The philosopher-man of letters brilliantly reflects on some 16 fellow poets and writers, including Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, and William Carols Williams.
In 1990, the Swedish Academy awarded Octavio Paz the Nobel Prize in Literature for impassioned writing with wide horizons, characterized by sensuous intelligence and humanistic integrity. Paz is a writer for the entire world to celebrate (Chicago Tribune)
Octavio Paz, asserts Eliot Weinberger in his introduction to these Selected Poems, is among the last of the modernists "who drew their own maps of the world." For Latin America's foremost living poet, his native Mexico has been the center o
Octavio Paz launches a far-ranging excursion into the "incestuous and tempestuous" relations between modern poetry and the modern epoch. From the perspective of a Spanish-American and a poet, he explores the opposite meanings that the word "
Octavio Paz has long been known for his brilliant essays as well as for his poetry. Through the essays, he has sought to confront the tensions inherent in the conflict between art and society and to achieve a unity of their polarities. The Siren and the S
Octavio Paz has long been acknowledged as Mexico's foremost writer and critic. In this international classic, Paz has written one of the most enduring and powerful works ever created on Mexico and its people, character, and culture. Compared to Orteg
The difficulty (and necessity) of translation is concisely described in Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, a close reading of different translations of a single poem from the Tang Dynasty—from a transliteration to Kenneth Rexroth’s loose interpretation
In this series of essays Octavio Paz explores the intimate connection between sex, eroticism, and love in literature throughout the ages. Rich in scope, The Double Flame examines everything from taboo to repression, Carnival to Lent, Sade to Freud, origin
Presented in Eliot Weinberger's excellent new translation with the Spanish texts en face, this is the 1957 poem "that definitively established Paz as a major international figure" (Sagetrieb). Written as a single cyclical sentence (at the e
Written while the Nobel Prize–winning author was the Mexican ambassador to India, this is a dazzling mind-journey to the temple city of Galta, "a sumptuous feast of visual imagery" (SFChronicle). Hanuman, the red-faced monkey god and ninth gramm
Most of the poems in this new collection follow the arc of the Caribbean archipelago from Trinidad to Jamaica. The reader is taken on an odyssey, beginning with "The Schooner Flight," in which a poor mulatto sailor abandons his life in Trinidad,
The poems in this sequence of fifty-four were written to encompass one year, from summer to summer. Their principal themes are the stasis, both stultifying and provocative, of midsummer in the tropics; the pull of the sea, family, and friendship on one wh
Drawing from every stage of his career, Derek Walcott's Selected Poems brings together famous pieces from his early volumes, including "A Far Cry from Africa" and "A City's Death by Fire," with passages from the celebrated Om
First published in 1973, Another Life by Nobel laureate Derek Walcott is one of the most highly praised long autobiographical poems in English. This volume presents the text of the poem, along with extensive annotations. In a critical essay, editors Baugh
Nobody's Nation offers an illuminating look at the St. Lucian, Nobel-Prize-winning writer, Derek Walcott, and grounds his work firmly in the context of West Indian history. Paul Breslin argues that Walcott's poems and plays are bound up with an
The first collection of essays by the Nobel laureate.
Derek Walcott has been publishing essays in The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and elsewhere for more than twenty years. What the Twilight Says collects these pieces to form a volume of r
A collection spanning the whole of Derek Walcott’s celebrated, inimitable, essential career
“He gives us more than himself or ‘a world’; he gives us a sense of infinity embodied in the language.” To Joseph Brodsky’s words of praise, one might add the mo
This remarkable collection, which won the 1986 "Los Angeles Times" Book Prize for Poetry, includes most of the poems from each of Derek Walcott's seven prior books of verse and all of his long autobiographical poem, "Another Life."
A poem in five books, of circular narrative design, titled with the Greek name for Homer, which simultaneously charts two currents of history: the visible history charted in events—the tribal losses of the American Indian, the tragedy of African enslaveme
The contemporary reader of English poetry is able to take pleasure in the sounds and movements of the English language in works written over the past eight centuries, and to find poems that convey powerful emotions and vivid images from this entire period
This book presents an innovative format for poetry criticism that its authors call "dialogical poetics." This approach shows that readings of poems, which in academic literary criticism often look like a product of settled knowledge, are in real
Examines the way in which poetry in English makes use of rhythm. The author argues that there are three major influences which determine the verse-forms used in any language: the natural rhythm of the spoken language itself; the properties of rhythmic for
This is the first introduction to rhythm and meter that begins where students are: as speakers of English familiar with the rhythms of the spoken word, nursery rhymes, song and rap. Poetic Rhythm builds on this knowledge and experience, moving from basic