SOURCE: Santí, Enrico Mario. “Octavio Paz: Otherness and the Search for the Present.” Georgia Review 49, no. 1 (spring 1995): 265-71.

In the following essay, Santí offers an overview of Paz's career and works.

In choosing Octavio Paz to receive the Nobel Prize in 1990, the Swedish Academy pointed particularly to Paz's “passionate writing of wide horizons … characterized by sensual intelligence and humanistic integrity.” By so doing, it acknowledged more than sixty years of a poetic and intellectual career which has made Paz one of the most important writers now living. For students of Latin American literature the news of the award came as no surprise; many had believed for years that Paz deserved it. It could even be said that with this award the Academy was vindicating its earlier indifference to other Latin American writers who were equally deserving (like Borges, Lezama Lima, or Guimarães Rosa) but were passed by...