Octavio Paz (1914-1998), Mexican poet and essayist, who in 1990 became the first Mexican writer to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Paz’s poetry captures the nuances of human experience both in the passing moment—“in which the whole being is sculptured and destroyed”—and in the continuity of cyclical and mythic time. His essays explore a variety of subjects, including modern poetic discourse, social philosophy, and the dynamics of Mexico’s cultural and political past and present. When he won the Nobel Prize, he was cited by the selection committee for his “impassioned writing with wide horizons, characterized by sensuous intelligence and humanistic integrity.”

Born in Mexico City and educated at the National University of Mexico (now National Autonomous University of Mexico), Paz grew up influenced by his father and grandfather, both of whom were involved with revolutionary regimes in Mexico. Paz founded an avant-garde literary journal when he was 17 years old and published his first book of poetry at age 19—Luna Silvestre (Forest Moon, 1933). He was deeply committed to social reform and spent the period from 1936 to 1939 in Spain, where he was a staunch supporter of the Loyalists during the Spanish Civil War. In Mexico from 1939 to 1943, he wrote for a labor-supported newspaper. He broke with the Communist Party after the German-Soviet pact in World War II (1939-1945) and gave up most political activity.

In 1944 Paz visited the United States as the winner of a Guggenheim fellowship, and from 1945 to 1968 he worked for the Mexican diplomatic corps, serving in France, Switzerland, Japan, and India. Paz was Mexico’s ambassador to India from 1962 until 1968, when he resigned to protest the Mexican government’s massacre of student demonstrators at the Plaza of Three Cultures in Mexico City. He taught at the University of Cambridge in England in 1970 and 1971. He also lectured at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1971 and 1972. His Harvard lectures were collected into Children of the Mire: Modern Poetry from Romanticism to the Avant Garde (1974).

As Paz’s writing style developed, he addressed a variety of themes. His early poems contained themes of sensuality and beauty, and they explored an individual’s communication with the world. In his later poetry, Paz posed questions concerning the human condition in an individual as well as a social context. One of his greatest works is the long poem Piedra del sol (1957; Sun Stone, 1963), which counterpoints time as fleeting moment and time as cyclical return, and contrasts solitude to solidarity with humankind and nature.

The essay collection El laberinto de la soledad: Vida y pensamiento de México (1950; The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico, 1961) is considered Paz’s masterpiece. The book attempts to explain his relationship to the Mexican way of life, in part by exploring the contradiction between the Mexican “mask” (the emulation of foreign cultural models) and the historic roots of native Mexican culture. Posdata (1970; The Other Mexico: Critique of the Pyramid, 1972) analyzes the way in which modern Mexico is still conditioned by the underlying Aztec model of domination and sacrifice, power and repression. Paz’s view of the relationship between modern society, art, and literature is most fully developed in the essays Corriente alterna (1967; Alternating Current, 1973) and Los hijos del limo (1974; Children of the Mire, 1974). In La llama doble: Amor y erotismo (1994; The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism, 1997), a series of eloquent meditations on the spiritual and the carnal, he attempts to explain why people love and are loved.

Paz’s fascination with poetry—its definition, its language, and its relation to both history (linear time) and to instantaneous time—is reflected in several collections of essays published between 1956 and 1974. These include El arco y la lira (1956; The Bow and the Lyre, 1973) and Las peras del olmo (The Pears of the Elm, 1957). Vislumbres de la India (1996; In Light of India, 1997) is a collection of essays that discuss Paz’s longtime association with India, and the similarities and differences between Mexico and India in their history and culture. Paz also wrote the biography Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, o, Las trampas de la fe (1982; Sor Juana: Or, The Traps of Faith, 1988), about a 17th-century Mexican poet and nun.