SOURCE: Wilson, Jason. “The Early Years: Spain, Politics, and Poetry.” In Octavio Paz, pp. 1-26. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986.

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.

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City in the middle of a bloody and chaotic revolution. However, he avoided this gruesome turmoil and was brought up in a large rundown house in Mixcoac by his pious mother—Josefina Lozano, daughter of Spanish immigrants—a spinster aunt (who introduced him to authors like Victor Hugo and Rousseau), and his paternal grandfather. His father, Octavio Paz, a journalist and lawyer who defended the peasant revolutionary Emiliano Zapata (1877?-1919) in New York and who helped introduce agrarian reform after the Revolution, was usually absent. Paz evoked this family in his long poem...