Many critics believe that Paz's finest work was in his extended essay The Labyrinth of Solitude , an extended meditation on the nature of the Mexican people and their character. It is now available in a 1985 edition from Grove Press.

The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1957- 1987 was edited by Paz's friend and collaborator Eliot Weinberger. The bilingual edition is available from New Directions, published in 1991.

Paz begins "Duration" with a line from the I Ching , the ancient Chinese book of numerology. A current edition, assembled and translated by Taoist master Alfred Huang, is available from Inner Traditions International under the title The Complete "I Ching": The Definitive Translation (1998).

Paz's poetry is often compared to that of Jorge Luis Borges, an Argentinian writer of the same generation whose short stories have the same metaphysical quality Paz employed. Some of Borges's best...