In spite of being a "world" poet, as glossily cosmopolitan as they come, [Octavio Paz] remains programmatically Mexican, not to say pre-Columbian; and in spite of being contemporary, so abreast of the very latest movements that he suffers, not gladly, the tag "post-avant-garde," he is still acutely conscious of belonging to his own generation, far from a young one now…. (p. 5)

A Mexican, but what is a Mexican?… The question is not a simple one for Señor Paz himself, and his many prose works on all sorts of subjects, and many of his poems too, are indirectly or directly about it. (p. 7)

A great part of his being a Mexican poet is a variable and ambivalent relation to Spain and her literature, quite like our relation to England and her literature. As we have tended to loosen the colonial relation by adopting other cultures than England's for...