In the following essay, Kushigian explores ways in which Paz uses language, imagery, and subject matter to depict his philosophy of the mutuality and intersection of Eastern and Western culture and philosophy.

In the following essay, Wilson offers a biographical and critical overview of Paz and his works, focusing mainly on the phase of his career from 1931 through the early 1940s.

In the following essay, Rader offers a comparison of the works of Paz with those of American poet Wallace Stevens.

In the following essay, Oviedo examines surrealism and poetic modes in “Salamandra.”

In the following essay, Khan discusses cosmopolitan and multicultural influences on Paz's poetry.

In the following essay, Zubizarreta explores literary connections between Paz and Robert Frost.

In the following essay, Clark offers an analysis of Renga, a quadri-lingual poem written in April 1969 in Paris by Octavio Paz, Charles Tomlinson, Jacques Roubaud, and Edoardo Sanguineti.

In the following essay, Zubizarreta explores thematic and aesthetic similarities among Paz and poets Wallace Stevens and Rubén Darío.

In the following excerpt, Valdés considers the relationships between poetry and philosophy in Paz's works.

In the following essay, Poirier explores connections between Paz and American poets including William James.

[In the following obituary, Kandell concentrates on diverse literary and cultural influences that shaped Paz's writings, detailing various controversies prompted by his views.]

In the following essay, Santí offers an overview of Paz's career and works.

In the following essay Hirsch offers an overview of theme and use of language in Paz's poetry.

In the following essay, Vendler offers a favorable review of the Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1957-1987.

In the following essay, Durán offers an overview of the works and career of Paz shortly after the poet was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1990.

In the following essay, Durán shares personal memories and a summarization of the life and work of Paz, following the death of the poet in 1998.

[Octavio Paz] is a poet whose reading of surrealism enabled him to revalue and affirm the role of poetry in the twentieth century in terms of a liberating, quasi-religious vocation. (p. 3) Surrealism did not influence Octavio Paz in the sense that it suddenly transformed his poetry and life-stance, for Paz was seeking what he found. (p. 6)

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 h...

In the following excerpt, McClatchy reviews The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1957-1987.

[Trevelyan is writer of history and travel guides. In the following review, he surveys the historical and cultural contexts of Indian civilization that inform the essays of In Light of India and the poems of A Tale of Two Gardens.]

[In the following obituary, Sheridan and Randolph assess Paz's place in Mexican literature and culture.]

[Hirsch is a poet. In the following essay, he contemplates characteristics of Paz's poetry.]

Octavio Paz wrote in 1953 his only play, a one-act re-creation of [Hawthorne's] "Rappaccini's Daughter." Re-creation, not simply adaptation. For while the Mexican poet does not tamper much with the plot, he significantly changes the atmosphere and meaning of the tale. Hawthorne contrasts love with "poisonous" sex, transcendent faith with imperfect empirical and rational knowledge. The tone and symbolism of "Rappaccini's Daughter" are influenced ...

[In the following review, Herrera outlines the substance and style of Essays on Mexican Art, focusing on the poetic instinct that seems to inform Paz's aesthetic taste.]

[In the following obituary, Barnes describes the literary and cultural significance of Paz's writings as well as the milestones of his life.]

[Stavans is a novelist and critic. In the following review, he examines Paz's treatment of love in The Double Flame, admiring its thematic breadth and depth.)

[Galhraith is an author and professor of economics emeritus at Harvard University. In the following review, Galbraith reveals the thematic arrangement of In Light of India.]

[In the following excerpt, Lawson detects revisionist tendencies in the thesis of Sor Juana or, The Traps of Faith.]

[In the following review, Mojica addresses the significance of Paz's association with the poet Xavier Villaurrutia, whose works, particularly Nostalgia for Death, prompted notable exegeses by Paz.]

In the following essay, Mujica reviews Paz's A Tale of Two Gardens, which contains poems about India written between 1952 and 1995.

[In the following review, Hopkinson traces the thematic origins of The Double Flame.]

Octavio Paz, an important public and literary figure in Mexico today, has published several volumes of condensed and highly metaphoric poetry in Spanish that display his close ties to Surrealism…. [In "Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare"] Mr. Paz has revised and extended two essays on Duchamp written over the last 10 years. This short vigorous book shuns the psychoanalytic speculation that weakens many of the 20-odd existing studies and probes deeply into Duchamp's relation...

[In the following obituary, the commentator reviews the highlights of Paz's life and career.]

In this anthology of Octavio Paz's works [A Draft of Shadows],… the impression we receive initially is that of a Mexican poet exposed for the first time to his European peers' influence and submerged in a rhetorical roil of surrealist images smacking more of virtuosity than honesty. The poems mirror Paz's experiences as his country's ambassador to India and his subsequent trips to England, France, and the United States. They are charged, even humorous, forcedly brilliant. ...

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 si...

[In the following review, McMurray surveys the content of Al paso, noting its thematic range and style.]

[The] sense of motion created by "Exclamación" and "Juventud" … is a key to the dynamic process of both poems. However, neither work contains any verbs and the poet has succeeded in creating the feeling of motion without the use of a single verbal mechanism, and this is a remarkable achievement. In "Exclamación" the skillful juxtaposition of contradictory statements produces a feeling of motion and both poems depend on the adept manipulation of ...

[In the following review, the critic summarizes the contents of An Erotic Beyond: Sade, noting the "uncommon intelligence and intellectual maturity" of Paz's approach to Sade.]

Breaking new ground has been for Octavio Paz a serious preoccupation. The Orient provided him with new style and concepts. The haiku drew him naturally, and so did the renga. A few years ago he took up the Japanese poetic tradition of composing a poem simultaneously with three major European poets. In this first renga ever to appear in the West, each of these poets wrote successively short, unrhymed, syllabically controlled stanzas in four different languages. Air Born/Hijos del aire is yet another experime...

[In the following review, Jamison comments on the changes in Paz's responses to Sade's literary legacy in An Erotic Beyond.]

Octavio Paz stands in the first rank of poets on the world-scene today. I'd stress the notion world-scene because it won't do thinking of him as a local, a Mexican or even South American. Paz's poetry, uttered in what seems a direct, even brutally vigorous language, derives its transcendental thrust and vision, its visual, aural, tactile power from the intellectual authority of the French Symbolists, from Surrealism during the 20s and 30s, from English and German romantic poets—a...

[In the poems of Octavio Paz] I recognized the paradox which haunts us all, which makes of art criticism a perpetually unsatisfactory endeavor. I recognized that if the word springs ahead of thought, as Octavio said, and if it rises from the written page, and if, as he keeps repeating in all his poetry, the presencia arrives by means forever undisclosed, so does the painted image. What is true about the image, or presencia, is precisely what cannot be rendered through any other image, and especially not thr...