This declaration of Octavio Paz, read on 22 June 1989 upon receiving the Premio Alexis de Tocqueville and published as
Poesía, mito, revolución: Premio Alexis de Tocqueville (Poetry, Myth, Revolution: Alexis de Tocqueville Prize, 1989), clearly shows how he conceived the intimate relationship between his different intellectual enterprises: his poems, his essays on poetry, and his historical, political, and social reflections.
The intellectual work of Paz is one of the most extensive and important in the history of Latin America. He wrote more than twenty books of poetry (more than thirty if all versions of the different editions that exist for many of the books are considered) and as many book-length essays about such topics as literature, eroticism, politics, anthropology, and painting. Until his death he fueled an intellectual passion that--through his essays and the magazines that he headed--turned him into an indispensable guide for several generations in the area of Spanish language. Not only with his poetry, but also with his prose, Paz renovated Spanish, thanks to his mastery of nuance, the communication between words, and the architecture of syntax.
Paz's work was recognized worldwide through translations of his books and many awards: the Festival of the Poetry of Flanders Prize in 1972; the Jerusalem Literature Prize in 1977; and the International Festival of the Book of Nice in 1979.
