Though [Paz's] account of modern poetry is deliberately selective [in Children of the Mire], there are many passages which a more systematic historian of literature might envy. As a Latin American poet, he writes with particular authority of the relation of modernismo to European romanticism and of the extent to which positivism, for nineteenth-century Latin American writers, implied an intellectual crisis similar in its terms, if not in its scope, to that of the Enlightenment in Europe. There are signs, too, that Paz is continuing to adjust his view of the romantic tradition: thus, his long-standing interest in Nerval now takes him back more profoundly than before to the German romantics, and in particular to Jean Paul Richter, the earliest proponent of the "death of God." Whether he is speaking of intellectuals like Marx and Fourier (one of the few writers, for Paz, in whom the possibilities of poetic thought and revolutionary thought coincide), or of the differences between Eliot and Pound, his judgments are invariably accurate and often memorable. (pp. 86-7)
Occasionally, what might have been a genuine insight remains at the level of a bright idea, as when he speaks of an "intimate relation" between Protestantism and romanticism, or of the possible link between accentual versification and analogical vision. More seriously, perhaps, there are moments at which the pattern is made to seem a little too neat, as when certain phenomena are said to be linked by a "contrary dialectic" or are described as "metaphors" of one another. Such verbal shortcuts are particularly frustrating in a writer of Paz's intelligence, since one inevitably feels them to be the result of overcompression, rather than of any basic failure of thought.
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