SOURCE: Durán, Manuel. “Remembering Octavio Paz.” World Literature Today 73, no. 1 (winter 1999): 101-03.

In the following essay, Durán shares personal memories and a summarization of the life and work of Paz, following the death of the poet in 1998.

I first met Octavio Paz in Paris, in 1951. I was studying Spanish and comparative literature at the Sorbonne. Paz was the Cultural Attache of Mexico. Born in 1914, he had started to write poetry while still very young, around 1931, and was already famous in Mexico and well known in France and elsewhere.

What struck me from the start was that he was a great conversationalist, brimming with ideas and original remarks, yet he also knew how to listen. Early success had not spoiled him. An individualist and a rebel in the Romantic tradition, he had an affinity for lost causes. He had been in Spain during the civil war, taken...