1974
First Published
4.06
Average Rating
198
Number of Pages
Octavio Paz launches a far-ranging excursion into the "incestuous and tempestuous" relations between modern poetry and the modern epoch. From the perspective of a Spanish-American and a poet, he explores the opposite meanings that the word "modern" has held for poets and philosophers, artists, and scientists. Tracing the beginnings of the modern poetry movement to the pre-Romantics, Paz outlines its course as a contradictory dialogue between the poetry of the Romance and Germanic languages. He discusses at length the unique character of Anglo-American "modernism" within the avant-garde movement, and especially vis-a-vis French and Spanish-American poetry. Finally he offers a critique of our era's attitude toward the concept of time, affirming that we are at the "twilight of the idea of the future." He proposes that we are living at the end of the avant-garde, the end of that vision of the world and of art born with the first Romantics.
Avg Rating
4.06
Number of Ratings
267
5 STARS
36%
4 STARS
41%
3 STARS
17%
2 STARS
3%
1 STARS
3%
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Author
Octavio Paz
Author · 36 books
Octavio Paz Lozano was a Mexican writer, poet, and diplomat, and the winner of the 1982 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature ("for impassioned writing with wide horizons, characterized by sensuous intelligence and humanistic integrity.")
