Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Children of the Mire: Modern Poetry from Romanticism to the Avant-Garde, New and Enlarged Edition

Children of the Mire: Modern Poetry from Romanticism to the Avant-Garde, New and Enlarged Edition

Paz, Octavio
Phillips, Rachel

Paperback

Series: Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, Book 44

Literary CriticismPoetry CriticismGeneral Poetry

ISBN10: 0674116291
ISBN13: 9780674116290
Publisher: Belknap Press
Published: May 22 1991
Pages: 192
Weight: 0.57
Height: 0.64 Width: 5.52 Depth: 8.28
Language: English

An instant classic.--Calvin Bedient, New Republic

Mexico's greatest modern poet reflects upon the twilight of modernity.

If Octavio Paz was one of the greatest poets that the Spanish-language world has ever produced, as Mario Vargas Llosa once said, he was also an astoundingly erudite critic. Here, in his 1971-1972 Norton Lectures, the Nobel laureate offers a potent and prescient diagnosis of the condition of poetry in the wake of literary modernism.

Poetry's relationship with modernity, Paz argues, has always been tempestuous. If modern temporality posited the forward march of history toward the gates of a secular future, poetry is the world of nonsequential time...a spiral sequence which turns ceaselessly without ever returning completely to its beginning. And if modernity is the age of revolution, a negation of the past propelled by critical rationality, poetry chafes against the strictures of reason, aimlessly dwelling in dreams, eroticism, mythology, and other realms inaccessible to revolutionary fervor. Meanwhile, avant-garde attempts to embrace the aesthetics of change and recreate the revolutionary spirit in verse have exhausted themselves. What's left, Paz maintains, is to return to the sinuous temporality of the poem itself, the irresolvable tension between the historical text and the abolition of history in the lyrical present.

Mapping the changing meanings of modernity across a wide range of poetic movements, from English and German Romanticism, French Surrealism, and Latin American modernismo to the avant-garde experiments of Vicente García-Huidobro, Children of the Mire is not only a dazzlingly cosmopolitan work of literary criticism. It is also a revealing portrait of the one of the defining voices of Latin American literature.

Also in

General Poetry

View All