‘Rodolfo Usigli en el teatro de la memoria’ (1991), in OC14, 128.
9. Paz, ‘Cuatro o cinco puntos cardinales’, in OC15, 40. In a leer to Pere Gimferrer of 30 August
1982, Paz also describes Usigli as ‘una incongruente versión polaco-italo-mexicana del
Prufro de Eliot (conservado en alcohol)’, Memorias y palabras, p. 230.
10. Usigli, ‘Prufro’, p. 5.
11. e article was first published in Ruta, 4, 4 (Sept 1938), 25–33; repr. in OC13, 269.
12. Eliot, Tierra baldía, p. 37.
13. ‘Trayectoria de Ruta’, Ruta, 1 (Jun 1938), p. 63; quoted in Merlin Forster, Index to Mexican
Literary Periodicals (New York: Scarecrow Press, 1966), p. 15.
14. ‘Cultura de la muerte’ was first published in Sur, 47 (Aug 1938), 81–85.
15. See Guillermo Sheridan, ‘Hora de Taller. Taller de España’, Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, 529–
30 (Jul–Aug 1994), 90–100 (pp. 97–98).
16. First published in Taller, 2 (Apr 1939), 30–34.
17. Paz, ‘Entrevista con Octavio Paz: Itinerarios de un poeta’, interview with Juan José Reyes and
Fernando García Ramírez, p. 13.
18. Arthur Rimbaud, ‘Temporada de infierno’, trans. by José Ferrel with intr. by Luis Cardoza y
Aragón, Taller (suplemento), 4 (Jul 1939), 1–37 (p. 3). Further references to this supplement are
given aer quotations in the text.
19. Cardoza y Aragón is probably referring to Paul Claudel whose discovery of Rimbaud’s poems in
1886 coincided with his own conversion.
20. Kermode, ‘A Babylonish Dialect’, p. 234.
21. In his edition of José Gorostiza’s Poesía completa (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1996),
Guillermo Sheridan argues that the notes Gorostiza made for a poem called ‘El semejante’
indicate that aer Muerte sin fin (1939) this leading member of the Contemporáneos was also
shiing from ‘la poesía de la especulación íntima y abstracta’ to ‘una poética de la intimidad
alterada por la realidad social e histórica concreta’ as a direct response to Eliot’s Waste Land
(p. 14).
22. e most notable omission was Julio Irazusta’s translation of ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’,
whi had appeared in Sur a year and a half before Ortiz de Montellano’s version of Ash-
Wednesday. Perhaps there was a political reason for its exclusion. As John King recounts,
Irazusta was involved in ‘an aa on liberalism as a movement whi had allowed
traditional, clerical, Hispanic and colonial values to be eroded’, Sur: A Study of the Argentine
Literary Journal and its Role in the Development of a Culture 1931–1970 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 73.
23. e two translations by Juan Ramón Jiménez had first appeared, along with a section of Ash-
Wednesday, in La Gaceta Literaria (15 Feb 1931), 3.
24. Paz, ‘Rescate de Enrique Munguía’, p. 42. He excised ‘con pequeños errores’ in OC14, 119.
25. Paz, Cuatro o cinco puntos cardinales’, in OC15, 40. e other ‘trabajo’ was a translation of
Eliot’s essay, ‘e Music of Poetry’, whi appeared in El Hijo Pródigo, 1, 1 (15 Apr 1943), 45–
54.
26. William Empson, Argufying: Essays on Literature and Culture, ed. by John Haffenden (London:
Hogarth, 1988), p. 356.
27. Paz recounts that Usigli was received ‘con gran cordialidad y simpatía’ by Eliot in London (OC14,
124).
28. López Velarde, Obras, p. 206.
29. Durán, ed., Antología de la revista Contemporáneos, p. 55n. José Gorostiza describes the
‘desdoblamiento de los términos de una oración’ in Xavier Villaurrutia’s poems of the late
1930s (Prosa, p. 173). See especially Villaurrutia’s ‘Nocturno’ of 1939, ‘Todo lo que la noe…’
(Obras, pp. 44–45), ‘Nocturno rosa’ (pp. 57–58) and ‘Nocturno mar’ (pp. 59–60).
30. Octavio G. Barreda wrote to Ortiz de Montellano on 1 July 1940 to point out that his version of
‘A Song for Simeon’, as one of the Ariel Poems, should appear aer Ash-Wednesday (Bernardo
Ortiz de Montellano, Epistolario (México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1999),
p. 168), but by this time the selection had already been published. ‘Miércoles de ceniza’ gains
from the error, appearing as the conclusion to a period of Eliot’s career.
31. Dudley Fis, who gave advice on the translation, paid close aention to the poem’s liturgical
aracter. He suggested to Ortiz de Montellano in a leer that he render ‘Lord I am not
worthy, / but speak the word only’, whi concludes the third part, in Latin rather than
Spanish: ‘Señor, yo no soy digno etc.: from the prayer at Mass, Dómine non sum dignus. . . sed
tantum dic verbo. NB: It might almost be beer to use the Latin here; because Eliot is quoting
from the Anglican missal, a nuance whi would be lost in Spanish anyway; and the liturgical
connotation should be preserved,’ Ortiz de Montellano, Epistolario, p. 319. Although Ortiz de
Montellano kept with the Spanish in this instance, he accepted Fis’s advice on two occasions,
translating ‘Oh my people, what have I done to thee’ of part v and ‘And let my cry come unto
ee’ of the conclusion as ‘Pópule meus, quid feci tibi?’ and ‘Et clamor meus ad te véniat’
(TSEP, 97 & 99).
32. In his introduction to the reprint of Miércoles de ceniza in book form (México: Espiga, 1946),
Ortiz de Montellano suggested a natural affinity between the Catholic culture of Latin
America and Eliot’s poems, observing that ‘la cultura latina florece a cada paso en su obra’ (p.
7). A leer from T. S. Eliot anowledging receipt of the book is reproduced in Ortiz de
Montellano, Epistolario, p. 312. Eliot declares: ‘e translation appears to me good. I cannot
profess to have enough knowledge of your language to be able to judge either accuracy of
translation or perfection of style, but I read with mu pleasure your introduction whi
seemed to me, if I may say so, very perceptive.’
33. Paz, ‘Rescate de Enrique Munguía’, p. 42. is statement is revised in OC14, 119 to ‘Otra buena
traducción es la de Ortiz de Montellano de Miércoles de ceniza. No es inferior a la de Usigli’.
34. Eliot, 9 August 1930; quoted in Ronald Suard, Eliot’s Dark Angel (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1999), p. 151.
35. Eliot, ‘Lancelot Andrews’, trans. by Antonio Marialar, p. 63.
36. It is separated from the rest of Xavier Villaurrutia en persona y en obra, and included with
general discussion of the Contemporáneos under the title ‘Variaciones sobre la muerte’.
37. Paz, Xavier Villaurrutia, p. 68. is passage was excised from OC4, 274.
38. 19 Mar 1938, Ortiz de Montellano, Epistolario, p. 138.
39. Enrique Ramírez y Ramírez, ‘Apuntes para un ensayo sobre el significado universal de la Unión
Soviética’, Cuadernos del Valle de México, 1 (Sept 1933), 3–10 (p. 8).
40. Paz, Itinerario, in OC9, 29. Paz claims that he le El Popular over the Hitler–Stalin pact. Rubén
Medina, however, points out that Paz wasn’t among the group of editors who resigned, and
concludes that ‘los datos disponibles revelan a un joven escritor indeciso ante varios eventos
históricos y políticos’, Autor, autoridad y autorización, p. 116n.
41. Neruda, ‘Versos de Sara de Ibañez’, Taller, 12 (Jan–Feb 1941), pp. 34–42 (p. 34).
42. Paz, ‘Poesía e historia: Laurel y nosotros’, in OC3, 85.
43. Paz, ‘Respuesta a un cónsul’, Letras de México, 4, 8 (15 August 1943), 5.
44. Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society (London: Faber and Faber, 1939), p. 64.
45. Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society, p. 64. For discussion of the coincidences between Eliot and
the politics of the le see Miael North, ‘Eliot, Lukács, and the Politics of Modernism’, in T. S.
Eliot: The Modernist in History, ed. by Ronald Bush (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991), pp. 169–89.
46. Christian Newsletter, 14 August 1940; quoted in Roger Kojeý, T. S. Eliot’s Social Criticism
(London: Faber and Faber, 1971), p. 126.
47. Antonio Sánez Barbudo, ‘A la orilla del mundo’, El Hijo Pródigo, 1, 1 (15 Apr 1943), 44–48 (p.
44).
48. Ibid., p. 45.
49. Paz, A la orilla del mundo y Primer día, Bajo tu clara sombra, Raíz del hombre, Noche de
resurrecciones (México: Compañía Editora y Librera ARS, 1942), p. 106; OC13, 82–92 (p. 88).
50. Ulacia, El árbol milenario, p. 91.
51. Paz, A la orilla del mundo y Primer día, p. 132; OC13, 100.
52. ‘Poesía de soledad y poesía de comunión’ was first published in El Hijo Pródigo, 1, 5 (Aug 1943),
271–78. A discussion from the congress involving Paz, José Bergamín, José Gaos, and Enrique
González Martínez among others, was also published as ‘Poesía, mística y filosofía: Debate en
torno a San Juan de la Cruz’, El Hijo Pródigo, 1, 3 (15 Jun 1943), 135–44.
53. Paz, ‘Reflejos: Réplicas. Diálogos con Francisco de evedo’ (1996), in OC14, 74.
54. A translation of Eliot’s Selected Essays 1917–1932 by Sara Rubinstein appeared as Los poetas
metafísicos y otros ensayos sobre teatro y religión (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1944).
55. Ulacia, El árbol milenario, p. 102.
56. Leyla Perrone-Moisès, ‘Choix et valeur dans l’œuvre critique des écrivains’, Littérature, 94 (1994),
97–112 (p. 104).
57. Stanton, Inventores de tradición, pp. 183–84.
58. Frank Kermode, Romantic Image (London: Collins, 1971), p. 182.
59. Stanton, Inventores de tradición, p. 183. Eliot’s own varying comments on San Juan indicate how
subjective his own seme is. In ‘e Clark Lectures’ (1926) San Juan, along with Teresa de
Ávila, is post-Fall: ‘e Aristotelian-Victorine-Dantesque mysticism is ontological; the Spanish
mysticism is psyological. e first is what I call classical, the second romantic’, The Varieties
of Metaphysical Poetry, p. 104. Yet he used San Juan for the epigraph to ‘Sweeney Agonistes’,
and in 1938 declared that ‘the only poetry I can think of whi belongs to quite the same class
as Herbert — as expression of purity and intensity of religious feeling, and […] for literary
excellence — is St. John of the Cross’, ‘George Herbert’, Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 27
May 1938; quoted in Suard, Eliot’s Dark Angel, p. 184. Donne himself was relegated in
Eliot’s seme and was replaced by Lancelot Andrewes as the example of a pre-Fall sensibility.
Paz probably encountered this version of the seme in the Cruz y Raya translation of
‘Lancelot Andrewes’ before he came across ‘e Metaphysical Poets’.
60. See ‘e Circuitous Journey: Pilgrims and Prodigals’, in M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism:
Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), pp. 141–95.
61. René de Costa, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), pp.
91–92.
62. Francisco de evedo, ‘Cartas y sonetos de la muerte’, ed. by Pablo Neruda, Cruz y Raya, 33
(Dec 1935), 83–101.
63. Robert Pring-Mill, ‘Introduction’ to Pablo Neruda, A Basic Anthology, p. xxiv.
64. Pablo Neruda, ‘Viaje al corazón de evedo’, in Obras, ii, 14.
65. Ibid.
66. Paz, ‘Reflejos: Réplicas. Diálogos con Francisco de evedo’ (1996), in OC14, 71–72.
67. Stanton, Inventores de tradición, p. 186.
68. Paz, ‘El poeta talentoso transforma la tradición’, Excélsior, 16 Feb 1991, pp. 1 & 3 (p. 3).
69. Stanton, Inventores de tradición, p. 184.
70. Ulacia, El árbol milenario, p. 102.
71. Stanton, Inventores de tradición, p. 182.
CHAPTER 6
North America
Paz travelled to San Francisco at the end of 1943 with a Guggenheim grant
and plans to write an essay on ‘América y su expresión poética’ [America
and its poetic expression]. He soon gained a minor post in the Mexican
diplomatic service, however, and he would spend nearly two years in the
United States, working first as empleado auxiliar in the Mexican Consulate
in San Francisco, then gaining a promotion to New York in August 1945,
with time spent in Vermont and Washington before he was sent to Paris at
the end of the year. Removed from the political allegiances of Taller, Paz
now re-read Eliot in a new context: ‘Leí con fervor a los poetas
norteamericanos, especialmente a T. S. Eliot’ [I read the North American
poets fervently, especially T. S. Eliot].1 Yet as that fervor implies, this reading
took place against the baground of a continuing personal crisis:
Había vivido aislado y había sufrido dificultades no solamente de orden material y político, como
mua gente piensa, sino de orden espiritual. Todo esto me afectó profundamente. Tardé algunos
años en rehacerme. La poesía fue mi confidente […] y mi maestra.2
[I had been isolated and suffered not only materially and politically, as many people think, but
also spiritually. All of this affected me deeply. I took several years to put myself ba together.
Poetry was my confidante […] and my master.]
e confessional tone suggests new possibilities both for his own poems and
for his reading of Eliot during this period. When ‘Ética del artista’ observed
that not only does contemporary man la ‘una religión interior, sino una
exteriorización de su religiosidad’ [an interior religion but an exteriorization
of his religiousness] (OC13, 186), it was clearly the exterior form that most
interested Paz. Now isolated from the le and the structures of belief it had
provided, Paz turns to poetry as confidante for a potentially more intimate
exploration of the self and its engagement with the world. Yet it is a heavy
burden that this poetry whi is both confidante and master must bear, and
Paz will test the limits of his work that takes Eliot as its model during this
brief period.
Asueto and ‘e Music of Poetry’
e first poems that Paz wrote in the United States were gathered in the
section of Libertad bajo palabra [Liberty beneath the Word] (1949), titled
Asueto [Calm]. Paz described a shi of focus in the poems of this period:
‘Me propuse respetar la realidad sensible; sin caer en la poesía descriptiva,
afirmé la existencia del mundo exterior’ [I decided to respect the reality of
the senses; without falling into descriptive poetry, I affirmed the existence of
the outside world].3 Eliot’s presence hovers around this shi, although it is
difficult to account precisely for his role. In ‘Lago’ [Lake] (1944), for
example, Eliot participates in an aa on a certain romantic
aggrandizement of the imagination as represented by Baudelaire. Paz’s
poem carries an epigraph from the Fren poet’s ‘Rêve parisien’ [Parisian
Dream]: ‘Tout pour l’œil, rien pour les oreilles’ [All for the eyes, nothing for
the ears]. Baudelaire describes a dream landscape, that is, a landscape he has
created, in whi he perceives ‘un silence d’éternité’ [an eternal silence]
only to be confronted with the sordid external world when he wakes up.4
Paz forgoes this assertion of the imagined over the real for a different
engagement between poet and physical landscape. He observes a lake, ‘entre
montañas áridas’ [amid arid mountains], whi reflects the sky:
agua y cielo reposan,
peo a peo, infinitos.
(LBP1, 62)
[water and sky repose
est to est, infinite.]
e water takes on the connotation of the infinite whi aends the object
that it reflects, the sky. He has won a vision through his material
surroundings of something beyond them. But that vision is vulnerable since
it depends on a world that has its own life independent of the poet’s
imagination. A breeze blows a mist over, and the water no longer reflects an
open sky but takes on the opacity of the element that has intervened:
Sólo para los ojos
esta luz y estas aguas,
esta perla dormida
que apenas resplandece.
¡Todo para los ojos!
Y en los ojos un ritmo,
un color fugitivo,
la sombra de una forma,
un repentino viento
y un naufragio infinito.
(LBP1, 62)
[Only for the eyes
this light and this water,
this sleeping pearl
that barely shines.
Everything for the eyes!
And in the eyes a rhythm,
a fleeting colour,
the shadow of a form,
a sudden wind
and an infinite drowning.]
So precarious are su visions that they can be erased by a sudden breeze,
taking the observer with them from a heavenly infinity to ‘un naufragio
infinito’. Paz’s poem provides a neat lesson that human understanding of the
eternal is bound to experience in time, and that knowledge of the immaterial
depends upon the material. e lesson’s conclusion is effected with an
extended reference to Phlebas the Phoenician of The Waste Land: the ‘perla
dormida’ recalls ‘ose are pearls that were his eyes’ (CPP, 62), itself taken
from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and the ‘naufragio infinito’ summons
Phlebas’s ‘death by water’ (CPP, 71). In the version of the poem that appears
in the Obras completas, ‘la sombra de una forma’ is modified to ‘la sombra
de una fortuna’ [the shadow of a fortune] (OC11, 46), a reminder that
Phlebas first occurs in the tarot reading of Madame Sosotris in ‘e Burial of
the Dead’. Paz’s application of ‘perla dormida’ to the lake also maintains the
Eliotic association of pearls with eyes. e fate of the poet’s vision, ‘sólo
para los ojos’, is bound to what the lake sees, or rather reflects, so that when
the water turns opaque the poet receives a vision of his own extinction.
I have said that Paz refers to The Waste Land but, while the nexus of
associations between pearls, eyes and drowning certainly recalls Eliot’s
poem, it does not point the reader there in the manner of an allusion. e
images can function independently of their source, mu as those images
function independently of The Tempest in Eliot. Yet the role that ‘un
naufragio infinito’ plays in the poem, as the negation of a poetic imagination
that would sweep all before it, is consistent with the Eliot of Paz’s earliest
poems. ere, a sceptical composite of Eliot and Villaurrutia counters the
poetic selves of Pellicer and Perse, who find their place in the world by
exerting a form of imaginative agency upon it. In ‘Lago’, the images from
The Waste Land stand in a similar relation to the Baudelaire of ‘Rêve
parisien’. Eliot opposes the poet’s vision of eternity with a materialist, or
realist, sense of the world’s recalcitrance to that vision.
Also included in Asueto, ‘Primavera a la vista’ [Spring in Sight] plays out
a similar gesture of holding the poetic imagination in e. ere is a
possible formal rather than imagistic eo of Eliot here:
Desnudo cielo azul de invierno, puro
como la frente, como el pensamiento
de una muaa que despierta, frío
como sueño de estatua sin memoria.
(LBP1, 67)
[Naked blue sky of winter, pure
like a forehead, like the thought
of a girl waking up, cold
like the dream of a statue without memory.]
e positioning of the adjectives puro and frío offers an equivalent to the
present participles that open ‘e Burial of the Dead’. In ea case, Paz’s use
of the line division isolates the adjective, the unadorned observation, from
the simile — ‘como la frente…’, ‘como sueño …’ — whi is the figurative and
interpretive elaboration of that observation. Aer the extended simile of
‘como el pensamiento / de una muaa que despierta’, frío intercedes as a
contrary movement ba to the real world whi is the starting point for
these poetic excursions. While it is still a vision imposed on the world, the
simile that he now produces is drained of life: ‘como sueño de estatua sin
memoria’. Paz’s adjectives function differently from the present participles
of ‘e Burial of the Dead’ whi halt the movement of the opening lines,
but also project energies disconcertingly beyond them. Nor is there Eliot’s
startling, and grimly suggestive, blend of the concrete and the abstract,
image and observation — from lilacs to memory and desire. Yet the halting
movement of these lines is consistent with the Eliot of ‘Lago’ who provides a
e on the flight of the poetic imagination.
Whether through lineation or image, Eliot’s presence in these poems
serves a similar function to his allegiance with Valéry and evedo in
‘Poesía de soledad y poesía de comunión’. He provides a form of critical
consciousness whi es the poet’s desire for innocent connection with
his environment. Yet Paz’s essay of 1943 also called upon the poem to unify
su states of division. e ambivalence at work in this essay derives from
his very earliest poems where the celebratory sensualism of Perse and
Pellicer was entertained, yet curtailed. Essays su as ‘Ética del artista’
would explain this denial as the response to a historical circumstance whi
was not propitious for the utopian impulse. Without the presence of the
contemporary, urban seing whi so oen stands as shorthand in his
poems for that history, ‘Lago’ and ‘Primavera a la vista’ reveal a structure of
feeling that underlies, and exceeds, Paz’s own socio-political explanation.
Paz is aracted to the exaltación lírica of a Perse, a Pellicer or a Neruda, to
the happy correspondence of world and poetic imagination, but he cannot
trust in it. In a sense, these poems are not really about ‘la existencia del
mundo exterior’ [the existence of the external world], but about the poet.
eir aracter is reflexive rather than descriptive. Yet that reflexivity has its
limitations. ‘Lago’, in particular, swily elevates its self-consciousness to the
level of a parable on the poetic imagination. e desire that Paz describes to
use poetry as a confidante has been evaded for a more generalizing
discourse. As his poems take a new historical turn aer Asueto, this
emotional paern is less evident, yet it persists nevertheless.
Paz described a shi in the poems of Asueto to ‘los versos más cortos de
las formas populares’ [the shorter lines of popular forms], whi he
aributed in interview to his reading of Antonio Maado.5 Towards 1944,
however, he went on to explain, ‘descubrí el lenguaje de la conversación, el
lenguaje coloquial. No la poesía popular y tradicional —como en los poemas
del período anterior— sino el lenguaje de la ciudad’ [I discovered the
language of conversation, colloquial language. Not popular, traditional
poetry — as with the poems of the previous period — but the language of the
city].6 is distinction between the language of the Cancionero and a
contemporary, urban idiom provided the basis of his 1951 critique of
Maado: ‘No son ésas nuestras palabras. El idioma de la urbe moderna,
según lo vieron Apollinaire y Eliot, es otro’ [ose aren’t our words. e
language of the modern city, as Apollinaire and Eliot saw, is different].7
Maado ‘cierra los ojos ante la aventura del arte moderno’ [closes his eyes
to the adventure of modern art] (OC3, 342), an adventure that follows Eliot.
Eliot had maintained a presence in the Maadian poems of Asueto. Now,
however, he promised a new formal articulation, with contemporary urban
colloquialism, of an art that possessed ‘un valor testimonial e histórico’ [a
testimonial and historical value] (OC13, 185). Both Salvador Novo and
Salomón de la Selva provided examples in 1920s Mexico of the possibilities
of this form, and they were included in the influential anthology of recent
poetry, Laurel (1941), whi Paz edited with José Bergamín and Xavier
Villaurrutia. In fact, he credited de la Selva with introducing poetry in
Spanish to ‘los giros coloquiales y el prosaísmo’ [colloquial and prosaic
expressions], an aspect of The Waste Land whi, in passages su as the
Albert and Lil and I dialogue of ‘A Game of Chess’, was least aenuated by
Munguía’s prose translation.8 is poetic reading was given theoretical
support and a new impetus with the publication in 1943 of Eliot’s essay ‘e
Music of Poetry’ in El Hijo Pródigo, only a year aer it had been delivered as
a lecture at Glasgow University.9 Paz was a member of the editorial board
for El Hijo Pródigo, and Enrico Mario Santí speculates that the essay may
well have appeared at his instigation, although its translator, Octavio G.
Barreda, who was a founder and editor of the magazine, had already
provided the translation of ‘A Song for Simeon’ for the Taller collection of
Eliot’s poems.10
‘La música de la poesía’ clearly had an impact on Paz. His reference to ‘el
lenguaje de la conversación, el lenguaje coloquial’ eoes references to
‘conversación’ [‘conversation’ (OPP, 29)], and ‘el lenguaje coloquial’,
[‘colloquial spee’ (OPP, 36)] in Barreda’s translation.11 In El arco y la lira
(1956) Paz describes the importance of ‘la música de la conversación, según
ha mostrado Eliot en un ensayo muy conocido’ [the music of conversation
as Eliot has shown in a well-known essay] (Arco1, 275; OC1, 284).12 In fact,
the essay probably enjoyed earlier and greater fame in Mexico, through the
publication of Barreda’s translation in El Hijo Pródigo, than it did in the
English-speaking world where it would have to wait until On Poetry and
Poets (1957) before it aieved widespread circulation. Paz refers more oen
to this essay than he does to any of Eliot’s Selected Essays, whi he could
either have been reading in English at this stage, or in Sara Rubinstein’s
translation, whi appeared as Los poetas metafísicos y otros ensayos sobre
teatro y religión in 1944.
e title of Eliot’s essay is misleading; its main concern is not music as
su but the conflict between colloquial spee and the musical tendencies
of verse: ‘the law that poetry must not stray too far from the ordinary
everyday language whi we use and hear’ (OPP, 29). Eliot describes an
oscillation between the two tendencies:
At some periods the task is to explore the musical possibilities of an established convention of the
relation of the idiom of verse to that of spee; at other periods, the task is to cat up with the
anges in colloquial spee, whi are fundamentally anges in thought and sensibility.
(OPP, 35)
Eliot’s argument aas the Pateresque idea that poetry, as one of the arts,
‘aspires towards the condition of music’ through ‘suppression or vagueness’
of maer.13 Rather than aspiration, a hazy desire for an ideal realm, Eliot
aends to the pragmatic ‘possibilities’, and the rather mundane aempt to
‘cat up with colloquial spee’. He places an emphasis on the quiddity of
the poet’s material, whi is not then transcended but deepened as its
musical possibilities are explored: ‘He must, like the sculptor, be faithful to
the material in whi he works; it is out of sounds that he has heard that he
must make his melody and harmony’ (OPP, 32).
By assigning a material role to language in this exploration of the analogy
between poetry and music, Eliot confirms and develops a typical move of
Symbolist theory that was exemplified by Paul Valéry in his ‘Conversación
sobre la poesía (fragmentos)’, whi immediately preceded ‘El páramo’ in
the pages of Contemporáneos. ere, Valéry proceeded from Malherbe’s
analogy of poetry with dancing, a system of acts whi have ‘su fin en sí
mismos’ [their end in themselves], and of prose with walking. e seeming
autonomy of art, however, is illusory: dancing ‘usa de los mismos miembros’
[uses the same limbs] as walking, just as the poet must use ‘una fabricación
de uso corriente y práctico (el lenguaje) para fines excepcionales y no
prácticos’ [a construction of daily and practical use (language) for
exceptional, non-practical ends].14 ‘e Music of Poetry’ provides a bridge
between Valéry’s essay and The Waste Land, elaborating on the significance
for poetry of spoken, prosaic language, whi is not only inescapable, but an
essential register of ‘anges in thought and sensibility’ (OPP, 35). Eliot
introduces a sense of historical process to Valéry’s thinking and he concedes
that even the ‘deterioration’ of colloquial language ‘must be accepted by the
poet and made the best of’ (OPP, 37). He is thus able to provide a meeting
point for Paz’s leist insistence on poetry as the register of a historical
reality and the consciousness that he inherited from the Contemporáneos of
language as a material with its own integrity. In the poems of Asueto, Paz
set the poetic imagination against the real, intractable world. ‘e Music of
Poetry’, with its articulation of the ‘possibilities of contrapuntal arrangement
of subject maer’ (OPP, 38), suggested a new transposition of this theme into
a conflict between different verbal realities and the human lives they
expressed.
‘Conversación en un bar’ and simultaneísmo
e contrapuntal use of different registers first appears in ‘Conversación en
un bar’ [Conversation in a Bar], whi is gathered with another fragment,
‘Razones para morir’ [Reasons to Die], under the title ‘Conscriptos U.S.A.’
[Conscripts U.S.A.] in the 1968 edition of Libertad bajo palabra and
subsequent editions of the Obra poética. Both poems originally formed
sections of a larger work, ‘El joven soldado’ [e Young Soldier]. ‘El joven
soldado’ was wrien in Berkeley at the same time as many of the other
Asueto poems, but it appeared in the section of Libertad bajo palabra where
Eliot’s influence is most apparent, Puerta condenada [Condemned Door]. e
poems of Asueto aempt to register the natural world whi sits beyond the
confines of the self. While the question of relationship is still alive in ‘El
joven soldado’, the interaction between poetic imagination and natural
world has been widened to include human relationship.
In the poem’s first section, ‘Árbol quieto entre nubes’ [Still Tree amid
Clouds], the speaker explores the appropriateness of a certain poetic
rhetoric:
Aquel joven soldado
era sonriente y tímido y erguido
como un joven durazno.
(LBP1, 96)
[at young soldier
was smiling and shy and upright
like a young pea tree.]
‘Lago’ and ‘Primavera a la vista’ suggested that Paz was suspicious of the
figurative elaborations that the poet uses to colour his world. Here, the
simile of a pea tree appeases the potential aggression of the soldier with
its own form of imaginative coercion. In the third section of ‘El joven
soldado’, however, ‘Conversación en un bar’, the soldier is given his own
voice:
—Sábado por la tarde, sin permiso.
La soledad se puebla y todo quema.
(El viento del Oeste son dos vientos:
en la noe es un búfalo fantasma,
al alba es un ejército de pájaros).
(LBP1, 99)
[— Saturday in the aernoon, without permission.
e solitude is filled and everything burns.
(e Western wind is two winds:
in the night it is a ghostly buffalo,
at dawn it is an army of birds).]
e first line is clearly overheard spee, with its casually appended ‘sin
permiso’. e second line then seems to be the poet’s voice, describing the
irruption of the outside conversation on his isolation in terms of metaphor:
‘todo quema’. Neither a description of the outside scene, nor exactly a
contribution to the conversation, it bears an associative relationship to the
soldier’s spee. e wind provides an image of something sweeping in from
afar just as this conversation has intruded on the poet’s solitude, while the
division into a night and a morning wind wanders from the suggestion of ‘la
tarde’. e extended use of figurative language displays the poetic invention
of the parenthetical voice. Yet this voice cannot entirely control
interpretation of the scene but is itself directed by the spee of the soldier.
e alternation between spoken idiom and a more elaborate figurative
discourse continues:
—Nos encerraron en la cárcel.
Yo le menté la madre al cabo.
Al rato las mangueras de agua fría.
Nos quitamos la ropa, tiritando.
Muy tarde ya, nos dieron sábanas.
(—En otoño los árboles del río
dejan caer sus hojas amarillas
en la espalda del agua.
Y el sol, en la corriente,
es una lenta mano que acaricia
una garganta trémula).
(LBP1, 99–100)
[— ey threw us in prison.
I was cursing.
Aer a while the cold showers.
We took off our clothes, shivering.
Mu later they gave us blankets.
( — In autumn the yellow leaves
of the trees by the river
fall onto the ba of the water.
And the sun, in the current,
is a slow hand that caresses
a trembling throat).]
Again, the images in braets are suggested by the dialogue: the clothes that
the soldiers had to strip off become the autumn leaves, the showers the river.
But where the showers were cold and had the soldier swearing, the image of
the sun on the water is a warm and gentle ‘acaricia’, whi ushers in an
erotic and feminine counter — ‘una garganta trémula’ — to the crudely
masculine tenor of the conversation.
Manuel Ulacia cites ‘A Game of Chess’ as the model for this contrast
between colloquial spee and a lyric voice:15
‘My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
‘Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.
‘What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
‘I never know what you are thinking. ink.’
I think we are in rats’ alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.
(CPP, 65)
For Ulacia, the contact between the two registers poeticizes the colloquial:
‘e daily conversations become poetic material par excellence, above all
when they are confronted with lyric and metaphysical discourse.’16 Yet
‘poetic material’ is a misleading description of a passage whose effect is so
clearly dramatic. e peremptory complaints of the woman’s spee vividly
suggest the accumulated suffering —‘ “Why do you never speak?” ’; ‘ “I
never know…” ’ — of a relationship in whi the demands of one side are
habitually met with mute resistance from the other. Rather than the ‘lyrical
and metaphysical’ discourse poeticizing this spee, the effect is reversed:
the more elevated tone of the speaker’s unspoken response gains its
resonance from the colloquial idiom that has gone before. Its higher register
is marked as an impotent defiance of the neurotic questioning that it dare
not answer directly. Frank Lentricia describes the ‘contemporary
aracters, situation and dialogue’ of The Waste Land as ‘the living theater’
of its plan, and it is this portrayal of a specific relationship that generates the
effect of the passage.17
e rhetorical form, and hence effect, of ‘Conversación en un bar’ is
distinct. e speaker is neither addressed by, nor does he address, the
soldier’s voice. Separated by braets, his observations are inspired by the
conversation, but they do not express an actual relationship between the
speakers. Paz gives the reader the more general portrayal of solipsism
expressed in Eliot’s note on F. H. Bradley, whi described an experience
that ‘falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the outside’ (CPP, 80),
rather than the tortured blend of claustrophobia and isolation conveyed in
the passage that Ulacia cites. In the absence of a truly dramatic relationship
between protagonists, of lives suggested beyond the words, the contrast of
registers generates a reflexive turn, creating a meditation on the aracter
and value of ‘material poético’ itself. Rather than poeticizing the colloquial
passages, ‘Conversación en un bar’ throws the value of a particular
figurative register in doubt.
For Paz, one of the defining aracteristics of modern poetry was ‘la
yuxtaposición y el oque del lenguaje poético culto con el idioma de la
conversación, como lo llamaba Eliot’ [the juxtaposition and clash of
cultivated poetic language with the language of conversation, as Eliot called
it].18 is choque could certainly be productive. In an essay of 1954, ‘Poesía
mexicana moderna’, Paz complains of an anthology in whi Castro Leal
edited out a prosaic passage of Alfonso Reyes’s Yerbas del Tarahumara:
Esa estrofa —adrede prosaica— cumplía una función dentro del poema: le daba peso, materialidad
y subrayaba así el lirismo de otros pasajes. No es otro el sentido de ciertas irrupciones del habla
coloquial o erudita en los poemas de Eliot, Pound y Apollinaire.
(OC4, 63)
[at stanza — deliberately prosaic — served a function in the poem: it gave weight, materiality
and thus underlined the lyricism of other passages. at is the meaning of certain irruptions of
colloquial or erudite spee in the poems of Eliot, Pound and Apollinaire.]
Here, the contrast is largely positive — the colloquial gives ‘materialidad’
that is, a kind of reality, to the poetic passages. Yet the material world can
provide an obstacle to the poetic imagination, as ‘Lago ‘and ‘Primavera a la
vista’ demonstrate. e colloquial voices of ‘Conversación en un bar’
provide an analogous verbal materialism whi the poetic register cannot
fully assimilate. e speaker’s reflections aempt unsuccessfully to palliate
the content of the soldier’s spee by translating it into a figurative
discourse, just as the ‘durazno’ [pea tree] of ‘Árbol quieto entre nubes’
tries to placate the violent potential of the soldier. e relationship between
self and object of the earlier poems is replaced by a dialogue between
speaking voices whi nevertheless remain isolated from ea other.
is isolation is revealed at its starkest in the poem’s final section,
‘Razones para morir’:
Mas otros no me hablaban.
En su silencio yo escuaba mi silencio.
‘Nada explica mi muerte,
porque el silencio es un espejo negro
donde se ahogan todas las preguntas’.
Y en su silencio sólo había
un bostezo infinito —y luego, nada.
(LBP1, 102–03)
[But others didn’t talk to me.
In their silence I listened to my silence.
‘Nothing explains my death,
because silence is a bla mirror
where all the questions are drowned.’
And in his silence there was only
an infinite yawn — and then, nothing.]
‘El joven soldado’ began as a cautious aempt to articulate the otherness of
a stranger. Yet this concluding act of ventriloquism suggests that the project
has failed: Paz can only find his own silence in the soldier’s silence, to whi
he gives voice ironically as a meditation on silence. e sense of la that
provoked the initial aempt to rea out beyond the confines of the self has
not been mitigated, but inhabits the speaker’s projection. e exercise rings
true as a parable on solipsism and the limits of the poem to register
otherness. Yet it is aieved at the expense of an involved, dramatically
realized relationship between speaker and protagonist. It has to remain
content with making a general point about isolation.
is colloquial experiment was not without a personal, and no doubt
deeply felt, resonance for Paz. As Manuel Ulacia points out, expressions in
the soldier’s spee su as ‘Yo le menté la madre al cabo’ [I cursed his
mother] are specifically Mexican colloquialisms: ‘Paz looks for a national
ontology in colloquial expression’, he concludes.19 e final section of ‘El
joven soldado’ also raises questions about the meaning of patria, and Ulacia
supports his argument suggestively, if briefly, with reference to El laberinto
de la soledad [The Labyrinth of Solitude]. Although it was not composed
until the summer of 1949 in Paris, Paz’s analysis of Mexican psyology and
belief refers ba to his experience in the United States. Ulacia draws a link
between the book’s first apter, ‘El Pauco y otros extremos’ [e Pauco
and Other Extremes] and the use of colloquial language in ‘El joven
soldado’.20 Paz later said of the Mexican immigrants discussed in this
apter that ‘me reconocí en los pachucos y en su local rebeldía contra su
presente y su pasado’ [I recognized myself in the pachucos and in their local
rebellion against present and past].21 Yet, ultimately, he stands outside their
world, observing their dress and then speculating on their inner life, his act
of identification as mu a form of projection as of empathy.
‘Conversación en un bar’ suggests that the other represented by a
colloquial voice is a threat to the poetic consciousness. Yet Paz’s reading of
Eliot still aimed to register otredad [otherness], as a later criticism of the
Contemporáneos indicates:
En ninguno de los ‘Contemporáneos’ aparecen ‘los otros’, esos hombres y mujeres de ‘toda
condición’ con los que, día tras día, hablamos y nos cruzamos en calles, oficinas, templos,
autobuses […] En los poemas de Gorostiza, Villaurrutia y Ortiz de Montellano no hay nadie; todos
y todo se han vuelto reflejos, espectros […] Para que se comprenda lo que quiero decir, citaré a dos
poetas muy opuestos, Eliot y Apollinaire. La gente es la ciudad y la ciudad es la doble faz de los
hombres, la faz nocturna y la diurna. Los hombres reales e irreales a un tiempo […] La ciudad es la
gente y la gente es nuestro horizonte. La poesía de la generación de Contemporáneos, admirable
por más de una razón, carece de ese horizonte. Poesía con alas pero sin el peso —la pesadumbre—
de la historia.22
[In none of the Contemporáneos do ‘the others’ appear, those men and women of ‘every class’
with whom, from day to day, we talk and whom we encounter in the street, the office, the ur
and the bus […] In the poems of Gorostiza, Villaurrutia and Ortiz de Montellano there is no-one;
everybody and everything has become a reflection, a ghost […] To clarify what I’m trying to say, I
will cite two very different poets, Eliot and Apollinaire. e people are the city and the city is the
double aspect of men, the nocturnal and the diurnal aspect. Men at once real and unreal […] e
city is people and people are our horizon. e poetry of the Contemporáneos generation,
admirable for many reasons, las that horizon. Poetry with wings but without the weight — the
suffering — of history.]
As with the ‘hombres huecos’ of ‘Pablo Neruda en el corazón’ (praiseworthy
in Eliot; blameworthy in the Contemporáneos), Paz’s distinction between
the hombres ‘reales e irreales’ of Eliot and the ‘espectros’ of Villaurrutia is
not entirely secured. It is a key juncture of the argument because it provides
an opportunity for Paz to define the otredad that he values in Eliot and
Apollinaire. I have argued that Paz’s own Eliotic experiment fails, quite
consciously, to enter the ‘otherness’ of its object. e colloquial voice
remains a recalcitrantly material obstacle to the speaker’s poetic designs. Paz
seems reluctant to explore the dramatic aracter of Eliot’s exanges in The
Waste Land resulting in a more reflexive yet less anecdotally and affectively
arged poetry. Although the passage cited above suggests an aempt to
register the human scene, it also elides the personal with a more general
discourse: the people with whom we talk become a horizon, whi is in turn
dissolved into history. at history is ‘el peso’, the weight that impedes
poetry’s flight. As in ‘Conversación en un bar’, other people are reduced to
extras in a drama that is centred on poetry. e ‘pesadumbre’ of history is
an emotional disposition that is not related to a human relationship, but a
generality.
Paz confirms his association of history and a form that employs colloquial
language in later essays with his use of the term simultaneísmo
[simultaneism], a method that he traced ba to the poems of this period.23
In ‘Poesía e historia: Laurel y nosotros’ (1983), Paz engages in extended
discussion of simultaneísmo, whi has now been promoted to the status of
‘una visión tanto como un método de composición’ [a vision as mu as a
method of composition]:
La pluralidad de tiempos y espacios que se conjugan en la ciudad moderna encontró su expresión
más viva en el simultaneísmo. Describirlo y definirlo me tomaría muas páginas: baste con decir
que es la traducción o trasposición verbal o rítmica de esa propiedad de la ciudad moderna
consistente en ser la conjunción de distintos tiempos y espacios en un aquí y ahora determinados.
En su origen fue un procedimiento que los poetas tomaron del montaje cinematográfico. Cendrars
y Apollinaire fueron los iniciadores: para ellos el simultaneísmo fue la forma lírica por excelencia
de la poesía de la ciudad. Eliot y Pound transformaron este procedimiento y lo insertaron en una
visión de la historia. Fue un cambio esencial.
(OC3, 119)
[e plurality of times and spaces that are combined in the modern city found its most vivid
expression in simultaneism. To describe and define it would take many pages: it is enough to say
that it is the verbal or rhythmical translation or transposition of that property of the modern city
whi consists of the conjunction of distinct times and spaces in a determinate here and now. It
was originally a procedure that poets took from cinematic teniques. Cendrars and Apollinaire
were the initiators: for them simultaneism was the lyric form par excellence of the poetry of the
city. Eliot and Pound transformed this procedure and inserted it in a vision of history. It was an
essential ange.]
Anglo-American critics of Eliot describe simultaneism in terms of subjective
experience, consistent with its origins in Henri Bergson’s concept of durée
[duration]. F. R. Leavis observes ‘a compression approaing simultaneity —
the co-presence in the mind of a number of different orientations,
fundamental aitudes, orders of experience’, while for F. O. Mahiessen The
Waste Land ‘embodies simultaneously several different planes of
experience’.24 For Paz, however, simultaneísmo registers an outer reality: it
mimics the city it inhabits and, in the works of Eliot and Pound, it is then
inserted in a vision of history. is objective purpose limits the potential for
a personal response to urban experience. Without a clearly expressed
subjective aitude to the contemporary world and its inhabitants, it
becomes difficult to express their otherness also, since there is no clear
relationship between the speaker and the object of his aention. Paz
consistently elides these affective ties between self and world in favour of
larger narratives. He would later criticize Juan Ramón Jiménez’s Espacio, the
first and second fragments of whi appeared at this time, precisely because
it laed the historical ambition of The Waste Land:25
En los grandes poemas simultaneístas […] hay un centro, un imán que mantiene unidos a todos los
fragmentos. En Espacio el imán es la sensibilidad de Juan Ramón: finísima, vasta, e insuficiente.
(OC3, 97)
[In the great simultaneist poems […] there is a centre, a magnet that unifies all the fragments. In
Espacio the magnet is the sensibility of Juan Ramón: extremely refined, vast, and insufficient.]
Yet Paz’s own conception of the form removes mu of its life. In interview,
he declared that in his simultaneísta poems, ‘ponía dos realidades frente a
frente y provocaba un oque’ [I placed two realities together and provoked
a clash].26 Once the personal aspect has been removed from the transaction,
however, the form’s element of choque loses its force. Simultaneísmo now
conjoins ‘tiempos y espacios’. e disjunction of voices in ‘Conversación en
un bar’ is forgoen as an objective world, bled of subjective experience is
shuffled at will. ‘Poesía de soledad y poesía de comunión’ displayed this dual
desire to entertain conflict but then to close it down. Paz’s early experiment
with simultaneísmo demonstrates how this move is effected by an evasion or
elision of the speaker’s experience.
Luis Cernuda
Although Paz would use the term simultaneísmo to describe a number of
later poems that engage Eliot’s influence, he does not return to the
contrapuntal use of colloquial language set against poetic voice that
aracterizes ‘Conversación en un bar’. e urban poems of Libertad bajo
palabra tend towards a more solitary meditation that brings the Spanish
poet Luis Cernuda into the orbit of Paz’s Eliot reading.27 Paz had met
Cernuda only briefly in Valencia in 1937, but they were regular
correspondents in the following years, and Cernuda’s poems appeared in
Taller. Cernuda was teaing at the University of Glasgow when Eliot first
delivered ‘e Music of Poetry’ as a lecture on 24 February 1942, and he may
well have been the prompt for the translation that appeared shortly aer in
El Hijo Pródigo. In ‘Ramón Gómez de la Serna’ (1963), Cernuda described
Eliot as ‘un artista consciente en extremo de las posibilidades de su arte y
sus límites’ [an artist who is extremely conscious of the possibilities of his
art and its limits], adding that Spanish writers are not temperamentally self-
conscious.28 Cernuda’s Eliot is similar to the figure promoted by the
Contemporáneos: verbally restrained and conscious of self and art.29 In the
summer of 1944, Cernuda entrusted Paz with the manuscript of Como quien
espera el alba [As he who Waits for the Dawn], the first of his collections to
betray a strong Eliot influence.30 Paz declared in interview that ‘Cernuda
conocía admirablemente la poesía inglesa y su ejemplo me sirvió para
penetrar ese mundo’ [Cernuda knew English poetry well and his example
helped me penetrate this world]. Indeed, it is not always easy to separate the
influences of Eliot and Cernuda in Paz’s urban poems of the 1940s.31 Jason
Wilson observes of the line in ‘El muro’ [e Wall], ‘a lluvia de ceniza en un
desierto’ [in a rain of ash in a desert] (LBP1, 95), that it ‘combines both Eliot
and Cernuda’.32 Anthony Stanton also aributes the form of poems su as
‘El joven soldado’ to Paz’s reading of Como quien espera el alba. Both poets
‘adopt the same form of monologue or soliloquy whi becomes an interior
dialogue: the poet alone talking to his double, his conscience, his memory or
his imagination’.33 Although ‘Conversación en un bar’ struggles to rea
beyond the confines of the speaker’s self, its form is distinct from an
‘interior dialogue’, however, and Stanton does concede that ‘the effect of a
clash between two worlds and languages’ differs from ‘the meditative style
of Cernuda’.34 e soldier’s voice is external, and it interrupts the poet’s
reflections. Yet Cernuda’s more meditative style clearly does inflect Paz’s use
of Eliot in other poems of Libertad bajo palabra.
‘Seven P. M.’ brings together the Cernudan form of an interior dialogue
with the London Bridge passage from ‘e Burial of the Dead’:
En filas ordenadas regresamos
y cada noe, cada noe,
mientras hacemos el camino,
el breve infierno de la espera
y el espectro que vierte en el oído:
‘¿No tienes sangre ya? ¿Por qué te mientes?
Mira los pájaros…
El mundo tiene playas todavía
y un barco allá te espera, siempre.’
(LBP1, 108–09)
[In ordered lines we return
and ea night, ea night,
while we make our way home,
the brief hell of the wait
and the spectre who pours into our ear:
‘Do you still have no blood? Why do you deceive yourself?
Look at the birds…
e world still has beaes
and a boat is always waiting for you there.’]
Paz recalls the ghostly commute of ‘A crowd flowed over London bridge, so
many /I did not think death had undone so many’ (CPP, 62), his ‘cada noe,
cada noe’ offering a faint eo of Eliot’s repeated ‘so many’. Paz also
reworks ‘And ea man fixed his eyes before his feet’ (CPP, 62), whi sees
eyes and feet manipulated by their owners as if they were inanimate objects:
‘Y las piernas caminan’ [And legs walk]; ‘Y los labios sonríen y saludan’
[And lips smile and greet] (LBP1, 109 & 110). He even flirts with the source
of this passage in Dante, switing Eliot’s (and Dante’s) limbo for ‘el breve
infierno de la espera’, extending the analogy with the introduction of a
spectre, a disembodied voice whi taunts the human. is is a genuine
example of the interior dialogue that Stanton aributes to Cernuda. e
moing voice finds a counterpart in Cernuda’s ‘Noe del hombre y su
demonio’ [Night of the Man and his Demon], a dialogue in whi the man
complains of his tormentor that ‘con sarcasmo mundano suspende todo acto’
[he suspends ea act with worldly sarcasm].35 e form recurs in a number
of the poems of Libertad bajo palabra. In ‘Soliloquio de medianoe’
[Midnight Soliloquy], a phantom voice interrupts the poet’s solitude: ‘
“Duermes, vencido por fantasmas que tú mismo engendras…” ’ [‘You sleep
conquered by phantoms you yourself have created…’]; and in ‘Pregunta’
[estion], the speaker complains, ‘Estoy con uno como yo, que no me
reconoce y me muestra mis armas’ [I am with one like myself, who does not
recognize me and shows me my weapons] (LBP1, 27 & 45).
Not only does Cernuda influence the form of ‘Seven P. M.’, however, but
the spectre’s voice also employs images that are distinctly Cernudan:
‘Cuerpos dorados como el pan dorado
y el vino de labios morados
y el agua, desnudez…'
(LBP1, 110)
[‘Bodies bronzed like golden bread
and the wine of purple lips
and water, nudity…’]
Stanton describes the contrast in Paz’s poems of this period between an
infernal urban world and ‘a mythical and paradisiacal space, a place open to
desire and full of Cernudan images of bronzed bodies, bea and sea’.36 Yet
these passages in ‘Seven P. M.’ do not deliver a paradisiacal world. ey are
spoken by a spectre to a consciousness that is in Hell; that is, they taunt that
consciousness with a paradise whi is beyond it. e parody of Christian
communion represented by these ‘cuerpos dorados como el pan dorado’
serves only to reinforce the main speaker’s distance from redemption. e
promise of sea and bronzed bodies is then negated by means of a Cernudan
‘ceniza’:
Y las piernas caminan
y una roja marea
inunda playas de ceniza.
(LBP1, 109)
[And legs walk
and a red tide
floods beaes of ash.]
e figurative language is infected with despair, and anger. e poetic image
is no longer a means of praising the world, or a form of grace, but the route
through whi dejection takes possession of the poet. e effect is closer to
the braeted passages of ‘Conversación en un bar’. ere an external voice,
as an anonymous representative of the pesadumbre [suffering] of history,
impeded the celebratory lyric impulse. Yet as I argued earlier, the poems of
Asueto reveal that Paz mistrusts this impulse; it is entertained in a form that
simultaneously denies it. When he summons a similar scene in ‘El muro’, it
is clearly imagined, beyond the rea of his present circumstance: ‘Cierro los
ojos; nacen dias, goces, / bahías de hermosura, eternidades / substraídas’ [I
close my eyes; joys, pleasures are born, / beautiful bays, eternities /
abducted] (LBP1, 95). Although the form is different in ‘Seven P.M.’, a similar
mistrust of the impulse is expressed.
e poem concludes with an offer of release that is degraded:
Y el hombre aprieta el paso
y al tiempo justo de llegar a tiempo
doblan la esquina, puntuales, Dios y el tranvía.
(LBP1, 110)
[And the man quiens his step
and just at the time of arriving on time
they turn the corner punctually, God and the tram.]
e tautology of the second line recalls Prufro’s ‘prepare a face to meet
the faces that you meet’ (CPP, 14), and also the ‘parejas pares’ of López
Velarde.37 It serves to trivialize the final line: yearning for divine grace
amounts to the same as rushing for a tram since both are forms of
expectation.
Although both ‘Conversación en un bar’ and ‘Seven P.M.’, the one with its
colloquial voice and the other with its commuters and trams, contain
recognizable elements of a contemporary urban scene, they are equally
mental reflections of the poet. I argued earlier that ‘Conversación’ takes a
reflexive turn, and it is a natural progression for the exterior scene to recede
as this meditation is explored. ‘Cuarto de hotel’ [Hotel Room] takes place in
an urban location, yet it is also a retreat where ‘Me rodean silencio y
soledad’ [Silence and solitude surround me], while ‘Fuera la noe crece,
indiferente / a la vana querella de los hombres’ [Outside the night grows,
indifferent / to the pointless dispute of men] (LBP1, 116). e speaker is the
ief actor in his own drama: ‘ “Después del tiempo”, pienso, “está la muerte
/ y allí seré por fin, cuando no sea” ’ [‘Aer time’, I think, ‘is death / and
there I will be at last, when I am not’] (LBP1, 119). Yet precisely because the
outside world has been excluded, the self around whi this drama turns is
elevated to an exemplary status: the poet as poet rather than as human
subject with a variety of experiences and relations. I noted this evasiveness
in ‘Conversación en bar’, and it is continued in these poems. ‘Soliloquio de
medianoe’, for example, tends away from the particular experience to a
more generalizing speculation: ‘ “otros sueñan delirios que son muerte / y
otros, más sencillamente, mueren también, allá en los frentes, /por defender
una palabra” ’ [‘others dream delirium that is death / and others, more
simply, die also, there on the fronts, / to defend a word’] (LBP1, 31).
While Cernuda provides a prompt for this form of meditation, it departs
from one of his own most productive uses of Eliot in poems that adopt a
particular persona, su as ‘Lázaro’, ‘etzalcóatl’, ‘Silla del Rey’, and ‘El
César’. In ‘Historial de un libro’ (1958), Cernuda anowledged a debt to
Robert Browning:
Algo que también aprendí de la poesía inglesa, particularmente de Browning, fue el proyectar mi
experiencia emotiva sobre una situación dramática, histórica o legendaria […] para que así se
objetivara mejor.38
[Something that I also learnt from English poetry, in particular from Browning, was how to
project my affective experience onto a dramatic, historical or mythical situation […] to beer
objectify it.]
Although he singles out Browning, Cernuda’s phrasing recalls the objective
correlative, whi Eliot described as ‘the only way of expressing emotion in
the form of art’ by ‘finding […] a set of objects, a situation, a ain of events
whi shall be the formula of that particular emotion’ (SW, 85). Cernuda’s
use of dramatized personae recalls su Ariel Poems as ‘Journey of the
Magi’, and indeed he wrote his own dramatic sequence titled ‘La adoración
de los magos’ [e Adoration of the Magi]. For Cernuda, the objective
situation is a way of expressing subjective experience. Paz’s reduction of the
poem to a reflexive meditation starves the affective element of an object that
could give it form and nourishment.
Paz esews the dramatic element in Cernuda’s reading of Eliot, and aims
instead for a more straightforwardly philosophical, conceptual discourse.
Although the Christian seme of ‘Seven P.M.’ is presented ironically, Paz
nevertheless directs his poems of this period beyond the variousness of his
surroundings to a final metaphysical end. ‘El ausente’ [e Absent One], for
example, exclaims:
no existes, pero vives,
en nuestra angustia habitas,
en el fondo vacío del instante […]
Dios vacío, Dios sordo, Dios mío.
(LBP1, 38–39)
[you don’t exist, but you are alive,
you inhabit our anguish,
in the empty depths of the instant […]
empty God, deaf God, my God.]
‘Soliloquio de medianoe’ similarly refers to the ‘elocuentes vejigas ya sin
nada: /Dios, Cielo, Amistad, Revolución o Patria’ [eloquent bladders now
with nothing: /God, Heaven, Friendship, Revolution or Nation] (LBP1, 28).
Both Paz and Cernuda shared what Paz describes an ‘ateísmo religioso’
[religious atheism], and one can find similar references in the Spanish poet
to an absent God.39 Yet the dramatic structure that Cernuda found in
Browning and Eliot provides an opportunity to contextualize and frame the
philosophical debate. By pushing his poems more single-mindedly toward
final metaphysical questions, Paz is confronted with an unpalatable oice
between a Christian God on the one hand and an underlying vacancy on the
other.
One might expect Eliot to be summoned in these poems as a model of
religious orthodoxy who could then be rejected. However, Paz is led ba to
the Eliot of the Contemporáneos who negates rather than asserts belief. ‘La
sombra’ looks for a way beyond his impasse through a journey into
darkness:
En los ojos abiertos
cae la sombra y luego son los ojos
los que en la sombra caen
y es unos ojos líquidos la sombra.
(LBP1, 107)
[In the open eyes
falls the shadow and then it is the eyes
that fall into the shadow
and the shadow is a pair of liquid eyes.]
Paz conflates the repeated references to eyes and the final section of The
Hollow Men, as it is rendered in León Felipe’s translation:
Entre la idea
y la realidad
entre el movimiento
y el acto
cae la sombra
(HH, 135–36)
[Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow]
(CPP, 85)
Paz seems intrigued by this sombra, and as the poem continues he moves
beyond the accusation of other poems aimed at a ‘Dios hueco’ [empty God]
to a more agnostic acceptance of emptiness and a moment where ‘todo está
presente’ [everything is present]. His early writing was uncomfortable with
states of vacancy but he now appears resigned:
Nada fue ayer, nada mañana,
todo es presente, todo está presente,
y cae no sabemos en qué pozos,
ni si detrás de ese sinfín
aguarda Dios, o el Diablo,
o simplemente Nadie.
(LBP1, 108)
[Yesterday was nothing, tomorrow nothing,
everything is present, everything is being present,
and falls in we know not what wells,
nor if behind this endlessness
God or the Devil waits for us,
or simply No-one.]
He concludes with a move whi, anticipating his later poems, does not
aempt to resolve the feelings of entrapment, exclusion and vacancy that he
has experienced, but broadens the perspective to observe himself in the act
of writing about these experiences. e reflexive turn of ‘Conversación en
un bar’ is extended as the urban scene and aendant theme of history are
le behind:
Huimos a la luz que no nos miente
y en un papel cualquiera
escribimos palabras sin respuesta.
Y enrojecen a veces
las líneas azules, y nos duelen.
(LBP1, 108)
[We flee to the light that does not lie to us
and in whatever role
we write words without reply.
And sometimes the blue lines
turn red, and hurt us.]
‘La sombra’ draws directly on the liturgical element of The Hollow Men, and
some of its measured syntactic construction might recall parts I and V of
Ash-Wednesday. is movement from exclamation to litany implies not so
mu a resolution of difficult experience as a desire to ritualize it and to find
a form in whi it can be contemplated. A moment in whi ‘todo está
presente’ suggests a meditative state, whi provides an alternative to Paz’s
more common experience in the United States: ‘Es un desierto circular el
mundo, / el cielo está cerrado y el infierno vacío’ [e world is a circular
desert, / Heaven is closed and Hell is empty] (LBP1, 123). Paz’s Eliotic poems
of this period still largely depend for their images and formal experiment on
The Hollow Men and The Waste Land, whi he had first read nearly fieen
years earlier. e moment of ‘La sombra’ in whi ‘todo está presente’,
however, calls to mind ‘all time is eternally present’ in Burnt Norton (CPP,
171). ‘La sombra’ was first published in El Hijo Pródigo on 31 October 1945.
At some time between August and December of 1945, while he was living in
New York, Paz came across Eliot’s final poetic work.
Four artets
Paz recalled his discovery of Four Quartets in his acceptance spee for the
T. S. Eliot Prize in 1988:
Cuando aparecieron los Four Quartets yo vivía en Nueva York; leí en algún diario una nota
bibliográfica sobre el nuevo libro de Eliot y me precipité a la librería más cercana para comprar un
ejemplar. Todavía lo guardo. Leí el libro con entusiasmo e incluso con fervor. La impresión que me
causó —tenía yo entonces treinta años— fue muy distinta a la que me había producido The Waste
Land. Creo que Four Quartets es uno de los grandes poemas de este siglo y su repetida lectura me
ha enriquecido poética y espiritualmente; sin embargo, no ha tenido —no podía tenerla— la
influencia que tuvo The Waste Land en mi formación poética.40
(OC2, 290–91)
[When Four Quartets appeared I was living in New York; I read a notice on Eliot’s new book in a
newspaper and I rushed to the nearest bookshop to buy a copy. I still have it. I read the book with
enthusiasm, even fervour. e impression it made on me — I was thirty years old at the time —
was very different from that of The Waste Land. I think that Four Quartets is one of the great
poems of this century and its repeated reading has enried me poetically and spiritually;
however, it hasn’t had — it couldn’t have — the same influence as The Waste Land on my poetic
development.]
Paz had read Eliot’s earlier major poems in translation, oen a number of
years aer their first publication in English. Now he was reading Four
Quartets ‘con fervor’ as it appeared in American bookshops.
41 One senses
bemusement, and dis appointment, in a response that was ‘distinta a la que
me había producido The Waste Land’. It is as if he didn’t know what to
make of this new poem. e subsequent assertion, that ‘Four Quartets es uno
de los grandes poemas de este siglo’, sounds a lile hollow, even if his
reference to ‘repetida lectura’ suggests that he persisted with it.
Paz would not have come to Four Quartets without any forewarning. El
Hijo Pródigo published a substantial essay on Eliot’s poem by Rodolfo Usigli,
who had provided the translation of ‘e Love Song of J. Alfred Prufro’
for the Taller collection. As a dramatist, Usigli was particularly interested in
Eliot’s use of colloquial language, whi also preoccupied Paz aer the
publication of ‘La música de la poesía’.42 Usigli refers to the ‘modalidades
dialogísticas’ [dialogistic modalities] of Eliot’s earlier poems, with whi Paz
himself was experimenting.43 However, he concludes that the Quartets have
moved on from this stage, detecting ‘el mismo poeta, llegado al fin a su
monólogo’.44 One can imagine an ambivalent reaction from Paz to this
conclusion: on the one hand, it takes Four Quartets away from the dialogic
forms, inspired by The Waste Land and ‘e Music of Poetry’, that Paz was
experimenting with; on the other, it confirms the tendency that this
experiment had taken abeed by Luis Cernuda, away from dialogue and
towards solitary meditation. Four Quartets may even have helped to
encourage this development, whi runs counter to Paz’s later use of the
term simultaneísmo to explain the poems of this period.45
Paz would also have baulked at a particular aspect of the monólogo that
Usigli identified in Four Quartets. In interview, he referred to the final stage
of Eliot’s career, in whi ‘se vuelve hacia anglicismo en religión’ [he turns
toward Anglicanism in religion], as ‘el que menos me interesa’ [the one that
interests me least].46 Usigli had himself praised the ‘ardor religioso’
[religious ardour] of López Velarde and Eliot, but then clarified:
La poesía es un asunto que está entre el poeta, árbol del hombre, y Dios, raíz del hombre. No hago
propaganda católica aun cuando Eliot la haya heo anglicana. No digo Dios en un sentido
dogmático o hagiográfico, ni, menos aún, en un sentido de origen y de fin. De Dios y del verbo,
que fue su primera forma.47
[Poetry is a maer between the poet, tree of man, and God, root of man. I am not making Catholic
propaganda even though Eliot may have done for the Anglican Chur. I do not mean God in the
dogmatic or hagiographic sense, nor, even less, in the sense of origin and end. Of God and the
word, whi was his first form.]
Usigli presents a non-dogmatic God who moves into the orbit of the
‘ateísmo religioso’ that Paz shared with Cernuda; and, indeed, his reference
to ‘raíz del hombre’ eoes Paz’s own pseudo-religious rhetoric. Paz would
later modify Usigli’s concept of monólogo to secularize further the theme of
Four Quartets when he described:
El poema extenso concebido no como un monólogo sino como una estructura musical, a la manera
de los Cuartetos de Eliot, compuesta por variaciones de un tema único: la conciencia solitaria
frente a la nada.48
[e long poem conceived not as a monologue but as a musical structure in the manner of Eliot’s
Four Quartets, composed of variations on a single theme: the solitary consciousness in front of the
nothing.]
Paz is writing here in 1983, but it is a reading that makes sense in the
context of poems at the time whi addressed a ‘Dios hueco’ [empty God].
As a response to the Eliot who dealt explicitly with Christian themes, Paz’s
reading first appears in his programme notes for a performance of Murder in
the Cathedral that he organized with Poesía en Voz Alta in Mexico City in
1957:49
In this play […] the true drama — as noted by Beet in one of the grandest moments of the piece
— is not so mu that of the martyr in front of his executioners, as that of the conscience alone
with itself. e most powerful temptation is not that of pleasure, power, or glory, but the
fascination that our own consciences exercise over us, the phantom image of our greedy ego. Or as
evedo says:
The abyss of waters
Where I fell in love with myself
Fascination with nothingness. Excessive pride is nihilism. omas knows that only he who forgets
about himself can be saved, he who surrenders himself and transcends himself so that he can be
transformed. From this point of view, Eliot’s play (even though it has the external form of a
tragedy) is a modern auto sacramental. at is: a play whose only aracter is the conscience with
no other intermediaries than the void and grace.50
Paz’s resort to the evedo who had appeared in ‘Poesía de soledad y poesía
de comunión’ suggests that both Four Quartets and Murder in the Cathedral
were assimilated to a secular preoccupation with the void that pre-dates
them, and whi can be traced ba to his earliest reading of Heidegger and
the Contemporáneos.51 A Heideggerian nada, carefully distinguished from
death, appears in the translation of Eliot’s play by Jorge Hernández Campos,
whi Paz himself had revised:52
aquí sólo está
la cara blanca y lisa de la Muerte, silenciosa sierva de Dios,
y tras la cara de la muerte el Juicio,
y tras el juicio la Nada, más hórrida que las activas formas del infierno;
el vacío, la ausencia, separación de Dios;
el horror del viaje sin esfuerzo a la tierra vacía
que no es tierra sino sólo vaciedad, ausencia, la Nada […]
no lo que llamamos muerte, sino lo que más allá de la muerte no es muerte
es lo que tememos, lo que tememos.53
[only is here
e white flat face of Death, God’s silent servant,
And behind the face of Death the Judgement
And behind the Judgement the Void, more horrid than active shapes of hell;
Emptiness, absence, separation from God;
e horror of the effortless journey, to the empty land
Whi is no land, only emptiness, absence, the Void […]
Not what we call death, but what beyond death is not death,
We fear, we fear.]
(CPP, 272–73)
e sense of Paz’s unspecifiable presence in this passage is tantalizing. e
‘Nada’, whi modifies as it translates Eliot’s ‘Void’, certainly reads as
Pazian, although it would have been the natural oice in Spanish for a
metaphysical rather than a literal emptiness (vacío or hueco). As with Paz’s
earliest poems, and in spite of the Christian theme, Eliot presents an image
of the isolated consciousness bounded by nothing: ‘Emptiness, absence,
separation from God.’
Usigli, in fact, suggested a direct link ba to these themes by claiming
that Eliot had influenced the two major Mexican exponents of a poetry of
absences: Xavier Villaurrutia and José Gorostiza, in particular the Gorostiza
of Muerte sin fin [Death Without End] (1939).54 Anthony Stanton notes the
influence of The Waste Land in the use of song and the ‘sardonic
intervention of colloquialism’ at the end of Muerte sin fin: ‘¡Anda, putilla del
rubor helado, / anda, vámonos al diablo!’ [Come on, trollop of the frozen
blush, / come on, to the devil with us!].55 Yet, on the whole, Gorostiza’s
poem is closer to the meditative manner of Four Quartets than to the
dramatic vignees of The Waste Land. In the apter that Mordecai Rubín
dedicates to ‘Gorostiza y los temas de T. S. Eliot’, he quotes repeatedly from
Eliot’s later poem, even though he accepts that it appeared too late to be an
actual influence.56 Muerte sin fin is then a precursor of Four Quartets, one
that, like Paz’s ‘conciencia solitaria frente a la nada’ [solitary consciousness
in front of the nothing], addresses an absent God:
que sigues presente
como una estrella mentida
por su sola luz, por una
luz sin estrella, vacía,
que llega al mundo escondiendo
su catástrofe infinita.57
[you remain present
like a star feigned
by its lone light, by a
light without star, empty,
whi reaes the world hiding
its infinite catastrophe.]
Rubín detects a similar method in the work of both poets: ‘the two proceed
by the method of the ancient Neoplatonists who sought truth by the
successive negation of the false’.58 Four Quartets thus confirms the
eliminatory, ‘obra escéptica y corrosiva’ [sceptical and corrosive work] of
the Contemporáneos whi first brought Eliot to Paz.
In Four Quartets, this negative way is represented by San Juan de la Cruz:
lines 114–21 of Burnt Norton summarize his ‘active purgation’; Part iii of
East Coker —‘O dark, dark, dark. ey all go into the dark’ — concludes with
an adaptation from the Subida del Monte Carmelo [Ascent of Mount Carmel]
(I. xiii); and Ronald Suard describes the Spanish mystic as one of ‘the
presiding spirits’ of Little Gidding.59 In ‘Poesía de soledad y poesía de
comunión’, Paz contrasted San Juan as a poet of communion with Francisco
de evedo as a representative of excision from God’s grace, staring into
‘las aguas del abismo’ [the waters of the abyss]. Yet now Eliot’s San Juan
must occupy the role that was aributed to evedo.60 is shuffling of
personnel in the Pazian seme is not as contrary as it might at first appear.
Both Paz’s evedo and Eliot’s San Juan represent a form of via negativa,
an inherently open concept since it describes the way towards God rather
than arrival. Whether it leads ultimately to God or to an absence, as in
Muerte sin fin, is not its concern since it is a ‘way of dispossession’ (CPP,
181).
In an essay of 1950, ‘Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’, Paz demonstrates the
thinking that is necessary to secularize the San Juan of Four Quartets. Paz
describes Sor Juana’s Primero sueño [First Dream], itself a model for Muerte
sin fin, in similar terms to his later reading of Four Quartets as a ‘noe
construida a pulso sobre el vacío’ [night constructed unaided above the
emptiness] (OC4, 154). ‘Primero sueño no es el poema del conocimiento, sino
del acto de conocer’ [Primero sueño isn’t the poem of knowledge, but of the
act of knowing] (OC4, 155), he explains. It is not the end of understanding
that maers but the passage towards it. Just as Heidegger had suggested that
‘El preguntar metafísico’ [Metaphysical enquiry] was a question that ‘Nos
preguntamos, aquí y ahora, para nosotros’ [We are questioning, here and
now, for ourselves], so Paz turns the religious question into an
epistemological one.61
Paz does not only negotiate Eliot’s conversion to the Anglican Chur in
his reading of Four Quartets, however, but his own commitment to the le
and to history as poetic theme. He had grown to appreciate that the ends of
the le did not justify the means — the Hitler–Stalin pact and the
assassination of Trotsky could not be excused in the name of a historical
progress towards revolution. e history of the le was denied its teleology,
its end point. By rescuing an epistemological poetry from a religious work
that was similarly denied its God, Paz was articulating the shi that his own
poems of the United States had taken once he severed connections with the
le. Without the promise of revolution, his poems turn on his own
consciousness. In Sor Juana’s Primero sueño, ‘el cielo se cierra’ [heaven is
closed], but she responds with a reflexive awareness of her own mental
activity: ‘Y así, Sor Juana trasmuta sus fatalidades históricas y personales
[…] Una vez más la poesía se alimenta de historia y biografía. Una vez más,
las trasciende’ [And so Sor Juana transmutes her historical and personal fate
[…] Once more poetry is fed by history and biography. Once more, it
transcends them] (OC4, 155).
In ‘Four Quartets: A Commentary’, published in a collection that Paz
refers to in El arco y la lira (Arco1, 76; OC1, 97), Helen Gardner argues that
‘Burnt Norton does not suggest any dogma’, taking as its source ‘Pascal’s
favourite text: “Vere tu es Deus absconditus” ’. Its central theme is ‘e point
of intersection of the timeless / With time’ (CPP, 190–91):
e subject of the poem is an experience for whi theology provides an explanation and on
whi religion builds a discipline, the immediate apprehension of a timeless reality, felt in time
and remembered in time, the sudden revelation of ‘the one end, whi is always present’.62
I suggested earlier that the ‘todo está presente’ of ‘La sombra’ may well have
been prompted by the Four Quartets. Manuel Ulacia compares Burnt Norton
to Paz’s ‘Cuarto de hotel’:
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
(CPP, 171)
While in Paz:
Arde el tiempo fantasma:
arde el ayer, el hoy se quema y el mañana.
Todo lo que soñé dura un minuto
y es un minuto todo lo vivido.
(LBP1, 117)
[e ghostly time burns:
yesterday burns, today burns and tomorrow.
Everything that I dreamed lasts a minute
and everything lived is a minute.]
Ulacia concludes that ‘the two poets have used the same conception of time.
Paz has found it in Eliot and Proust; Eliot and Proust in Bergson.’63 It is
debatable whether Bergson is as direct an influence on Four Quartets as he is
on Eliot’s earlier poems. e claim that Paz ‘found’ this conception of time
in Eliot must also be treated with caution. Time appears as an explicit theme
in Paz’s poems before he reads Four Quartets.64 In fact, in his discussion of
Primer día (poems of 1935–36), Ulacia aributes the theme of time,
‘understood as the relation of the eternity of the instant to the fleetingness of
the moment’, to Paz’s reading of evedo.65 Nevertheless, the fact that Paz
was already preoccupied with this theme must have alerted him to its
appearance in Eliot’s poem. His own ‘sitio de la música tensa’ [place of tense
music] finds confirmation in Eliot’s analogy of music and Chinese jar:66
Only by the form, the paern,
Can words or music rea
e stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
(CPP, 175)
Paz’s interest in Eliot’s use of time as theme was also confirmed by other
Hispanic poets. Fernando Ortiz suggests that Eliot’s ‘moment in and out of
time’ influenced Cernuda’s notion of ‘acorde’ whi appeared in Ocnos (a
volume that Paz reviewed in 1943);67 and Mordecai Rubín offers Eliot’s ‘the
intense moment’ and Gorostiza’s ‘un minuto, quizá, que se enardece’ [a
minute, perhaps, that burns] (possibly the source for ‘el hoy se quema’
[today burns] of ‘Cuarto de hotel’) among a number of examples of time in
the two poets’ works.68
Given Paz’s own interest in this theme even before he read Four Quartets,
and his impatience to clear up the tesis, or belief, aspect of his poems, it is
no surprise that time appears repeatedly in his subsequent poetry and prose.
Eliot’s meditation is also linked to a consistent aspect of Paz’s Eliot reading,
history: ‘A moment not out of time, but in time, in what we call history.’69
Yet it is a departure from the concrete manifestations of history — drunken
soldiers and commuters — that began to appear in Paz’s poems of this
period. As I have argued, these poems tend to retreat from the detail of
contemporary urban life to a more solitary meditation of the poet as poet.
Four Quartets would appeal precisely because it suggested a transposition of
the material business of history to a more conceptual plane. More than the
theme of history itself, Eliot’s inclusion of conscious theorizing in
conjunction with lyrical passages provides a model that suits Paz’s own
temperament. It permits an interpenetration of two types of thinking and
writing that are habitually confined to either poetry or prose. In his early
writing, Paz resisted the artepurista version of the modernist aesthetic of
presentation, whi is hostile to interpretive comment within the poem. In
Four Quartets, Paz found an example, sanctioned by the author who had
introduced him to modern poetry, of a work that included su comment.
Although Paz described Eliot’s later poem in 1973 as ‘un regreso hacia una
poesía anterior a The Waste Land’ [a return to a poetry prior to The Waste
Land], it suited his own ambivalence about the version of the vanguardia
that the Contemporáneos represented.70
‘Himno entre ruinas’
If Four Quartets retreats from the poetic experiment of The Waste Land, it is
a development that did not serve Paz so badly. His aempts in the United
States to recreate the dramatic exanges of Eliot’s earlier poem were
limited. Yet he persisted with a version of simultaneísmo, making it serve
the reflexive tendency of his own poems. In ‘Himno entre ruinas’ [Hymn
among Ruins] the contrasting voices of soldier and poet from ‘Conversación
en un bar’ have been replaced by a debate between competing poetic
influences: Eliot, Valéry and Jorge Guillén. at debate provides an
opportunity to confront the Eliot who expresses a state of impasse in the
poems of Asueto and Puerta condenada, whether as an internal critical
consciousness or as a response to an external history. Ramón Xirau describes
‘Himno entre ruinas’ as a watershed: ‘a first stage ends and the one of his
great poems begins’.71 e poem was composed in 1948, aer Paz had been
transferred to the Mexican embassy in Paris, but it provides a form of
conclusion to his output in the United States, closing the final section of
Libertad bajo palabra (1949) whi gathers the poems that I have discussed
in this apter.
Like the poems of Asueto and, beyond them, Paz’s earliest work inspired
by Carlos Pellicer and Saint-John Perse, ‘Himno entre ruinas’ opens with
praise of the external world:
Coronado de sí el día extiende sus plumas
¡Alto grito amarillo,
caliente surtidor en el centro de un cielo
imparcial y benéfico!
(LBP1, 126)
[Crowned with itself the day stretes its plumage.
High yellow shout,
hot spring in the centre of a sky
impartial and beneficent!]
Yet this praise is paradoxical. e opening line plays a game in whi the
qualifier ‘coronado’ is presented before the object that it qualifies; indeed, it
elaborates tautologically — ‘coronado de sí’ — before the reader can refer the
meaning to ‘el día’. Paz’s syntax dramatizes a situation in whi linguistic
meaning is appended to, rather than found in, the world; yet this appended
meaning claims that the world is self-sufficient — ‘coronado de sí el día…’.
e statement’s import denies its status as language. Ramón Xirau observes
that the explicit claim results from a situation in whi, ‘isolated and naked,
removed from concrete immediacy, the imagination invents a universe of
perfect identities.’72 Poet and world are discrete entities: ‘Equal to himself
the poet sees a world that is also equal to itself.’73 Xirau reads the
epistemology of the passage convincingly, yet he fails to account for the role
of the poet’s desire in this scenario. If the poet were really self-sufficient,
surely he would not need to find unity in the world, or to praise it. He seems
to need this external unity in order himself to feel whole. e syntactic
game of the opening line does not so mu describe wholeness as dramatize
the act of desiring it, a desire that bespeaks division and dependence on a
world beyond the self whi, precisely because of the poet’s own interest in
the transaction, fails to materialize as an objective reality. e paradoxical
nature of his aempt is manifested instead as a restless shi of vehicle and
aention:
Las apariencias son hermosas en esta su verdad momentánea.
El mar trepa la costa,
se afianza entre las peñas, araña deslumbrante;
la herida cárdena del monte resplandece;
un puñado de cabras es un rebaño de piedras;
el sol pone su huevo de oro y se derrama sobre el mar.
Todo es dios.
¡Estatua rota,
columnas comidas por la luz,
ruinas vivas en un mundo de muertos en vida!
(LBP1, 126)
[Appearances are beautiful in this their momentary truth.
e sea clambers onto the coast,
clings among the ros, dazzling spider;
the purple wound of the mountain glistens;
a handful of goats is a flo of stones;
the sun places its golden egg and spills onto the sea.
Everything is god.
Broken statue,
columns eaten by the light,
living ruins in a world of living dead!]
Rather than illustrating the bald statement of ‘Las apariencias son
hermosas’, the ensuing sequence of metaphorical observations confirms its
inadequacy. Ea observation slides into another, and the passage runs
through a bewildering range of feeling with lile sense of orderly relation:
from the security of ‘se afianza’ to the threat of ‘araña’, pain of ‘herida
cárdena’, deliberation of ‘pone’, and excess of ‘se derrama’. When the
totalizing vision of ‘Todo es dios’ aempts to arrest the descriptive trawl, the
speaker’s aention slides once more to a local observation, and another shi
of emotion, as the dismayed, Eliotic ‘ruinas vivas’ usher a transition from
praise to the lament of the second stanza.
Eliot had provided a critical awareness to e the metaphorical
effusions of Asueto. In ‘Himno’ this influence is accompanied by the Valéry
of Le Cimetière marin [The Cemetery by the Sea], a poem whi enjoyed
wide circulation in the Spanish-speaking world through Jorge Guillén’s
translation of 1929, ‘una obra maestra’ [a master work] according to Paz.74
In ‘Poesía e historia’ Paz praised the poem for its communication with the
outside world:
El cementerio marino nos seduce, precisamente, por la realidad del mundo físico que refleja —la
ola, las barcas, las rocas, los pinos, el insecto pulido por la sequía— frente a la realidad, no menos
real, de la conciencia de la muerte.
(OC3, 90)
[The Cemetery by the Sea seduces us precisely for the reality of the physical world that it reflects
— the wave, the boats, the ros, the pine trees, the insect polished by drought — faced with the no
less real reality of the consciousness of death.]
Valéry observes a similar scene to Paz: ‘El Mediodía justo en él enciende / El
mar’ [In impartial midday / e sea burns]; and the poet can ‘¡Mirar por fin
la calma de los dioses!’ [Look at last on the calm of the gods!].75 e gesture
of standing ba from the scene in ‘Me place este lugar’ [is place pleases
me] (p. 347), accompanied by a slight relaxation of tone, could well have
provided the suggestion for Paz’s own ‘las apariencias son hermosas…’
[appearances are beautiful…]. As in Paz, Valéry’s midday is seemingly self-
sufficient: ‘¡Y qué paz, ah, parece concebirse!’ [And what peace, ah, it seems
to conceive itself!] (p. 343); ‘El Mediodía / En sí mismo se piensa y se
conviene’ [Midday / inks of itself and is suited to itself] (p. 347). Yet the
application of thinking verbs — concebirse and se piensa — to the natural
world implies a human interaction whi upsets that world’s self-sufficiency.
Like Paz, Valéry suggests that an aempt to identify with a completion in
the outside world is suspect, since the aempt is itself a symptom of human
incompletion. Like Paz, he aempts to find a measure outside himself: ‘A
esta pureza subo y me acostumbro’ [To this purity I rise and accustom
myself] (p. 343). Yet he concludes that, rather than adopting the completion
of the world, he detracts from it:
Yo soy en ti la secreta mudanza […]
¡Mi contrición, mis dudas, mis aprietos
Son el defecto de tu gran diamante!
(pp. 347–49)
[I am the secret ange in you […]
My contrition, my doubts, my distress
Are the defect of your great diamond!]
Valéry provides a model for the uncertainty that tugs beneath the will to
praise of ‘Himno entre ruinas’.
As in Paz’s earlier poems, Eliot pis up that critical awareness and
articulates it as an analysis of history:
Cae la noche sobre Teotihuacán.
En lo alto de la pirámide los muchachos fuman marihuana,
suenan guitarras roncas.
¿Qué yerba, qué agua de vida ha de darnos la vida,
dónde desenterrar la palabra,
la proporción que rige al himno y al discurso,
al baile, a la ciudad y a la balanza?
(LBP1, 126–27)
[Night falls on Teotihuacan.
At the top of the pyramid the youths smoke marihuana,
harsh guitars sound.
What herb, what water of life will give us life,
where unearth the word,
the proportion that governs hymn and speech,
the dance, the city and the measuring scales?]
e italics mark a new voice, whose questions recall the ‘Son of man…’
passage of ‘e Burial of the Dead’: ‘What are the roots that clut, what
branes grow…?’ (CPP, 61). is Eliot places the conflict of stanza one in a
specific historical context — the ruins of Teotihuacan whi also allude to
the ruin of post-war Europe.76 e stanza not only contextualizes conflict,
however, but diagnoses it: contemporary civilization las ‘la proporción que
rige al himno y al discurso...’. In El arco y la lira, Paz uses this verb regir to
describe Eliot’s Waste Land: a unified vision is replaced by ‘el automatismo
de la asociación de ideas, que no está regido por ningún ritmo cósmico o
espiritual, sino por el azar’ [the automatism of the association of ideas,
whi is not governed by any cosmic or spiritual rhythm, but by ance]
(Arco1, 77; OC1, 98).
Yet this language of conscious, historical diagnosis seems unwelcome. e
next stanza does not offer a form of proportion, a structure that can order
experience. It looks instead to sensual relation:
Los ojos ven, las manos tocan.
Bastan aquí unas cuantas cosas:
tuna, espinoso planeta coral,
higos encapuados,
uvas con gusto a resurrección,
almejas, virginidades ariscas,
sal, queso, vino, pan solar.
(LBP1, 127)
[Eyes see, hands tou.
A few things are enough here:
prily pear, spiky planet of coral,
hooded figs,
grapes that taste of resurrection,
clams, shy virginities,
salt, eese, wine, the sun’s bread.]
e figurative language is more cautious, as if the effusions of the poem’s
opening had been astened by the intervention of the Eliotic passage: ‘Uvas
con gusto a resurrección’ tactfully suggests a desire for grace without being
too explicit about its possibility. Gusto can be read two ways, both of whi
temper the claims of the image: either it is taste as in a brief sample rather
than a full encounter; or it can be taste as in a sensual apprehension rather
than a spiritual one. e poet’s aention is more steadily fixed on the
material world, and the progression of the passage is more certain as a result
— in the world of the senses a few things are enough, and he lists them.
ere is no equivalent of the jump in stanza one from the waywardly
metaphorical inventory of the landscape to the totalizing generalization of
‘Todo es dios’.
e alternation of ‘Himno’ between stanzas of sensual relation and an
italicized critical consciousness already operated, although less explicitly, in
Paz’s earliest poems whi played off Pellicer and Saint-John Perse against
Eliot and Villaurrutia. Paz praised Pellicer in terms that eo his own poem:
‘Tuvo siempre los sentidos despiertos: ver, oír, tocar, oler, gustar’ [His senses
were always awake: to see, hear, tou, smell, taste].77 In ‘El Más allá de
Jorge Guillén’, Paz reads the translator of El cementerio marino as a bridge
between the two separate aitudes, the ‘classical’ and the sensual:
Por sus inclinaciones clásicas Guillén hace pensar en un Eliot mediterráneo […] Hay algo […] que
lo separa radicalmente de Eliot: en su obra apenas si hay huellas de cristianismo. Su tema es
sensual e intelectual: el mundo tocado por los sentidos y la mente. Poesía profundamente
mediterránea.78
(OC3, 200)
[His classical inclinations make one think of a Mediterranean Eliot […] ere is something […]
whi separates him radically from Eliot: in his work there is hardly any trace of Christianity. His
theme is sensual and intellectual: the world toued by the senses and the mind. Profoundly
Mediterranean poetry.]
Paz actually makes lile of the ‘inclinaciones clásicas’ of Guillén, who is
nudged in ‘Himno entre ruinas’ to provide a clear alternative to Eliot and
Valéry. His praise of the senses sidesteps the call of the Eliotic stanza for ‘la
proporción que rige’ [the proportion that governs]: structures of belief are
rejected in favour of a direct relationship. Paz sides with the Guillén who
had himself departed from an early enthusiasm for Valéry. Guillén rejected
the self-consciousness of the Fren poet in his Cántico of 1926, according to
Robert Havard, in whi ‘reflexivity is tempered by an uncomplicated
vitality whi never loses tou with the real world’.79
Yet the contrastive form of ‘Himno entre ruinas’ works against a
realization of ‘uncom plicated vitality’. e poem’s italicized stanzas mediate
the speaker’s innocent, sensual relation to the world through an explicit
meditation on the possibilities of different poetic influences. ey conclude
in conscious reflection:
Mis pensamientos se bifurcan, serpean, se enredan,
recomienzan,
y al fin se inmovilizan, ríos que no desembocan,
delta de sangre bajo un sol sin crepúsculo.
(LBP1, 128)
[My thoughts split, meander, grow entangled,
start again,
and in the end they are still, rivers with no outlet,
delta of blood beneath a sun without evening.]
As I have argued, Paz admired Eliot as a poet who addressed questions of
meaning and belief. e danger of this emphasis is that beliefs can trample
the local epiphanies and felicities of language on whi a hymn depends.
Paz mused of Pellicer that ‘tal vez pensó poco’ [perhaps he didn’t think
mu], then added, ‘¿é importa?’ [So what?] (OC3, 106). In spite of the
hostility that ‘Himno’ displays towards a sear for ‘la proporción que
rige…’, Paz remained aracted to conceptual, or philosophical, explanations
of problems whi were in part affective. e conflict continues throughout
his career and troubles the poem’s conclusion.
In a return of the reflexive consciousness, the final stanza resolves sensual
contact with the world into metaphor, and then talks about that resolution:
¡Día, redondo día,
luminosa naranja de veinticuatro gajos,
todos atravesados por una misma y amarilla dulzura!
La inteligencia al fin encarna en formas,
se reconcilian las dos mitades enemigas
y la conciencia-espejo se licúa,
vuelve a ser fuente, manantial de fábulas:
Hombre, árbol de imágenes,
palabras que son flores que son frutos que son actos.
(LBP1, 129)
[Day, round day,
glowing orange of twenty-four segments,
all suffused with the same yellow sweetness!
e intelligence is at last embodied in forms,
the two enemy halves are reconciled,
and the consciousness-mirror melts,
becomes a fountain again, source of fables:
Man, tree of images,
words that are flowers that are fruits that are acts.]
e passage does not exactly make contact with the day that the poet had
been cast out from in the opening stanza; it manages instead to create an
image that is alive to the senses. e round day is an orange, an orange one
can open and whose segments one can count and taste — they are sweet.80
Paz then takes a step ba from this process in order to describe it: ‘La
inteligencia al fin encarna en formas […] y la conciencia espejo se licúa’. e
shi of perspective is dramatic, and sets a precedent for mu of Paz’s later
poetry, whi frequently observes the psyological processes of its own
composition. Yet there is a danger of loss as well as gain. e reader is told
that the divided halves of consciousness are reconciled, but this resolution
occurs off-stage; it is asserted rather than demonstrated by the poem’s
words. John M. Fein describes this section as ‘one of the most beautiful
stanzas of twentieth-century Spanish poetry’, but for Jason Wilson the final
line is ‘programmatic’.81 Paz has made a new creed of his sensual answer to
an Eliotic sear for belief.
Paz described ‘Himno entre ruinas’ as his ‘primera y tímida tentativa’
[first and timid aempt] at the form of simultaneísmo, and Julio Ortega sees
it as a new development in Paz’s work: ‘the text now equals consciousness:
in this analogy poetic faith and critical irony are the new internal tension of
the poetic discourse’.82 As I have demonstrated, however, Paz had already
experimented with contrasting voices in the United States, and the debate
between ‘poetic faith’ and ‘critical irony’ is present in his earliest poems.
Even the shi from the midday sun of the first stanza to the crepuscular
world of Teotihuacan recalls the earlier contrast of a sunny Pellicer and a
nocturnal Villaurrutia. e form responded to expressive needs that
preceded it, and Paz confided in interview that his simultaneísmo was
developed ‘de un modo intuitivo’ [in an intuitive way].83 Since the form did
not arise from a conscious project, it came to answer a number of different
purposes. Paz oen talks of simultaneísmo as a way of bringing the past and
present together; but the ruins and the mythical figure of Polyphemus,
whi allude to history in ‘Himno’, could easily have appeared in a more
straightforwardly descriptive poem that esewed the contrastive form of
Paz’s work. More commonly Paz uses the form, as here, to play off assertion,
or poetic faith, against critical consciousness, and to make the negotiation of
influence an explicit part of the poem’s function. Anthony Stanton notes this
‘metapoetic consciousness’ as early as ‘Nocturno de la ciudad abandonada’
(1931).84 Yet the metapoetic consciousness is not purely self-referential. In
‘Himno entre ruinas’ it allows Paz to test out the worth of a utopian impulse
whi is but one side of his leist call for a poetry of history. He has clearly
become impatient of the disaffection that Eliot expresses. ‘Himno’ then
provides a form in whi Paz can summon Eliot to perform a literary
exorcism. Yet this Eliot was in part a projection of Paz’s own self, of his own
doubts about the capacity of poetry to realize a utopian project. Eliot was
not so easily cast off, and the poem’s paradoxical conclusion — a
programmatic rejection of literary programme — suggests a conflict that will
mark the next stage of Paz’s career.
Notes to Chapter 6
1. Paz, ‘Los pasos contados’, p. 55.
2. Paz, ‘Genealogía de un libro: Libertad bajo palabra’ (1988), interview with Anthony Stanton, in
OC15, 112.
3. Paz, ‘Los pasos contados’, p. 55.
4. Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1968), p. 106.
5. Paz, ‘Los pasos contados’, p. 55; ‘Genealogía de un libro’, in OC15, 115.
6. Paz, ‘Los pasos contados’, p. 55.
7. Paz, ‘Antonio Maado’, in OC3, 341.
8. Paz, ‘Poesía e historia: Laurel y nosotros’, in OC3, 98.
9. Eliot, ‘La música de la poesía’, El Hijo Pródigo, 1, 1 (15 Apr 1943), 21–30.
10. Santí, El acto de las palabras, p. 95n.
11. Eliot, ‘La música de la poesía’, pp. 23 & 28.
12. In Xavier Villaurrutia en persona y en obra, Paz refers to ‘el famoso ensayo de Eliot sobre “la
música en la poesía” ’ (OC4, 272); he also describes ‘los ritmos del habla diaria o, como decía
Eliot, de “la música de la conversación” ’ in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz o las trampas de la fe
(OC5, 364). Eliot did not actually describe a music of conversation so mu as a music that is
the artistic elaboration of colloquial spee.
13. Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (London: Collins, 1961), pp. 129 & 131.
14. Valéry, ‘Conversación sobre la poesía (fragmentos)’, pp. 5 & 6.
15. Ulacia, El árbol milenario, p. 109.
16. Ulacia, El árbol milenario, p. 108–09.
17. Lentricia, Modernist Quartet, p. 267.
18. Paz, ‘Poesía e historia: Laurel y nosotros’, in OC3, 103.
19. Ulacia, El árbol milenario, p. 112.
20. Ibid., p. 113.
21. Paz, ‘Cómo y por qué escribí El laberinto de la soledad’, in Itinerario (Barcelona: Seix Barral,
1994), p. 24.
22. Paz, Contemporáneos (1977), in OC4, 76–77.
23. Paz, ‘Genealogía de un libro’, in OC15, 113. e term derives from the Fren simultanisme, or
simultanéisme. Its paternity was contested by Guillaume Apollinaire and Henri-Martin
Barzun. For Apollinaire’s side of the debate see ‘Simultanisme-Libreisme’, Les Soirées de
Paris, 15 June 1914; repr. in Œuvres en prose complètes, ed. by Miel Décaudin, 3 vols (Paris:
Gallimard, 1977-93), II, 974–79. Apollinaire was clearly the more able poetic exponent of the
form, as well as the more rigorous theorist, and Paz credits him, along with Blaise Cendrars, as
the ‘iniciadores’ (OC3, 119).
24. Leavis, New Bearings in English Poetry, p. 82; F. O. Mahiessen, The Achievement of T. S. Eliot,
3rd edn (New York: Oxford University Press, 1939), p. 37.
25. ey appeared in Cuadernos americanos 11, 5 (1943) & 17, 5 (1944).
26. Paz, ‘Genealogía de un libro’, in OC15, 113.
27. Federico García Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York (1940), whi recounted his experience of 1929–30,
might seem like a more obvious influence for Paz’s urban poems of the United States.
According to Howard T. Young, Lorca did himself read the Ángel Flores translation of The
Waste Land in New York, and he detects an eo of ‘What the under Said’ (CPP, 74) in the
line from ‘Nueva York (Oficina y denuncia)’, ‘¿é voy a hacer? ¿Ordenar los paisajes?’,
‘Bridges to Romance: Nostalgia in Eliot, Salinas and Lorca’, in The Spanish avant-garde, ed. by
Derek Harris (Manester and New York: Manester University Press, 1999), pp. 136–48 (pp.
143 & 140). Yet Emilio Barón Palma, in T. S. Eliot en España (p. 19), describes Eliot’s influence
on the collection as faint. Lorca’s own influence on the Paz of this period is fainter still.
28. Luis Cernuda, Obra completa, ed. by Derek Harris and Luis Maristany, 3 vols (Madrid: Ediciones
Siruela, 1993–94), II, 827.
29. For an account of Eliot’s influence on Cernuda, see Brian Hughes, Luis Cernuda and the Modern
English Poets (Alicante: Universidad de Alicante, 1987), pp. 159–200.
30. Paz, ‘Juegos de memoria y olvido’ (1985), in OC3, 265.
31. Paz, ‘Con Octavio Paz y España como tema’, p. 34. In his inaugural address to a seminar on T. S.
Eliot in India, where he served with the Mexican diplomatic service from 1962 to 1968, Paz
described Luis Cernuda alongside Pablo Neruda as the two Hispanic poets whose ‘contact with
Eliot’s poetry was fruitful’, T. S. Eliot, ed. by M. M. Bhalla (Bombay: P. C. Manaktala & Sons,
1965), p. 1.
32. Jason Wilson, Octavio Paz (Boston, MA: Twayne, 1986), p. 30.
33. Stanton, Inventores de tradición, p. 230.
34. Ibid., p. 234.
35. Cernuda, Obra completa, I, 367.
36. Stanton, Inventores de tradición, p. 232.
37. López Velarde, Obras, p. 207.
38. Cernuda, Obra completa, II, 646–47.
39. Paz, ‘Luis Cernuda: La palabra edificante’ (1964), in OC3, 255. For examples in Cernuda, see ‘Las
ruinas’ and ‘Apologia pro vita sua’ in Obra completa, I, 325 & 348.
40. is passage did not appear in the original version of the article, whi was published as ‘T. S.
Eliot’ in Vuelta (1988).
41. e first American edition of the poem did in fact become available rather earlier, on 5 May 1943.
42. Eliot claimed in interview that his own experience of ‘writing plays […] made a difference to the
writing of the Four Quartets […] It led to a greater simplification of language and to speaking
in a way whi is more like conversing with your reader’, Donald Hall, ‘T. S. Eliot’, in Writers
at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Second Series (New York: Viking, 1965), pp. 89–110 (pp.
104–05).
43. Rodolfo Usigli, ‘Los cuartetos de T. S. Eliot y la poesía impopular’, El Hijo Pródigo, 2, 8 (15 Nov
1943), 89–94 (p. 88).
44. Ibid., p. 90.
45. I have argued that Cernuda responded more fully to the dramatic aracter of Eliot’s earlier
poems. He did also display enthusiasm for Eliot’s later work: ‘Cuatro Cuartetos (“Four
artets”) es de una trascendencia extraordinaria y es en ella donde Eliot se ha logrado mejor
desde el punto de vista del lenguaje. ¡é lenguaje más rico! ¡é exactitud y qué precisión en
el concepto!’, Obra completa, III, 788.
46. Paz, ‘Cuatro o cinco puntos cardinales’, in OC15, 41.
47. Usigli, ‘Los cuartetos de T. S. Eliot’, p. 94.
48. Paz, ‘Poesía e historia: Laurel y nosotros’, in OC3, 102.
49. ere was widespread Spanish American interest in T. S. Eliot’s plays in this period. Between
1948 and 1960, reviews and translations appeared of The Family Reunion, The Cocktail Party,
The Confidential Clerk, and Murder in the Cathedral, along with Eliot’s essay ‘Poetry and
Drama’. In interview with Esther Seligson, Paz describes the aims of Poesia en Voz Alta in
terms that eo Eliot. eir productions were ‘adaptaciones del teatro clásico español bajo la
forma del Music Hall’, and he explains their aim thus: ‘El idioma llevado a su expresión más
alta vuelve a ser el idioma original, común y comunicable. El idioma en que todos pueden
reconocerse y reconocer a los demás. Esta es, ha sido y será la intención primaria del teatro.
De ahí su función liberadora y unificante’, ‘La hija de Rappaccini: Entrevista con Octavio Paz’,
interview with Esther Seligson, La Cabra, 3 (1 Oct 1978), 9–11 (pp. 10 & 11). In his obituary of
Marie Lloyd (1923), Eliot had similarly described music hall as a collaborative experience: ‘e
working man who went to the music-hall and saw Marie Lloyd and joined in the orus was
himself performing part of the act; he was engaged in that collaboration of the audience with
the artist whi is necessary in all art and most obviously in dramatic art’ (SE, 458).
50. oted in Roni Unger, Poesía en Voz Alta in the theater of Mexico (Columbia: University of
Missouri Press, 1981), pp. 88–89.
51. e readings of poem and play are more than coincidental: Eliot himself described the emergence
of Burnt Norton from ‘lines and fragments that were discarded in the course of the production
of Murder in the Cathedral’, John Lehmann, ‘T. S. Eliot Talks About Himself and the Drive to
Create’, New York Times Book Review, 29 November 1953, pp. 5 & 44 (p. 5).
52. See Unger, Poesía en Voz Alta in the theater of Mexico, p. 83. It was Paz’s only direct involvement
in a translation of Eliot’s work. e edition of Asesinato en la catedral that UNAM published
in 1960 did not anowledge his revisions.
53. Eliot, Asesinato en la catedral, trans. by Jorge Hernández Campos (México: Universidad Nacional
Autónoma de México, 1960), pp. 75–76.
54. Usigli, ‘Los cuartetos de T. S. Eliot y la poesía impopular’, p. 94.
55. Stanton, Inventores de tradición, p. 84; Gorostiza, Poesía completa, p. 149.
56. Mordecai Rubín, Una poética moderna: Muerte sin fin de Gorostiza. Análisis y comentario
(México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1966), p. 196.
57. Gorostiza, Poesía completa, p. 149.
58. Rubín, Una poética moderna, p. 189.
59. Suard, Eliot’s Dark Angel, p. 186. For the translations of San Juan de la Cruz that Eliot used,
see The Composition of Four Quartets, ed. by Helen Gardner (London: Faber and Faber, 1978),
pp. 42, 89 & 107.
60. Ángel Flores, however, had suggested a link between San Juan and states of vacancy in The
Waste Land: ‘Llega un momento cuando San Juan de la Cruz, desorbitado, tartamudea… y
momentos hay en Tierra Baldía cuando Eliot se ve obligado a recurrir a presentimientos
Védicos o a mirar pavorosamente las entrañas blancas del silencio’, Eliot, Tierra baldía, p. 9.
61. Heidegger, ‘¿é es la metafísica?’, p. 86; trans. by Krell, in Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, p.
94.
62. T. S. Eliot: A Study of his Writings by Several Hands, ed. by B. Rajan (London: Dobson, 1947), p.
63.
63. Ulacia, El árbol milenario, pp. 114–15.
64. See, for example, ‘Crepúsculos de la ciudad’, p. 3, and A la orilla del mundo y Primer día, pp. 63
& 57.
65. Ulacia, El árbol milenario, p. 47.
66. Paz, A la orilla del mundo y Primer día, p. 57; OC13, 58.
67. Fernando Ortiz, ‘Eliot en Cernuda’, Vuelta, 124 (Mar 1987), 33–37 (p. 34).
68. Rubín, Una poética moderna, p. 193.
69. ‘Choruses from “e Ro”’ (CPP, 160). Patri O. Dudgeon quoted this source for the Four
Quartets in ‘Los cuartetos de T. S. Eliot’, Sur, 146 (Dec 1946), 7–46 (p. 42).
70. Paz, ‘Cuatro o cinco puntos cardinales’, in OC15, 41.
71. Ramón Xirau, Octavio Paz: El sentido de la palabra (México: Joaquín Mortiz, 1970), p. 44.
72. Xirau, Octavio Paz, p. 45.
73. Ibid., pp. 45–46.
74. Paz, ‘El Más allá de Jorge Guillén’ (1977), in OC3, 200.
75. Paul Valéry, ‘El cementerio marino’, trans. by Jorge Guillén, Revista de Occidente, 7, 72 (Jun
1929), 340–53 (p. 341). Further references to this translation are given aer quotations in the
text.
76. Paz described ‘Himno’ as ‘un poema escrito después de la segunda guerra mundial […] por todas
partes los escombros de las ciudades modernas se superponían a las de la antigüedad’ (OC15,
117). His ‘Nueva York, Londres, Moscú’ (LBP1, 127) in the fourth stanza alludes directly to
‘What the under Said’: ‘Jerusalem Athens Alexandria / Vienna London / Unreal’ (CPP, 73).
77. Paz, ‘Poesía e historia: Laurel y nosotros’, in OC3, 106.
78. ‘Himno entre ruinas’ carries an epigraph from the poem whi Guillén had studied in his PhD,
Luis de Góngora’s Polifemo y Galatea.
79. Havard, Jorge Guillén: Cántico, p. 21.
80. Paz may have found this image in Valéry’s ‘Pequeños textos: Comentarios de grabados’, p. 34:
‘Tarde ésta de la más hermosa estación, tan plena como una naranja cuya madurez se acentúa.’
81. Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz, ed. by Ángel Flores (México: Joaquín Mortiz, 1974), p. 169;
Wilson, Octavio Paz: A Study of his Poetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p.
29.
82. Paz, ‘Poesía e historia: Laurel y nosotros’, in OC3, 119; Julio Ortega, Arte de innovar (México:
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México/Ediciones del Equilibrista, 1994), p. 202.
83. Paz, ‘Genealogía de un libro’, in OC15, 117.
84. Stanton, Las primeras voces, p. 40.
CHAPTER 7
Surrealism
With ‘Himno entre ruinas’, Paz aempts to answer the poems of the United
States that court Eliot’s influence. It is a complex negotiation. e poem
appears to reject the theme of history, whi presses so urgently during this
period, in favour of direct contact with the natural world. Yet Paz not only
rejects a theme that he associated closely with Eliot, but a specifically Eliotic
interpretation of that theme. e sensual delight of Pellicer and Perse pushes
the consciousness aside that calls for ‘la proporción que rige’ [the proportion
that governs] (LBP1, 127) as uncomplicated relation replaces the belief that
would give order to man’s dealings with the world. Paz seems willing at last
to accept a celebratory poetics, whi had resurfaced in the poems of Asueto
only to be denied by an Eliotic consciousness. Yet the conclusion of ‘Himno’
suggests that Paz has not quite le Eliot and the experience of the United
States behind. Its transposition of conflict to the conceptual register of
literary programme replays a move that is familiar from other poems of the
period whi simultaneously evince and evade a pressing sense of personal
crisis. Composed aer Paz’s transfer to the Mexican embassy in Paris of
December 1945, ‘Himno entre ruinas’ responds to a new influence that will
allow him to look afresh at the worlds of Pellicer and Perse, but one that will
also reinforce his conceptualizing habit: Surrealism.
When André Breton visited Mexico in 1938, he expressed his aim in a
special edition of Letras de México that was dedicated to Surrealism to ‘ver,
oír, tocar’ [look, hear, tou].1 Paz did not meet Breton on that visit, but he
would have read Letras de México, whi published work by members of the
Contemporáneos. He had come across a translation of Breton’s L’Amour fou
[Mad Love] in Sur in 1936, whi he described in terms that eo his
discovery of Eliot: ‘abrió las puertas de la poesía moderna’ [it opened the
doors of modern poetry].2 Paz also established friendships with a number of
the Surrealists who sought exile in Mexico during the Second World War. It
was one of this number, Benjamin Péret, who introduced Paz to André
Breton and the meetings at the Café de la Place Blane. A substantial
friendship developed between Paz and Breton, and Paz would later confess
that ‘en muas ocasiones escribo como si sostuviese un diálogo silencioso
con Breton; réplica, respuesta, coincidencia, divergencia, homenaje, todo
junto’ [I oen write as if I were holding a silent dialogue with Breton; retort,
reply, coincidence, divergence and homage all at once].3 Breton became
internalized as a form of conscience, and thus provided the moral guidance
that had previously been taken care of by Paz’s political commitment.
Like Paz, Breton had turned from initial support of the orthodox le in La
Révolution surréaliste and Le Surréalisme au service de la Révolution to a
rejection of socialist realism and an eventual public defiance of the
communists in Du temps que les surréalistes avaient raison (July 1935).4 Yet
the Surrealists preserved the aspirations of a libertarian movement beyond
this split. ey maintained the utopian impulse of the le while casting off
the sophistry that Paz had encountered among Stalin’s apologists in the
1930s. ey could thus accommodate the Pellicerian and Persian sensualism
of ‘Himno entre ruinas’ in a wider political project that remained innocent
of the orthodox le’s distortions. Eliot had always been a troublesome poetic
exemplar of Paz’s political militancy, a situation that Surrealism promised to
clarify: ‘Eliot y Pound reazaban con horror la sociedad moderna, pero
buscaban el remedio en el pasado —en China o en Roma’ [Eliot and Pound
rejected modern society with horror, but they looked for the remedy in the
past — in China or Rome]. While the same horror provoked the Surrealists,
they did not look for ‘la respuesta en un modelo clásico’ [the answer in a
classical model]: ‘Sus arquetipos son la socied ad libertario-comunista o la
sociedad primitiva: Fourier, Marx, Rousseau, Sade’ [eir aretypes are the
libertarian-communist or primitive society: Fourier, Marx, Rousseau, Sade].5
Eliot gains some credit, as he does elsewhere, for his horrified rejection of
modern society. Yet his resort to ‘un modelo clásico’, ‘la proporción que
rige…’ in the words of ‘Himno’, appears to constrain the aretype of ‘la
sociedad libertario-comunista’ whi had aracted Paz from the start of his
career.
e Surrealists allowed Paz to reclaim as a political project what had
always been an emotional disposition in his poems. e celebratory poetics
of Pellicer, Perse, and even Huidobro, were given a new purpose.6 Along
with Pierre Reverdy and Guillaume Apollinaire, Huidobro had edited Nord-
Sud, an early meeting ground for the Surrealists. Apollinaire now provided a
convenient bridge for Paz as he aempted to make a transition from Eliot to
the new influence that he encountered in Paris. Paz describes the Surrealist
injunction to ‘maravillar y maravillarse’ [create and experience wonder] as
‘heredado de Apollinaire’ [inherited from Apollinaire].7 Yet, as I argued in
the previous apter, Paz also insisted on Apollinaire as a forerunner of
Eliot’s simultaneísmo. He protests in Los hijos del limo [The Children of the
Mire] (1974) that ‘nadie ha explorado el [tema] de las semejanzas entre el
collage poético de Pound y Eliot y la estructura “simultaneísta” de “Zone”,
“Le musicien de Saint-Merry” y otros poemas de Apollinaire’ [nobody has
explored the [theme] of the similarities between the poetic collage of Pound
and Eliot and the ‘simultaneist’ structure of ‘Zone’, ‘e Musician of Saint-
Merry’ and other poems by Apollinaire] (OC1, 435).8 e final apter of his
study, ‘El ocaso de la vanguardia’ [e Twilight of the Avant-garde], is in
part an aempt to relate the simultaneísmo of Eliot and Pound to the
Parisian tradition of writers su as Apollinaire and Pierre Reverdy.
Nevertheless, Paz did make a distinction between the uses to whi
Apollinaire and Eliot put this form:
Cendrars y Apollinaire fueron los iniciadores: para ellos el simultaneísmo fue la forma lírica por
excelencia de la poesía de la ciudad. Eliot y Pound transformaron este procedimiento y lo
insertaron en una visión de la historia.9
[Cendrars and Apollinaire were the initiators: for them simultaneism was the lyric form par
excellence of the poetry of the city. Eliot and Pound transformed this procedure and inserted it in a
vision of history.]
Paz contrasts this lyricism with Eliot’s vision of what he describes elsewhere
in the same essay as ‘el rumor confuso y aterrador de la historia humana’
[the confused and terrifying rumble of history] (OC3, 97). In this account,
Eliot and Pound bring an awareness of history to bear on the exaltación
lírica [lyric exaltation] of Apollinaire. But can Paz reverse this process? Can
he, with the aid of the Surrealists, desert the historical and critical
consciousness of Eliot in favour of a new utopian vision?
El laberinto de la soledad
El laberinto de la soledad [The Labyrinth of Solitude] (1950) is a book about
Mexican history, but it is also an aempt to test a Surrealist against an
Eliotic vision of that history. Although Paz cites Eliot’s ‘paern / of timeless
moments’ (CPP, 197) from Little Gidding in the later stages of the book
(OC8, 185), the two influences are most significant in the implicit dialogue
that they conduct through the accounts of the Mexican Colonial Period and
Revolution.
Paz’s use of colloquial language as a register of popular experience,
‘anticipated timidly’ by Samuel Ramos according to Anthony Stanton in the
book’s ief Mexican precursor, El perfil del hombre y la cultura en México
[Profile of Man and Culture in Mexico] (1934), has direct links to Eliot’s ‘e
Music of Poetry’ and Paz’s own poetic experiments of the United States.10
Yet Paz’s discussion, in ‘Los hijos de La Maline’ [e Sons of La
Maline], of ‘un grupo de palabras prohibidas, secretas’ [a group of
prohibited, secret words] (OC8, 93), also suggests a Surrealist unleashing of
forbidden desires. In César Moro’s anthology of Surrealist poetry, published
in Mexico in the late 1930s, Paul Éluard had referred to ‘algunas de las
palabras que, hasta ahora, me estaban misteriosamente prohibidas’ [some of
the words that, up to now, have been mysteriously prohibited for me].11
Within this Surrealist model, the native vigour of the Mexican people has
been suppressed by the inappropriate forms of belief that have been imposed
on them:
La presión de nuestra vitalidad, constreñida en formas que la traicionan, explica el carácter mortal,
agresivo o suicida, de nuestras explosiones. Cuando estallamos, además, […] rozamos el vértice
vibrante de la vida
(OC8, 81)
[e pressure of our vitality, constrained by forms that betray it, explains the mortal, aggressive or
suicidal, aracter of our explosions. When we erupt, moreover, […] we tou the vibrating peak
of life.]
Paz’s critique of formas that betray a native vitalidad continues the
argument of ‘Himno entre ruinas’ against the proportion that governs, and
marks a distance from Eliot’s ‘mythic method’ that would ‘control’ and
‘order’.12 Paz’s critique also represents a rejection of the forms of Marxist
belief that had once aracted him. e value that he now aaes to the
moments when his countrymen estallan, when they break through the
forms that constrain them, reveals a Surrealist allegiance. He praises the
Mexican Revolution precisely because it was a popular explosion that did
without forms of belief, ‘desnuda de doctrinas previas, ajenas o propias’
[naked of prior, foreign or native doctrines] (OC8, 140):
La Revolución es una súbita inmersión de México en su propio ser […] es una búsqueda de
nosotros mismos y un regreso a la madre […] Como las fiestas populares, la Revolución es un
exceso y un gasto, un llegar a los extremos, un estallido de alegría y desamparo […] La Revolución
apenas si tiene ideas. Es un estallido de la realidad: una revuelta y una comunión.
(OC8, 146)
[e Revolution is a sudden immersion of Mexico in its own being […] it is a sear for ourselves
and a return to the mother […] like the popular fiestas, the Revolution is excess and expense, a
reaing of extremes, an eruption of happiness and abandonment […] e Revolution barely has
ideas. It is an eruption of reality: a revolt and a communion.]
Paz’s rhetoric contains Surrealist tropes of rupture and also of descent into
the fluid territory of the unconscious, ‘un estallido’, but also ‘una súbita
inmersión’ and ‘un regreso a la madre’.
His aa on forms of belief does not name Eliot, but a contemporary
essay, ‘El lenguaje de López Velarde’ [e Language of López Velarde]
(1950), indicates the position that Eliot occupied in relation to this rhetoric.
Eliot provides a frame for Paz’s reading of the Mexican poet whose
‘“reducción de la vida sentimental a ecuaciones psicológicas”’ [‘reduction of
the affective life to psyological equations’] (OC4, 168) eoes the ‘objective
correlative’ whi provides a ‘formula’ for a ‘particular emotion’ (SW, 85).
Yet Paz makes a distinction between the two poets’ use of colloquial
language:
El poeta [López Velarde] se sumerge en el habla provinciana —casi a tientas, con la certeza
sonámbula de la doble vista— y extrae de ese fondo maternal expresiones entrañables, que luego
elabora y hace estallar en el aire opaco. Con menos premeditación que Eliot —otro descendiente de
Laforgue—, su lenguaje parte del habla común, esto es, de la conversación
(OC4, 169–70)
[e poet [López Velarde] submerges himself in provincial spee — almost blindly, with the
certainty of the sleepwalker’s double vision — and extracts intimate expressions from that
maternal base, whi he later elaborates, causing them to erupt in the dark air. With less
premeditation than Eliot — another descendant of Laforgue — his language starts from common
spee, that is, from conversation.]
López Velarde acquires the rhetoric that Paz uses to describe the Mexican
Revolution: he submerges himself in a ‘fondo maternal’ and then makes his
language ‘estallar’. Eliot, by contrast, is accused of ‘premeditación’. ‘e
Music of Poetry’ is preoccupied with finding a structure for colloquial
language, placing Eliot on the wrong side of Paz’s Surrealist polemic against
formas: ‘I believe that the properties in whi music concerns the poet most
nearly, are the sense of rhythm and the sense of structure’ (OPP, 38). While
the Surrealists adopt the old libertarian impulse of the le, Eliot represents
calculation and restriction. In ‘El surrealismo’ (1954), a suppressive Eliotic
theory of impersonality acts as foil for Paz’s praise of the Surrealist ‘empresa
poética’ [poetic project], whi ‘no consiste tanto en suprimir la
personalidad como en abrirla y convertirla en el punto de intersección de lo
subjetivo y lo objetivo’ [whi does not consist in suppressing the
personality so mu as opening it and transforming it to the point of
intersection between the subjective and the objective].13
Although Paz praises the Revolution as ‘desnuda de doctrinas previas,
ajenas o propias’ [naked of prior, foreign or native doctrines], he goes on to
describe it as ‘una búsqueda a tientas de la doctrina universal que la
justifique y la inserte en la historia de América y en la del mundo’ [a
stumbling sear for the universal doctrine that would justify it and insert it
in the history of America and the world] (OC8, 140), that is, as a sear for a
form of belief. His persistent araction to forms of belief leads to what
Stanton describes as ‘a surprisingly idealized vision of the Colonial world’.14
When El laberinto first appeared, José Vasconcelos noted approvingly that
Paz ‘shows singular good sense’ in his treatment of this period.15 In spite of
his hostility to organized religion, Paz describes the Catholic Chur of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as ‘una fe viva’ [a living faith] (OC8,
112), and claims that ‘la creación de un orden universal, logro extraordinario
de la Colonia, sí justifica a esa sociedad y la redime de sus limitaciones’ [the
creation of a universal order, extraordinary aievement of the Colony,
justifies that society and redeems its limitations] (OC8, 114). He was clearly
not so comfortable to find himself maintaining this opinion, however, and in
the second edition of 1959 he added a paragraph that pleaded, ‘No pretendo
justificar a la sociedad colonial…’ [I do not claim to justify Colonial
society…] (OC8, 114).16 e version of this apter that appeared in the first
edition had returned immediately to the critique of belief that typifies the
rest of the book: ‘Religión y tradición se nos han ofrecido siempre como
formas muertas, inservibles, que mutilan o asfixian nuestra singularidad’
[Religion and tradition have always been offered to us as dead, useless forms
that mutilate or strangle our singularity] (OC8, 116). Yet even so, the apter
concludes with an ambivalent assessment: ‘Mundo abierto a la participación
y, por lo tanto, orden cultural vivo, sí, pero implacablemente cerrado a toda
expresión personal, a toda aventura’ [World open to participation and,
therefore, a living cultural order, but also implacably closed to personal
expression and all adventure] (OC8, 123). e opposition between open and
closed, the living and the repressive, whi Paz was able to turn against Eliot
in his essay on López Velarde, turns out to be less easily managed.
If Paz is unexpectedly sympathetic towards the Colonial Period in
Mexico, he is equally surprisingly harsh to the liberalism that succeeded it:
‘La Reforma funda a México negando su pasado. Reaza la tradición y
busca justificarse en el futuro’ [e nineteenth-century reform movement
founds Mexico by denying its past. It rejects tradition and looks to justify
itself in the future] (OC8, 130). It is a poor substitute, and he concludes
sternly that ‘la geometría no substituye a los mitos’ [geometry cannot
replace myths] (OC8, 131). Yet in 1988 Paz described his first encounter with
Eliot of 1930, and his own ‘ideas y creencias, las de entonces y las de ahora’
[ideas and beliefs, both of then and of now], in the following terms:
No sentía nostalgia por el orden cristiano medieval ni veía en la vuelta a Roma una vía de
salvación […] Creía en una revolución universal que transformaría a la sociedad y cambiaría al
hombre. Me seducían por igual las geometrías del futuro y los follajes del comienzo de la historia.
(OC2, 293)
[I did not feel nostalgia for the medieval Christian order nor did I see in the return to Rome a
route of salvation […] I believed in a universal revolution that would transform society and
ange man. I was equally seduced by the geometries of the future and the foliage of the
beginning of history.]
El laberinto de la soledad certainly does not prea a return to Rome but it
does display a strong araction towards a particular ‘orden cristiano’ and a
corresponding hostility towards ‘las geometrías del futuro’. Stanton astutely
observes that ‘there is a tension here [in El laberinto], and in all of Paz’s
writings, between two utopias that pull in two different directions: the myth
of an abstract future and the myth of a lost past’.17 e specific
manifestations of this tension in El laberinto suggest that the accusation of
nostalgia that Paz levels at Eliot is a projection of an inner conflict whi he
wishes to sele in favour of the progressive, libertarian side of his thought. It
is certainly doubtful as an assessment of Eliot.
Guillermo Sheridan aributes the passages of El laberinto de la soledad
that aempt to ‘insert the particularity of Mexico into a universal tradition’
to the influence of Jorge Cuesta.18 As I noted in Chapter 4, Cuesta was
familiar with Eliot’s work and with figures he had read su as Julien Benda.
Cuesta’s statements about ‘universal tradition’ and belief as a social
construction bear a close affinity to Eliot’s thought. Paz’s praise of the
Colonial Period as an ‘orden universal’ does sound Cuestan but also eoes
the Eliot of ‘What is a Classic?’ (1944), whi appeared in separate Spanish
translations in Sur in 1947 and then in Mexico in 1949. Eliot aempts to
account for a distinction between ‘the universal classic’ (OPP, 55), translated
by E. L. Revol as ‘lo clásico universal’,19 and a classic that is confined to a
single language, noting in passing ‘the provinciality whi indicates the
disintegration of Christendom, the decay of a common belief and a common
culture’ (OPP, 61).
Eliot’s essay may also have provided evidence for Paz’s accusation of
‘nostalgia por el orden cristiano medieval’ and a ‘vuelta a Roma’. It
concludes with admiration for ‘the universality of Latin’, ‘a paern set in
Rome’ whi comprehends both Virgil and the Christian civilization of
Dante (OPP, 70). Yet it stretes the terms of the debate in El laberinto. Eliot
does not specify a specific belief qualification for the classic, but decrees that
‘the classic must, within its formal limitations, express the maximum
possible of the whole range of feeling whi represents the aracter of the
people who speak that language’ (OPP, 67). Eliot’s inclusion of ‘the range of
feeling’ places a aracteristic emphasis on the emotional expression of the
human subject whi falls outside the range of Paz’s more sematic
opposition between vitality and form.20 Although he compares Eliot’s
‘premeditación’ [premeditation] unfavourably with the ‘expresiones
entrañables’ [intimate expressions] of López Velarde, Paz’s discussion keeps
the experience of the subject at arm’s length. Eliot’s own understanding of
religion was as motivated by a personal awareness of suffering, and original
sin, as it was directed towards an external belief. His preoccupation with the
religious aspect of Dante’s work can thus be read as evidence not only of
nostalgia for the order of the medieval Catholic Chur, but also of an
identification with states of spiritual suffering. When, prior to his
conversion, Eliot praised the ‘order’ of Dante’s work it was the ‘ordered
scale of human emotions’ (SW, 142) whi he admired, maintaining his
focus on experience as well as doctrine. For Eliot, ‘understanding begins in
the sensibility’.21 Paz tends to discuss belief in general terms as an issue in
the abstract rather than relating it to experience, the ‘agony of the spiritual
life’.22 Without this dimension, Paz’s discussion of belief, in El laberinto as
elsewhere, is unable to explore the contradictions that animate it: between
past and future utopias; order and liberation; Eliot and Surrealism.
‘Sueño de Eva’
Paz’s contact with the Paris Surrealists informs mu of the polemical thrust
in El laberinto de la soledad. Yet it is hard for a reader to grasp precisely
where he engages with the movement and where he departs from it. It was
evidently hard, too, for Paz to find clear or consistent expression for an
allegiance that was defined in general terms. Evodio Escalante notes this
generalizing tendency in Paz’s essay of 1954 on the movement: ‘El
surrealismo deviene “actitud espiritual”, “dirección del espíritu humano”,
“método de búsqueda interior”, e incluso, como llega a leerse en su libro
Corriente alterna, “un movimiento de liberación total”’ [Surrealism becomes
a ‘spiritual aitude’, a ‘direction of the human spirit’, a ‘method of inner
exploration’, and even, as one will come to discover in his book Alternating
Current, ‘a movement of total liberation’].
23 For Escalante, this
‘universalizing of Surrealism’ is Paz’s ‘master stroke’.24 Yet Rubén Medina is
sceptical of an approa that ‘does not tale Surrealism as a political and
aesthetic avant-garde, located in time’.25
If Paz is careless of Surrealism’s history, his sear for universal values
also tends to elide the ways that the movement responds to earlier stages of
his own poetic development. Anthony Stanton declares that the
‘unconventional religious element’ of El laberinto de la soledad ‘is obviously
derived from Surrealism’s notorious anthropological and aesthetic interest in
primitive societies as a source of regeneration for the decadent West’.26 Yet
he also notes that Paz had been reading Frazer’s Golden Bough at the time,27
whi provided the ief source for the ‘mythic method’ of The Waste Land.
‘Sueño de Eva’ [e Dream of Eve], composed in the United States then
published in Sur in 1945, indicates the terms on whi Paz’s own use of
myth would make the transition from the earlier to the later influence.28
In interview, Paz noted that critics have detected a Surrealist influence on
‘Sueño de Eva’. ‘Puede ser cierto,’ [ey could be right] he conceded, ‘por la
aparición de imágenes oníricas; sin embargo, lo esencial es el carácter mítico
de esas imágenes, todas ellas en relación con un arquetipo femenino […] La
manera de asociar estas imágenes míticas podría recordar más bien a Eliot’
[because of the appearance of oneiric images; however, what is essential is
the mythic aracter of those images, all in relation to a feminine aretype
[…] e way of associating those mythical images might rather recall
Eliot].29 Eliot’s presence predominates in the poem:
Arrodillada cava las arenas,
cava la piedra con las uñas rotas.
‘¿A que desenterrar del polvo estatuas?
La boca de los muertos está muerta.’
Sobre la alfombra junta las figuras
de su rompecabezas infinito
y siempre falta una, sólo una,
y nadie sabe dónde está, secreta.
En la sala platican las visitas.
El viento gime en el jardín en sombra.
‘Está enterrada al pie del árbol. ¿Quién?
La llave, la palabra, la sortija.’
Pero es muy tarde ya, todo está oscuro,
se maran las visitas y su madre
les dice: buenas noes, buenas noes…30
[On her knees she digs in the sand,
digs at the ro with her broken nails.
‘Why dig up statues from the dust?
The mouth of the dead is dead.’
On the rug she gathers the pieces
of her infinite puzzle
and she is always one short, just one short,
and nobody knows where it is, hidden.
In the room the visitors at.
e wind moans in the garden in shadow.
‘It is buried at the foot of the tree. Who?
The key, the word, the ring.’
But it is very late now, everything is dark,
the visitors leave and her mother
says: good night, good night…]
‘En la sala platican las visitas’ eoes ‘In the room the women come and go /
talking of Mielangelo’ of ‘Prufro’ (CPP, 13), while the ‘buenas noes,
buenas noes’ recalls the Albert and Lil and I dialogue at the end of ‘A
Game of Chess’: ‘Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night,
good night’ (CPP, 66). e abrupt transitions create a sense of unreality
whi derives in Eliot’s earlier poems from a subjective Idealism but whi
leads naturally to Surrealist oneirism. Paz also eoes one of the more
bizarre passages of ‘e Burial of the Dead’: ‘“O keep the Dog far hence,
that’s friend to men, / “Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!”.’ Shorn of the
rhyming couplet, Munguía’s prose translation aieved a maer-of-factness
that accentuates the strangeness of the image: ‘“Ahuyenta de allí al Perro
que es amigo del hombre porque, si no, con sus uñas lo desenterrará de
nuevo”’ (EP, 18). Paz now applies this image to the poem’s protagonist as
‘cava la piedra con las uñas rotas’. Eliot’s dog (like Webster’s wolf) threatens
to dig up a corpse, providing a further example of the highly ambivalent
feelings towards the surfacing of subterranean life that pervade the opening
of The Waste Land. Eliot fears what is buried. Paz’s poem, by contrast,
anticipates a form of release as the outcome of revelation: ‘La llave, la
palabra, la sortija.’
Paz reaes for a ‘liberación total’ [total liberation] but in doing so he
vitiates just that element of Eliot that is most sympathetic to Surrealism: his
sense of the uncanny. Maud Bodkin in 1934 described ‘the re-entrance into
myth and legend aieved through phantasmagoria — the shiing play of
figures, as in dream, delirium, or the half-discerned undercurrents of
consciousness’ as ‘an art form aracteristic of both Eliot’s poetry, and of the
present day’.31 William Skaff goes further and argues for a ‘Surrealist poetic’
in Eliot whi derives from a shared aitude to the unconscious: ‘Both Eliot
and the Surrealists believed that the unconscious is the source of an ultimate
Reality, and both therefore were seeking unconscious experience in their
art.’32 It is doubtful whether Eliot regarded the unconscious as a ‘source of
ultimate Reality’, and at the level of explicit poetics, he was unsympathetic
to the movement, describing it as ‘a method of producing works of art
without imagination’.33 Yet he did value the capacity of poetry to ‘make us
from time to time a lile more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings whi
form the substratum of our being, to whi we rarely penetrate’ (UPUC,
155). His own works are pervaded with a sense of the uncanny whi is, in
part, indebted to nineteenth-century writers su as omas Lovell Beddoes,
Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, who are all cited by David Gascoyne as
examples of a ‘Surrealist element in English literature’.34 When asked in an
interview of 1972, why Surrealism had not had su a strong impact in
English, Paz himself cited this proto-Surrealist tradition:
izá porque los ingleses han tenido siempre su propia y especial versión del surrealismo. Hay
una vena fantástica y humorística, para o pre surrealista, que aparece continuamente en los
grandes autores, de Shakespeare a Diens —para no hablar de Lewis Carroll y de Edward Lear.35
[Perhaps because the English have always had their own special version of Surrealism. ere is a
fantastical and humorous vein, para- or pre-Surrealist, that appears constantly in their great
authors, from Shakespeare to Diens — not to mention Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear.]
Paz finds this sense of what he describes as ‘lo bizarro’ [the bizarre] in Eliot,
and uses his images and abrupt transitions in ‘Sueño de Eva’ to explore an
oneiristic vision. Yet Paz’s dream world is relatively benign and turns on an
image of buried revelation, or release, whi is desired but denied. e
Eliotic image of buried material whi provides Paz’s source elicits more
troublesome feelings. In a brief discussion of Eliot and the proto-Surrealist
Beddoes, Christopher Ris describes what they share not as a liberating
exploration of the unconscious but a ‘sense of so mu of life as a grotesque
and sinister farce’.36
Ronald Suard, in his essay ‘e Horrific Moment’, provides numerous
examples of Eliot’s terror of unreality and the life beyond consciousness: in
The Revenger’s Tragedy, for example, the aracters ‘seem merely to be
spectres projected from the poet’s inner world of nightmare, some horror
beyond words’ (SE, 190).37 Eliot’s distress was particularly acute at the time
he was composing The Waste Land, and in a leer to John inn of 1922 he
confided that he found himself ‘under the continuous strain of trying to
suppress a vague but intensely acute horror and apprehension’ (L1, 750).
Freudian psyoanalysis, whi provided the foundation of mu Surrealist
thought, had ‘not yet analysed’, according to Eliot, ‘the atmosphere of
unknown terror and mystery in whi our life is passed’.38 Paz did himself
go through a profound personal crisis in the United States, but his Eliotic
poems tend to aenuate the experience. ‘Conversación en un bar’ and
‘Seven P.M.’ esew the iefly dramatic aracter of The Waste Land. ey
evade the shape of a specific perception in favour of a more exemplary
significance. e very aspect of Eliot that could most nourish a move to
Surrealism — his acute register of an ‘inner world of nightmare’ — had
already been excluded from Paz’s own poems.
‘Sueño de Eva’ proposes two states of being that are familiar from those
poems: exclusion on the one the one hand, and revelation, or inclusion, on
the other. Still drawn to an Eliot who, from his earliest poems, had provided
an example of the sceptical consciousness, Paz does remain metaphysically
hard-headed. e poem’s protagonist fails to arrive at a moment of
revelation: ‘Al pie del árbol otra vez. No hay nada / y es inútil cavar’ [At the
foot of the tree again. ere is nothing / and it is useless digging] (p. 49). In
the version of the poem that appeared four years later in Libertad bajo
palabra (1949), Paz revised this passage, and drew on ‘e Fire Sermon’ and
the ‘testimony of summer nights’ (CPP, 67) that remained aer the nymphs
had departed, to accentuate the sense of myth lost:
Al pie del árbol otra vez. No hay nada:
latas, botellas rotas, un cuillo,
los restos de un domingo ya oxidado…
(LBP1, 115)
[At the foot of the tree again. ere is nothing:
tins, broken boles, a knife,
the remains of a Sunday now rusty…]
Paz remains faithful to the sceptical awareness of his earliest Eliotic poems,
but he cannot access the level of personal, affective experience that would
give substance to the general theme. It is hard for a reader to grasp what is
really at stake here. Paz alludes to passages from Eliot whi suggest the fate
of lives that extend beyond the poem — Prufro, the women in the pub, the
water nymphs. His own protagonist, however, struggles to move beyond a
merely illustrative status.
is tendency to see human subjects as exemplars of wider debates has
consequences for the theme being illustrated. ‘Sueño de Eva’ establishes a
straightforward oppos ition between release, or revelation, and constriction.
For Suard, by contrast, ‘there is a close connection in Eliot’s poetry
between the rare moments of ecstasy and the recurring moments of
horror’.39 Of the vision that is recounted in ‘Silence’, Eliot declares, ‘You
may say what you will, / At su peace I am terrified’, and in ‘A Prediction
in Regard to ree English Authors’ he praises work that throbs ‘with the
agony of the spiritual life’.40 Without this sense of the relationship between
the two states in Paz’s poem, it is difficult to know how one might
realistically progress from one to the other. If Paz resists the liberating vision
here, his sematicism does leave subsequent poems a prey to facile utopias.
For all its aractive sensualism, ‘Himno entre ruinas’ asks the reader to take
its resolution on trust when it claims that ‘la conciencia-espejo se licúa’ [the
consciousness-mirror melts] (LBP1, 129). It cannot resist the temptation of
programmatic assertion whi effectively bypasses the experience that
would justify it: ‘palabras que son flores que son frutos que son actos’
[words that are flowers that are fruits that are acts] (LBP1, 129). Jason
Wilson argues that criticism of Latin American Surrealism has centred on
‘the manifestoes about poetry being oen more stimulating than the actual
writing (even in Octavio Paz’s case), on the consequent “nominalism” the
belief that words could carry these loaded meanings’.41 is nominalism is
already evident in ‘Sueño de Eva’ and ‘Himno entre ruinas’. By the time of
Paz’s 1954 lecture on Surrealism, the process has reaed a point where he
can praise the sear for ‘un nuevo sagrado extrareligioso, fundado en el
triple eje de la libertad, el amor y la poesía’ [a new extra-religious sacred,
founded on the triple axis of freedom, love and poetry].42 His account of the
movement is rousing, yet it remains vague about the precise status of this
freedom, love and poetry. He would shortly, however, publish a mu more
substantial work of poetic theory, whi engages directly with the
Surrealists and with Eliot.
El arco y la lira
When Juan José Hernández reviewed the first edition of El arco y la lira in
Sur in 1958, he declared himself unable to ‘reduce Paz’s thought to a logical
order’.43 e evasiveness that Hernández identifies is in part the result of an
effort to synthesize the work of a number of different thinkers, among them
Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Oo Rank and André Breton. Yet it is
also testimony to the unresolved debate between Eliot and the Surrealists
over the ‘myth of a lost past’ that had surfaced earlier in El laberinto de la
soledad.
44
Paz proposes at the outset of El arco y la lira [The Bow and the Lyre]
(1956) to ‘interrogar a los testimonios directos de la experiencia poética’
[examine the direct evidence of the poetic experience] (Arco1, 14; OC1, 41),
an approa whi is indebted to the Phenomenology of Husserl.45 Yet he
does not confine himself to a work of philosophical analysis. He soon
embarks on a mythical vision of a past age when ‘se creía que el signo y el
objeto representado eran lo mismo’ [it was believed that the sign and the
object represented were the same] (Arco1, 29; OC1, 57). Unity was followed
by division, however: ‘al cabo de los siglos los hombres advirtieron que entre
las cosas y sus nombres se abría un abismo’ [centuries later men realized
that an abyss was opening between things and names] (Arco1, 29; OC1, 57).
e myth of a fall from grace is recognizable from El laberinto de la
soledad and from ‘Poesía de soledad y poesía de comunión’, an essay for
whi El arco y la lira is now ‘la maduración, el desarrollo y, en algún
punto, la rectificación’ [the maturation, the development and, to a certain
extent, the rectification] (Arco1, 7; OC1, 35). However, Paz transposes the fall
myth of the earlier essays from the realm of belief to that of language. e
poem is thus promoted to the means of healing various forms of division. It
must ‘fundar […] un nuevo sagrado’ [found a new sacred] (Arco1, 243; OC1,
239). ‘Poesía de soledad’ was uncertain about poetry’s capacity to resolve
states of conflict. El arco y la lira continues to employ the earlier essay’s
dialectical habits, embodied in the metaphor of polos [poles]. However,
whereas before those poles represented opposing states (solitude and
communion) both now grant poetry an unambiguously redemptive purpose:
La poesía contemporánea se mueve entre dos polos: por una parte, es una profunda afirmación de
los valores mágicos; por la otra una vocación revolucionaria.
(Arco1, 36; OC1, 63)
[Contemporary poetry moves between two poles: on the one hand, it is a profound affirmation of
magical values; on the other, it is a revolutionary vocation.]
e sacred, the magical and the revolutionary all bear the imprint of the
Surrealist movement, and André Breton wrote to Paz when the book
appeared in Fren in 1965 to express his enthusiasm.46 is influence was
modified by the ontological speculation of Martin Heidegger. As Enrico
Mario Santí argues: ‘Paz maintains the conceptual hieraries of Bretonian
Surrealism but substitutes ontological for psyological revelation: he is not
interested in revealing the unconscious but being.’47 Paz was aracted,
according to Anthony Stanton, by the preoccupation of Heidegger’s later
works with lyric poetry and, in line with the German philosopher’s
description of language in ‘Art and Poetry’ as ‘the house of being’, he
declares that ‘la poesía es entrar en el ser’ [poetry is to enter being] (Arco1,
108; OC1, 126).48
Paz’s earlier Marxist allegiance had tended to subordinate artistic
products to historical process. Surrealism, via Heidegger, now offered a
utopian myth of access through poetry to a ‘condición original’ whi could
answer the horror of the modern world that Paz shared with Eliot. However,
in order to facilitate that myth Paz had to revise his conception of the
relationship between poem and history. He now argues:49
Como toda creación humana, el poema es un producto histórico, hijo de un tiempo y un lugar;
pero también es algo que trasciende lo histórico y se sitúa en un tiempo anterior a toda historia, en
el principio del principio. Antes de la historia, pero no fuera de ella
(Arco1, 183–84; OC1, 191)
[Like all human creation, the poem is a historical product, the ild of a time and a place; but it is
also something that transcends the historical and whi is situated in a time before history, in the
beginning of the beginning. Before history, but not outside it.]
Paz appeals to ‘un tiempo anterior a toda historia’, whi he also describes
as a ‘comienzo absoluto’ [absolute beginning], and as a ‘tiempo total y
autosuficiente’ [complete, self-sufficient time] that can be repeated in ‘el
instante de la comunión poética’ [the instant of poetic communion] (Arco1,
183–84; OC1, 191). It is this mythical status whi is the vehicle of poetry’s
redemptive power.
Paz makes a bold, and largely unsubstantiated, claim for the capacity of
poetry to transcend its moment and gain access to a mythical pre-history.
e claim is sustained in mu of the argument of El arco by an ambiguous
use of the term ritmo [rhythm]. One is accustomed to equate ritmo with
metre, a formal description of the manner in whi language unfolds over
time; yet Paz has greater ambition for it: ‘el ritmo no es medida sino tiempo
original’ [rhythm isn’t measure but original time] (Arco1, 57; OC1, 79). Ritmo
is original time and ‘todo poema, en la medida en que es ritmo, es mito’
[every poem, to the extent that it is rhythm, is myth] (Arco1, 64).50 But if
‘ritmo no es medida’ how does Paz measure that ‘en la medida que es
ritmo’? e question is crucial, since Paz makes the measure of a poem’s
rhythm the qualification for its mythical efficacy. Presumably, he does not
wish to argue that all verse is inherently mythical by virtue of its rhythm.
Or does he?
Versificación rítmica y pensamiento analógico son las dos caras de una misma medalla. Gracias al
ritmo percibimos esta universal correspondencia; mejor dio, esas correspondencias no son sino
manifestaciones del ritmo.
(Arco1, 73; OC1, 94)
[Rhythmical versification and analogical thought are two sides of the same coin. anks to
rhythm we perceive this universal correspondence; or rather, those correspondences are but
manifestations of rhythm.]
Paz’s equation of ‘versificación rítmica’ with ‘pensamiento analógico’
indicates that, in spite of the assertion that ‘el ritmo no es medida’, he does
indeed equate the formal and the mythical properties of rhythm. As Jorge
Aguilar Mora notes, in his critique of Paz’s prose, El arco y la lira
simultaneously ‘employs logical and metaphorical argument’.51 Formal
properties, whi are in themselves neutral, then acquire a strong moral
colouring as they come to embody a mythical significance. A reader could
be forgiven for concluding from the passage cited above that since all verse
employs rhythmical form, it therefore possesses mythical properties whi
are denied prose. Paz has allowed a moralizing dialectical habit of thought —
mythical ‘versificación rítmica’ versus unmythical prose — to lead him into
extravagant assertions about formal properties. In the second edition of the
book, he made some aempt to clear a distinction between formal verso and
analogical ritmo, anging ‘el ritmo español’ [Spanish rhythm] (Arco1, 79) to
‘el verso español’ [Spanish verse] (Arco2, 87; OC1, 105), for example. Yet the
tendency remains to conflate the two concepts.
is conflation of form and myth leads to questionable assertions. A
comparison with a similar discussion in Eliot is instructive. He described the
‘auditory imagination’ as
the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and
feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the most primitive and forgoen, returning to the
origin and bringing something ba, seeking the beginning and the end.
(UPUC, 118–19)
His ‘returning to the origin’ corresponds to Paz’s ‘tiempo original’, yet
Eliot’s claim is less sweeping. It is the ‘feeling for syllable and rhythm’
whi communicates with the unconscious, not the rhythm itself, and the
product of that feeling is tentatively described — ‘bringing something ba’.
Eliot might be accused of vagueness here, but he could also be credited with
a tactful refusal to burden a formal property with a purpose it cannot fulfil.
Paz’s discussion of ritmo occurs in the same section — ‘Verso y prosa’ —
as his discussion of Eliot,52 whi is consequently troubled by the same
loaded treatment of poetic form: ‘La poesía inglesa tiende a ser puro ritmo:
danza, canción, verso blanco. La francesa, discurso, monólogo, “meditación
poética”’ [English poetry tends to be pure rhythm: dance, song, blank verse.
e Fren, spee, monologue, ‘poetic meditation’] (Arco1, 74; OC1, 94). e
qualifier ‘puro’ implies a ritmo that is distinct from the merely formal
definition, and so activates the mythical association that he has established
earlier. Yet this contrast between English and Fren verse would assign
Eliot and the Surrealists to unaccustomed sides of the Pazian contrast that I
observed in El laberinto de la soledad, between critical consciousness and
myth. e Fren Surrealists would now be the conscious poets while Eliot
was granted access to a ‘tiempo original’. Paz tries to sidestep this problem
by making of Eliot an exception. Like Milton, he represents ‘la influencia
latina dentro de la poesía inglesa’ [the Latin influence in English poetry]:
‘Reacciones de signo contrario, períodos durante los cuales el pensamiento,
la ironía, la lengua coloquial o la versificación silábica equilibran la balanza’
[Opposing reactions, periods during whi thought, irony, colloquial
language or syllabic versification restore the balance] (Arco1, 74).53 Eliot can
now represent, as he has done before in Paz’s work, an ironical
consciousness in contrast to the mythical awareness of ritmo. Yet in order to
maintain the simultaneously formal and mythical status of ritmo, Paz must
accuse Eliot, incorrectly, of deserting accentual metre for syllabic
versification. He also asserts that ‘la lengua coloquial’ in English derives
from ‘la influencia latina’. An argumentative habit that assigns a priori
mythical values to formal properties leads to some bizarre claims.
As he proceeds, the already shiing contrast on whi his discussion is
based, between the accentual and the syllabic, the mythical and the
reflective, mutates further. He appears to continue the formal argument
based on the tradition of English verse:
The Waste Land […] ha sido juzgado como un poema revolucionario por buena parte de la crítica
inglesa y extranjera. Pero sólo a la luz de la tradición del verso inglés puede entenderse
cabalmente la significación de este poema.
(Arco1, 74; OC1, 96)
[The Waste Land […] has been judged a revolutionary poem by the large part of English and
foreign criticism. But only in the light of the tradition of English verse can the significance of this
poem be properly understood.]
Yet the appearance of ‘revolucionario’ suggests a further transposition to a
political realm. Paz continues in this vein as he asserts that Eliot’s poem ‘no
es simplemente la descripción del helado mundo moderno, sino la nostalgia
de un orden universal cuyo modelo es el orden cristiano de Roma’ [is not
simply the frozen description of the modern world, but nostalgia for a
universal order whose model is the Christian order of Rome] (Arco1, 74;
OC1, 96). Eliot’s Latinity is not formal aer all, but an adherence to a body
of religious beliefs. One dialectical opposition gives way to another as the
active contrast is no longer formal or mythical but political — between
revolucionario and nostalgia. Paz has anged the personnel of his dialectic
but the emotive paern of his argument is maintained — he still pursues a
contrast between a aracteristic with a broadly positive value and its
negative counterpart.
Eliot is now portrayed as a politically conservative poet in distinction
from the revolutionary status that the Surrealists, for example, would enjoy.
Yet this was not the only role that Eliot had played in Paz’s own career.
‘Nocturno de la ciudad abandonada’ used Eliot as the model for a poem that
looked squarely at a state of separation from redemptive belief, whether past
or present. is Eliot was consistent with a Marxist analysis of modern
history as the destroyer of mu that had made poetry possible in previous
cultures. El arco y la lira aims to revise the Marxist version of history with a
belief in the efficacy of poems and ritmo to incarnate a foundational
mythical time irrespective of the historical circumstance in whi they
occur. Eliot’s apparent denial of the modern poem’s ability to incarnate su
myth could no longer, therefore, receive sanction from Paz:
Lo que hace a Baudelaire un poeta moderno no es tanto la ruptura con el orden cristiano, cuanto
la conciencia de esa ruptura. Modernidad es conciencia. Y conciencia ambigua: negación y
nostalgia. El lenguaje de Eliot recoge esta doble herencia: despojos de palabras, fragmentos de
verdades, el esplendor del Renacimiento inglés aliado a la miseria y aridez de la urbe moderna.
Ritmos rotos, mundo de asfalto y ratas atravesado por relámpagos de belleza caída. En este reino
de hombres huecos, todo carece de sentido. Al ritmo sucede la repetición.54
(Arco1, 75; OC1, 97)
[What makes Baudelaire a modern poet is not so mu his break with Christian order, but his
consciousness of that break. Modernity is consciousness. And ambiguous consciousness: negation
and nostalgia. Eliot’s language gathers this double inheritance: remains of words, fragments of
truths, the splendour of the English renaissance allied to the poverty and aridity of the modern
city. Broken rhythms, world of tarmac and rats, shot through with lightning bolts of fallen beauty.
In this kingdom of hollow men, everything las meaning. Repetition replaces rhythm.]
Eliot now falls behind Paz’s ambition for poetry as myth on two counts.
What before had been a valuable example of a typically modern
consciousness has now become a denial of myth: a world of ‘ritmos rotos’
where ‘todo carece de sentido’. Yet both Eliot and Baudelaire are also
accused of ‘nostalgia’. Paz criticizes Eliot for a consciousness that denies
ritmo and at the same time his sense of Eliot’s Christian belief hardens. His
reading of Eliot may well have been influenced by Cleanth Brooks, whose
description of Eliot’s theme as ‘la rehabilitación de un sistema de creencias
conocido pero desacreditado’ Paz quotes (Arco1, 76; OC1, 97).55 Eliot’s
‘reforma poética es sobre todo una restauración’ [Eliot’s poetic reform is
above all a restoration], Paz concludes (Arco1, 76).56 Eliot seems to be
receiving criticism for both denying and having beliefs.
Paz never distinguishes clearly between the value of his ritmo or
comienzo and the deficiencies of Eliot’s own beliefs. In fact, the rhetoric that
Paz employs to describe Eliot’s nostalgic belief veers towards terms that he
values. He opens a contrast between Pound as a poet of the future and Eliot
as the nostalgic conservative who looks to the past: ‘Eliot desea
efectivamente regresar y reinstalar a Cristo; Pound se sirve del pasado como
otra forma del futuro’ [Eliot effectively wishes to return and to reinstall
Christ; Pound makes use of the past as another form of the future] (Arco1,
76; OC1, 98). Eliot engages in ‘la búsqueda de una pauta que dé sentido a la
historia, fijeza al movimiento’ [the sear for a model that would give
meaning to history, fixity to movement] (Arco1, 77; OC1, 99). However, Paz
then reframes this sear in terms that bring Eliot close to his own project:
‘una tentativa por regresar al centro del que un día fuimos expulsados’ [an
effort to return to the centre from whi we were once expelled]. Eliot is no
longer an apologist for the power of Rome; like Paz and the Surrealists, he
aempts to recover the myth of an original innocence. In the second edition
of El arco, Paz anged this last sentence to ‘una búsqueda de la casa
ancestral’ [a sear for the ancestral home] (Arco2, 80; OC1, 99), thus
clarifying the contrast between a conservative, socially determinate religious
project and a mythical one.57
e contradictions in Paz’s aitude to Eliot arise in part from the
polemical use to whi he put him in his early career. Eliot could represent a
form of sceptical, modern consciousness or an ‘arte de tesis’ [art of thesis],
as the need arose. As Paz adopted the beliefs of the Surrealists, however, he
was confronted with the stark differences between André Breton and Eliot’s
Anglo-Catholicism. Yet he struggles to separate the two. El laberinto de la
soledad demonstrates that although Paz is aaed to a Surrealist-inflected
account of the Mexican Revolution as spontaneous uprising and popular
myth, he also feels sympathy for the Eliotic order and religious belief
embodied by the Colonial Period. One way through this contradiction
would be to engage in a detailed critique of both Eliot and the Surrealists in
order to arrive at a more intimate understanding of their affinities and
divergences. In El arco y la lira, however, Paz’s dialectical method of
argument militates against su detail. Dialectic is inherently polemical: it
pushes arguments to opposite poles, and so is incapable of addressing the
complex interrelations that oen lie between seemingly contrary beliefs.
Paz’s discussion of Eliot veers from one assertion to another, but it seems
to retreat from, rather than exploit, the implications of its rhetoric. As his
description of Eliot’s Anglo-Catholicism floats into a suggestive proximity to
Surrealism searing for the centre ‘del que un día fuimos expulsados’, Paz
anges ta:
Nostalgia de un orden espiritual, las imágenes y ritmos de The Waste Land niegan el principio de
la analogía. Su lugar lo ocupa la asociación de ideas, destructora de la unidad de conciencia. La
utilización sistemática de este procedimiento es uno de los aciertos más grandes de Eliot.
Desaparecido el mundo de valores cristianos —cuyo centro es, justamente, la universal analogía o
correspondencia entre tierra, cielo e infierno— no le queda nada al hombre, excepto la asociación
fortuita y casual de pensamientos e imágenes. El mundo moderno ha perdido sentido y el
testimonio más crudo de esa ausencia de dirección es el automatismo de la asociación de ideas,
que no está regido por ningún ritmo cósmico o espiritual, sino por el azar
(Arco1, 77; OC1, 98)
[Nostalgia for a spiritual order, the images and rhythms of The Waste Land deny the principle of
analogy. In their place is the association of ideas, destroyer of the unity of consciousness. e
systematic use of this procedure is one of Eliot’s greatest aievements. Gone is the world of
Christian values — whose centre is, precisely, universal analogy or the correspondence between
earth, sky and hell — there is nothing le for man but the fortuitous and ance association of
thoughts and images. e modern world has lost meaning and the starkest evidence of that la of
direction is the automatism of the association of ideas, whi is not governed by any cosmic
rhythm but by ance.]
e status of ‘nostalgia de un orden espiritual’ is ambiguous, partly thanks
to the loose appositional syntax that links it to the rest of the sentence. Paz
appears to be continuing the general arge of the previous paragraph that
Eliot wishes to return to an old spiritual order; yet as his argument unfolds it
proposes precisely the opposite. Eliot portrays a sensibility whi is
definitively severed from any source of spiritual nutriment: ‘[sus imágenes y
ritmos] niegan el principio de la analogía’. Ritmo is once again a formal
aracteristic, although it maintains some contact with the mythical sphere
since it is an anti-ritmo in Paz’s more loaded sense: it denies analogía. Eliot
is now praised in terms that recall Paz’s earlier allegiance to Marxism: one
of his ‘aciertos más grandes’ is the portrayal of a sensibility that is
‘destructora de la unidad de conciencia’. Eliot portrays the crisis of a
historical moment: ‘el mundo moderno ha perdido sentido’. Yet Paz’s
language dris into realms of suggestion that complicate the argumentative
purpose. Although Eliot has been separated from the Christian beliefs that
he espoused in the preceding paragraph, those beliefs maintain contact with
Paz’s own ‘sagrado extrareligioso’ [extra-religious sacred]: ‘El mundo de
valores cristianos’ is not an institution so mu as a manifestation of ‘la
universal analogía’. Eliot’s denial of this world in favour of ‘el automatismo
de la asociación de ideas’ and ‘el azar’ also drags him, however, towards
Surrealist automatic writing and ‘azar objetivo’ [objective ance]. It is hard
to know whi of these connections Paz wishes to explore since he
concludes the paragraph by returning to an assertion that does not square
with any of them:
El significado espiritual del poema de Eliot, tanto como su lenguaje, apuntan hacia una forma de
salud histórica y moral representada por la iglesia romana y el clasicismo latino.
(Arco1, 78)
[e spiritual meaning of Eliot’s poem, as mu as its language, aims for a form of moral and
historical health represented by the Roman ur and Latin classicism.]
Paz excised this conclusion from the second edition of El arco, yet it is only
one of the more conspicuous symptoms of an argumentative method whose
confusion runs too deep for editing to resolve.
Paz concludes his discussion of Eliot by comparing him with W. B. Yeats.
Once again, his habit of working by dialectic forces his argument into bold
assertions:
En el primero [Yeats] triunfan los valores rítmicos; en el segundo [Eliot] los conceptuales. Uno
inventa o resucita mitos, es poeta en el sentido original de la palabra. El otro se sirve de los
antiguos mitos para revelar la condición del hombre moderno.
(Arco1, 78; OC1, 100)
[In the first [Yeats] rhythmical values triumph; in the second [Eliot] conceptual values. One
invents or revives myths, he is a poet in the original sense of the word. e other makes use of the
old myths to reveal the condition of modern man.]
e mythical imagination of the one becomes concept and irony in the
other. To the Marxist Paz, Eliot’s ironic use of myth was a virtue; it revealed
a ‘horror ante el mundo moderno’. He now wanted a myth that could
answer that world, or ‘history’ as he oen referred to it. Mu of the
confusion in the pages of El arco y la lira that are dedicated to Eliot derives
from the shiing status in Paz’s own mind of the two terms ‘myth’ and
‘history’. He stood between, on the one hand, a history that he associated
with a Marxism from whi he was now distanced and, on the other, an
aament to the myth of Surrealism whi was not yet fully tested.
Manuel Durán blandly describes the pages of El arco y la lira dedicated to
discussion of T. S. Eliot as ‘the most lucid and perceptive of contemporary
criticism’.58 I have found more contradiction in Paz’s thought than this
praise would admit. Yet perhaps that contradiction is a necessary
recognition of the complexity of the enterprise. Anthony Stanton advises
that readers should not be surprised if the answers that Paz offers ‘are
shiing, partial and even incompatible […] Perhaps su results are the only
ones possible in an investigation of this sort’.59 However, the allenge of
Paz’s prose discussion lies not so mu in the answers that it provides as in
its means of arriving at them. Sebastião Uoa Leite identifies a ‘poetic
method of doubling’, and observes that in El arco ‘Paz makes his critical
language baroque, using the dialectic of thesis vs. antithesis, synonymy vs.
antonymy’. ‘In Octavio Paz there is a permanent methodological doubt
implicit in the very verbal meanism of his criticism’, he concludes.60
Leite’s analysis is astute, but it does not necessarily support his conclusion
that Paz’s dialectical method is a form of doubt. Doubt requires an
awareness of the implications of a given argument. A dialectic, by contrast,
pushes assertions to opposite poles. It is ill-suited to account for the grey
areas between those poles where identities engage in more complex relations
of affinity and difference than its oscillating paern allows. Paz seems
unable to accommodate the nuance of the relation between Eliot’s religious
and his own pseudo-religious beliefs. e affinities between his Surrealist-
inspired ritmo and Eliot’s Anglo-Catholicism emerge in his rhetoric,
nevertheless, in the manner of a troublesome unconscious symptom. Yet the
dialectic is not able to access the symptom’s source — the affinity between
positions that the habit of thesis and antithesis would separate — and so the
reader is bounced from one opposition to another while the undercurrent of
Paz’s rhetoric hints at connections whi his method is unable to explore.
ere is so lile doubt in a form of writing that permits a constant
sententiousness, one whi is exacerbated by the clear moral values of good
and bad, at source emotional aitudes rather than demonstrable
aracteristics, that drive the oppositions.61
El arco y la lira aempts to make poetry the foundation of a utopian myth
As Rubén Medina argues, ‘Poetry offers the symbolic solution to historical
and existential conflicts.’62 Eliot tended to look askance at su claims. To I.
A. Riards’s statement that ‘“Poetry is capable of saving us,”’ he retorted, ‘it
is like saying that the wall-paper will save us when the walls have
crumbled’.63 Eliot plays this role of the sceptical, questioning consciousness
in Paz’s earliest poems, and appears in similar guise in El arco y la lira. Yet
Paz was always reluctant to accept this critical awareness, even as he was
drawn to it. His most extended discussion of Eliot so far provides evidence
of this conflict, but it is unable to articulate the implication of its assertions.
La estación violenta
El arco y la lira came to exert a considerable influence on subsequent
criticism of Paz’s poems. In 1975, Guillermo Sucre would declare that
throughout Paz’s work ‘the question effectively persists that Paz poses in the
prefatory note to El arco y la lira (1956): “Would it not be beer to transform
life into poetry than to make poetry out of life?”.’64 Yet I have argued that
Paz’s prose assertions about the transformative power of poetry arose from a
tendency within his own poems to elide personal experience, the messiness
of life that poetry was being asked to transform. For Jason Wilson this
aenuation of experience then raises questions about the value of the
theory: ‘If you share this personal belief, then Paz will confirm your own
experience; if you do not, his language does not describe the experience that
justifies the assertion.’65 It is a question that can be bypassed, however, if
theory and poem are called upon to justify ea other. us Sucre uses some
of the more doubtful rhetoric from El arco y la lira to describe Piedra de sol
[Sunstone] (1957) as ‘un poema esencialmente rítmico, no simplemente
ritmado’ [an essentially rhythmical poem, not simply a poem that employs
66
rhythm]. Piedra de sol concludes La estación violenta [The Violent Season]
(1958), the poetic collection that accompanies the theory of El arco y la lira,
and draws to a form of conclusion the bale between Eliot and Surrealism
in Paz’s work.
La estación violenta opens with ‘Himno entre ruinas’, whi had
previously concluded Libertad bajo palabra with an aempt to cast off
Eliot’s influence in favour of a sensual delight in the world. ‘El cántaro roto’
[e Broken Water Jar] (1955) returns to the desert landscape of The Waste
Land and Entre la piedra y la flor:
Pero a mi lado no había nadie.
Sólo el llano: cactus, huizaes, piedras enormes que estallan bajo el sol.
No cantaba el grillo,
había un vago olor a cal y semillas quemadas,
las calles del poblado eran arroyos secos
y el aire se habría roto en mil pedazos si alguien hubiese gritado: ¿quién vive?
Cerros pelados, volcán frío, piedra y jadeo bajo tanto esplendor, sequía, sabor
del polvo,
rumor de pies descalzos sobre el polvo, ¡y el pirú en medio del llano como un
surtidor petrificado
(OC11, 213–14)
[But at my side there was no one.
Only the plain: cactus, acacias, enormous ros that burst in the sun.
e criet did not sing,
there was a faint smell of lime and burnt seeds,
the streets of the village were dried streams
and the air would have broken into a thousand pieces if someone had called out:
Who is there?
Bare hills, dead volcano, stone and panting beneath so mu splendour, dryness,
taste of dust,
sound of bare feet in the dust, and the pepper plant in the middle of the plain like
a petrified fountain!]
e passage concludes with an image whi both suggests and denies the
presence of water — ‘como un surtidor petrificado’ — just as ‘What the
under Said’ tantalizingly offers a sound only: ‘Drip drop drip drop drop
drop drop’ (CPP, 73). I argued that in Entre la piedra y la flor Paz aempted
to load meaning onto the external world whi it could not carry. ‘El
cántaro roto’ uses landscape to express a la of human meaning. Paz seems
more able to accept Eliotic states of vacancy that have no particular claim to
represent historical context. Yet the poem concludes in a different mode:
Hay que dormir con los ojos abiertos, hay que soñar con las manos,
soñemos sueños activos de río buscando su cauce, sueños de sol soñando sus mundos,
hay que soñar en voz alta, hay que cantar hasta que el canto ee raíces, tronco,
ramas, pájaros, astros,
cantar hasta que el sueño engendre y brote del costado del dormido la espiga roja de
la resurrección…
(OC11, 215–16)
[We must sleep with our eyes open, we must dream with our hands,
dream active dreams of a river looking for its annel, dreams of a sun dreaming its
worlds,
we have to dream aloud, we must sing until our song sprouts roots, trunk, branes,
birds, stars,
sing until the dream engenders and springs from the side of the sleeping man the
red ear of corn of resurrection…]
e invocation runs to over a page. I earlier quoted Jason Wilson on a
criticism of Latin American Surrealism that ‘the manifestoes about poetry’
are ‘oen more stimulating than the actual writing’.67 Here, the poem has
itself become a manifesto. As in the earlier Entre la piedra y la flor, Paz has
clear designs on the reader. e content may have altered, and Carlos H.
Magis argues that ‘unlike the first “social poetry”, the poem does not sele
for condemnation: as well as testimony, he pursues what can “ange man”
and “ange society” ’.68 Yet that call for ange does not simply add a new
dimension to earlier calls for historical witness; it does, in fact, close out the
historical element of the poem. As Rubén Medina points out, ‘El cántaro
roto’ ‘does not oppose a social system or the groups that control it’: ‘e
rhythm, images, pathos, confession, tragedy, the call to invent, are elements
of a compensatory rhetoric or aesthetic.’69
Paz’s reading of Surrealism conforms to a template established by his
advocacy of the le in the 1930s and his extensive experience of a political
journalism, as Guillermo Sheridan describes it, ‘to be read out loud in front
of a sympathetic audience’.70 In ‘Poesía mexicana moderna’ (1954), he
declared that for the poets who contributed to Taller, poetry was
una experiencia capaz de transformar al hombre, sí, pero también al mundo. Y, más
concretamente, a la sociedad. El poema era un acto, por su naturaleza
misma, revolucionario.
(OC4, 66–67)
[an experience capable of transforming man, yes, but also the world. And, more specifically,
society. e poem was, by its very nature, a revolutionary act.]
Paz reads his own later experience of Surrealism ba into the magazine, but
the real significance of his statement lies in the power that he is now
prepared to give the poem and its language. In an interview of the same
year, he declared that for the Surrealists, ‘la dualidad entre poesía e historia
debe desaparecer, en proveo de la primera’ [the duality between poetry
and history must disappear, in favour of the former].71 If a poem has the
power to resolve the conflicts of history then an injunction to ‘soñar hasta
que el sueño engendre’ cannot be resisted as fantastical. By its very inclusion
in a poem it gains the status of a revolutionary act. Saying makes it so.
Paz’s rhetoric anges from explicitly political to a more politico-
prophetic register, but the impulse remains to mitigate states of vacancy and
distress with either accusation in the present or a promise of future
plenitude. It is not solely a political impulse but also a wider need for
meaning whi recurs throughout Paz’s relationship with Eliot. ‘Máscaras
del alba’ [Masks of Dawn] (1948) does not employ a Surrealist rhetoric, yet it
nevertheless provides an example of the conceptualizing habit that guided
Paz’s interpretation of the Fren movement. He described the opening of
his poem, and Eliot’s influence, in a leer to the Catalan poet Pere
Gimferrer:72
Fue una tentativa, no lograda del todo, por encontrar un lenguaje moderno que pudiese expresar
(y explorar) un mundo apenas tocado por la poesía de lengua española (e incluso por la francesa):
la ciudad. Pero no la ciudad como un paisaje o un escenario por el que transcurre una anécdota
sentimental o erótica, a la manera de Apollinaire, sino la ciudad como una condensación histórica
y espiritual: piedras y gentes, signos y destinos: tiempo. Hay más de un eco de Eliot en mi poema
[…] Los cinco versos de la primera estrofa me siguen pareciendo eficaces —comienzan como una
descripción y terminan como una visión, a un tiempo histórica y espiritual, de nuestro tiempo:
Sobre el tablero de la plaza
se demoran las últimas estrellas.
Torres de luz y alfiles afilados
cercan las monarquías espectrales.
¡Vano ajedrez, ayer combate de ángeles!
[…] Técnica de la presentación, para emplear la expresión de Pound, sin enlaces ni comentarios.73
[It was a not entirely successful aempt to find a modern language that could express (and
explore) a world barely toued by poetry in Spanish (and even Fren): the city. But not the city
as a landscape or seing in whi an erotic or sentimental anecdote occurs, in the manner of
Apollinaire, but the city as a historical and spiritual condensation: stones and people, signs and
destinies: time. ere is more than one eo of Eliot in my poem […] e five lines of the first
verse seem, to me, to work — they begin with a description and end with a vision, both historical
and spiritual, of our time:
On the board of the square
the last stars linger.
Towers of light and sharpened bishops
surround the spectral monarchies.
Vain chess, yesterday combat of angels!
[…] Tenique of presentation, to employ Pound’s expression, without links or commentary.]
Paz evacuates potential content — ‘anécdota’ — in favour of explicit
interpretation: ‘una condensación histórica y espiritual’. Although he
describes a ‘técnica de la presentación’, this opening stanza is impatient to
comment; and the descriptive first four lines ‘terminan en una visión’:
‘¡Vano ajedrez, ayer combate de ángeles!’. Paz elaborated elsewhere on the
content of this vision: ‘En ese juego vano se ha resuelto el antiguo combate
entre los diablos y los ángeles que fue la visión medieval de la historia’ [In
that vain game the old combat between devils and angels that was the
medieval vision of history is resolved].74 Paz may have been inspired by the
Cleanth Brooks essay in T. S. Eliot: A Study of his Writings by Several Hands
(1947), whi he quotes directly in El arco y la lira (Arco1, 76; OC1, 97).
Brooks cites Allen Tate on the game of ess in The Waste Land as ‘“a game
that symbolizes the inhuman abstraction of the modern mind”’.75 Certainly,
Paz’s ‘vano ajedrez’, whi calls up a history of spiritual decline, responds to
this idea of Eliot. It is an Eliot he rejected in ‘Himno entre ruinas’. Yet the
return of a historical interpretation here reveals Paz’s continuing reluctance
to engage with the dramatic aracter of Eliot’s poem, and an aesthetic of
presentation that resists grander narratives.
La estación violenta concludes with Piedra de sol (1957), the poem whi
for Guillermo Sucre draws a whole period of Paz’s career to close.76 It was
his most extensive poem to date, running to 584 lines whi correspond to
the days of the Aztec calendar. Yet it began as a mu shorter fragment of
thirty lines, whi open:
Un sauce de cristal, un opo de agua,
un alto surtidor que el viento arquea,
un árbol bien plantado mas danzante,
un caminar de río que se curva,
avanza, retrocede, da un rodeo
y llega siempre.
(OC11, 217)
[A willow of glass, a poplar of water,
a tall fountain that the wind ares,
a deep rooted but dancing tree,
a course of a river that bends,
advances, retreats, spins round
and always arrives.]
e passage hovers appealingly between natural observation and
metaphorical elaboration as the willow and poplar simultaneously respond
to the wind and a figurative imagining whi runs from the delicate but
slightly brile ‘cristal’ to the fluid movement of water. ‘Un caminar de río’
starts as a metaphor for the tree, but comes to fill the view as an object in
itself, suggesting a wider application to some form of imaginative journey,
or the writing process itself. e easy transaction between natural and
figurative worlds promises a development of the celebratory passages of
‘Himno entre ruinas’; and indeed a less programmatic interpretation of
Surrealism than occurs in Paz’s other works of the period. In 1975 he
described the way that this opening fragment ‘se inició como un
automatismo. Las primeras estrofas las escribía como si, literalmente,
alguien me dictara’ [began automatically. I wrote the first stanzas as if,
literally, someone were dictating to me].77 I have discussed the consequences
for Paz’s poetry of what Jason Wilson describes as ‘the separation of the
philosophy from the practice’ of Surrealism.78 Here, he engages in a form of
Surrealist practice — ‘un automatismo’ — whi allows him to connect with
a strain of exaltación lírica that the influence of Eliot had hindered from his
earliest poems.
When Paz returned to extend this fragment into what would become
Piedra de sol, he continued to write ‘con una extraña facilidad’ [with a
strange facility], but ‘en esta ocasión intenté utilizar la corriente verbal y
orientarla un poco’ [now I tried to use the verbal flow and direct it a lile].79
at direction of the initial impulse would take the poem ba to the theme
of history. In interview Paz declared that although the poem ‘en apariencia
es autobiográfico; en realidad es la biografía de una generación, marcada por
ciertas ideas y ciertas realidades históricas, como la guerra civil en España’
[is autobiographical in appearance; in fact, it is the biography of a
generation, affected by certain ideas and certain historical realities, like the
Spanish Civil War].80 Paz eoes early readings of The Waste Land, and his
own later description of the poem as ‘la fusión del yo subjetivo y el nosotros
histórico, mejor dio, la intersección entre el destino social y el individual’
[the fusion of the subjective I and the historical we, or rather, the
intersection of social and individual destiny] (OC2, 292).81 Eliot’s presence is
detectable, if indistinctly, in a literally pivotal point of Piedra de sol as
halfway through the poem Paz turns to an air-raid in the Spanish Civil War:
Madrid, 1937,
en la Plaza del Ángel las mujeres
cosían y cantaban con sus hijos,
después sonó la alarma y hubo gritos,
casas arrodilladas en el polvo,
torres hendidas, frentes escupidas
y el huracán de los motores, fijo:
los dos se desnudaron y se amaron
por defender nuestra porción eterna,
nuestra ración de tiempo y paraíso,
tocar nuestra raíz y recobrarnos,
recobrar nuestra herencia arrebatada
por ladrones de vida hace mil siglos,
los dos se desnudaron y besaron
porque las desnudeces enlazadas
saltan al tiempo y son invulnerables.
(OC11, 225)
[Madrid, 1937,
in the Plaza del Ángel the women
sewed and sang with their ildren,
then the siren sounded and there were shouts,
houses brought to their knees in the dust,
towers craed, facades spat out
and the hurricane of the motors, fixed:
two people took off their clothes and made love
to protect our eternal portion,
our helping of time and paradise,
to tou our root and reclaim us,
reclaim our inheritance snated
by thieves of life for a thousand years,
two people took off their clothes and kissed
because entwined nakednesses
leap from time and are invulnerable.]
ere are no obvious eoes of Eliot here, although the air-raid could
perhaps be related to Little Gidding.82 However, Carlos Magis describes the
scene as an example of ‘the memories of very concrete events, whi seem
to interrupt the discourse’.83 History has invaded the poem as it invaded the
world of Symbolism in The Waste Land. Paz may also have wished to
answer the typist scene of Eliot’s poem, and as Pere Gimferrer points out, it
is the first time that ‘the third person plural is employed in the text to
describe an event’.84 e speaker, like Tiresias, is an onlooker. Paz outlines a
double argument against Eliot for a Surrealist view of the erotic: the
argument is both a rebual of frigidity in The Waste Land; and also an
answer to the vision of history as destruction that he finds in Eliot’s poem.85
Yet that argumentative purpose competes with a less coercive tendency in
the passage. As Guillermo Sheridan points out, those lovers described in the
third person were in fact Paz and his young wife Elena Garro in a Madrid
hotel in 1937.86 An element of remembered delight does come through as the
assonance of e’s and a’s in ‘desnudeces enlazadas’ entwines the reader
pleasingly in their act. e reverse of the generally iambic rhythm in ‘saltan’
is also effective, and generates appropriate relief as the rhythm seles ba
to type in ‘y son invulnerables’. Yet this line esews any ‘técnica de la
presentación’ as it insists on an interpretation of their experience whi is
forced — that love conquers bombs. e metric has been made to serve a
particular understanding of the scene rather than to realize it, and one
cannot be sure that Paz himself is convinced. ‘Ladrones de vida’ recalls the
impotent anger of Entre la piedra y la flor, a poem with whi he was never
satisfied.
Paz may well have had the lovers from Guillén’s ‘A pesar de todo’ [In
Spite of Everything] in mind, who remain ‘seguros, implacables’ [secure,
implacable], in spite of the ‘batahola’ [din], ‘polvo’ [dust], and ‘crimen
difuso’ [scaered crime] that surround them.87 Yet a love that survives the
din of city life is one thing; a love that is invulnerable to bombardment quite
another. For Guillermo Sucre: ‘e intensity of this experience is measured
precisely by its disproportion; that disproportion is not desperate: it is the
affirmation of the body and the rejection of history as devouring
abstraction.’88 One cannot help but feel, however, that the experience has
been lost when this anecdote can be made to serve su a fantastical ‘triple
eje de la libertad, el amor y la poesía’ [triple axis of liberty, love and poetry]
(OC2, 213). Paz’s aempt to answer the erotic failures of The Waste Land is
certainly welcome, and Eliot’s own prose discussion of this theme can be
unaractive:
Whitman had the ordinary desires of the flesh; for him there was no asm between the real and
the ideal, su as opened before the horrified eyes of Baudelaire.89
e dismissiveness of ‘ordinary desires’ perhaps betrays a note of defence, a
counter-feeling of envy towards a poet like Whitman who could enjoy su
pleasures since he was spared the awareness that horrified Baudelaire (and
Eliot). Yet there is a genuine vision of human experience in Eliot’s
comments. e ideal to whi Eliot refers is not, in this context, a divine
ideal, but a product of human desire. e ‘asm’, as he describes it
elsewhere, is ‘the awful separation between potential passion and any
actualization possible in life’.90 Paz’s own vision of the erotic refuses to
account for this mismat between desire and reality. us in Piedra de sol,
‘Breton’s call to fuse Rimbaud and Marx and ange the world and the
individual is aieved through love, in the mind.’91 Yet the ange remains
mental, or verbal, at best. is is where the ‘disproportion’ of Paz’s lovers
lies: in the way that they are made to serve a utopian desire whi exceeds
historical reality.
e agility, delight and responsiveness of the opening fragment of Piedra
de sol was less in evidence as Paz returned to the theme of history, and a
highly conceptualized version of Surrealism. He had le Paris in 1951, and a
number of the poems of La estación violenta were composed during an
itinerant period with the Mexican diplomatic service in New Delhi, Tokyo
and Geneva before his return to Mexico in 1953. Yet he maintained contact
with the Surrealists, and Benjamin Péret would translate Piedra de sol in
1962. It was the poem that secured his international reputation, with English
translations by Muriel Rukeyser and Peter Miller appearing in New York and
Toronto the following year. For Hugo Verani, the poem ‘quily aieves the
level of great universal poetry’.92 Yet at what cost? e Journal des Poètes
bafflingly declared that Piedra de sol had been granted a prestigious prize
from the Maison Internationale de la Poèsie in recognition of ‘el universo de
piedras de Octavio Paz’ [the universe of stones of Octavio Paz].93 Something
had clearly been lost in translation. Pere Gimferrer describes a more
comprehensive impact in Spanish, Catalan and Portuguese, whi ‘is
comparable in historical importance to that of Eliot’s Waste Land for the
English language between the wars’.94 Just as it invites comparison with
Eliot’s poem, Piedra de sol marks a definitive gesture of separation from
Paz’s Anglo-American precursor. Yet that gesture is rooted in his earlier
response to Eliot, and in his effort to translate the murkier and more
distressing experience of Eliot’s poems onto a conceptual plane. If that
universal significance would allow access to a Surrealist-inspired vision of
‘liberación total’ [total liberation], it also hindered the influences that had
animated Paz’s early career: both the sceptical, corrosive Eliot of the
Contemporáneos, and the innocent sensual delight of Pellicer and Perse.
Notes to Chapter 7
1. André Breton, ‘Los vasos comunicantes (fragmento)’, Letras de México, 27 (10 May 1938), p. 5.
2. Paz, ‘André Breton o la búsqueda del comienzo’ (1967), in OC2, 219.
3. Ibid.
4. For details of the events leading up to this declaration see Gérard Durozoi, History of the
Surrealist Movement (Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 296–97.
5. Paz, ‘Cuatro o cinco puntos cardinales’, in OC15, 47.
6. Jason Wilson argues that although Huidobro was critical of the Surrealists, his poetry shared
many of their preoccupations: dream, liberation from the prison of language, love, hostility to
the traditional lyric self, and mimicry of mind-flow. See his ‘Coda: Spanish American
Surrealist Poetry’, in A Companion to Spanish Surrealism, ed. by Robert Havard (Woodbridge:
Tamesis, 2004), pp. 253–76 (pp. 255–56).
7. Paz, ‘Los pasos contados’, p. 55.
8. Paz repeats this complaint in his acceptance spee for the T. S. Eliot Prize (OC2, 292). For an
account of Apollinaire’s influence on Ezra Pound, see Willard Bohn, Apollinaire and the
International Avant-Garde (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), pp. 27–41.
Bohn suggests (pp. 39–40) that Pound’s use of the term ‘super-position’ in ‘Vorticism’
(September 1914) derives from Apollinaire’s ‘Simultanisme-Libreisme’ (June 1914).
9. Paz, ‘Poesía e historia: Laurel y nosotros’ (1982), in OC3, 119.
10. Stanton, ‘Models of Discourse and Hermeneutics in Octavio Paz’s El laberinto de la soledad’,
Bulletin of Latin American Research, 20, 2 (April 2001), 210–32 (p. 226).
11. In ‘La poesía surrealista’, ed. by César Moro, Poesía (suplemento), 3 (n.d. [1938?]), 3–18 (p. 8).
12. Eliot, ‘Ulysses, Order, and Myth’, p. 483. Eliot does not always conform to this role. East Coker
declares that ‘el conocimiento nos impone una forma y falsifica’ [‘e knowledge imposes a
paern, and falsifies’ (CPP, 179)], trans. by José Rodríguez Feo, Orígenes, 3, 9 (Spring 1946),
21–27 (p. 23).
13. Paz, ‘Estrella de tres puntas: El surrealismo’ (1954), in OC2, 208. Patri O. Dudgeon encouraged
this reading of Eliot shortly before by translating Eliot’s own translation of damyata, ‘control’
(CPP, 80), as ‘reprime’ [repress], ‘Los cuartetos de T. S. Eliot’, p. 25. Flores had osen
‘controla’, Tierra baldía, p. 47.
14. Stanton, ‘Models of Discourse’, p. 229.
15. José Vasconcelos, ‘Octavio Paz’, Todo, 6 Apr 1950; repr. in El Ángel (supl. of Reforma), 24 Mar
1994, pp. 15–16 (p. 15).
16. Enrico Mario Santí notes this ange, whi Paz made to the first edition of El laberinto de la
soledad (México: Cuadernos Americanos, 1950), in his 4th edn (Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra,
1998), p. 244. ‘Un mundo suficiente, cerrado al exterior pero abierto al cielo’ was also anged
to ‘…a lo ultraterreno’ in later editions in an effort to excise specifically Christian connotations
(Santí, ed., p. 241; OC8, 112).
17. Stanton, ‘Models of Discourse’, p. 231.
18. Sheridan, Poeta con paisaje, p. 462.
19. Eliot, ‘¿é es un clásico?’, trans. by E. L. Revol, Sur, 153–56 (Jul–Oct 1947), 18–44 (p. 21).
20. Revol’s translation may have directed Paz here, rendering Eliot’s ‘range’ as ‘el orden del
sentimiento’, p. 38.
21. Eliot, ‘Introduction’ to In Parenthesis, by David Jones (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), pp. vii–
viii (p. viii).
22. Eliot, ‘A Prediction in Regard to ree English Authors’, Vanity Fair, 21 (February 1924), 29 & 98
(p. 29).
23. Evodio Escalante, ‘La vanguardia requisada’, Fractal, 1, 2, 4 (Jan–Mar 1997), pp. 67–87;
<www.fractal.com.mx>, 4 of 11.
24. Ibid.
25. Medina, Autor, autoridad y autorización, p. 52.
26. Stanton, ‘Models of Discourse’, p. 216.
27. Ibid., p. 214.
28. ‘Sueño de Eva’ was later re-named ‘Virgen’. In a leer to Pere Gimferrer, Paz describes the poem
as ‘escrito hacia 1944, en los Estados Unidos’, 12 July 1988, Memorias y palabras, p. 326.
29. Paz, ‘Genealogía de un libro: Libertad bajo palabra’ (1988) in OC15, 107.
30. Paz, ‘Sueño de Eva’ Sur, 127 (May 1945), 47–50 (pp. 48–49). Further references to this poem are
given aer quotations in the text.
31. Maud Bodkin, Archetypal Patterns in Poetry: Psychological Studies of Imagination (London:
Oxford University Press, 1934), p. 308. Maud Ellmann compares The Waste Land to Freud’s
definition of unheimlich, or the uncanny, in The Poetics of Impersonality: T. S. Eliot and Ezra
Pound (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1987), pp. 101–02.
32. William Skaff, The Philosophy of T. S. Eliot: From Skepticism to a Surrealist Poetic, 1909–1927
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), p. 133.
33. Eliot, ‘Introduction’ to Josef Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture (London: Faber and Faber, 1952),
pp. 11–17 (p. 12).
34. David Gascoyne, A Short Survey of Surrealism [1st edn 1935] (London: Enitharmon Press, 2000),
p. 94.
35. Paz, ‘Cuatro o cinco puntos cardinales’, in OC15, 144. ‘e Music of Poetry’ refers to Edward
Lear’s The Jumblies, whi it describes as ‘a poem of adventure, and of nostalgia for the
romance of foreign voyage and exploration’ (OPP, 29).
36. Christopher Ris, The Force of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 142.
37. For further examples, see Suard, Eliot’s Dark Angel, pp. 125–28.
38. Eliot, ‘London Leer’, Dial, 73, 3 (September 1922), 329–31 (p. 330).
39. Suard, Eliot’s Dark Angel, p. 121.
40. Eliot, Inventions of the March Hare, p. 18; ‘A Prediction in Regard to ree English Authors’, p.
29.
41. Wilson, ‘Coda’, p. 276.
42. ‘Estrella de tres puntas: El surrealismo’, in OC2, 213.
43. Juan José Hernández, ‘Octavio Paz: El arco y la lira; Piedra de sol’, Sur, 252 (May–Jun 1958), 76–
78 (p. 76).
44. Stanton, ‘Models of Discourse’, p. 231.
45. Paz made substantial revisions to the second edition of El arco y la lira (México: Fondo de
Cultura Económica, 1967), whi then provided a basis for the text that appears in OC1. Since
the later version is the more widely available, I have referred simultaneously where possible to
the first edition (Arco1) and the Obras completas (OC1), indicating any significant revisions to
the second edition (Arco2). For a summary and interpretation of the anges that Paz made to
the second edition, see Emir Rodríguez Monegal, ‘Relectura de El arco y la lira’, Revista
Iberoamericana, 37, 74 (Jan–Mar 1971), 35–46.
46. Paz, L’Arc et la Lyre, trans. by Roger Munier (Paris: Gallimard, 1965). I owe this information to
an interview with Anthony Stanton in Mexico City, 16 April 2002. Paz later lost the leer.
47. Enrico Mario Santí, ‘Textos y contextos: Heidegger, Paz y la poética’, Iberoromania, 15 (1982), 87–
96 (p. 90).
48. Anthony Stanton, ‘Una lectura de El arco y la lira’, in Reflexiones lingüísticas y literarias, ed. by
Rafael Olea Franco and James Valender, 2 vols (México: El Colegio de México, 1992), II, 301–22
(pp. 310–11).
49. Stanton, ‘Lectura’, p. 311.
50. In Arco2, 63; OC1, 85, this statement is anged to the less contentious ‘No todos los mitos son
poemas pero todo poema es mito’.
51. Jorge Aguilar Mora, La divina pareja: Historia y mito en Octavio Paz (México: Ediciones Era,
1978), p. 67.
52. Parts of this discussion were recycled in English as an inaugural spee at a seminar on T. S.
Eliot, the papers of whi were collected in T. S. Eliot, ed. by M. M. Bhalla, pp. 1–10.
53. In Arco2, 75; OC1, 95, this sentence is anged to ‘reacciones de signo contrario, períodos en los
que la poesía inglesa busca insertarse de nuevo en la tradición latina’.
54. Paz added ‘prosa y lirismo’ in Arco2, 77 to the sentence: ‘Y conciencia ambigua: negación y
nostalgia.’
55. e reference is taken from Rajan, ed., T. S. Eliot: A Study of his Writings, p. 35.
56. is statement is removed from OC1, 97–98.
57. Paz replicates Augustí Bartra’s earlier description of Eliot’s conversion in broadly mythical
terms: ‘Le ha sido [a Eliot] indispensable buscar la salvación en un orden, o mejor, en unas
tradiciones culturales que para él significaban un regreso a los orígenes,’ Antología de la poesía
norteamericana (México: Colección Letras de México, 1952), p. 448.
58. Manuel Durán, ‘La estética de Octavio Paz’, Revista Mexicana de Literatura, 8 (1956), 114–36 (p.
132).
59. Stanton, ‘Lectura’, p. 322.
60. Sebastião Uoa Leite, ‘Octavio Paz: El mundo como texto’, Diorama de la Cultura (supl. of
Excélsior), 12 Mar 1972, pp. 7–10 (p. 7 & 8).
61. William Rowe notes the Maniaean tendency of Paz’s dialectic: ‘the “grammar” or politics of his
thought would be that one dualism spawns another, successive dualisms appearing to include
previous ones, in an ever more totalizing way […] Furthermore the dualisms are always
hierarical, in that there is always a privileged element, an ultimate origin or goal’, ‘Paz,
Fuentes and Lévi-Strauss: e Creation of a Structuralist Orthodoxy’, Bulletin of Latin
American Research, 3, 2 (1984), 77–82 (p. 80). Eliot was himself fond of su pairings, whi
Miael Levenson describes as ‘symptomatic, marking the strength of the modernist urge
towards dualistic opposition and radical polarities. “Good” and “Evil” may disappear from the
modernist vocabulary, but the Maniean habit remains’, A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study
of English Literary Doctrine 1908–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. ix.
62. Medina, Autor, autoridad y autorización, p. 141.
63. Eliot, ‘Literature, Science, and Dogma’, Dial, 82, 3 (Mar 1927), 239–43 (p. 243).
64. Guillermo Sucre, La máscara, la transparencia: Ensayos sobre poesía hispanoamericana, 2nd edn
(México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2001), p. 181.
65. Wilson, Octavio Paz, p. 85.
66. Sucre, La máscara, la transparencia, p. 192.
67. Wilson, ‘Coda’, p. 276.
68. Carlos H. Magis, La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz (México: El Colegio de México, 1978), p.
211.
69. Medina, Autor, autoridad y autorización, p. 192.
70. Sheridan, Poeta con paisaje, p. 221.
71. Roberto Vernengo, ‘Entrevista con Octavio Paz’, Sur, 227 (Mar–Apr 1954), p. 62. Paz had made a
similar assertion in ‘Introducción a la historia de la poesía mexicana’ (1950): ‘Cada poema es
una tentativa por resolver la oposición entre historia y poesía, en beneficio de la segunda’
(OC4, 149).
72. Pere Gimferrer (1945–) wrote poems in Spanish and Catalan. He was awarded the Premio
Nacional de Poesía for Arde el mar (1966) and was elected to the Real Academia Española in
1985. He also produced a book of criticism on Paz’s poems, Lecturas de Octavio Paz
(Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, 1980), and edited a collection of essays on his work, Octavio
Paz (Madrid: Taurus Ediciones, 1982).
73. Paz, 12 July 1988, Memorias y palabras, pp. 325–26.
74. Paz, ‘Genealogía de un libro’, in OC15, 119.
75. Rajan, ed., T. S. Eliot: A Study of his Writings, p. 15.
76. Sucre, La máscara, la transparencia, p. 196.
77. Paz, ‘Convertimos en muladar el más hermoso sitio del planeta’, ‘La Onda’, suplemento de
Novedades, 92, 16 Mar 1975, pp. 7 & 12; quoted in Hugo J. Verani ‘“Piedra de sol”: Cincuenta
años de eternidad’, in his Lecturas de ‘Piedra de sol’ (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica,
2007), pp. 11–27 (p. 23). Paz generally took lile interest in automatic writing, and maintained
that ‘la poesía es el fruto de la colaboración, o del oque, entre la mitad oscura y la mitad
lúcida del hombre’ (OC15, 428). He also expressed his reservations about automatic writing in
Arco1, 244–46.
78. Wilson, ‘Coda’, p. 276.
79. Paz, ‘Convertimos en muladar’; quoted in Verani, ed., Lecturas, pp. 23–24.
80. Paz, ‘Octavio Paz. Su poesía convierte en poetas a sus lectores’ (1958), in OC15, 21.
81. Eliot himself declared in ‘oughts aer Lambeth’ (1931) that ‘when I wrote a poem called The
Waste Land some of the more approving critics said that I had expressed the “disillusionment
of a generation”, whi is nonsense’ (SE, 368).
82. Pablo Zambrano points out a number of analogies between other parts of Piedra de sol and Four
Quartets. See ‘Paz, Borges, Eliot: Tres recreaciones del eterno retorno’, in Las formas del mito
en las literaturas hispánicas del siglo XX, pp. 181–201 (pp. 187, 196–97 & 199). Zambrano
cautiously describes his examples as ‘imágenes, ideas, versos, etc. cuya similitud puede ser solo
coincidencia pero que hay que señalar’ (p. 199).
83. Magis, La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz, pp. 209–10.
84. Pere Gimferrer, Lecturas de Octavio Paz (Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, 1980), p. 48.
85. Rajan, ed., T. S. Eliot: A Study of his Writings, gives the impression that Eliot’s literary critical
readers were themselves uncomfortable with the erotic life, from Cleanth Brooks’s illy ‘the
propagation of the race’ (p. 29) to Duncan Jones’s coy ‘baward glance at carnal loveliness’ (p.
38).
86. Sheridan, Poeta con paisaje, p. 263.
87. Jorge Guillén, Cántico, 3rd edn (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1973), p. 316.
88. Sucre, La máscara, la transparencia, p. 195.
89. Eliot, ‘Whitman and Tennyson’, Nation and Athenaeum, 40, 11 (18 December 1926), p. 426.
90. Eliot, ‘Beyle and Balzac’, Athenaeum, 4648 (30 May 1919), 392–93 (p. 393).
91. Wilson, ‘Coda’, p. 263.
92. Verani, ed., Lecturas, p. 19.
93. Pierre Bourgeois, ‘Notre grand prix: O. P.’, Le Journal des Poètes, 34, 7 (1964), 1; quoted in Verani,
ed., Lecturas, p. 19.
94. Gimferrer, Lecturas de Octavio Paz, p. 24.
Conclusion
As he concluded his acceptance spee for the T. S. Eliot Prize in 1988, Paz
looked ba at The Waste Land, whi he had discovered nearly sixty years
earlier: ‘A través de tantos años y mutaciones, ese poema sigue siendo para
mí un obelisco cubierto de signos, invulnerables ante los vaivenes del gusto
y las vicisitudes del tiempo’ [Aer so many years and anges, that poem
continues to be an obelisk covered in signs for me, invulnerable to the
anges of taste and the vicissitudes of time] (OC2, 291). His praise for the
poem-as-monument represents the kind of courtesy one would expect at
su a formal occasion. Yet the metaphor of the obelisk also carries a more
troubling implication. e poem has endured as a material object, but can
those signs be deciphered? Paz returns to the first of his Eliotic poems,
‘Nocturno de la ciudad abandonada’, whi contemplated the ‘fórmulas y
los conjuros’ [formulas and spells] of a pre-Columbian civilization, now
‘impronunciables, borrados de los bloques eternos’ [unpronounceable,
erased from the eternal blos of stone].1 e invulnerable signs of The
Waste Land may have fared rather beer, but their meaning is no clearer. In
Maud Ellmann’s version of the metaphor, Eliot’s poem is ‘a sphinx without a
secret’.2
Paz separates the poem as an object from the meanings it can generate for
a reader. It is a typically modern awareness, whi was succinctly expressed
by Stéphane Mallarmé when Edgar Degas suggested that he had some ideas
for a poem: ‘Ce n’est point avec des idées, mon er Degas, que l’on fait des
vers. C’est avec des mots’ [It is not with ideas, my dear Degas, that one
makes poetry. It is with words].3 But how does one translate a poem from
one language to another without a mediating interpretation? How can one
oose equivalent words without resorting to some sense of the ideas to
whi they refer? In a Mallarméan spirit, Ellmann argues that in The Waste
Land it is not even in the words but ‘in the silences between the words that
meaning fliers, local, evanescent’.4 How does one then translate the
arrangements of words, whi must depend on the particularities of an
individual language’s syntax? Enrique Munguía’s prose translation
conspicuously fails to meet these allenges, compensating instead with a
substantial, considered and well-informed introduction. Yet that
introduction inevitably vitiates one of the most striking allenges of Eliot’s
poem: the uncertainty that hovers between its form and its meaning,
between word and idea. Munguía sets the tone, if he does not provide the
cause, for Paz’s own use of Eliot, whi consistently transforms ambiguous
verbal and emotional experience to more explicit conceptual semes. ose
semes bring their own complications. Paz’s reading of Eliot frequently
refers to ‘history’, yet the single term masks a double injunction both to
confront and answer the horrors of the modern world. at injunction is
then expressed through competing poetic influences — Perse, Pellicer, Eliot,
Villaurrutia and Valéry among others — whi do not always correspond
tidily to the political intention. Paz’s adoption of Surrealism aempts to
resolve these contradictions, and Piedra de sol marks one of the high points
of his poetic career. Yet it also removes his work from the modern
preoccupation with an art that resists easy interpretation, and appropriation.
Paz anowledged the formal differences between Piedra de sol and The
Waste Land in interview with Roberto González Eevarría and Emir
Rodríguez Monegal in 1972:
The Waste Land es muo más complejo. Se ha dio que es un collage, pero yo diría que es un
assemblage de pièces détachées. Una extraordinaria máquina verbal que emite significados
poéticos por la rotación y el frotamiento de una parte con otra y de todas con el lector. No, yo
prefiero The Waste Land a Piedra de sol, francamente. Si hay que comparar algo mío con The
Waste Land —pero yo no veo ni la razón ni la necesidad de la comparación— me parece que
habría que pensar en Homenaje y profanaciones, Salamandra, Viento entero o Blanco.5
[The Waste Land is mu more complex. It has been described as a collage, but I would say that it
is an assembly of detaed pieces. An extraordinary verbal maine that emits poetic meanings
through the rotation and contact of one part with another and of all of them with the reader. No,
frankly I prefer The Waste Land to Piedra de sol. If one has to compare something of mine with
The Waste Land — but I don’t see the reason or the need for the comparison — I think one would
have to think of Homenaje y profanaciones, Salamandra, Viento entero or Blanco.]
With Blanco (1967) Paz does make an aempt to engage directly with the
formal allenge of Eliot, and of Mallarmé. e poem is divided into
columns whi can be read in different combinations. Charles Tomlinson
describes the structure as ‘in large part paratactic, inviting the mind to make
leaps’, and mentions Eliot’s own experiment as an analogue: ‘Who can read
6
The Waste Land passively?’. Mallarmé provides the poem’s epigraph, and
Un Coup de dés [A Throw of the Dice] stands as a precursor for ‘una forma
que no encierra un significado sino una forma en busca de significación’ [a
form that does not enclose a meaning but a form in sear of meaning],
what Malcolm Bowie describes an ‘epistemological view of the poem’.7 Yet
in the epilogue that Enrico Mario Santí wrote for his edition of Blanco, he
describes the two poems as ‘in reality […] quite distinct’.8 He views
Mallarmé as merely a ‘generalized […] presence’.9 Eliot’s Waste Land, whi
Paz cites as a comparable formal example of the poem as a ‘máquina de
significaciones’, also appears in images, rather than structure, whi are
familiar from Paz’s earlier poems:
Río de sangre,
río de historias
de sangre,
río seco:
boca de manantial
amordazado
por la conjuración anónima
de los huesos,
por la ceñuda peña de los siglos
y los minutos.
(OC11, 430)
[River of blood,
river of histories
of blood.
dry river:
mouth of well
bloed
by the anonymous spell
of the bones,
by the grim cliff of the centuries
and the minutes.]
Here are the ‘exhausted wells’ (CPP, 73) of The Waste Land and a
aracteristically Pazian-Eliotic association of history as theme with images
of aridity. Desert images recur with a ‘paramera abrasada’ [burnt plain]
(OC11, 433), and Paz eoes his own Eliotic Entre la piedra y la flor: ‘Hay
púas invisibles, hay espinas / en los ojos […] / La rabia es mineral’ [ere
are invisible spikes, there are thorns / in my eyes […] / Rage is mineral]
(OC11, 433–34). As in ‘What the under Said’, the promise of rain ‘in the
violet air’ (CPP, 73) suggests a possible release:
El cielo se ennegrece
como esta página.
Dispersión de cuervos.
Inminencia de violencias violetas
(OC11, 434)
[e sky turns bla
like this page.
Scaering of crows.
Imminence of purple violence.]
Santí describes a ‘sort of wasteland of language’ in this section.10 It remains
an imagistic rather than a formal use of Eliot, however. e more
allenging use of fragmentary form occurs in the sections made up of two
columns, whi intersperse the Eliotic passages of aridity:
Los ríos de tu cuerpo el río de los cuerpos
País de latidos astros infusorios reptiles
Entrar en ti torrente de cinabrio sonámbulo (OC11, 432)
[e rivers of your body the river of the bodies
Land of pulses infusionary stars reptiles
To enter you stream of sleepy cinnabar]
Here the le-hand column implies a direct address to a lover while the right-
hand column describes analogous sympathies in the world outside.
Depending on how the reader ooses to combine the components of this
passage (either le to right or up and down), different experiences of
connection between intimate and universal relation will be explored. Yet,
however one combines these two columns they stand as an erotic and
watery resolution of the states of aridity that are expressed in the desert
passages. e impulse persists of Paz’s earlier poems to mitigate Eliotic
states of disaffection, as does the particular form of mitigation that appeared
in Piedra de sol: the erotic life provides an answer to history.
Malcolm Bowie suggests of Mallarme’s Un Coup de dés that ‘the poem
may be seen as a portrait of thought at risk, an “inscape” of the anxious and
intellectually questing mind’.11 e disruptions of Mallarmé’s syntax are
carefully managed to draw the reader into a construction of meaning whi
is constantly threatened. Paz divides up the separate passages of Blanco and
offers the reader different possibilities for finding his or her way through
them, but there is lile sense of risk in the enterprise since his habitual
tendency to think in oppositions where one term (here the erotic) is
favoured directs the structure. Although the poem offers the reader an
opportunity to relate its components in different combinations, the status of
the erotic passages does not ange. Paz has wrien a different type of
poem, mu closer to certain forms of meditation. e epigraph from
Mallarmé is accompanied by a quotation from The Hevajra Tantra — ‘By
passion the world is bound, by passion too it is released’ — and in an
introductory note he compares the poem to ‘un rollo de pinturas y
emblemas tántricos’ [a roll of Tantric paintings and emblems], adding that
‘se despliega ante nuestros ojos un ritual’ [a ritual unfolds before our eyes]
(OC11, 422). He has ritualized a certain belief in the erotic rather than
questioning the way that belief has been constructed. Blanco is a less varied
and a less dramatic construction than the antecedents with whi it claims
an affinity, and Santí concedes that although it is ‘the most ambitious poem
that Octavio Paz has created’, it is not ‘the most important’.12
Blanco was Paz’s last major aempt to engage with the poetic form of The
Waste Land. Eliotic landscapes can be detected in Vuelta [Return] (1976), but
the poem that had accompanied Paz’s poetic birth in the early 1930s now
recedes from view. e meditative manner of Blanco does, however, bring
Paz closer to Eliot’s final poetic work. Although he consistently expressed
more enthusiasm for The Waste Land, the philosophical reflection of Four
Quartets appears in two key poems of Paz’s later career: ‘Cuento de dos
jardines’ [Tale of Two Gardens] (1968), and Pasado en claro [Clean Draft of
the Past] (1975).
13
‘Cuento de dos jardines’ refers to two gardens — the one in Mixcoac
where Paz grew up, and the other in India where he married his second
wife, Marie-José Tramini. It opens, however, into a broader perspective:
Una casa, un jardín,
no son lugares:
giran, van y vienen.
Sus apariciones
abren en el espacio
otro espacio,
otro tiempo en el tiempo.
Sus eclipses
no son abdicaciones:
nos quemaría
la vivacidad de uno de esos instantes
si durase otro instante.
(OC11, 412)
[A house, a garden,
are not places:
they spin, come and go.
eir apparitions
open another space
in space,
another time in time.
eir eclipses
are not abdications:
the life of one of those instants
would burn us
if it lasted another instant.]
Henry Gifford observes that ‘the careful distinctions, the hovering motion,
the culminating insight all bring to mind the opening of Burnt Norton’.14 e
content as well as the manner of this opening passage also recalls Four
Quartets: the garden of Burnt Norton, the ‘moment in and out of time’ of
The Dry Salvages ( CPP, 190), and ‘human kind / Cannot bear very mu
reality’ (CPP, 172).15 Gifford concludes, nevertheless, that ‘Paz has a rier
joy in the “substance of time and its inventions” than Eliot’; and Charles
Tomlinson agrees: ‘what we experience is less an “interpenetration of the
timeless with time” than a deepening — oen erotic — of the content of time
itself’.16
Yet Paz clearly associated Eliot’s poem with his own version of the poetic
instante, both here and elsewhere in this later work. In Los hijos del limo
[The Children of the Mire] (1974), he declared that ‘la obra posterior de Eliot
pierde en tensión poética lo que gana en claridad contextual y firmeza de
convicciones religiosas’ [Eliot’s later work loses in poetic tension what it
gains in contextual clarity and religious certainty].17 While he remained
resolutely opposed to orthodox Christian conviction, the desire for ‘claridad
contextual’ was always a aracteristic of Paz’s own poetry. e explicit
treatment of time in Four Quartets accompanies an important clarification of
Paz’s own conceptual seme. e present moment comes to replace his
former belief in the
preeminencia del futuro, creencia en el progreso continuo y en la perfectibilidad de la especie,
racionalismo, descrédito de la tradición y la autoridad, humanismo […] la historia concebida como
mara.18
[the pre-eminence of the future, the belief in continuous progress and the perfectibility of the
species, rationalism, the discredit of tradition and authority, humanism […] history conceived as
an onward mar.]
at belief in the future had guided Paz’s early leist reading of The Waste
Land, frequently diverting him from the dramatic aracter of Eliot’s poem
as he pursued a vaguely defined history. His concern with the present
moment in his later poems keeps this preoccupation with history in the
abstract at arm’s length. Paradoxically, this move towards greater contextual
clarity also allows room for a more personal inflection to enter his work.
e polemical, or belief, element of ‘Cuento de dos jardines’ is less
insistent than in the earlier poems that courted The Waste Land. Paz’s
bolder assertions of access to mythical experience are now grounded in the
details of a life lived:
Un día,
como si regresara,
no a mi casa,
al comienzo del Comienzo,
llegué a una claridad.
(OC11, 414)
[One day,
as if I were returning,
not to my house,
to the beginning of the Beginning,
I reaed a clarity.]
Along with this new understatement comes humour: ‘Nuestros cuerpos / se
hablaron, se juntaron y se fueron. / Nosotros nos fuimos con ellos’ [Our
bodies / talked to ea other, came together and le. / We le with them]
(OC11, 416); ‘¡sunyata, / plenitud vacía, / vacuidad redonda como tu grupa!’
[Sunyata, empty plenitude, / vacuity round like your rump!] (OC11, 419). e
humour arises from a shi of address: Paz is no longer writing for a public
about the living conditions of agricultural workers in the Yucatan but
talking to his wife about their physical relationship. Blanco, in a paern that
runs ba through and beyond Paz’s contact with the Surrealists, suggests
the erotic as a mitigation of historical conf lict. ‘Cuento de dos jardines’
relaxes the explicit claim of the earlier poems but intensifies the focus on a
specific erotic life. Charles Tomlinson described Paz’s marriage to Marie-José
as ‘one of the events whi has deeply affected’ his later work,19 and the
combination of philosophical meditation and intimate address in the poem
that recounts that marriage is continued into the last works of Árbol adentro
[Tree Within] (1987) su as ‘Primero de enero’ and ‘Como quien oye llover’.
Eliot has all but disappeared from those last poems, but he does stand as a
presiding figure at the work that marks Paz’s poetic graduation, Pasado en
claro (1975). Once again, Paz calls on Four Quartets for a combination of
philosophical theme and autobiographical content. José Miguel Oviedo
describes Pasado en claro as the ‘most confessional and moving poem that
Paz wrote’.20 It carries an epigraph from Wordsworth’s Prelude — ‘Fair seed-
time had my soul and I grew up / Foster’d alike by beauty and by fear…’ —
whi Paz had read in Cambridge, in 1970, on Charles Tomlinson’s
recommendation.21 As Anthony Stanton points out, however, Four Quartets
is also a presence. In all three poems
past and present, origin and destiny are mixed in the aempt to fix momentarily what
Wordsworth called ‘spots of time’, what Eliot called ‘the point of intersection between the timeless
and time… the moment in and out of time’.22
As in ‘Cuento de dos jardines’, the influence of Eliot’s poem is clearest in the
opening passage:
Oídos con el alma,
pasos mentales más que sombras,
sombras del pensamiento más que pasos,
por el camino de ecos
que la memoria inventa y borra:
sin caminar caminan
sobre este ahora, puente
tendido entre una letra y otra.23
[Heard with the soul,
mental steps more than shadows,
shadows of thought more than steps,
through the path of eoes
that memory invents and erases:
without walking they walk
over this present, bridge
streted out from one leer to another.]
Paz utilizes a number of components from the opening of Burnt Norton:
Footfalls eo in the memory
Down the passage whi we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose garden. My words eo
us, in your mind.
(CPP, 171)
His ‘pasos mentales’ provide a route into the past whi is similar to Eliot’s
‘Footfalls eo in the memory’. Eliot then brings in the reader with ‘My
words eo / us, in your mind’, a oice whi Paz avoids, although he
accentuates Eliot’s conflation of memory and language with ‘ahora, puente /
tendido entre una letra y otra’, and then ‘esta frase, senda de piedras…’ [this
sentence, a path of stones…] (p. 10). Later, Eliot’s garden is replaced by a
‘Patio inconcluso, amenazado / por la escritura y sus incertidumbres’
[incomplete patio, threatened / by writing and its uncertainties] (p. 12); and
‘the leaves were full of ildren, / Hidden excitedly, containing laughter’
(CPP, 172) becomes ‘Cuieos: / me espían entre los follajes / de las letras’
[Whispers: they spy on me from the foliage / of the leers] (p. 15).
Paz’s aempt to recover a form of past innocence through these images
may have been suggested by M. H. Abrams’s Natural Supernaturalism
(1971). Abrams describes both Wordsworth’s Prelude and Eliot’s Four
Quartets as examples of ‘the garden world of peace, innocence, and gaiety of
our individual and generic infancy, before the beginning of the adult and
fallen man’s divided and unhappy consciousness’.24 Yet does Eliot’s garden
represent a return to ildhood? His memory moves ‘down the passage
whi we did not take / Towards the door we never opened’, and he asks,
‘Shall we follow / the deception of the thrush?’ (CPP, 171). Eliot seems to be
warning against the temptation of a past whi cannot be reaed and
whi perhaps never was.25 In a determinedly elegiac vision, time is
unredeemable.
Charles Tomlinson contrasts an Eliotic conception of time whi is tainted
by the eternal with Paz’s more worldly ‘deepening — oen erotic — of the
content of time itself’. In a comparison of Tomlinson and Paz, however, Ruth
A. Grogan suggests another distinction:
Because Paz’s model for the escape from ronometric time is sexual ecstasy, he thinks of time’s
transfiguration as an ‘instant’, something out of time, whereas Tomlinson’s most frequent model
for the transfiguration of time is music, an art uerly dependent on the passage of time.26
Grogan contrasts not a worldly and an eternal vision, but a poetry whi
anowledges the passage of time and one that aempts to arrest it. is
sear for a moment beyond succession appears in a later revision of Pasado
en claro, whi summons Eliot:
no han inventado el tiempo todavía,
no ha envejecido el sol,
esta nieve es idéntica a la yerba,
siempre y nunca es lo mismo.27
(OC12, 80)
[they have not yet invented time,
the sun has not grown old,
this snow is identical to grass,
always and never are the same.]
Paz’s metaphorical conflation of snow and living grass recalls the ‘transitory
blossom’ of Little Gidding:
Now the hedgerow
Is blaned for an hour with transitory blossom
Of snow, a bloom more sudden
an that of summer, neither budding nor fading,
Not in the seme of generation
(CPP, 191)
Here too is an apparently timeless moment, ‘not in the seme of
generation’. Yet Eliot’s snow whi is ‘neither budding nor fading’ has
appeared as a ‘sudden’ bloom, blaning the hedgerow for only ‘an hour
with transitory blossom’. e image of timelessness is itself fleeting. Paz
projects his images beyond time where Eliot engages an apprehension of
timelessness in a complex experience of shiing identities and seasons whi
is rooted in the present.
Eliot’s ‘transitory blossom’ expresses the persistently elegiac strain of his
verse. A sense of unreality, of presences whi are not quite present,
pervades his poems, whether in the curiously rapt elegy for Phlebas as ‘A
current under sea / Pied his bones in whispers’ (CPP, 71), or the conflation
of loss and feared anticipation in ‘Eyes I dare not meet in dreams / In
death’s dream kingdom / ese do not appear’ (CPP, 83). His acute sense of
transience and the void that lies beyond finite experience has its formal
counterpart in the Symbolist isolation of textual fragments whi float clear
of interpreting comment: experience is separated from meaning. Paz was
fascinated by both the form and the vision of absence, as his experiment
with simultaneísmo in the United States, then with the Mallarmé of Un
Coup de dés in Blanco, and his repeated reference to Heidegger’s nada aest.
Yet he struggled to admit the threatening aspect of this experience in poems
that rea for compensating forms of utopian myth and conceptual
explanation.
In a leer to Pere Gimferrer of 31 October 1988, a month aer the award
of the T. S. Eliot Prize, Paz surveyed Eliot’s work and what it had meant to
him:
En estos meses he releído a Eliot y he vuelto a comprobar que en su obra hay un tránsito —mejor
dio: momentos de fusión— entre la vida histórica y la vida espiritual íntima. En esto reside su
paradójica modernidad y lo que, desde el principio, me atrajo en su poesía. Ya te he contado que lo
leí por primera vez en 1930, cuando yo tenía 17 años; desde entonces me acompaña, me intriga, me
irrita, me conmueve. Para Eliot lo único que de verdad cuenta y hace soportable el diario tedio y
horror diario no está en el tiempo sucesivo, sea el de la historia o el del vivir cotidiano, sino en la
intersección de los tiempos, en esos raros momentos en que, simultáneamente, somos tiempo y
destiempo. Esos momentos en los que, como él dice, se juntan el ahora y el nunca (never and
always). Son nuestra porción de paraíso. Éste fue también el tema de Proust, aunque sin más allá,
sin trascendencia. Tal vez por esto, al cerrar su libro, nos preguntamos desconsolados: ¿por qué,
para qué?28
[I have re-read Eliot in recent months and I have confirmed once more that in his work there is a
movement — or rather, moments of fusion — between the historical and the intimate, spiritual life.
is is where his paradoxical modernity resides and what aracted me to his poems from the very
beginning. As I have said before, I first read him in 1930 when I was seventeen years old; since
then he has accompanied, intrigued, irritated and moved me. For Eliot the only thing that truly
counts and makes the daily tedium and horror tolerable is not in successive time, whether it be of
history or daily living, but in the intersection of times, in those rare moments in whi we are
simultaneously time and timelessness. ose moments in whi, as he says, the present and the
never meet (never and always). ey are our portion of paradise. is was also Proust’s theme,
although without a beyond, without transcendence. Perhaps for this reason, on closing his book,
we ask disconsolately: Why? For what?]
Paz revisits the historical poet of 1930, the poet of ‘El páramo’ and ‘Los
hombres huecos’. He had aempted to mitigate this poet’s vision of ‘el diario
tedio y horror diario’ with leist and then Surrealist assertion. Now, he
employs Proust and Eliot’s own ‘moment in and out of time’ from the Four
Quartets as a vision whi ‘hace soportable’ the world of those earlier
poems.29 He confirms the move away from a preoccupation with history as
public events to what is simultaneously a more personal and more
philosophical contemplation of history as time. Yet problems remain.
Proust’s conception of time does not go far enough, and Paz closes À la
recherche... asking ‘¿por qué, para qué?’. He cannot, however, share Eliot’s
‘fe en la salvación ni su terror ante la condena’.
Paz continues his discussion in a further leer to Gimferrer of 20
December 1988:
La redención que busca Eliot no es estética ni subjetiva: es una salvación religiosa que comprende
a todos los hombres y a todos los tiempos. Su búsqueda es personal (la salvación de su alma),
histórica (¿qué hacer con nuestro mundo?) y transhistórica (la redención del género humano).
Como todos nosotros, Proust no puede decir nada sobre esta búsqueda. Como todos nosotros
también —aunque con más genio que nosotros— Proust substituye a la revelación religiosa por la
revelación poética. En cambio, Eliot reaza la estética y la poesía (o las coloca en un segundo
plano) en favor de lo único que de verdad le importa: la revelación religiosa […] Yo me quedo con
la respuesta de Proust pero me doy cuenta de que es incompleta. En realidad no es una verdadera
respuesta: es menos que una religión y más que una estética. Comprendo que Proust fue un talento
muo más amplio y poderoso que Eliot: fue el creador de un mundo imaginario mientras que el
otro fue el autor de unos admirables poemas líricos y religiosos… […] Su obra [la obra de Eliot] es
corta, pero variada —Eros es el gran ausente— y, no obstante, su delgada voz penetró en zonas
espirituales que no rozó Proust.30
[e redemption that Eliot seeks is not aesthetic or subjective: it is a religious salvation whi
includes all men and all times. His sear is personal (the salvation of his soul), historical (what to
do with this world?) and trans-historical (the redemption of the human race). Like all of us, Proust
cannot say anything about this sear. Like all of us also — although with more brilliance than us
— Proust substitutes poetic for religious revelation. Eliot, for his part, rejects aesthetics and poetry
(or places them in the baground) in favour of the one thing that maers to him: religious
revelation […] I side with Proust’s reply but I realize that it is incomplete. In reality it is not a
genuine answer: it is less than a religion and more than an aesthetic. I understand that Proust was
a mu more wide-ranging and more powerful talent than Eliot: he was the creator of an
imaginary world while the other was the author of some admirable lyric and religious poems […]
His [Eliot’s] oeuvre is short but varied — Eros is the great absentee — and yet his thin voice
penetrated areas of the spirit that Proust did not tou.]
ese leers constitute Paz’s last substantial discussion of Eliot’s work, yet
they bring no final resolution of his relationship with the presence that ‘me
acompaña, me intriga, me irrita, me conmueve’. He remains divided over a
poet who could represent the artepurismo of the Contemporáneos, the
history of the political le, and a belief in God and organized religion that
Paz could never share. Proust offers an alternative, secular vision. Yet Paz is
not satisfied: ‘no es una verdadera respuesta: es menos que una religión y
más que una estética’. Confronted with what he describes as the inadequacy
of his own, and Proust’s, position, one senses a hostility emerge towards
Eliot: Proust remains ‘un talento muo más amplio y poderoso’ while
Eliot’s poems receive the lukewarm ‘admirables’. Unable to accept Eliot’s
Christian belief, Paz aempts to sele the comparison on purely artistic
terms. Yet he concludes with an observation whi leaves the previous
debate to one side: ‘su delgada voz penetró en zonas espirituales que no rozó
Proust’. What are those ‘zonas espirituales’, and how do they relate to the
belief in salvation and punishment that Paz has rejected? He does not pursue
su questions, and so anowledges an aspect of his response to Eliot whi
lies beyond the terms through whi he has comprehended him.
Paz’s leers to Pere Gimferrer do allow for an Eliot who has evaded his
reading, yet they also confirm a aracteristic determination to judge poetry
in terms of belief. Given this tendency towards conceptual explication, it is
perhaps unsurprising that critics have come to value Paz’s essayistic output
above his poems. Gilberto Prado Galán cites the view that ‘Paz is mu more
influential as an essayist and critic than as a poet’ in a list of recent critical
commonplaces.31 For Ilan Stavans, ‘Paz would have preferred to be
remembered as a poet, but his prose is a beer metronome for our times.’32
He enthuses that Paz’s
nonfiction […] is sublime. Even those essays in whi he elucidates on poetry itself are inspiring.
Oen deep into the night, when everything else feels banal, I open The Bow and the Lyre, his
meditation on poetic revelation, and am quily hypnotized by it.33
Yet what is le when the hypnotic effects of the prose have faded? El arco y
la lira typifies an argumentative method whi is agile, brilliant even; but
the dazzling succession of ideas works at several removes from the poetry
that is its justification. Moreover, in works su as Piedra de sol, there is
evidence that the more polemical assertions of the prose have come to
interfere with the poems themselves.
For Rubén Medina, the essays represent ‘various strategies and a will to
power and authority’.34 e poems are in danger of becoming empty
counters in a political game that is conducted through the prose. Medina’s
argument is a persuasive retort to the dominant, and domineering, figure
that Paz became, memorably caricatured in Roberto Bolaño’s Los detectives
salvajes, boasting ‘con una voz que salía como del corazón de un lobo: a mí
no me asalta ni el presidente de la República’ [in a voice that seemed to
come from the heart of a wolf: not even the president of the Republic mugs
me].35 Medina’s approa also receives some support from Eliot’s own
critical writings. In ‘e Music of Poetry’, he declared:
I believe that the critical writings of poets […] owe a great deal of their interest to the fact that the
poet, at the ba of his mind, if not his ostensible purpose, is always trying to defend the kind of
poetry he is writing, or to formulate the kind that he wants to write.
(OPP, 26)
Yet the bale in Paz, and in Eliot, between poetic practice and explicit
critical formulation is not simply an aempt to hoodwink readers. It is a
recognition of an ambivalence that is widespread in poetry of the modern
period. Poems su as Un Coup de dés and The Waste Land allenge the
relationship of part to whole, experience to world-view, text to meaning.
ey thus call into question the interaction of poem and critical reflection.
Inevitably, there is a temptation to sele that ambivalence. In a leer to
Charles Morice, Mallarmé stated that ‘Je révère l’opinion de Poe, nul vestige
d’une philosophie, l’éthique ou la métaphysique, ne transparaîtra’ [I am in
complete sympathy with Poe’s view that no philosophy, whether moral or
metaphysical, must be allowed to appear in a poem].36 ere is an irony, of
course, in Mallarmé’s use of Poe as a theorist rather than as a poet to express
this view. In ‘From Poe to Valéry’ (1948), Eliot discussed the disparity
between Poe’s English and American reputation as a minor practitioner, and
the ‘high opinion’ of his thought held by Baudelaire, Mallarmé and,
especially, Valéry (TCC, 36). For all his reputation as an ‘Olympian
pontificator’,37 whi he did mu to foster, Eliot was anxious about the
ways that poetic theory might interfere with practice. One of his own most
notorious theories, the dissociation of sensibility, worried about what he
described as the ‘reflective’ poets of the nineteenth century, poets who
‘ruminated’ (SE, 287 & 288).
Eliot notoriously praised Henry James for possessing ‘a mind so fine that
no idea could violate it’.38 Yet he recognized elsewhere that reflection, and
ideas, were ines ca pable: ‘immediate experience, at either the beginning or
end of our journey, is anni hilation and uer night’.39 Paz would certainly
have welcomed his comment in ‘e Frontiers of Criticism’ (1956) that ‘a
critic who was interested in nothing but “literature” would have very lile
to say to us, for his literature would be a pure abstraction’ (OPP, 116).40 Yet
when a poet has more to say about poetry, the local interactions in his own
poems, of word with word and word with reader, can suffer. Aer the
dramatic transitions of The Waste Land, readers have commonly baulked at
the more solemn commentary of Four Quartets, what Geoffrey Faber
described as the ‘ “lecture-stigmata” ’ in a note to Eliot on the manuscript.41
Paz, who had begun his career calling for an ‘arte de tesis’ [art of thesis],
gravitates naturally towards this side of Eliot. Yet in doing so, he ooses to
leave behind the productive ambivalence of the poem that first introduced
him to what would become an abiding influence. If the signs of The Waste
Land remain both inviolate and indecipherable, it is precisely because they
encourage interpretive movements for whi there is no final resting point:
from dramatic vignee to the solarly parody of the notes, and beyond to
the contradictory assertions The Sacred Wood and other, uncollected essays
of the period. ose movements do come to rest in the Four Quartets, and
they generally take more predictable, conceptualized forms in Paz’s own
work. How valuable this particular version of Eliot proves, only time and a
longer historical perspective will tell. Both Stavans and Medina do suggest,
however, that if Paz’s prose has done mu to secure his presence in
Mexican and international leers it is at the expense of his poems. ose
poems now require new readers. ey will decide whether his work marks a
significant development of the poets, su as Eliot, whom he claimed as
formative influences; or whether it is to occupy no more than a footnote in
the history of modern poetry.
Notes to the Conclusion
1. Paz, ‘Nocturno de la ciudad abandonada’, p. 7.
2. Ellmann, The Poetics of Impersonality, p. 91.
3. e anecdote is recounted by Paul Valéry in ‘Poésie et pensée abstraite’ (1939), Œuvres, ed. by
Jean Hytier, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), I, 1324.
4. Ellmann, The Poetics of Impersonality, p. 92.
5. Paz, ‘Cuatro o cinco puntos cardinales’, in OC15, 39.
6. Charles Tomlinson, ‘Traducciones y colaboraciones’, in Archivo Blanco, ed. by Enrico Mario
Santí (México: Ediciones El Equilibrista, 1995), pp. 153–75 (pp. 164 & 167).
7. Paz, Poesía en movimiento, p. 11; Malcolm Bowie, Mallarmé and the Art of Being Difficult
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 119.
8. Santí, El acto de las palabras, p. 329.
9. Ibid., p. 330.
10. Santí, El acto de las palabras, p. 349.
11. Bowie, Mallarmé and the Art of Being Difficult, p. 119.
12. Santí, El acto de las palabras, p. 301.
13. In ‘La palabra edificante: Luis Cernuda’ (1964), Paz declared that ‘A Cernuda ese poema le
parecía lo mejor que había escrito Eliot y varias veces discutimos las razones de esta
preferencia, pues yo me inclinaba por The Waste Land’ (OC3, 245).
14. Gifford, ‘Introduction’, in Enrique Caracciolo-Trejo, ed., The Penguin Book of Latin American
Verse, p. xliv.
15. Paz may have remembered this line from its first appearance in Murder in the Cathedral, whi
he had helped to translate (CPP, 271).
16. Gifford, ‘Introduction’, in Enrique Caracciolo-Trejo, ed., The Penguin Book of Latin American
Verse, p. xliv; Tomlinson ‘Introduction’, in Paz, Selected Poems, p. 13.
17. Paz, Los hijos del limo, in OC1, 453.
18. Paz, ‘Revuelta, revolución, rebelión’ (1967) in OC10, 591.
19. Tomlinson ‘Introduction’, in Paz, Selected Poems, p. 14.
20. José Miguel Oviedo, ‘e Passages of Memory: Reading a Poem by Octavio Paz’, in Octavio Paz:
Homage to the Poet, ed. by Kosrof Chantikian (San Francisco: Kosmos, 1980), pp. 199–239 (p.
199). He cites Piedra de sol (1957) as an earlier example of this autobiographical poetry (p. 200).
e ‘corredores sin fin de la memoria’ (OC11, 219) of Piedra de sol may well suggest an early
use of Four Quartets — ‘Footfalls eo in the memory / Down the passage…’ (CPP, 171) — for
this type of poem.
21. See Tomlinson, ‘Mexican Poet Inspired by een Victoria’, Sunday Telegraph, 4 June 1989, p. 22.
22. Anthony Stanton, ‘Vida, memoria y escritura en Pasado en claro’, in Tradición y actualidad de la
literatura iberoamericana, ed. by Pamela Bacarisse, 2 vols (Pisburgh, PA: University of
Pisburgh, 1995), I, 85–91 (p. 87).
23. Paz, Pasado en claro (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1975), p. 9. Further references to this
edition are given aer quotations in the text. I have referred to the first edition of the poem,
whi is revised in OC12, 75–91.
24. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, p. 319.
25. e second tempter in Murder in the Cathedral offers omas a return to the past whi must be
resisted: ‘e ancellorship that you resigned / When you were made Arbishop — that was
a mistake / On your part — still may be regained’ (CPP, 248).
26. Ruth A. Grogan, ‘e Fall into History: Charles Tomlinson and Octavio Paz’, Comparative
Literature, 44, 2 (1992), 144–60 (p. 152).
27. e third line was originally ‘esta nieve es idéntica a la otra’, Paz, Pasado en claro, p. 20.
28. Paz, Memorias y palabras, pp. 330–31.
29. Although Paz’s prose comments on Four Quartets tend to be unenthusiastic, the re-reading
whi he describes to Pere Gimferrer appears to have provoked a new admission of the
importance of Eliot’s later poem to him. He surprised Charles Tomlinson in interview the
following year, who declared: ‘I take it that you feel Eliot’s development is rather
disappointing aer The Waste Land, that you go from that poem of many voices to that rather
parsonorial single voice of the Quartets.’ Paz replied, ‘Well, in some ways, but on the other
hand I think also the Four Quartets — don’t you think? — is a work of great intensity and great
perfection.’ ‘Octavio Paz Talks to Charles Tomlinson’, May 1989.
30. Paz, Memorias y palabras, pp. 333–34.
31. Gilberto Prado Galán, ‘La poesía mexicana ¿Descansa en Paz?’, Ínsula, 707 (Nov 2005), p. 2.
32. Ilan Stavans, Octavio Paz: A Meditation (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001), p. 4.
33. Ibid., p. 6.
34. Medina, Autor, autoridad y autorización, p. 17.
35. Roberto Bolaño, Los detectives salvajes (Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, 2000), p. 506.
36. Mallarmé, Propos sur la poésie, p. 207; trans. by Bradford Cook, Selected Prose Poems, p. 104.
37. Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory (London: Verso,
1978), p. 148.
38. Eliot, ‘In Memory of Henry James’, p. 2.
39. Eliot, Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley (London: Faber and Faber,
1964), p. 31.
40. is article appeared in Spanish as ‘Las fronteras de la crítica’, trans. by José Bianco, Sur, 251
(Mar-Apr 1958), 4–17 (p. 16).
41. Helen Gardner, ed., The Composition of Four Quartets, p. 133.
Biblography
For ease of reference the bibliography is divided into the following sections
and subsections:
T. S. Eliot in Spanish Octavio Paz Complete Works of Octavio Paz Other
Works by Octavio Paz Interviews with Octavio Paz Critical Works on
Octavio Paz
T. S. Eliot Works by T. S. Eliot Uncollected Articles and Introductions by T.
S. Eliot Critical Works on T. S. Eliot
Other Works Literary Periodicals Consulted as Primary Sources Other
Works of Literature, Criticism, eory, Intellectual History etc.
*****
T. S. Eliot in Spanish
e following list of Spanish translations of, and articles on, T. S. Eliot is
indebted to three sources: DONALD GALLUP, T. S. Eliot: A Bibliography; the
apter ‘La presencia de T. S. Eliot in México’ in M. E. González Padilla,
Poesía y teatro de T. S. Eliot; and EMILIO BARÓN PALMA, T. S. Eliot en España
(all listed in the main section dedicated to Eliot of this bibliography). I have
selected from and added to their findings in order to establish a picture of
the works that Paz might reasonably have known. Although I have not
excluded peninsular Spain, whi produced some highly influential
translations of Eliot, the inevitable bias is towards Mexico and Argentina.
Correspondence between T. S. Eliot and Ángel Flores, 1928–1930, Private
collection, Mrs. Valerie Eliot, London
‘Guía de poetas norteamericanos’, Contemporáneos, México, 4 (Sept 1928),
91–96. Article by Xavier Villaurrutia whi includes discussion of T. S.
Eliot
Tierra baldía (Barcelona: Editorial Cervantes, 1930). A translation with
introduction by Ángel Flores of The Waste Land with Eliot’s notes
‘El páramo’, Contemporáneos, 26–27 (Jul–Aug 1930), 7–32. A prose
translation with introduction by Enrique Munguía Jr. of The Waste Land,
without Eliot’s notes
‘Los hombres huecos’, Contemporáneos, 33 (Feb 1931), 132–36. A translation
by León Felipe of The Hollow Men
‘Poemas (hora diversa) de T. S. Eliot’, La gaceta literaria, Madrid, 99 (15 Feb
1931), 3. Prose translations by Juan Ramón Jiménez of Marina, ‘La Figlia
Che Piange’ and the third section of Ash-Wednesday (under its original
title ‘Som de L’Escalina’)
‘Lancelot Andrews’ [sic], Cruz y Raya, Madrid, 12 (Mar 1934), 59–87. A
translation with introduction by A. Marialar of ‘Lancelot Andrewes’
‘Journey of the Magi’, “1616” (English and Spanish Poetry), London, 8 (1935),
7–10. A translation by Manuel Altolaguirre preceded by the English text
‘Rapsodia de una noe ventosa’, Sur, Buenos Aires, 29 (Feb 1937), 43–46. A
translation by Julio Irazusta of ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’
‘Swinburne’, Sur, 33 (Jun 1937), 93–94. Jorge Luis Borges allenges Eliot’s
‘Swinburne as Poet’ (1920)
‘El canto de amor de J. Alfred Prufro’, Poesía (suplemento), México, 2 (Apr
1938), 1–10. A translation by Rodolfo Usigli of ‘e Love Song of J.
Alfred Prufro’
‘Miércoles de ceniza’, Sur, 48 (Sept 1938), 20–29. A translation by Bernardo
Ortiz de Montellano of Ash-Wednesday
‘Poemas’, Taller (suplemento), México, 2, 10 (Mar–Apr 1940), 61–105.
Selected and introduced by Bernardo Ortiz de Montellano, includes
translations of ‘e Love Song of J. Alfred Prufro’ by Rodolfo Usigli;
‘La Figlia Che Piange’ by Juan Ramón Jiménez; The Waste Land by
Ángel Flores; The Hollow Men by León Felipe; Marina by Juan Ramón
Jiménez; A Song for Simeon by Octavio G. Barreda; and Ash-Wednesday
by Bernardo Ortiz de Montellano
Poemas (México: Ediciones Taller, 1940). 250 copies. A separate edition of the
Taller supplement
La idea de una sociedad cristiana (Buenos Aires and México: Espasa–Calpe
Argentina, 1942). A translation by Carlos M. Reyles of The Idea of a
Christian Society
‘Poesía en tiempos de guerra’, Sur, 99 (Dec 1942), 27–29. An anonymous
translation of ‘T. S. Eliot on Poetry in Wartime’
‘La música de la poesía’, El Hijo Pródigo, México, 1, 1 (15 Apr 1943), 45–54. A
translation by Octavio G. Barreda of ‘e Music of Poetry’
‘Testimonios (sobre la política y la juventud)’, Letras de México, México, 19
(15 Sept 1943), 105. A passage from ‘Poesía en tiempos de guerra’
alongside passages by Antonio Maado and Juan Ramón Jiménez
‘Los cuartetos de T. S. Eliot y la poesía impopular’, El Hijo Pródigo, 2, 8 (15
Nov 1943), 89–94. An article on Four Quartets by Rodolfo Usigli.
Includes his own translations of various quotations from Eliot’s work
Los poetas metafísicos y otros ensayos sobre teatro y religión (Buenos Aires:
Emecé, 1944). A translation by Sara Rubinstein of Selected Essays
1917/1932
‘East Coker’, Orígenes, La Habana, 3, 9 (Spring 1946), 21–27. A translation by
José Rodríguez Feo
Miércoles de ceniza (México: Espiga, 1946). 200 copies. A separate edition of
Bernardo Ortiz de Montellano’s translation of Ash-Wednesday, with
introduction, and English and Spanish on facing pages
‘Los cuartetos de T. S. Eliot’, Sur, 146 (Dec 1946), 7–46. An article on Four
Quartets by Patri O. Dudgeon
¿é es un clásico?’, Sur, 153–56 (Jul–Oct 1947), 18–44. A translation by E.
L. Revol of ‘What is a Classic?’
‘Little Gidding (fragmento)’, Sur, 153–56 (Jul–Oct 1947), 366–69. A
translation by E. L. Revol of the first part of section v of Little Gidding,
with English and Spanish on facing pages
‘La reunión de familia’, Sur, 159 (Jan 1948), 109–18. An article by William
Shand on The Family Reunion
‘T. S. Eliot’, Sur, 169 (Nov 1948), 7–10. A note by Victoria Ocampo
Notas para la definición de la cultura, Colección Grandes Ensayistas, 19
(Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1949). A translation by Jerónimo Alberto
Arancibia of Notes towards the Definition of Culture
‘¿é es en clásico?’, Prometeus, México, 1, 2 (Apr 1949), 105–58. A
translation by Rodolfo Usigli of ‘What is a Classic?’
Cocktail Party (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1950). A translation by Miguel Alfredo
Olivera of The Cocktail Party
Cuatro cuartetos (Madrid: Ediciones Rialp, 1951). A translation by Vicente
Gaos of Four Quartets
‘ “e Cotail Party” de T. S. Eliot’, Sur, 203 (Sept 1951), 100. A Review by
Miguel Alfredo Olivera of The Cocktail Party at the New eatre,
London
‘ “e Cotail Party” de T. S. Eliot’, Sur, 209–10 (Mar–Apr 1952), 128–30. A
review by Vera Macarow of Miguel Alfredo Olivera’s translation of The
Cocktail Party
‘Carta a Vera Macarow’, Sur, 211–12 (May–Jun 1952), 169–70. Refers to
Macarow’s earlier review of The Cocktail Party
Poesía y drama, Colección Emecé de Obras Contemporáneas (Buenos Aires:
Emecé, 1952). A translation by Jorge Zalamea of ‘Poetry and Drama’
Antología de la poesía norteamericana (México: Colección Letras de México,
1952). Selected and translated with an introduction and biographical and
critical notes by Augustí Bartra. Includes translations of ‘Preludes I’, ‘e
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufro’, The Waste Land, The Hollow Men,
Marina, Ash-Wednesday, and The Dry Salvages
Reunión de familia, Teatro del Mundo (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1953). A
translation by Rosa Chacel of The Family Reunion
Tierra baldía y otros poemas, Colección Grandes Poetas (Buenos Aires:
Emecé, 1954). A translation of The Waste Land and Other Poems
‘Noticia de Londres’, Sur, 227 (Mar–Apr 1954), 78–79. Patricio Gannon
discusses responses to The Confidential Clerk
Función de la poesía y función de la crítica (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1955). A
translation by Jaime Gil de Biedma of The Use of Poetry and the Use of
Criticism
Cuatro cuartetos (Buenos Aires: Raigal, 1956). A translation by J. R. Wilco
of Four Quartets with English and Spanish on facing pages
‘Mitos y cansancio clásico’ by José Lezama Lima, 1st edn (La Habana:
Instituto Nacional de Cultura, 1957); repr. in La expresión americana y
otros ensayos (Montevideo: Arca, 1969), pp. 7–29. An aa on Eliot’s
understanding of myth
‘Las fronteras de la crítica’, Sur, 251 (Mar–Apr 1958), 4–17. A translation by
José Bianco of ‘e Frontiers of Criticism’
Sobre la poesía y los poetas (Buenos Aires: Sur, 1959). A translation by María
Raquel Bengolea of On Poetry and Poets
Su hombre de confianza (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1959). A translation by
Miguel Alfredo Olivera of The Confidential Clerk
‘Goethe y Mr. Eliot’(1959) in Luis Cernuda, Obra completa, ed. by Derek
Harris and Luis Maristany, 3 vols (Madrid: Ediciones Siruela, 1993–94),
ii, 759–67. Cernuda aas Eliot’s discussion of Goethe in The Use of
Poetry and the Use of Criticism
Asesinato en la catedral (México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de
México, 1960). A translation by Jorge Hernández Campos of Murder in
the Cathedral
El viejo estadista,Teatro del Mundo (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1963). A
translation by Miguel Alfredo Olivera of The Elder Statesman
‘Homenaje a T. S. Eliot’, Revista de Bellas Artes, México, 1 (Jan–Feb 1965),
4–23. Includes translations of The Waste Land, without notes, and an
apocryphal poem ‘Estampa’, by Homero Aridjis and Bey Ferber; ‘Mr
Apollinax’, ‘Conversation Galante’, and ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’
are translated by Isabel Fraire
‘Mínimo homenaje a T. S. Eliot’, Revista de la Universidad de México (Feb
1965), 31. An obituary by Juan García Ponce
‘Paisajes’, Diálogos, México, 3 (Mar–Apr 1965), 22–23. Translations by Isabel
Fraire of ‘Landscapes’: ‘New Hampshire’, ‘Virginia’, ‘Usk’, ‘Ranno, by
Glencoe’, and ‘Cape Ann’
‘Homenaje’, Corno emplumado, México, 14 (Apr 1965), 84–89. Includes a
translation of ‘e Naming of Cats’ by Rosa del Olmo, a note by editor
Sergio Mondragón, and answers to a questionnaire by Ludovico Silva,
Augustí Bartra, Héctor Yánover, Homero Aridjis and Alejandra Pizarnik
‘Recordando a Eliot’, Sur, 297 (Nov–Dec 1965), 8–30. A translation by María
Antonia Oyuela de Grant of Stephen Spender’s ‘Remembering Eliot’
‘Dante’, Sur, Buenos Aires, 297 (Nov–Dec 1965), 31–40. A selection from
parts one and two of ‘Dante’ (1929), translated by Sara Rubinstein
Poesías reunidas 1909–1962 (Madrid: Alianza, 1978). A translation, by José
María Valverde, of Collected Poems
‘Miércoles de ceniza’, La Semana de Bellas Artes, México, 31 (5 Jul 1978), 2–
7. A reprint of Bernardo Ortiz de Montellano’s 1938 translation, with
introduction
Cuatro cuartetos (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1989). A translation
by José Emilio Paeco of Four Quartets
Poesía completa 1909–1962 (México: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana,
1990). A translation by José Luis Rivas of Collected Poems
Octavio Paz
Complete Works of Octavio Paz
Obras completas, 2nd edn, edición del autor, 15 vols (Barcelona: Círculo de
Lectores; México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1994–2003)
1. La casa de la presencia: Poesía e historia (1994)
2. Excursiones/incursiones: Dominio extranjero (1994)
3. Fundación y disidencia: Dominio hispano (1994)
4. Generaciones y semblanzas: Dominio mexicano (1994)
5. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz o las trampas de la fe (1994)
6. Los privilegios de la vista I: Arte moderno universal (1994)
7. Los privilegios de la vista II: Arte de México (1994)
8. El peregrino en su patria: Historia y política de México (1994)
9. Ideas y costumbres I: La letra y el cetro (1995)
10. Ideas y costumbres II: Usos y símbolos (1996)
11. Obra poética I (1997)
12. Obra poética II (1997)
13. Miscelánea I: Primeros escritos (1999)
14. Miscelánea II: Últimos escritos (2001)
15. Miscelánea III: Entrevistas (2003)
Other Works by Octavio Paz
‘Nocturno de la ciudad abandonada’, Barandal, 4 (Nov 1931), 7–9
‘Desde el principio’, Cuadernos del Valle de México, 1 (Sept 1933), 11–13
Luna silvestre (México: Fábula, 1933)
¡No pasarán! (México: Simbad, 1936)
Raíz del hombre (México: Simbad, 1937)
‘Sonetos’, Taller Poético, 3 (Mar 1937), 33–38
‘Notas’, El Nacional, 8 May 1937, 2nd section, pp. 1 & 3
Bajo tu clara sombra y otros poemas sobre España (Valencia: Ediciones
Españolas, 1937)
‘Las enseñanzas de una juventud: El camino de la unidad’, El Popular, 3 Aug
1938, pp. 5 & 6
Entre la piedra y la flor (México: Nueva Voz, 1941)
Bajo tu clara sombra 1935–1938 (México: Letras de México, 1941)
‘Crepúsculos de la ciudad’, Letras de México, 3, 18 (15 Jun 1942), 3
A la orilla del mundo y Primer día, Bajo tu clara sombra, Raíz del hombre,
Noche de resurrecciones (México: Compañía Editora y Librera ARS,
1942)
‘Respuesta a un cónsul’, Letras de México, 4, 8 (15 Aug 1943), 5
‘Sueño de Eva’, Sur, 127 (May 1945), 47–50
Libertad bajo palabra (México: Tezontle, 1949)
El arco y la lira: el poema; la revelación poética; poesía e historia, 1st edn
(México and Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1956)
‘Inaugural Address’, in T. S. Eliot, ed. by M. M. Bhalla (Bombay: P. C.
Manaktala & Sons, 1965), pp. 1–10
Poesía en movimiento: México, 1915–1966, ed. by Octavio Paz, Alí
Chumacero, José Emilio Paeco and Homero Aridjis (México: Siglo
XXI, 1966)
El arco y la lira: el poema; la revelación poética; poesía e historia, 2nd edn,
corr. and exp. (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1967)
Pasado en claro (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1975)
Xavier Villaurrutia en persona y en obra (México: Fondo de Cultura
Económica, 1978)
Selected Poems, trans. by Charles Tomlinson and others (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1979)
‘Los pasos contados’, Camp de l’arpa: Revista de literatura, 4, 74 (Apr 1980),
51–62
‘T. S. Eliot’, Vuelta, 142 (Sept 1988), 40–41
‘Rescate de Enrique Munguía’, Vuelta, 142 (Sept 1988), 42–43
Itinerario (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1994)
Blanco/Archivo Blanco, ed. with intr. by Enrico Mario Santí (México:
Ediciones El Equili-brista, 1995)
El laberinto de la soledad, ed. with intr. by Enrico Mario Santí, 4th edn
(Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, 1998)
Correspondencia: Alfonso Reyes/Octavio Paz (1939–1959), ed. and intr. by
Anthony Stanton (México: Fundación Octavio Paz and Fondo de Cultura
Económica, 1998)
Memorias y palabras: Cartas a Pere Gimferrer 1966–1997, ed. by Pere
Gimferrer (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1999)
Interviews with Octavio Paz
VERNENGO, ROBERTO, ‘Entrevista con Octavio Paz’, Sur, 227 (Mar–Apr 1954),
61–64
FERGUSON, WILLIAM, ‘La evolución poética de Octavio Paz’, Diorama de la
Cultura (supl. of Excélsior), 2 Jul 1972, pp. 7–9
TAJONAR, HÉCTOR, ‘Con Octavio Paz y España como tema’, Siempre!, 1246 (11
May 1977), 30–34
SELIGSON, ESTHER, ‘ La hija de Rappaccini: Entrevista con Octavio Paz’, La
Cabra, 3 (1 Oct 1978), 9–11
‘Neruda veía la realidad de un modo fantástico y maravilloso: Tenía los ojos
de sonámbulo’, Unomásuno, 21 Sept 1983, p. 15; ‘Hay que juzgar al poeta,
no al político; con el Neruda político tenemos que ser duros: Paz’,
Unomásuno, 22 Sept 1983, p. 17
‘Octavio Paz’, unpublished transcript of Bookmark interview broadcast on
BBC 2 (29 Feb 1988)
‘Octavio Paz talks to Charles Tomlinson’, recorded at Emmanuel College,
Cambridge, May 1989 (Keele University, 1989)
REYES, JUAN JOSÉ, and FERNANDO GARCÍA RAMÍREZ, ‘Entrevista con Octavio
Paz: Itinerarios de un poeta’, El Nacional (supl. cultural), 29 Nov 1990,
pp. 13 & 14; ‘Las revelaciones del cuerpo’, 30 Nov 1990, pp. 13 & 16;
‘Escribir para estar en tierra’, El Nacional, 1 Dec 1990, p. 16
‘El poeta talentoso transforma la tradición’, Excélsior, 16 Feb 1991, pp. 1 & 3
PERDOMO ORALLANA, JOSÉ LUIS, ‘Me asombra haber llegado a los 80: Octavio
Paz’, El Financiero, 28 Mar 1994, p. 69; 29 Mar 1994, p. 73; 30 Mar 1994,
pp. 69–70; 31 Mar 1994, p. 57
Octavio Paz at the een Elizabeth Hall, London, 10 June 1996, presented by
Miael Smidt (Poetry Library, London)
Critical Works on Octavio Paz
ABREU GÓMEZ, ERMILO, ‘ Entre la piedra y la flor de Octavio Paz’, Tierra
Nueva, 9–10 (May– Aug 1941), 173–74
AGUILAR MORA, JORGE, La divina pareja: Historia y mito en Octavio Paz
(México: Ediciones Era, 1978)
CHILES, FRANCES, Octavio Paz: The Mythic Dimension (New York: Peter Lang,
1987)
CUESTA, JORGE, ‘ Raíz del hombre, Octavio Paz’, Letras de México, 2 (1 Feb
1937), 3 & 9
DURÁN, MANUEL, ‘La estética de Octavio Paz’, Revista Mexicana de
Literatura, 8 (1956), 114–36
EDWARDS, MICHAEL, ‘ “Renga”, Translation, and Eliot’s Ghost’, P.N. Review, 7,
2 (1980), 24–28
ESCALANTE, EVODIO, ‘La vanguardia requisada’, Fractal, 1, 2, 4 (Jan–Mar
1997), pp. 67–87; <www.fractal.com.mx>
FEIN, JOHN, Toward Octavio Paz: A Reading of his Major Poems, 1957–1976
(Lexington: University of Kentuy Press, 1986)
FLORES, ÁNGEL, ed., Aproximaciones a Octavio Paz (México: Joaquín Mortiz,
1974)
GIFFORD, HENRY, ‘Introduction’, in The Penguin Book of Latin American
Verse, ed. by Enrique Caracciolo-Trejo (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971),
pp. xxxvii–xlv
GIMFERRER, PERE, Lecturas de Octavio Paz (Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama,
1980)
—— ed., Octavio Paz (Madrid: Taurus Ediciones, 1982)
GONZÁLEZ, MIKE, and DAVID TREECE, The Gathering of Voices: The Twentieth-
Century Poetry of Latin America (London and New York: Verso, 1992)
GONZÁLEZ PELAYO, IRMA, ‘Octavio Paz y T. S. Eliot: Un diálogo en la tradición
de la ruptura’ (unpublished master’s thesis, Universidad Nacional
Autónoma de México, 1991)
GONZÁLEZ TORRES, ARMANDO, Las guerras culturales de Octavio Paz (México:
Colibrí, 2002)
GRENIER, YVON, From Art to Politics: Octavio Paz and the Pursuit of Freedom
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Lilefield, 2001)
GROGAN, RUTH A., ‘e Fall into History: Charles Tomlinson and Octavio
Paz’, Comparative Literature, 44, 2 (1992), 144–60
HERNÁNDEZ, JUAN JOSÉ, ‘Octavio Paz: El arco y la lira; Piedra de sol’, Sur, 252
(May–Jun 1958), 76–78
Homage to Octavio Paz, our 1982 Neustadt Laureate, in World Literature
Today: A Literary Quarterly of the University of Oklahoma, 56, 4 (1982)
Homenaje a Octavio Paz, Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, 343–45 (Jan–Mar
1979)
HOOVER, JUDITH MYERS, ‘e Urban Nightmare: Alienation Imagery in the
Poetry of T. S. Eliot and Octavio Paz’, Journal of Spanish Studies, 6, 1
(1978), 13–28
IVASK, IVAR, ed., The Perpetual Present: The Poetry and Prose of Octavio Paz
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1973)
MAGIS, CARLOS H., La poesía hermética de Octavio Paz (México: El Colegio
de México, 1978)
MALPARTIDA, JUAN, ‘El cuerpo y la historia: Dos aproximaciones a Octavio
Paz’, Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, 468 (Jun 1989), 45–56
—— La perfección indefensa: Ensayos sobre literaturas hispánicas del siglo
XX (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1998)
MANUEL MENDIOLA, Víctor, ed., Festejo: 80 años de Octavio Paz (México:
Ediciones El Tucán de Virginia, 1994)
MARTÍNEZ, JOSÉ LUIS, ‘Octavio Paz: Entre la piedra y la flor’, Letras de México
(15 May 1941), p. 4
MEDINA, RUBÉN, Autor, autoridad y autorización: Escritura y poética de
Octavio Paz (México: El Colegio de México, 1999)
ORTEGA, JULIO, Arte de innovar (México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de
México and Ediciones del Equilibrista, 1994)
ORTIZ DE MONTELLANO, BERNARDO (under pseudonym Marcial Rojas) ‘Poesía
y retórica’, Letras de México, 1, 15 (15 Jan 1937), 2
OVIEDO, JOSÉ MIGUEL, ‘e Passages of Memory: Reading a Poem by Octavio
Paz’, in Octavio Paz: Homage to the Poet, ed. by Kosrof Chantikian (San
Francisco: Kosmos, 1980), pp. 199–239
PACHECO, JOSÉ EMILIO, ‘Piedra de sol’, Estaciones, 3, 9 (Spring 1958), 99
PASTÉN B., J. AGUSTÍN, Octavio Paz: Crítico practicante en busca de una
poética (Madrid: Editorial Pliegos, 1999)
PERRONE-MOISÈS, LEYLA, ‘Choix et valeur dans l’œuvre critique des écrivains’,
Littérature, 94 (1994), 97–112
PHILLIPS, RACHEL, The Poetic Modes of Octavio Paz (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1972)
PONIATOWSKA, ELENA, Octavio Paz: Las palabras del árbol (Barcelona: Plaza &
Janés, 1998)
PRADO GALÁN, GILBERTO, ‘La poesía mexicana ¿Descansa en Paz?’, Ínsula, 707
(Nov 2005), 2
QUIROGA, JOSÉ, Understanding Octavio Paz (Columbia: University of South
Carolina Press, 1999)
RODRÍGUEZ MONEGAL, EMIR, ‘Relectura de El arco y la lira’, Revista
Iberoamericana, 37, 74 (Jan–Mar 1971), 35–46
ROGGIANO, ALFREDO, ed., Octavio Paz (Madrid: Editorial Fundamentos, 1979)
ROWE, WILLIAM, ‘Paz, Fuentes and Lévi-Strauss: e Creation of a
Structuralist Orthodoxy’, Bulletin of Latin American Research, 3, 2
(1984), 77–82
RUNNING, THORPE, The Critical Poem: Borges, Paz and Other Language-
Centred Poets in Latin America (Lewisburg, PA: Bunell University
Press; London: Associated University Press, 1996)
RUY SÁNCHEZ, ALBERTO, Una introducción a Octavio Paz (México: Joaquín
Mortiz, 1990)
SÁNCHEZ BARBUDO, ANTONIO, ‘A la orilla del mundo’, El Hijo Pródigo, 1, 1 (15
Apr 1943), 44–48
SANTÍ, ENRICO MARIO, El acto de las palabras: Estudios y diálogos con Octavio
Paz (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1997)
—— ‘e Politics of Poetics’, Diacritics, 8 (Winter 1978), 28–40
—— ‘Textos y contextos: Heidegger, Paz y la poética’, Iberoromania, 15
(1982), 87–96
SERRANO CARRETO, PEDRO FRANCESCO, ‘e Rhetorical Construction of the
Modern Poet in T. S. Eliot and Octavio Paz in Poetry and Criticism’
(unpublished MPhil thesis, King’s College London, 1995)
SHERIDAN, GUILLERMO, ‘Hora de Taller. Taller de España’, Cuadernos
Hispanoamericanos, 529–30 (Jul–Aug 1994), 90–100
—— Poeta con paisaje: Ensayos sobre la vida de Octavio Paz (México:
Ediciones Era, 2004)
STANTON, ANTHONY, Inventores de tradición: Ensayos sobre poesía mexicana
moderna (México: El Colegio de México, 1998)
—— ‘Una lectura de El arco y la lira’, in Reflexiones lingüísticas y literarias,
ed. by Rafael Olea Franco and James Valender, 2 vols (México: El Colegio
de México, 1992), ii, 301–22
—— ‘Models of Discourse and Hermeneutics in Octavio Paz’s El laberinto de
la soledad’, Bulletin of Latin American Research, 20, 2 (April 2001), 210–
32
—— ‘Octavio Paz como lector crítico de la poesía mexicana moderna’, Nueva
Revista de Filología Hispánica, 49, 1 (2001), 53–79
—— ‘Octavio Paz y la poesía moderna en lengua inglesa’, in Homenaje a
Octavio Paz, ed. by Ignacio Durán and Hugo Hiriart (New York:
Institutos Culturales Mexicanos de Washington y Nueva York, 2001), pp.
67–78
—— ‘Octavio Paz y los “Contemporáneos”: La historia de una relación’,
Actas del X Congreso de la Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas, ed.
by Antonio Vilanova, 4 vols (Barcelona: PPU, 1992), IV, 1003–10
—— ‘La prehistoria estética de Octavio Paz: Los escritos en prosa (1931–
1943)’, Literatura Mexicana, 2, 1 (1991), 23–55
—— Las primeras voces del poeta Octavio Paz (1931–1938) (México: Ediciones
sin nombre, 2001)
—— ‘Vida, memoria y escritura en Pasado en claro’, in Tradición y
actualidad de la literatura iberoamericana, ed. by Pamela Bacarisse, 2
vols (Pisburgh, PA: University of Pisburgh, 1995), I, 85–91
STAVANS, ILAN, Octavio Paz: A Meditation (Tucson: University of Arizona
Press, 2001)
SUCRE, GUILLERMO, La máscara, la transparencia: Ensayos sobre poesía
hispanoamericana, 2nd edn, corr. and exp. (México: Fondo de Cultura
Económica, 1985)
—— ‘Poesía hispanoamericana y conciencia del lenguaje’, Eco, 198–200 (Apr–
Jun 1978), 608–33
TOMLINSON, CHARLES, ‘Mexican Poet Inspired by een Victoria’, Sunday
Telegraph, 4 June 1989, p. 22
UCHOA LEITE, SEBASTIÃO, ‘Octavio Paz: El mundo como texto’, Diorama de la
Cultura (supl. of Excélsior), 12 Mar 1972, pp. 7–10
ULACIA, MANUEL, El árbol milenario: Un recorrido por la obra de Octavio Paz
(Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg and Círculo de Lectores, 1999)
UNGER, RONI, Poesía en Voz Alta in the theater of Mexico (Columbia:
University of Missouri Press, 1981)
VASCONCELOS, JOSÉ, ‘Octavio Paz’, Todo, 6 Apr 1950; repr. in El Ángel (supl. of
Reforma), 24 Mar 1994, 15–16
VERANI, HUGO J., ed., Lecturas de ‘Piedra de sol’ (México: Fondo de Cultura
Económica, 2007)
—— Octavio Paz: Bibliografía crítica (México: Universidad Nacional
Autónoma de México, 1983)
WILLIAMSON, RODNEY, The Writing in the Stars: A Jungian Reading of the
Poetry of Octavio Paz (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007)
WILSON, JASON, Octavio Paz (Boston, MA: Twayne, 1986)
—— Octavio Paz: A Study of his Poetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1979)
—— ‘Tradición y traducción: Acerca de las relaciones de Octavio Paz con la
poesía anglosajona’, Ínsula, 46, 532–33 (Apr–May 1991), 34–35
XIRAU, RAMÓN, Octavio Paz: El sentido de la palabra (México: Joaquín
Mortiz, 1970)
YURKIEVICH, SAÚL, Fundadores de la nueva poesía latinoamericana: Vallejo,
Huidobro, Borges, Girondo, Neruda, Paz, 2nd edn (Barcelona: Barral
Editores, 1973)
ZAMBRANO, PABLO, ‘Paz, Borges, Eliot: Tres recreaciones del eterno retorno’,
in Las formas del mito en las literaturas hispánicas del siglo XX, ed. by
Luis Gómez Canseco (Huelva: Universidad de Huelva, 1994), pp. 181–201
T. S. Eliot
Works by T. S. Eliot
The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Faber and Faber,
1997)
For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order (London: Faber and Faber,
1928)
Anabasis: A Poem by St.-John Perse (London: Faber and Faber, 1930)
Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1999)
The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Relation of
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Index
Abel, Riard 56
Abrams, M. H. 204
Abreu Gómez, Ermilo 105
Aguilar Mora, Jorge 182
Aiken, Conrad 25–27
Alberti, Rafael 72, 82, 86–87, 94, 117
Sobre los ángeles 78–80, 83–84
Alighieri, Dante 56, 68–70, 98, 130, 149, 175
Altolaguirre, Manuel 108–09
‘Journey of the Magi’, see Eliot, T. S.: works in Spanish translation
antipoesía 32, 41–42, 45
Apollinaire, Guillaume 28, 38, 140, 145–47, 166 n. 23, 171–72, 190, 194 n. 8
Arenales, Ricardo 40–41
Aridjis, Homero 11, 58
Aristotle 10
Arnold, Mahew 85
artepurismo, see pure poetry
Babbi, Irving 98
Bakhtin, Mihkail 8–9
Barón Palma, Emilio 34 n. 9, 78, 166 n. 27
Barreda, Octavio G. 101, 121–22, 141
‘Anábasis’ 54–56
‘Un canto para Simeon’, see Eliot, T. S.: works in Spanish translation
‘La música de la poesía’, see Eliot, T. S.: works in Spanish translation
Barthes, Roland 18 n. 36
Barzun, Henri-Martin 166 n. 23
Bate, Walter Jason 2, 3, 10, 14
Baudelaire, Charles 35 n. 35, 50, 129, 138–39, 183–84, 193, 208
Baxandall, Miael 5, 9
Beddoes, omas Lovell 178
Benda, Julien 99, 175
Bergamín, José 82, 85, 94, 141
Bergson, Henri 147, 159
Blamur, R. P. 119
Bloom, Harold 2–14
Bodkin, Maud 177
Bolaño, Roberto 207
Borges, Jorge Luis 1, 6–7, 11–12, 38, 95, 130
Bos Fonserré, José 69
Bosquet, Alain 58
Bowie, Malcolm 199–201
Bradbury, Malcolm 40
Bradley, F. H. 144
Breton, André 55, 74, 170–71, 180–81, 184, 193
Brooks, Cleanth 24–25, 51–52, 75, 184, 190, 197 n. 85
Browning, Robert 151–52
Bush, Ronald 35 n. 24, 62 n. 84, 75
Calles, Plutarco Elías 69
Cárdenas, Lázaro 91, 101
Cardoza y Aragón, Luis 119, 121–22
Carroll, Lewis 178
Cendrars, Blaise 147, 171–72
Cernuda, Luis 17, 108–09, 117, 148–52, 155, 159, 219 n. 13
Como quien espera el alba 148–49
La realidad y el deseo 108
Chumacero, Alí 11
classicism 51, 70, 98–100, 121, 135 n. 59, 163–64, 171, 186
Colhoun, Charles K. 34 n. 8
Corbière, Tristan 28, 132
Cortés Tamayo, Ricardo 101
creacionismo 16, 38–39, 44, 58, 72–73
Cruz, Sor Juana Inés de la 131, 157
Cuesta, Jorge 39, 49, 91–92, 97–102, 106, 109, 113, 116–17, 121, 127–28, 175
‘El clasicismo mexicano’ 100
‘Clasicismo y romanticismo’ 98–99
‘Raíz del hombre, Octavio Paz’ 92, 97–99
Curtius, E. R. 61 n. 67
Dada 38–39, 124–25
Dante, see Alighieri, Dante
Darío, Rubén 37
‘Augurios’ 41
Cantos de vida y esperanza 41, 60 n. 40
Davie, Donald 28, 30–31
de Costa, René 131
Degas, Edgar 44, 198
de la Selva, Salomón 40, 46, 58, 141
El soldado desconocido 44–45
de Man, Paul 4, 13
Derrida, Jacques 8–9
Descartes, René 2
Diens, Charles 178
Diego, Gerardo 72, 78
Díez-Canedo, Enrique 7, 43
Domínguez Miael, Christopher 110 n. 36
Donne, John 130, 135 n. 59
Durán, Manuel 33, 123, 186
Eagleton, Terry 208
Eandi, Héctor 95
Edwards, Miael 15
Ehrenburg, Ilya 107
Eliot, T. S.:
poems and plays:
Anabasis: A Poem by St.-John Perse 54, 56–58
Ariel Poems 122, 134 n. 30, 152
Ash-Wednesday 76, 123–25, 131, 134 nn. 22 & 30, 153
‘Choruses from “e Ro” ’ 159
The Cocktail Party 167 n. 49
The Confidential Clerk 167 n. 49
The Family Reunion 167 n. 49
‘La Figlia Che Piange’ 122
Four Quartets 15, 56, 108, 154–60, 167 n. 45, 197 n. 82, 201–04, 206, 208–09, 209 n. 20 Burnt Norton
15, 154, 157–58, 202, 204; East Coker 157, 194 n. 12; The Dry Salvages 202; Little Gidding 157,
172, 192, 205
The Hollow Men 14, 22, 30–33, 43, 54, 69, 75–81, 84, 101–05, 113, 115–16, 122–23, 129, 152–54
Inventions of the March Hare 179
‘Journey of the Magi’ 108, 152
‘e Love Song of J. Alfred Prufro’ 7, 30, 43–44, 109 n. 14, 112, 114–15, 123, 125, 154, 177, 179
‘Marina’ 122
Murder in the Cathedral 155–56, 167 n. 49, 168 n. 51, 209 n. 15, 210 n. 25
‘Portrait of a Lady’ 44
Prufrock and Other Observations 43
‘Silence’ 179
‘A Song for Simeon’ 122
‘Sweeney Agonistes’ 135 n. 59
The Waste Land 1, 3, 7, 11, 14–17, 22–33, 37–38, 40, 44–47, 51–52, 54, 56–58, 67–70, 74–80, 82, 84–
86, 92–95, 97, 100–06, 109, 113, 115, 119–23, 139–42, 144, 147–49, 154–57, 159–60, 162–63, 176–
78, 183, 185, 188, 190, 192–94, 198–202, 205, 208 ‘e Burial of the Dead’ 29–30, 79, 103–04,
139–40, 149, 162, 177; ‘A Game of Chess’ 28, 34 n. 9, 45–46, 141, 144, 177; ‘e Fire Sermon’ 23,
51, 93, 179; ‘Death by Water’ 139, 205; ‘What the under Said’ 30, 76, 90 n. 64, 102, 115–16,
123, 166 n. 27, 168 n. 76, 188, 200
prose:
After Strange Gods 99
‘Beyle and Balzac’ 193
‘Blake’ 51, 70
‘A Brief Introduction to the Method of Paul Valéry’ 36 n. 55, 61 n. 56
correspondence with Ángel Flores 23, 30, 35 n. 33
‘Dante’ 51, 61 n. 56, 70–71, 98
For Lancelot Andrewes 70
‘A Fren Romantic’ 61 n. 68
‘From Poe to Valéry’ 53, 61 n. 56, 71, 208
‘e Frontiers of Criticism’ 208
‘George Herbert’ 135 n. 59
‘Hamlet and his Problems’ 51, 62 n. 88, 98, 103, 151, 173
The Idea of a Christian Society 127
‘In Memory of Henry James’ 62 n. 88, 208
‘Introduction’ to David Jones, In Parenthesis 175
‘Introduction’ to Josef Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture 178
‘Introduction’ to Paul Valéry, The Art of Poetry 52, 61 n. 56, 71
Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley 208
‘Lancelot Andrewes’ 84–86, 98, 120, 124, 135 n. 59
‘Leçon de Valéry’ 61 n. 56, 77, 88 n. 20
Letters of T. S. Eliot 50, 61 nn. 55, 56, 66 & 67, 89 n. 42, 178
‘Lere d’Angleterre’ 51
‘Literature, Science and Dogma’ 187
‘London Leer’ 178
‘Marie Lloyd’ 167n. 49
‘e Metaphysical Poets’ 26, 130–32, 135 n. 59, 208
‘Modern Tendencies in Poetry’ 12, 29, 51, 60 n. 34, 71
‘e Music of Poetry’ 16, 19 n. 45, 141–42, 148, 155, 172–73, 195 n. 35, 208
‘Note sur Mallarmé et Poe’ 7, 29, 51, 98
On Poetry and Poets 11–12, 16, 141–42, 173, 175, 195 n. 35, 208
‘Philip Massinger’ 11–12, 26
‘Poetry and Drama’ 167 n. 49
‘A Prediction in Regard to ree English Authors’ 176, 179
The Sacred Wood 11–12, 26, 29, 50–52, 56, 61 n. 56, 62 n. 88, 70–71, 97–99, 103, 130, 151, 173, 175,
208
‘A Sceptical Patrician’ 71
Selected Essays 26, 86, 98, 130, 132, 167 n. 49, 178, 197 n. 81, 208
‘Swinburne as Poet’ 70–71
To Criticize the Critic 10, 12, 53, 61 n. 56, 71, 208
‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ 11–12, 29, 50–52, 130, 132
‘T. S. Eliot’, Paris Review interview 167 n. 42
‘T. S. Eliot Talks About Himself and the Drive to Create’ 168 n. 51
‘Ulysses, Order, and Myth’ 24, 55, 71, 172
The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism 61 n. 56, 70–71, 90 n. 84, 178, 182
The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 43, 135 n. 59
‘ “e Voice of his Time” ’ 29, 56
‘What Dante Means to Me’ 10
‘What is a Classic?’ 175
‘Whitman and Tennyson’ 193
works in Spanish translation:
Asesinato en la catedral 155–56
‘El canto de amor de J. Alfred Prufro’ 7, 44, 114, 122–24, 154
‘Un canto para Simeon’ 122, 134 n. 30, 141
‘East Coker’ 194 n. 12
‘La Figlia Che Piange’ 122
‘Las fronteras de la crítica’ 210 n. 40
‘Los hombres huecos’ 22, 31–33, 66, 75, 79, 102, 115, 122–23, 146, 152–53, 206
La idea de una sociedad cristiana 127
‘Journey of the Magi’ 108
‘Lancelot Andrews’ 84–86, 98, 120, 124, 135 n. 59
‘Marina’ 122
‘Miércoles de ceniza’ 7, 124–25
‘La música de la poesía’ 134 n. 25, 141, 154
‘El páramo’ 1, 7, 17, 22–26, 28, 30–31, 33, 34 n. 8, 37, 40, 44–47, 54, 66–68, 77, 79, 80, 88 n. 11, 89 n.
60, 102, 142, 177, 206
‘Poemas’, suplemento de Taller 120–25, 141, 154
Los poetas metafísicos y otros ensayos sobre teatro y religión 135 n. 54, 141
‘¿é es un clásico?’ 175
‘Rapsodia de una noe ventosa’ 134 n. 22
Tierra baldía 7, 17 n. 2, 22–23, 28, 34 n. 6, 35 n. 33, 36 n. 52, 44, 89 n. 60, 115–16, 168 n. 60, 195 n.
13
Ellmann, Maud 195 n. 31, 198
Éluard, Paul 172
Empson, William 28, 122
Escalante, Evodio 176
estridentismo 16, 38–40, 44, 70
Faber, Geoffrey 208
Fein, John M. 165
Felipe, León 15, 31–33, 75, 115, 121–23, 152–53
‘Los hombre huecos’, see Eliot, T. S.: works in Spanish translation
Fernandez, Ramon 50–51, 99
Ferrel, José 119
‘Temporada de infierno’ 119–20
Fis, Dudley 134 n. 31
Flaubert, Gustave 6
Fleter, John Gould 45
Flores, Ángel 7, 17 n. 2, 22–23, 28, 34 nn. 6 & 19, 36 n. 52, 78–79, 89 n. 60, 110 n. 48, 121, 166 n. 27, 168
n. 60
correspondence with T. S. Eliot 23, 30, 35 n. 33
Tierra baldía, see Eliot, T. S.: works in Spanish translation
Forster, Merlin H. 39, 61 n. 51
Fortún, Fernando 7–43
Fourier, Charles 171
Frazer, James George 176
Freud, Sigmund 3, 8, 22, 178, 195 n. 31
Fussell, Paul 44
Gaos, José 135 n. 52
García Lorca, Federico 78, 166 n. 27
Gardner, Helen 158
Garro, Elena 81, 92, 193
Gide, André 50, 61 n. 68, 107–08, 126
Gifford, Henry 15, 202
Gimferrer, Pere 17, 133 n. 9, 190, 192, 194, 195 n. 28, 197 n. 72, 205–07, 210 n. 29
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 13
Góngora y Argote, Luis de 68, 131–32, 168 n. 78
González Eevarría, Roberto 34 n. 10, 199
González Martínez, Enrique 37, 40–41, 105, 126, 135 n. 52
González Padilla, María Enriqueta 98
González Pelayo, Irma 15–16
González Rojo, Enrique 39
González Torres, Armando 40
Gorostiza, José 39–40, 53, 74, 77, 134 nn. 21 & 29, 146, 159
Muerte sin fin 98, 156–57
Gourmont, Remy de 6
Grogan, Ruth A. 204
Guillén, Jorge 160, 193
Cántico 72, 164
El cementerio marino 161–63
Hamilton, Ian 93
Hartman, Geoffrey 4, 8
Havard, Robert 72, 164
Heidegger, Martin 7, 86, 95–96, 113, 116, 124–25, 131–32, 156–58, 180–81, 205
‘What is Metaphysics?’ 82–84, 157–58
Henríquez Ureña, Pedro 45
Hernández, Juan José 180
Hernández Campos, Jorge 156
Asesinato en la catedral, see Eliot, T. S.: works in Spanish translation
Hoover, Judith Myers 15, 112–14
Huerta, Efraín 103, 117
Huidobro, Vicente 37–39, 58, 72, 78, 171
Hulme, T. E. 98
Husserl, Edmund 180
influence, see literary relation, theories of
intertextuality, see literary relation, theories of
Ionesco, Eugène 1
Irazusta, Julio 134 n. 22
Jauss, Hans Robert 13–14, 16
Jiménez, Juan Ramón 67, 81, 86, 117, 121–22, 126, 148
Eternidades 47
‘La Figlia Che Piange’, see Eliot, T. S.: works in Spanish translation
‘Marina’, see Eliot, T. S.: works in Spanish translation
Piedra y cielo 47
‘Vino, primero, pura…’ 67, 81
Joyce, James 86
Juan de la Cruz, San 128–33, 135 n. 59, 157, 168 n. 60
Kant, Immanuel 68
Keats, John 5
Kenner, Hugh 32
Kermode, Frank 52, 119, 131
Kirkpatri, Gwen 41
Knodel, Arthur 58
Krell, David Farrell 83–84, 158
Kristeva, Julia 8–9, 13–14, 18 n. 36
Lacan, Jacques 8
Laforgue, Jules 7, 12–13, 27–28, 43–44, 47, 75, 112, 122, 132, 173
Landsberg, Paul Ludwig 68
Larbaud, Valéry 62 n. 79
Lautréamont, Comte de 129
Lawrence, D. H. 92, 99
Lear, Edward 178
Leavis, F. R. 24, 26, 147
Lentricia, Frank 4, 22, 144
Levenson, Miael 196 n. 61
Lippman, Walter 69
literary relation, theories of 3–14
Lile, Roger 62 n. 84
López Malo, Rafael 91
López Velarde, Ramón 7, 16, 40, 42–44, 50, 57–58, 60 n. 40, 75, 92, 100, 151, 155, 173–75
‘El retorno maléfico’ 42–43, 46–47, 122
Zozobra 42–43
Lowell, Amy 45
Lugones, Leopoldo 42–43, 112
MacFarlane, James 40
Maado, Antonio 140
Malherbe, François de 48–49, 142
Mallarmé, Stéphane 7, 25, 27–30, 38, 50, 51, 71, 98, 198–201
Un Coup de dés 15, 199–200, 205, 208
‘Crise de vers’ 9
Propos sur la poésie 30, 208
‘Sur l’évolution liéraire’ 29
Maples Arce, Manuel 39
Marialar, Antonio 84–86, 120, 124
‘Lancelot Andrews’, see Eliot, T. S.: works in Spanish translation
Martí, José 37
Martínez, José Luis 105–06
Marvell, Andrew 24
Marx, William 61 n. 66
Marxism 22, 27, 32–33, 67–69, 88 n. 8, 103, 172, 181, 183, 185–86
Mahiessen, F. O. 147
Medina, Rubén 16–17, 135 n. 40, 176, 187, 189, 207–09
Menand, Louis 13
Miller, J. Hillis 62 n. 88
Miller, Peter 194
Milton, John 5, 11–12, 182
modernismo 7, 16, 37, 41, 43, 46–47, 67, 81, 100, 126
Monro, Harold 24
Morton, A. L. 70
Munguía Jr., Enrique 1, 7, 15–17, 22–28, 30–31, 33, 44–47, 66, 68–69, 74–75, 77, 79, 80, 121, 141, 177, 198
‘El páramo’, see Eliot, T. S.: works in Spanish translation
Naipaul, V. S. 1
Neruda, Pablo 7, 76, 78, 92–97, 100, 107, 115–17, 126–27, 131–33, 140, 167 n. 31
‘Caballero solo’ 93–94
Residencia en la tierra 92–95, 119, 124, 127, 131
Tres cantos materiales 94–95, 103
Nerval, Gérard de 129
Nietzse, Friedri 119
North, Miael 70, 135 n. 45
Novalis 35 n. 35, 92, 129
Novaro Fiora, Octavio 101
Novo, Salvador 7, 11, 39, 40, 45–47, 58, 66, 141 ‘N.Y.’ 45
Nye, Bill 4
Obregón, Álvaro 85
Ortega, Julio 165
Ortega y Gasset, José 66, 83, 88 n. 4, 117
Ortiz de Montellano, Bernardo 7, 39, 59 n. 18, 74, 88 n. 9, 92, 101, 109, 117, 121, 124–25, 146
‘Conversación sobre la poesía (fragmentos)’ 47–50, 53, 67, 142
‘Miércoles de ceniza’, see Eliot, T. S.: works in Spanish translation
‘Notas de conversación’ 87
‘Notas de un lector de poesía’ 52–53
Othón, Manuel José 105
Oviedo, José Miguel 203
Owen, Gilberto 39, 50, 61 n. 54
Paeco, José Emilio 11, 44–45
Paz, Octavio:
life:
and Rafael Alberti 72, 78–80, 82, 86–87, 94
Barandal 66, 73, 77, 86, 91
and Contemporáneos group 39–40, 44–45, 47, 49, 50–53, 55, 66–68, 70–72, 76–78, 81–87, 91–92, 97,
100–01, 107, 112, 114–18, 121–22, 129, 132–35, 142, 146, 148, 152, 156–57, 159, 170, 194, 207
Cuadernos del Valle de México 86, 90 n. 86, 126–27
and Jorge Cuesta 91–92, 97–102, 106, 109, 113, 117, 127–28, 175
Escuela Nacional Preparatoria 22, 24, 40, 66, 69, 72, 91, 97
and father, Octavio Ireneo Paz Solórzano 91, 97, 101
first reads The Waste Land 1–2, 22–24, 34 n. 6, 54, 62 n. 80, 110–11 n. 48, 154, 205–06
in Mérida 91, 101–07
and Pablo Neruda 7, 76, 92–97, 100, 107, 115–17, 126, 131–33, 140, 167 n. 31
in North America 1, 34 n. 11, 125, 128, 130, 133, 137–60, 165, 166 n. 27, 170, 172, 176, 178, 205
in Paris 55, 137, 146, 160, 170–71, 176, 193
Poesía en Voz Alta 155–56, 167 n. 49
and political le 69–70, 85–87, 91, 97, 101, 107–09, 117, 125–27, 133, 137, 158, 171, 173, 189, 207
Spanish Civil War 91, 107–09, 116–17 191–92
and Surrealism 40, 55, 74, 124–25, 170–94, 199, 203, 206
Taller 91, 109, 117–28, 137, 141, 148, 154, 189
UNAM 9
poems:
‘Al polvo’ 128
Árbol adentro 203
‘El ausente’ 152
Bajo tu clara sombra 91, 114
Bajo tu clara sombra y otros poemas sobre España 108
Blanco 124, 199–201, 203, 305
‘Cabellera’ 73–74
‘El cántaro roto’ 188–89
‘Conscriptos U.S.A.’, see ‘El joven soldado’
‘Conversación en un bar’, see ‘El joven soldado’
‘Crepúsculos de la ciudad’ 112–14, 120, 128
‘Cuarto de hotel’ 151, 158–59
‘Cuento de dos jardines’ 15, 201–03
‘Desde el principio’ 79–81, 87, 103
Entre la piedra y la flor 91, 101–07, 109, 113–14, 117, 188–89, 193, 200
‘Himno entre ruinas’ 160–66, 170–72, 179, 188, 191
Homenaje y profanaciones 199
‘El joven soldado’ 142–47, 149
‘Juego’ 72–73, 81
‘Lago’ 138–40, 143, 145
Libertad bajo palabra 92, 113, 137–66, 170, 179, 188 Asueto 137, 139–40, 142, 150, 160–61, 170;
Puerta condenada 142, 160; La estación violenta 187–94
Luna silvestre 72, 81–82
‘Máscaras del alba’ 189–91
‘El muro’ 149–50
‘Noe de resurrecciones’ 127–28
‘Nocturno de la ciudad abandonada’ 75–79, 87, 116, 120, 123, 165, 183, 198
¡No pasarán! 91–92, 109
‘Orilla’ 74
Pasado en claro 15, 91, 201, 203–05
Piedra de sol 15, 188, 191–94, 199–200, 207, 209 n. 20
‘Pregunta’ 150
‘Primavera a la vista’ 139–40, 143, 145
Primer día 91, 114, 159
Raíz del hombre 91–92, 94–98, 101, 106, 109, 124, 127
‘Razones para morir’, see ‘El joven soldado’
Salamandra 199
‘Seven P.M.’ 149–52, 178
‘Soliloquio de medianoe’ 150–52
‘La sombra’ 152–54, 158
‘Sueño de Eva’ 176–80
‘Viento entero’ 199
Vigilias 95, 128
Vuelta 201
prose:
‘André Breton o la búsqueda del comienzo’ 170
‘Antevíspera: Taller (1938–1941)’ 118–21, 125–27
‘Antonio Maado’ 140
‘Apuntes’ 100
El arco y la lira 15, 109 n. 15, 141, 158, 163, 180–88, 190, 207
‘El camino de la pasión’ 60 n. 36
‘El caracol y la sirena: Rubén Darío’ 37
‘El cómo y el para qué: José Ortega y Gasset’ 18 n. 27, 88 n. 4
‘Cómo y por qué escribí El laberinto de la soledad 146
‘Con Octavio Paz y España como tema’ 87, 148–49
Corriente alterna 176
‘Cuatro o cinco puntos cardinales’ 34 nn. 10 & 12, 56, 93–94, 114, 122, 155, 159, 171, 178, 199
‘Cultura de la muerte’ 117, 125
‘Las enseñanzas de una juventud’ 108
‘Entrevista con Octavio Paz’ 189
‘Entrevista con Octavio Paz: Itinerarios de un poeta’ 118
‘Ética del artista’ 53, 66–74, 76–79, 81–83, 85–87, 91–92, 100–01, 115–17, 121, 137, 140
‘La evolución poética de Octavio Paz’ 22, 34 n. 6, 54, 82, 111 n. 48
‘Ezra Pound: Galimatías y esplendor’ 45
‘Genealogía de un libro: Libertad bajo palabra’ 114, 137, 140, 147–48, 165, 176, 190
‘La hija de Rappaccini: entrevista con Octavio Paz’ 167 n. 49
Los hijos del limo 9, 37, 41, 171, 202
‘Un himno moderno: Saint-John Perse’ 55–56, 58
‘Inaugural address’ 167 n. 31
Itinerario 85, 87, 101–02, 107, 126
El laberinto de la soledad 15, 100, 146, 172–76, 180, 182, 185
‘El lenguaje de López Velarde’ 60 n. 36, 173
‘Literatura y literalidad’ 43, 60 n. 36
‘Luis Cernuda: La palabra edificante’ 152, 209 n. 13
‘El Más allá de Jorge Guillén’ 161, 163–64
‘Me asombra haber llegado a los 80’ 100, 102
Memorias y palabras 17, 133 n. 9, 176 n. 28, 190, 205–07
‘Neruda veía la realidad de un modo fantástico y maravilloso’ 97
‘Notas’ 36 n. 57, 104, 106
‘Octavio Paz’, Bookmark interview 101, 110 n. 48
‘Octavio Paz’, interview with Rita Guiber 62 n. 80, 82, 88 n. 10
‘Octavio Paz Talks to Charles Tomlinson’ 16, 210 n. 29
‘El ogro filantrópico’ 33
La otra voz 18 n. 27
‘Pablo Neruda en el corazón’ 115–17, 132, 146
‘Los pasos contados’ 72, 78, 137–38, 140, 171
‘Poesía de soledad y poesía de comunión’ 114, 128–33, 140, 148, 156–57, 180
‘Poesía e historia: Laurel y nosotros’ 97, 124, 126, 141, 144–45, 147, 155, 161, 163, 165, 171–72
Poesía en movimiento 11, 199
‘Poesía mexicana moderna’ 40, 122, 145, 189
‘El poeta talentoso transforma la tradición’ 132
‘Rafael Alberti: visto y entrevisto’ 78, 86–87
‘Razón de ser’ 10, 117–18, 121
‘La religión solar de D. H. Lawrence’ 92
‘Rescate de Enrique Munguía’ 1, 23, 37, 111 n. 48, 121–22, 124
‘Respuesta a un cónsul’ 126
‘Rodolfo Usigli en el teatro de la memoria’ 68
Solo a dos voces 86–87, 108
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz o las trampas de la fe 166 n. 12
‘El surrealismo’ 173, 176, 179
‘T. S. Eliot: mínima evocación’ 1–2, 13, 22–24, 27, 33, 34 n. 6, 38, 40, 47, 58, 69, 85, 111– 12 n. 48,
154, 174–75, 192, 194 n. 8, 198
Xavier Villaurrutia en persona y en obra 49, 112, 124–25, 166 n. 12
Pellicer, Carlos 7, 11, 40, 58, 66, 72–76, 80–82, 84, 92, 95, 97, 100, 107–08, 117, 133, 139–40, 160, 163–65,
170–71, 194, 198
Péret, Benjamin 170, 194
Perrone-Moisès, Leyla 130
Perse, Saint-John 7, 40, 53, 73–74, 76, 80–81, 95, 97, 100, 133, 139–40, 160, 163, 170–71, 194, 198
Anabase 54–58, 73, 121
Phenomenology 83–84, 180
Poe, Edgar Allan 29, 35 n. 35, 49–50, 98, 129, 208
Powell, Charles 23–24
Prado Galán, Gilberto 207
Pring-Mill, Robert 93, 131
Proust, Marcel 30, 86, 159, 205–07
pure poetry 47, 53, 61 nn. 52 & 56, 66–68, 72, 76, 86–87, 94–95, 118, 122, 125–26, 131
evedo y Villegas, Francisco Gómez de 17, 80, 105, 114, 128–33, 140, 155–57, 159
intero Álvarez, Alberto 117
Rainey, Lawrence 24
Ramírez y Ramírez, Enrique 69, 86
Ramos, Samuel 40, 59 n. 22, 69, 172
Rank, Oo 180
Reverdy, Pierre 38, 171
Revol, E. L. 175
Riards, I. A. 26, 85
Ris, Christopher 13, 82, 84, 178
Riword, Edgell 70
Rilke, Rainer Maria 121, 124–25, 131–32
Rimbaud, Arthur 7, 121–22, 124, 193
Une Saison en enfer 118–20
Rodríguez Monegal, Emir 196 n. 45, 199
Rojas, Marcial, see Ortiz de Montellano, Bernardo
romanticism 2, 7, 9, 12, 35 n. 35, 38, 52, 61 n. 68, 88 n. 8, 98–99, 121, 124–25, 131, 135 n. 59, 138
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 171
Rowe, William 196 n. 61
Rubín, Mordecai 157, 159
Rubinstein, Sara 135 n. 54, 141
Rukeyser, Muriel 194
Rulfo, Juan 34 n. 10
Sade, Marquis de 171
Sánez Barbudo, Antonio 127
Santayana, George 69
Santí, Enrico Mario 16–17, 95, 141, 180–81, 195 n. 16, 199, 201
Smidt, Miael 15
Sneider, Luis Mario 40
Suard, Ronald 157, 178–79
Seldes, Gilbert 26
Serrano Carreto, Pedro 15–16, 47
Serrano Plaja, Arturo 108
Shakespeare, William 11–12, 32, 139, 178
Sheridan, Guillermo 22, 24, 39, 45, 49, 50, 60 n. 46, 66, 69, 72, 89 n. 52, 90 n. 86, 102–03, 111 n. 58, 117,
134 n. 21, 175, 189, 193
Sieburth, Riard 6
simultaneísmo 75, 105, 147–48, 155, 160, 165, 171, 205
Skaff, William 177
Solana, Rafael 117
Spender, Stephen 43, 98, 108
Stalin, Joseph 107, 126, 158, 171
Stanton, Anthony 17, 45, 60 n. 46, 61 n. 52, 71–73, 75–76, 79–80, 82, 114, 130–32, 149, 156, 165, 172, 174–
76, 181, 186, 196 n. 46, 203
Stavans, Ilan 207, 209
Stead, William Force 124–25
Stevens, Wallace 7
Still, Judith 9
Straey, Lyon 50
Sucre, Guillermo 37, 187, 191, 193
Surrealism 40, 45, 52–53, 55, 74, 79, 124–25, 170–94, 199, 203, 206
Swinburne, Algernon Charles 70
Symbolism 7, 9, 27–31, 33, 37, 43, 46–47, 49–50, 53–54, 67, 70–71, 102, 122, 124, 131, 142, 192, 205
Symons, Arthur 43–44
Tajonar, Héctor 87
Tate, Allen 190
Tennyson, Alfred 29, 56,
Todorov, Tzvetan 35 n. 35, 38
Tomlinson, Charles 15–16, 199, 202–04, 210 n. 29
Torres Bodet, Jaime 39, 46, 50, 125, 134 n. 30
Tramini, Marie-José 201, 203
Trotsky, Leon 107, 126, 158
Uoa Leite, Sebastião 186
Ulacia, Manuel 104–05, 128, 130, 132, 144, 146, 158–59
ultraísmo 16, 38, 44
Untermeyer, Louis 26
Usigli, Rodolfo 7, 44, 114, 121–24, 154–55
‘El canto de amor de J. Alfred Prufro’, see Eliot, T. S.: works in Spanish translation
Valéry, Paul 7, 13, 28, 40, 51–53, 55, 58, 61 n. 56, 70–72, 74, 83, 86, 95, 97–98, 121, 129, 132, 140, 168 n. 80,
208, 209 n. 3
Le Cimetière marin 32, 160–62, 164
‘Propos sur la poésie’ 47–50, 53, 66–67, 77, 142
Vallejo, César 60 n. 40, 80
Vasconcelos, José 73, 174
Verani, Hugo 194
Villaurrutia, Xavier 7, 11, 39, 49, 66, 76, 81–83, 86, 92, 95, 97–98, 100–01, 112, 114, 116, 121, 123–26, 131–
33, 139, 141, 146, 156, 163, 165, 198
‘Dos nocturnos’ 77–79
‘Guía de poetas norteamericanos’ 49–52
Nostalgia de la muerte 117, 125
Virgil 175
Wagner, Riard 4
Walton Litz, A. 62 n. 88
Webster, John 177–78
Whitman, Walt 193
Williams, Raymond 88 n. 8
Wilson, Edmund 25–28, 52
Wilson, Jason 16, 149, 165, 179, 187, 189, 191, 194 n. 6
Woolf, Virginia 61 n. 66
Wordsworth, William 55, 203–04
Worton, Miael 9
Xirau, Ramón 160
Yáñez, Agustín 34 n. 19
Yeats, W. B. 186
Yurkievi, Saúl 46–47, 94, 96
Zaid, Gabriel 73
Zambrano, María 94
Zambrano, Pablo 15, 197 n. 82
Zubiri, X., ‘¿é es la metafísica?’ 82–84
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