In the following essay, Verani elucidates the influence of world philosophies on Paz's poetic push to recapture "the natural innocence of man."

Within the landscape of the 20th century, in an increasingly specialized and divided world, Octavio Paz is a writer of exceptional and diverse interests, of prodigious versatility, unusual erudition and imagination, recognized as one of the major poets of our time and as a lucid interpreter of modernity. His critical thought includes a bewildering number of fields of human activity—art, aesthetics, philosophy, Oriental religion, anthropology, psychology, political ideology. The preoccupations that cross Paz's writing—the search for lost unity and the reconciliation of man with himself and the universe, the celebration of love and of freedom of thinking, the merging of contraries, the reviving of the poetic work—converge in the reflexive prose of his essays and in a poetry that assumes the form...