SOURCE: Zubizarreta, John. “Darío, Stevens, and Paz: The Modernist Connection.” South Atlantic Review 56, no. 1 (January 1991): 47-60.

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

In Children of the Mire, Octavio Paz states that “A literature is a language existing not in isolation but in constant relation with other languages, other literatures” (120-21). Relation, of course, does not necessarily denote influence, for it is probable that artists of different heritages, living in the same historical epoch, feel upon their imaginations the same pressures of reality that result in comparable art forms. This notion of the simultaneity of artistic trends informs Paz's comment that “poetry written in English” during the modernist period “is part of a general trend” linked to “contemporary French poetry.” One of his models is Wallace Stevens, who, Paz says, “had an admirable...