Widely Acknowledged As The Greatest Poet Of Contemporary Mexico, Octavio Paz Has

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Term Paper Title	Widely Acknowledged As The Greatest Poet Of Contemporary Mexico, Octavio Paz Has
# of Words	1362
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	5.45

Widely acknowledged as the greatest poet of contemporary Mexico, Octavio Paz has led a life that in many ways is typical of the Mexican intelligentsia he describes in THE LABYRINTH OF SOLITUDE. He has published ten books of poetry, fought with the Loyalists in Spain, and served his country as a diplomat. Deeply involved in the future of the Mexican land, he has fitted himself out for defining it to the world by a career that includes the experiences of intense action and intenser contemplation.
THE LABYRINTH OF SOLITUDE was first published in 1950 by Jesus Silva Herzog's famous and influential magazine, Cuadernos Americanos. The version that comes to North Americans through Lysander Kemp's translation is based upon a second edition, revised and expanded, published by the Fondo de Cultura Economica in 1959. This book is in effect the result of labors that span a decade, labors that show themselves best in Paz's mastery of his own implications: the labyrinth he describes is the modern world.
Paz begins with an analysis of the phenomenon of the pachucos, those youths of Latin descent who during the 1940's and 1950's alarmed the cities of the Southwest with their "antisocial" behavior, their peculiar dress, and their hostile acts and attitudes. He sees the pachuco as standing between Mexican culture and North American culture, in a Limbo, unable to accept the values of either, equally alienated from both. Moreover, says Paz, the pachuco has, without understanding them, reasons; for both cultures have cut themselves off from the flux of life, have failed in their separate ways to reconcile man and the universe. Unable to partake of communion, both the Mexican and the North American have thus become spiritual orphans, imprisoned in the sterility of solitude. If the Mexican seclusion is similar to stagnant water, Paz says, North America is similar to a mirror. Neither contains life any more.
The forces that confine the North American are summarized in the three sets of laws to which Paz pays at least lip service: the seventeenth century religious code of Calvin, the eighteenth century political code of the Founding Fathers, and the nineteenth century moral code of the American Victorians. Caged by these sets of laws, the North American has let himself become a cipher, handling the universe easily by simply denying any part of it that might conflict with these codes. As a man he lives, therefore, in a wholly artificial world, creating his psychological mothers and...

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