After studying the poetry of Walt Whitman, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams, and researching Octavio Paz, I have found that each of these “master poets” has influenced Paz’s work. However, I will be focusing on only one of these major influences: Robert Frost.
A fellow blogger expands on these influencing poet masters:
“Everywhere, his appetite for literature was insatiable. In the United States, he devoured Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound; in Europe, T.S. Eliot, Federico Garcia Lorca, the French symbolists and surrealists; in India, the Ramayana, the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita; and in Japan, the haiku poets. They all exerted influences on the content, esthetics and structure of his poetry.”
ROBERT FROST & OCTAVIO PAZ
The poetic connection between Frost and Paz is almost invisible to the public; when searching for some ‘scholarly’ information it was almost impossible to find any support, however, I was able to find an article full of great information connecting these two poets. This information reveals that, contrary to the ‘un-findable’ sources, the intertextuality between Frost and Paz is very prominent.
“Paz and Frost are widely regarded as the laureates of their respective cultures: one, the poet of Mexico’s native identity and history, its pervasive and indigenous, hot, acrid dust, a symbol of Mexico’s particular reality and of the characteristic Latin American preoccupation with time and death; the other, the Yankee bard of northern snow and dark woods, equivalent symbols of Frost’s restless anxiety over outer chaos and over even more troubling inner “desert places”" (Frost, Poetry 296).
The two poets only met in person one time, during an interview with Paz interviewing Frost. Although only meeting once, this interview exposes how similar these poets were, and how strong the intertextuality between them is.
Both poets range over subjects such as the relationships between creativity and solitude, art and nature, individual talent and tradition, humor and passion.
The subject matter, themes, styling, and structure of Paz’s and Frost’s poetry is incredibly similar.
“Both poets, for instance, acknowledge vigorously the particularities of the phenomenal world, the irreducible thereness of the physical while also invoking the ineffable mystery of being, the ghostly incandescence of spiritual life and desire.”
The following is an excerpt from Paz’s poem Visita:
After walking along the road for twenty minutes in the three-o’clock sun, I finally came to the bend. I turned right and began to climb the slope. At intervals the trees bordering the path afforded a little coolness. There was water running among grasses in a brook. The sand creaked under my shoes. The sun was everywhere. The air smelled of hot, thirsty green weeds. Not a leaf stirred on the trees. Above them, a few clouds rested heavily, anchored in a windless blue gulf. A bird sang. I halted: “It would be much better to lie down under the elm. The sound of water is worth more than all the words of poets.”) (“Visit” 8 )
The bordering trees (“lines,” as Frost calls them in “The Wood Pile,” “Straight up and down… / Too much alike to mark or name a place by / So as to say for certain I was here / Or somewhere else: I was just far from home”), the sibilant brook, the creaking of sand under foot, the bird in song, the reflective and self-conscious stance–all are details that Paz may well have deliberately borrowed from Frost but that in any case reveal the Mexican poet’s affinity for the spectacle of the physical (Poetry 101).
This clearly shows that Paz was influenced by Frost, as he has ‘borrowed’ some of Frost’s lines, and used them in his own poem, Visita. Also obvious, is how both these poets focused on nature in many of their poems, as Visita and The Wood Pile are both centered around a natural setting, with trees, water, sand, and animals.
The Following is another excerpt from Visita:
Nature is hostile….Besides, we are few and weak. The landscape swallows men up, and there is always the danger of being changed into a cactus…It is a country that will turn to stone some day. The trees and plants are tending toward stone, the same as the people. And the animals, too, the dogs and coyotes and snakes. There are birds made of baked clay and it is very strange to see them fly and hear them sing, because you have not got used to the idea that they are actually birds. (“Visit” 8 )
Frost read this poem, paying close attention to Paz’s creative language, and explained that it is similar to the freedom of a country:
“Both poetry and “country things,” as Frost suggests in a different context (the complex lyric “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things”), are “experience[s] in freedom. It’s like poetry. Life is like poetry, when a poet writes a poem. It starts out by being an invitation to the unknown: he writes the first line and doesn’t know what comes next.” “Tiene usted razon” (“You are right”), answers Paz. “La poesia es la experiencia de la libertad. El poeta se arriesga, se juega el todo por el todo del poema en cada verso que escribe” (“Poetry is an experience in freedom. The poet takes chances, he gambles the whole poem in every line he writes”). “And you can’t take it back,” adds Frost. “Each act, each line, is irrevocable and forever. You’re compromised forever in every line” (“Visita” 36-37; “Visit” 8). As in Frost’s “The Tuft of Flowers,” the poetic act is as vitalizing as country mowing–inviting dreaming, weary men to bond in “brotherly speech”–but also as perpetually unfinished as the country work of stacking wood in “The Wood-Pile”: although the gamble of metaphor may, like blooms spared from the keen scythe, survive the encounter with country, with reality’s pressures, and offer the poet a moment of “sheer morning gladness,” it also may end, like the “cord of maple,” the meticulous “labor of…ax,” wasted and sinking in the “frozen swamp… / With the slow smokeless burning of decay” (Poetry 23, 101-02). Always risk, always compromise.”
Frost and Paz both see poetry as a form of liberation, in which people can come together; they also reveal that poets must take chances, and that once you put the words down they will be there forever, and you can never erase them. Both poets know that poetry is taxing, and may not always end up as you hope, but they are so determined to create poetry that they continue writing it, no matter the outcome.
The following lines of Paz reveal this idea that both him and Frost have stated:
Yo dibujo estas letras como el dia dibuja sus imagenes y sopla sobre ellas y no vuelve
(I draw these letters as the day draws its images and blows over them and does not return.)
(Collected Poems 252-53)
Frost and Paz both use metaphor to “resist the void” and they believe that “analogical imagination” is the “source of order against reason”. They both use poetry to explore the outer world, and bring forward the inner imagination.
One of Paz’s significant thematic predilections as a poet tends to parallel Frost’s concerns with the role of metaphor in the imagination’s efforts to define and order through the power of analogy the outer confusion of shifting reality. On the subject of how metaphor–thus language itself–as analogy bridges the gulf between the conceiving imagination of poet and the physical world perceived by senses, Paz writes, “Analogy is a rhythmic vision of the universe; before becoming an idea, it is a verbal experience. If the poet hears the universe as a language, he also utters the universe” (Mire 94).
In Paz’s poem “Entre Lo Que Veo” (“Between What I See”), both poets theory on poetry is revealed:
Tangible idea, intangible word: poetry comes and goes between what is and what is not. It weaves and unweaves reflections. Poetry scatters eyes on a page, scatters words on our eyes. Eyes speak, words look, looks think. To hear thoughts, see what we say, touch the body of an idea. Eyes close, the words open.
Throughout the entire interview, Frost and Paz agreed on almost all their beliefs on poetry, and each poets see the other as inspirational and talented. They were both poets who were “predominantly concerned with the essential risk of words”. This leads to Paz’s belief that poetry leaves you alone, and in solitude:
“El campo es…la experiencia de la soledad” (“The country is an experience in solitude”), Paz had remarked to Frost earlier, but so is poetry (“Visita” 36; “Visit” 8). In the act of forging meaning out of either dust or snow “que apenas se toca se deshace entre las manos…” (“which, when you barely touch it, sifts through your fingers…”), the poet is truly alone, as in love and death.
As revealed earlier, Paz uses an equation of creativity, that involves poetry and life itself, with “love set against the world’s unalterable course towards death”. Paz’s equation would have pleased Frost. This is evident in 1939 when Frost wrote:
“The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same as for love. No one can really hold that the ecstasy should be static and stand still in one place. It begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life…a momentary slay against confusion” (Poirier, “Paz” 6; Frost, Prose 18).
Furthermore, Frost would also please Paz, as Frost eventually made the Mexican’s “great themes of solitude and creativity” the focus of one of the last poems he wrote, during the last year of his life:
In winter in the woods alone
Against the trees I go.
I mark a maple for my own
And lay the maple low.
At four o’clock I shoulder ax,
And in the afterglow
I link a line of shadowy tracks
Across the tinted snow.
I see for Nature no defeat
In one tree’s overthrow
Or for myself in my retreat
For yet another blow.
This poem, written by Frost, using Paz’s themes on solitude, clearly shows the connection between these poets. Once again, nature is the main subject of the poem, and the speaker is alone, in solitude, in nature. This poem also demonstrates their similar belief that nature is undefeated, but the poet may be defeated, but words are forever, and they must continue forward. This also demonstrates both poets dependency on metaphors in their poetry; this poem is a metaphor on life, and being alone. Being in solitude allows you to be one with nature, and allows your thoughts to flow. Frost clearly wanted to incorporate Paz into his final piece of poetry.
“The Mexican and the American, the great poets of the dust and snow that vanish all too quickly even in the spell of poetry, met only once. But perhaps they would have enjoyed bracing together another time for yet another blow against a diminishing world and against the blankness of that space after the poem.”
Source:
Octavio Paz and Robert Frost: El Polvo y la Nieve Que se Deshacen Entre las Manos
By John Zubizarreta
Comparative Literature, Vol. 47, No. 3 (Summer, 1995), pp. 235-250
(article consists of 16 pages)
Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of the University of Oregon
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3612/is_199507/ai_n8715588
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