This volume with the best verses of the Nobel Prize winner and some of his essays on poetics was necessary. Even the intellectual activity of the Mexican writer is inconceivable without his poetry.
The poet invents more or less real images and figures with human feelings and passions that break the social order. Every true poem is subversive because, as was maintained in Roman Jakobson's Opojaz, "it is the voluntary deformation of common speech through organized violence exercised against it." Recovering the poem, which for Paz is knowledge that eroticizes ideas and fixes the moment as a fusion of opposites by abolishing succession, embodies history as an act and inserts us into the true creative community. The universalist vocation, enlightened and romantic at the same time, of Paz's literary experience and reflection, of reconciling artistic and speculative traditions of very diverse cultures, it is worth repeating, has his poetry as an absolute radiating center. “I am increasingly amazed by Octavio's lucid and sensitive intelligence, although he is very far from his criteria in many things," wrote Julio Cortázar in 1968.