Description: Mexico's leading poet, essayist, and cultural critic writes of a Mexican poet of another time and another world, the world of seventeenth-century New Spain. His subject is Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the most striking figure in all of Spanish-American colonial literature and one of the great poets of her age.
Brief description: Octavio Paz (1914-1998) was a renowned Mexican poet, essayist, diplomat, and cultural critic. The author of more than forty volumes of poetry and prose, he was the winner of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1982, the Miguel de Cervantes Prize in 1981, and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1990.
Review Quotes: I believe Paz's book to be the culmination of his magnificent effort to bring history and poetry together. His Sor Juana is an intellectual landmark--a superb interpretation of the life and work of the first great Latin American poet, and the richest portrait we have of the intellectual life of the viceroyalty of New Spain. Octavio Paz has wrought speech from silence; he has made a mute century speak at last.--Carlos Fuentes