La relación entre poesía e historia en el joven Octavio Paz

Abstract

This article explores Octavio Paz’s stand in the central debate of the third decade of the 20th Century, one made out of two antagonistic sides: on the one hand, art committed to serving an ideological purpose; on the other, pure art, aloof from history and extrapoetical reality. From 1938, when he took charge of Taller magazine, Paz contributed in an outstanding way to defend an independent position, exploring the complex relations between poetry and history in the contemporary world, a central theme to a new generation of Mexican writers. Paz found in poets such as T. S. Eliot, Novalis and Rimbaud, a model that would allow him to reconcile “the eternal with the ephemeral” and to state that true poetry consists in the crystallization of an absolute present that never refuses to be faithful to its times.