SOURCE: McClatchy, J. D. “Masks and Passions.” Poetry 154, no. 1 (April 1989): 29-48.

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

In the prologue to his magisterial study of Sor Juana, as part of a meditation on “the system of implicit authorizations and prohibitions” in modern culture, Octavio Paz speculates that the democratic and progressivist societies dominant in the West since the late eighteenth century are constitutionally hostile to certain literary genres. Bourgeois rationalism and poetry, for instance, are oil and water. The methods and attitudes, the very nature of poetry has grown hostile to the dogmas of the day and the cult of the future, to the moral pieties of modern society. Poetry is a violation. Baudelaire and the Symbolists, the pioneers of Modernism, the Surrealists—these were enemies within the walls, and remain the champions of all those forces opposed to the relentless...