Octavio Paz

Octavio Paz was a Mexican poet, essayist and diplomat who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1990. He served in Paris, Tokyo and New Delhi, and resigned as ambassador to India in 1968 in protest at the Tlatelolco massacre of students in Mexico City. His essay The Labyrinth of Solitude explores Mexican identity through masks, fiestas, attitudes to death and the legacy of the Spanish conquest. His other prose works examine poetry, eroticism, history and the culture of Mexico.

Key ideas

• Solitude is the deepest condition of human life, and Mexicans experience it with special intensity.
• Mexicans often hide behind masks of reserve and formality to protect an exposed inner self.
• The fiesta breaks open this solitude in moments of explosive communion.
• Mexican identity is marked by the trauma of the conquest and a divided relation to its Indigenous and Spanish origins.
• Poetry is a form of revelation that reconciles humans with the world and with one another.

Major works

• The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950)
• The Bow and the Lyre (1956)
• Sunstone (1957)
• Sor Juana, or, The Traps of Faith (1982)
• The Double Flame (1993)

In the Book corner

• The Labyrinth of Solitude 1950; revised 1959 · Intermediate
  A book of essays on Mexican identity by the poet and later Nobel laureate, first published in 1950 and revised in 1959.…

In the conversation

No topics yet. Start one about this thinker.