Description: A collection of a major Mexican writer's essays, focusing on individual poets and on poetry in general.
Review Quotes: Octavio Paz is a living incarnation of those tensions in modern poetry between human commitment and aesthetic concern, a dialectic that is fundamental to the art of all nations. And his poetics is important, for it places the poet at the heart of modern life, singing his solitary song in company with the massed voices of human solitude. In his view, the poet does not speak the language of society but turns away from it, gaining strength in exile.-- "Hudson Review"