SOURCE: "Mexico Pays Homage to Poet Paz, Its 'Teacher,'" in Los Angeles Times, April 21, 1998, pp. A1, A8.

[In the following obituary, Sheridan and Randolph assess Paz's place in Mexican literature and culture.]

From government leaders and billionaire businessmen to jeans-clad students and workers, this nation on Monday mourned the death of Octavio Paz, its Nobel Prize-winning poet and philosopher who died over the weekend at age 84.

"Octavio Paz is a teacher of Mexico and the world. He will forever form part of the consciousness of our country and our era," a somber President Ernesto Zedillo told scores of black-suited mourners—including much of the country's political and intellectual elite—at a memorial service before Paz's casket in the nation's Palace of Fine Arts.

Outside, away from the television lights and bodyguards, stretched a line of hundreds of Mexicans, clutching flowers and water bottles, fanning themselves with newspapers...