The Mexican succumbs very easily to sentimental effusions, and therefore he shuns them.
Category Archive: Octavio Paz
Any reflection about poetry should begin, or end, with this question: who and how many read poetry books?
I think we all have our own personality, unique and distinctive, and at the same time, I think that our own unique and distinctive personality blends with the wind, with the footsteps in the street, with the noises around the corner, and with the silence of memory, which is the great producer of ghosts.
The sound of water is worth more than all the poets’ words.
All poems say the same thing, and each poem is unique. Each part reproduces the others, and each part is different.
Poetry is the experience of liberty. The poet risks himself, chances all on the poem’s all with each verse he writes.
What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.
If we are a metaphor of the universe, the human couple is the metaphor par excellence, the point of intersection of all forces and the seed of all forms. The couple is time recaptured, the return to the time before time.
Futurists wanted to suggest movement by means of a dynamic painting; Duchamp applies the notion of delay – or, rather, or analysis – to movement.
The modern tradition is the tradition of revolt. The French Revolution is still our model today: history is violent change, and this change goes by the name of progress. I do not know whether these notions really apply to art.