Octavio Paz - Poetry Quotes

6 Sourced Quotes

View all Octavio Paz Quotes
Touched by poetry, language is more fully language and at the same time is no longer language: it is a poem.

Octavio Paz
There can be no society without poetry, but society can never be realized as poetry, it is never poetic. Sometimes the two terms seek to break apart. They cannot.

Octavio Paz
There can be a "boom" in petroleum or wheat, but there can't be a boom in the novel and less still in poetry.

Octavio Paz
Only now have I understood that there was a secret relationship between what I have called my expulsion from the present and the writing of poetry. Poetry is in love with the instant and seeks to relive it in the poem, thus separating it from sequential time and turning it into a fixed present. But at that time I wrote without wondering why I was doing it. I was searching for the gateway to the present: I wanted to belong to my time and to my century. A little later this obsession became a fixed idea: I wanted to be a modern poet. My search for modernity had begun.

Octavio Paz
Eroticism is first and foremost a thirst for otherness. And the supernatural is the supreme otherness. This is perhaps the most noble aim of poetry, to attach ourselves to the world around us, to turn desire into love, to embrace, finally what always evades us, what is beyond, but what is always there — the unspoken, the spirit, the soul.

Octavio Paz
Surrealism is not a school of poetry but a movement of liberation... A way of rediscovering the language of innocence, a renewal of the primordial pact, poetry is the basic text, the foundation of the human order. Surrealism is revolutionary because it is a return to the beginning of all beginnings.

Octavio Paz