SOURCE: Poirier, Richard. “On Octavio Paz.” Western Humanities Review 45, no. 1 (spring 1991): 3-9.

In the following essay, Poirier explores connections between Paz and American poets including William James.

Responding to a question last evening, Octavio Paz spoke with tolerant amusement of the various “tribes” now occupying the terrain of literary criticism and theory. One of these, for the moment in its ascendancy—the tribe of critical historicists or new historicists—seems to me distinctly at odds with Paz's own sense of what literature is about. They favor a kind of criticism that tends to be rhetorically assured of its global utility while being vociferously anti-imperialist, a criticism confident of its institutional power even as it mourns the ubiquity of institutional networkings. They have pretty much decided that what some of us, including Octavio Paz, would call human creativity or human genius is a product merely of discursive formations, that...