SOURCE: Vendler, Helen. “To Be a Sun Again.” New Yorker 64, no. 7 (4 April 1988): 97-101.

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

Nothing in the visible estrangement of poetry from prose is more astonishing than their estrangement in one person. Octavio Paz—Mexico's famous poet, born in 1914—is a torrential writer, whose successive books of prose and verse have enriched our century; while his prose is often circumstantial, historical, and evidential, his poetry is not. It is something else. Someone reading the verse as one reads prose might say, “Abstract, generalizing, unreal.” But someone reading the verse as one reads verse would say, “Musical, sensual, real.” When a single historical writer slips into two such different gears, some explanation is required. For Paz, the political real (present in all his essays) is not the desired real (aspired to in all...