Poetry and Modernity

OCTAVIO PAZ
Translated by Eliot Weinberger

THE TANNER LECTURES ON HUMAN VALUES

Delivered at

The University of Utah

October 18-20, 1989
Octa vio Pa z was born in 1714 in Mexico City and edu-
cated at the University of Mexico. A writer and diploma-
tist, he is a former Secretary of the Mexican Embassy in
Paris, Chargé d’Affaires of the Mexican Embassy in Japan,
and served as Mexico’s Ambassador to India from 1962 to
1968. He was the Simón Bolívar Professor of Latin-
American Studies and Fellow of Churchill College, Cam-
bridge and the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at
Harvard. An honorary member of the American Academy
of Arts and Letters, he was awarded the International
Poetry Grand Prix in 1763; the Jerusalem Prize; the Grand
Golden Eagle of the International Festival, Paris, 1977;
Peace Prize (Fed. German Book Trade), 1984; and Gran
Cruz de Alfonso. Among his widely respected works in
poetry is Selected Poems ( 1 9 6 3 ) , which is available in a
bilingual edition, translated by Muriel Rukeyser. His works
in prose include The Labyrinth of Solitude (1961),
Claude Lévi-Strauss: An Introduction (1972), and Marcel
Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare (1981).
 First of all, I would like to thank the University of Utah and
the Tanner Lecture Committee for inviting me to speak to you.
I of course accepted, but not without fear and trepidation. My
credentials for giving this lecture are more than dubious: I am
neither a specialist nor a professional criticnor a historian. The
only thing that justifies my presence here is my passion for poetry.
Since adolescence — along with the jobs that have supported me,
and sometimes in spite of them — I have worked at writing poetry.
Poetry has been for me not only an everyday task and an invincible
affection but also a vice, a fate, and ultimately, a cult, a personal
religion. But I write poems only intermittently and, like other
poets, in the empty stretches of time I sometimes reflect on poetic
creation and the psychological and historical circumstances that
surround and, to a large extent, determine it. Thus my contribu-
tion will not be that of a philosopher, critic, or historian but,
rather, that of a practitioner: what I say must be seen more as a
testimony than a verdict.

I. MODERNITY AND ROMANTICISM

The subject I would like to explore — poetry and modernity —

is composed of two terms whose relationship to each other is far
from clear. The poetry of this fin de siècle is simultaneously a
beneficiary of the poetic movements of modernity, from romanti-
cism to the avant-garde, and a repudiation of them. Nor is it
obvious what we mean by the word modernity. Its meanings are
elusive and changing: the modern is, by its nature, transitory;
“contemporary” is a quality that vanishes as soon as we name it.
There are as many modernities and antiquities as there are epochs
and societies: the Aztecs were moderns compared to the Olmecs, as
Alexander was to Amenophis IV. The “modernist” poetry of

[57]
58 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

Rubén Darío was an antique for the ultraists, and futurism now
strikes us more as a relic than an aesthetic. The modern age cannot
help but be tomorrow’s antiquity, But for the moment we have to
resign ourselves and accept that we live in the modern age, con-
scious of the fact that the label is both ambivalent and provisional.
What does this word mo de rni ty mean? When did it begin?
Some believe that it began with the Renaissance, the Reformation,
and the discovery of the Americas; others claim that it began with
the birth of the nation-states and the institution of banking, the
rise of mercantile capitalism, and the creation of the bourgeoisie;
others emphasize the scientific and philosophical revolutions of the
seventeenth century, without which we would have neither our
technology nor our industries. Each of these opinions is partially
correct; taken together they form a coherent explanation. For that
reason, perhaps, most cultural historians tend to favor the eigh-
teenth century: not only did it inherit these changes and innova-
tions, it also consciously recognized many of those characteristics
that we now claim as ours. Was that age a prefiguration of the
one we live in today? Yes and no. It would be more precise to say
that ours has been the era of the mutilation of the ideas and
projects of that great century.
Modernity began as a critique of religion, philosophy, morality,
law, history, economics, and politics. Criticism was its most dis-
tinctive feature, its birthmark. All that has been the modern age
has been the work of criticism, which I take to mean a method of
investigation, creation, and action. The principal concepts and
ideas of the modern age — progress, evolution, revolution, free-
dom, democracy, science, technology — were born from that criti-
cism. In the eighteenth century reason shaped the criticism of the
world and of itself, thereby radically transforming classical ra-
tionalism and its timeless geometries. A criticism of itself: reason
renounced those grandiose constructions called being, good, and
truth; it ceased to be the mansion of ideas and became instead a
road, a means of exploration. A criticism of metaphysics and of
[PAZ] Poetry and Modernity 59

its truths that were impermeable to change: Hume and Kant. A

criticism of the world, of the past and present; a criticism of cer-
tainties and traditional values; a criticism of institutions and be-
liefs, the throne and the altar; a criticism of mores, a reflection on
passion, sensibility, and sexuality: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Denis
Diderot, Pierre Laclos, the Marquis de Sade; the historical criti-
cism of Edward Gibbon and Montesquieu; the discovery of the
other: Chinese, Persians, American Indians; the changes of per-
spective in astronomy, geography, physics, biology. In the end, a
criticism that was incarnated in history: the American Revolution,
the French Revolution, the independence movements of the Span-
ish and Portuguese colonies. (For reasons I have discussed in
other writings, the revolutions for independence in Spanish and
Portuguese America failed both politically and socially. Our mo-
dernity is incomplete or, more exactly, is a historical hybrid.)
It is no accident that these great revolutions, the roots of mod-
ern history, were inspired by eighteenth-century thought. It was
an age rich with utopias and projects for social reform. It has been
said that those utopias are the most disastrous aspect of that leg-
acy. Yet we can neither ignore nor condemn them: although many
horrors have been committed in their name, we owe them nearly
all the humanitarian acts and dreams of the modern age. The
utopias of the eighteenth century were the great ferment that set in
motion the history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Utopia is the other face of criticism, and only a critical age could
be the inventor of utopias. The empty spaces created by the demo-
litions of the critical spirit are almost always filled by utopian con-
structions. Utopias are the dreams of reason. Active dreams that
turn into revolutions and reforms. The preeminence of utopias is
another characteristic feature of the modern age. Each era may be
identified by its vision of time, and in ours the continual presence
of revolutionary utopias testifies to the exaggerated regard we
have for the future. The past was no better than the present: per-
fection is not behind us but ahead; it is not an abandoned paradise
60 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

but a territory we will someday colonize, a city that remains to

be built.
Christianity replaced the cyclical vision of time of Greco-Roman
antiquity with a time that was linear, successive, and irreversible;
one with a beginning and an end, from the Fall of Adam and Eve
to the Final Judgment. Alongside this mortal and historical time
there was another, supernatural time, invulnerable to death and
change: eternity. Thus the only truly decisive moment of terres-
trial history was the Redemption: the descent and sacrifice of
Christ represents the intersection of eternity and temporality, the
successive and moral time of man and the time of the beyond,
which neither changes nor moves in succession, forever identical to
itself. The modern age began with the criticism of Christian eter-
nity and the appearance of yet another time. On the one hand, the
finite time of Christianity, with its beginning and end, became the
nearly infinite time of nature’s evolution and of history that re-
mained open to the future. On the other, modernity devalued eter-
nity: perfection was transported to a future that was not in the other
world but in this one. In the famous image of G. W. F. Hegel,
the rose of reason was crucified in the present. History, he said,
is a calvary: the transformation of the Christian mystery into his-
torical action. The road to the absolute passes through time; it is
time. Perfection resides in the future and is forever ahead of us.
Changes and revolutions are incarnations of the human drive to-
ward the future and its paradises.
The relation between romanticism and modernity is both filial
and contentious. Romanticism was the child of the age of criti-
cism, and change prompted its conception and birth and was its
distinguishing feature. It was the great change not only in the arts
and letters, but also in imagination, sensibility, taste, and ideas.
It was a morality, an eroticism, a politics, a way of dressing and a
way of loving, a way of living and of dying. A rebellious child,
romanticism was a criticism of rational criticism; it replaced suc-
cessive historical time with a time of origin, before history, and the
[PAZ] Poetry and Modernity 61

utopian future with the instantaneous present of the passions, love

and the flesh. Romanticism was the great negation of modernity
as it has been conceived in the eighteenth century by critical,
utopian, and revolutionary reason. But it was a negation that
remained within modernity. Only an age of criticism could have
produced such a total negation.
Romanticism coexisted with modernity, time af ter time merg-
ing with it only in order to transgress it. These transgressions
assumed many forms but only two modes: analogy and irony. I
take the first to mean “the vision of the universe as a system of
correspondences and the vision of language as a double of the
universe.”1 It is a very ancient tradition, reelaborated and trans-
mitted by Renaissance Neoplatonism through various hermetic
traditions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Having
nourished the philosophical and libertine sects of the eighteenth
century, it was recognized by the romantics and their followers
through to our own era. It is the central, albeit underground,
tradition of modern poetry, from the first romantics to William
Butler Yeats, Rainer Maria Rilke, and the surrealists. Simulta-
neous to this vision of universal correspondence, its enemy-twin
appeared: irony. It was the rip in the fabric of analogies, the ex-
ception that ruptured the correspondences. If analogy may be con-
ceived as a fan which, unfolded, displays the resemblances between
this and that, microcosm and macrocosm, stars, men, and worms,
then irony tears the fan to pieces. Irony is the dissonance that
disrupts the concert of the correspondences, turning it into cacoph-
ony. Irony has many names: it is the anomaly, the deviation, the
bizarre, as Baudelaire called it. In a word, it is that great accident:
death.
Analogy steeps itself in myth; its essence is rhythm, the cyclical
time of appearances and disappearances, deaths and resurrections.
Irony is the coming of criticism to the kingdom of imagination and
1Octavio Paz, Children of the Mire: Modern Poetry from Romanticism to the

Avant -Garde (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1 9 7 4 ) .

62 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

sensibility; its essence is linear time which leads to death — the

death of both man and the gods. Twin transgressions: analogy
replaces the linear time of history and the canonization of the
utopian future with the cyclical time of myth; irony, in turn, sheds
mythic time in order to affirm the lapses in contingency, the plu-
rality of gods and myths, the death of God and his creatures. The
twin ambiguities of romantic poetry: it was revolutionary, but it
occurred alongside, not as part of, the revolutions of the century;
at the same time, its spirituality was a transgression of the Chris-
tian denominations.2 The history of modern poetry, from romanti-
cism to symbolism, is the history of various manifestations of the
two principles by which it has been composed since its birth:
analogy and irony.

II. MODERNITY AND THE AVANT-GARDE

The nineteenth century may be seen as the apogee of mod-

ernity. The ideas born from criticism, which had a polemical value
in the eighteenth century — democracy, the separation of church
and state, the end of royal privileges, freedom of beliefs, opinions,
and association — became the principles shared by nearly all the
European nations and the United States. The West grew, extended
its boundaries, and held fast. But at the end of the last century a
deep unease spread through the centers of our civilization, one that
affected the social, political, and economic systems as much as the
systems of beliefs and values. We may name the cycle that includes
the birth, apogee, and crisis of modernity the modern age; the last
stage, that of crisis, may be called the contemporary era. Never-
theless, its duration — it has lasted nearly a century — leads me to
doubt that the term is appropriate. Equally inapt are those words
that always appear as soon as one speaks on this topic: decadence,
decline, sunset. The word crisis, while not inexact, has been

2 Ibid .
[PAZ] Poetry and Modernity 63

weakened by continual use. In the end, whatever name we give it,

the period that began at the start of this century is distinguishable
from the others by its uncertainty toward the values and ideas that
formed modernity. The first signs of this universal crisis appeared
at the end of the last century; by 1910 they were apparent with a
brutal clarity. I need not describe them. For a long time they have
been the favorite topic of sociologists, astrologers, clergymen,
economists, prophets, psychoanalysts, journalists, and the other
faith healers of the ills of our society. I will confine myself simply
to mentioning the areas touched by this historical disease.
The birth of the modern age also brought the blossoming of
that great upheaval and great aberration nationalism. Transformed
into the religion of the national state, it acquired, in the last cen-
tury, a tremendous ferocity. The reactionary criticism against bour-
geois democracy — rationalism, cosmopolitanism, skepticism, hedo-
nism — allied itself with a nostalgia for precapitalist societies and
their “idyllic relations,” as Marx ironically called them. In these
sermons against the sins of progress there were echoes of the
ancient Christian horror of Satan the skeptic and intelligent mam-
mon, lover of industry, pleasure, and the arts. From the other ex-
treme, and with similar passion, the revolutionaries — above all,
the anarchists — denounced the oppressive character of the state
and of social institutions: family, property, the law. In the first
stage of the crisis, socialism — in its various forms, not excluding
those of Marxist inspiration — was critical but not subversive; al-
though the Second International contributed greatly to improving
the lot of the workers, it still maintained its ties to the social in-
stitutions of the industrial nations.
In the second decade of the twentieth century the crisis of the
social institutions was transformed into a crisis of international
politics that exploded into the First World War. The revolutions
that followed changed the face of the planet. Marxism — or more
exactly, its authoritarian version, Leninism — became a world
power. In the third decade, under various names and with con-
64 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

tr a ditor y ideologies, it embodied a new historical reality: the

totalitarian bureaucratic state. The process has continued every-
where throughout the century. Even the countries that maintain a
democratic system have a tendency to copy this model of bureau-
cratic domination, be it in the huge capitalist consortia, the workers’
unions, or in the technocratic states. Few people suspected, at the
beginning of this century, that the benevolent libertarian and revo-
lutionary aspirations of those years would degenerate, fifty years
later, into a new absolutism.
This crisis of public life was also a crisis of consciousness. A
criticism of the family and of male domination, a criticism of
sexual morality, a criticism of the schools, churches, beliefs, and
values. In spite of the immense technological gains, there began
to be doubts about progress — the ruling principle of the West
and its main intellectual myth. The spiritual state that prevailed
in the first half of the century, with its violent oscillation between
passivity and violence, radical skepticism and faith in instincts, ex-
treme intellectualism and the cult of blood, has been described
many times and need not be repeated here. I would merely like to
point out that these fluctuations coincided with certain funda-
mental discoveries in the sciences which similarly called into ques-
tion the ancient certainties. It is hardly necessary to mention these
changes: non-Euclidean geometry, quantum physics, relativity, the
fourth dimension. T o these advances have been added, more re-
cently, those of molecular biology and, above all, genetics. If the
ancient spirit had evaporated, transformed into a chemical reac-
tion, then the ancient matter had equally lost its mass and had be-
come pure energy: time-space, a reality that endlessly expands and
endlessly falls into itself. If matter has broken down into atoms
and particles of particles, what can we say of consciousness? It
has ceased to be the cornerstone of the individual and has van-
ished. For some, it became a theater of war for new entities, spe-
cies that were, perhaps, no less illusory than those of Renaissance
psychology : the subconscious, the unconscious, the libido, the
[PAZ] Poetry and Moderity 65

superego. For others, thought and emotion were no more than the
results of physiological and chemical combinations. The family
was transformed into a nursery for fantasies, and the crime of
Oedipus took on the universal dignity previously bestowed upon
original sin: the essential mark of the human species, the feature
that distinguishes us from the other species.
Art and literature are representational forms of reality. Rep-
resentations that are, I need hardly add, also inventions: imaginary
representations. But reality, in this century, began to fall apart and
vanish; it took on the attributes of the imaginary; it became men-
acing or contemptuous, inconsistent or fantastic. The chair ceased
to be the chair we see and was transformed into a construct of
invisible forces, atoms, and particles. Not only did the new physics
undermine the presumed solidity of material things, but the non-
Euclidean geometries opened the possibility of other spaces, en-
dowed with properties that were entirely different from those of
traditional space. A new being was born, and it became the sub-
ject of endless lucubration by writers and painters, and the central
myth of the first avant-garde: time-space. Only later, in the next
generation — that of the surrealists — did psychoanalysis influence
the poets and painters. Since then the vision of the “I” and of the
self has undergone profound changes, and with it the language
of the artists, committed to expressing the discontinuities and
lapses of the conscience and the senses.
Symbolism allied itself with an esoteric language: a cult of the
mystery of the universe and a cult of the poet as the high priest of
this secret religion. The new poets replaced that language with
irony and prosaicism. Symbolism exalted chiaroscuro; it was an
art of inner doors that took subtle shadings as its treasures. The
new art went out into the streets: a poetry of sharp contrasts and
brua1 oppositions. Symbolism had delineated a nostalgia for the
beyond, one that was, for some, located in an impossible past,
or, for others, in a no less impossible nowhere. The new poetry
celebrated the moment, the present: that which the eyes see and
66 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

the hands touch. Baudelaire’s city was an urban nocturne in which

the gaslights and their reflections — as ambiguous as the human
conscience — lit the woundlike streets and their parade of prostitu-
tion, crime, and solitary despair. The city of the modern poets was
that of the crowds, the city of neon advertisements, buses, and
cars, which transforms itself every night into an electric garden.
But the modern city was no less terrible than Baudelaire’s:
Now you walk in Paris alone among the crowd
Herds of bellowing buses hemming you about
Anguish of love parching you within.3

The romantic hero was an adventurer, a pirate, a poet turned

freedom fighter or a solitary figure along the bank of a deserted
lake, lost in sublime meditation. Baudelaire’s hero was the angel
fallen into the city, dressed in black, his elegant and threadbare
costume stained with wine, oil, and mud. Apollinaire’s hero is an
urban vagabond, almost a bum, ridiculous and pathetic, lost in the
crowd. It is the figure that later would be incarnated by Charles
Chaplin, the heroes of Vladimir Mayakovski's The Cloud in Trou-
sers and Fernando Pessoa’s Tobacco Shop. A poor devil and a
being endowed with occult powers, a clown and a magician. Such
characters were both new and yet closely tied to romanticism.
Although the human adventure — its passions, madnesses, illu-
minations — continued to unfold in the new poetry, its speakers
had changed. The ancient natural world had disappeared with its
forests, valleys, oceans, and mountains populated by monsters,
gods, demons, and other marvels; in its place appeared the abstract
city and, among the old monuments and venerable plazas, the ter-
rible newness of the machines. A change of reality: a change of
mythology. In the past, man spoke with the universe, or thought
that he spoke with it: if it did not answer, it was, at least, his
mirror. In the twentieth century the mythical speaker, the mys-

3 Guillaume Apollinaire, “Zone,” trans. Samuel Beckett.

[PAZ] Poetry and Modernity 67

terious voices, have vanished. Man remains alone in the enormous

city, sharing his solitude with solitary millions. The hero of the
new poetry is a loner in a crowd, or more exactly, in a crowd of
loners. It is the H.C.E. (Here Comes Everybody) of James Joyce.
W e discovered that we were alone in the universe. Alone with our
machines. Milton’s industrious devils must have rubbed their
hands with glee. It was the beginning of the great solipsism.
The ancients venerated the horse and the sailing ship; the new
age worshiped the train and the steamer. N o doubt the poem of
Walt Whitman that most influenced his followers was the one
dedicated to a locomotive. Valéry Larbaud wrote a memorable
ode to the Orient Express, “the train of the millionaires”; Blaise
Cendrars’s equally memorable “Prose of the Trans-Siberian” is the
first marriage of poetry and film. The futurists sang to the auto-
mobile, and later there were countless poems to the airplane, the
submarine, and other modern vehicles. None of these strident
texts can compare to the original poem by Whitman. The trans-
atlantic steamers also fired the imagination, as in the “Maritime
Ode” of Alvaro de Campos — neither an allegory nor a symbol of
Fernando Pessoa: his double and his enemy — written on the docks
of Lisbon, but also in Liverpool, Singapore, Yokohama, and Har-
bin. The steamer was associated, in the poetry of this period, more
with Asia than the Americas. The first act of Paul Claudel’s
Partage de midi occurs on a steamer interminably crossing the
Indian Ocean. The poetry of the sea, in the novels and poems of
that time, was a poetry of the beyond: not only the unknown seas
and lands, but also the other civilizations: Rudyard Kipling’s India,
Joseph Conrad’s Africa and Southeast Asia, the Far East of Claudel
and Saint-John Perse.
The presence of the landscapes and artistic forms of the Orient,
Africa, and pre-Columbian America is a major feature of the
poetry and art of those years. Poets adopted the haiku, and the
Noh theater influenced Yeats and other playwrights. Ezra Pound’s
translations of Chinese poetry were an important contribution to
68 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

those changes. In short, the first third of the twentieth century was
the culmination of a long process of discovery of the other civiliza-
tions and their various visions of reality and of man. This process,
begun in the sixteenth century with the discovery of the Americas,
resulted, in our time, in the adoption of artistic forms that were
not only different from but contrary to the central traditions of the
West. It was a change of such profundity that it still affects us
and, without a doubt, will affect the arts and sensibilities of those
who follow us. This change was, on the one hand, the natural
result of the aesthetic revolution that began with romanticism, and
its extreme consequence; on the other hand, it was the ultimate
change, the change of changes: with it ended a tradition that
began with the Renaissance. The models of that tradition were
the works of Greco-Roman antiquity. By denying them, modern
art ruptured the continuity of the West. Thus the change was both
a self-denial and, simultaneously, a metamorphosis. An end of
nature as ideal, an end of perspective and the Golden Section, an
end of representations that pretended to give the illusion of reality.
The decisive factor was not the replacement of traditional
canons — including their romantic, symbolist, and impressionist
variations — with foreign cultures and civilizations but, rather,
the search for other forms of beauty. For this reason I spoke not
only of self-denial but of metamorphosis. The aesthetic change
was as profound as the changes wrought by the sciences to the
traditional visions of reality. Physics had shown that visible reality
is dependent on a structure that is a relation of forces in an un-
stable equilibrium. The artists similarly attempted to dismantle
the appearance of everyday objects, and the cubists in particular
conceived of the painting as a system of relations. There was a
sort of Neoplatonism in this notion: the painter attempted to rep-
resent the structure — or more exactly, the archetype, the idea —
of the coffeepot or the pipe. Thus the necessity of painting both
the exterior and the interior of things. The example of African
masks, which contained both front and back on the same surface,
[PAZ] Poetry and Modernity 69

opened the way. On their part, the futurists wanted to paint

motion, something that photography does much better than paint-
ing. In that period the chronophotograph was popular: a series of
consecutive instants of an object or figure in motion, a horse run-
ning, a woman walking rhythmically, a bicyclist. The most notable
example was Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase.
All of these works and experiments were influenced by the new
forms of reproducing reality. The major attraction, especially for
the poets, was photography in motion: the cinema. The great
theoretician of montage Sergei Eisenstein notes in one of his writ-
ings that the absence of rules of syntax and of punctuation marks
in film has revealed, by omission, the true nature of the art: juxta-
position and simultaneity. That is, the rupture of the linear nature
of narrative. Eisenstein discovered the predecessors of simultaneity
in the arts of the East, particularly in Japanese theater and the
Chinese ideogram. Years later, Carl Jung, in his preface to an
edition of the Chinese classic the I Ching, maintained that the
principle that rules the combination of the hexagrams is not cau-
sality but, rather, confluence. Causality assumes that one thing
follows the next, that an event is the cause of another event. The
I Ching is dependent on the simultaneous presence of various
chains of causes. Jung called this coincidence synchronicity, a con-
junction of times that is also a conjunction of spaces. In sum, in
the second decade of the twentieth century there appeared in paint-
ing, poetry, and the novel an art made up of temporal and spatial
conjunctions that tended both to dissolve and to juxtapose the divi-
sions of before and after, front and back, internal and external.
This art had many names, the best of which, the most descriptive,
is simultaneism.
The painters advanced the notion that a painting should be a
simultaneous presentation of the various facades of the object. A
cubist painting displayed both the interior and exterior of the ob-
ject, the front and back of reality; a futurist picture showed —
or more exactly, pretended to show — the before and after: a dog
70 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

running or a trolley crossing a plaza. Painting is a spatial art, and

the eye can see, at the same time, a number of representations and
forms on a single surface: eyesight is simultaneous. Juxtaposition
mandated a plastic order that was a system of visual relations. The
principle ruling this type of representation is contiguity: things are
next to each other and are perceived simultaneously by the viewer.
In the temporal arts, such as music or poetry, things are behind
each other. In reality they are neither in front nor behind: they
follow one another. One sound follows another, one word goes
before or after another. The ruling principle is not contiguity but
succession. Yet there is an essential difference between music and
poetry. In the former, synchrony is continual: counterpoint, har-
mony, the fugue. Poetry, however, is made of words: sounds that
are meanings. Each sound must be heard clearly so that the lis-
tener may perceive the meaning. Harmony is the essence of music;
in poetry it produces only confusion. Poetry cannot be synchronous
without going against its nature and renouncing the great powers
of the word. At the same time, simultaneity is not only a powerful
technique but one which is present in the basic forms of the poem.
Comparison, metaphor, rhythm, and rhyme are conjunctions and
repetitions that obey the same laws as simultaneous presentation.
This was the challenge that confronted the poets about 1910: how
to adapt spatial simultaneity to an art ruled by temporal succession.
In 1911 dramatism arose in Paris; it was later called simu l-
tane ism. (Both the word and the concept had been used slightly
earlier by the futurists.) The procedure could not have been more
simple: the various parts of the poem were read aloud at the same
time. The futurist solution was more chaotic: they gave “concerts”
in which the human voice, reduced to elements of pure sound,
from exclamations to whispers, was mixed with other urban noises,
such as the clatter of typewriters. Later in Zurich, during the war,
the dadaist Hugo Ball rediscovered the “talking in tongues” of the
early Christians, the Gnostics, and other religions. Similarly, in
Moscow and Saint Petersburg, at about the same time, the Russian
[PAZ] Poetry and Modernity 71

futurists exploited the possibilities of glossolalia, which they called

transrational language. But this translation of language into mere
rhythmical emissions of vague sense, while admitting juxtaposition
and simultaneity, reduced meaning to a minimum. It was an im-
poverishment and, nearly always, a mutilation.
Cubism and, above all, the Orphism of Robert Delaunay in-
spired the first experiments by Cendrars and Guillaume Apolli-
naire, with whom simultaneism truly began. In the case of Cendrars
especially, the influence of the cinema — particularly its montage
and flashback — was decisive. The use of these cinematographic
devices shattered syntax and the linear and successive nature of
traditional poetry. Apollinaire went even further: he nearly totally
omitted connectives and syntactical nexuses — an act similar to the
elimination of perspective in painting — and applied the technique
of collage to incorporate found phrases into the text and to juxta-
pose various blocks of words. In this way he attempted to create
a conjunction of spaces and times in a single piece of writing.
Unlike the paintings of the cubists, Apollinaire’s poems move:
that is, they not only have a beginning and end, they also elapse.
Futurism had attempted to represent movement: the new poetry
was movement itself. Other French poets followed Apollinaire in
this direction, most notably Pierre Reverdy.
Some years later Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot adopted simul-
taneism. Adopting it, they transformed and extended it, creating
a new form of the long poem and exploring a territory left un-
touched by the French poets: the social and spiritual history of the
West. In Spanish, simultaneism, with the exception of a short and
perfect poem by José Juan Tablada, was not employed until my
generation. It is worth reiterating a small complaint here: Ameri-
can critics, with the exception of Roger Shattuck, the poet Kenneth
Rexroth, and a few others, never refer to the French origins of
simultaneism and persist in repeating Pound’s claim that his
method of presentation, as he called it, grew out of his reading of
Ernest Fenollosa and his translations of Chinese poetry. I have
72 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

attempted on various occasions to correct this, but due to the ex-

traordinary influence of Anglo-American culture, the critics of
other languages — including Latin America and even France —
continue to repeat the canonical version. N o one wants to see
the Cantos and The Waste Land as the extreme consequences of the
simultaneism initiated ten years before by Apollinaire and Cendrars.
It is hardly necessary to add that these fortuitous consequences were
also creations. Not imitations but graftings: the results were new
plants, more vast, complex, and powerful than the original.
Simultaneism — sometimes called poetic cubism — was an-
other manifestation, at times brash and nearly always effective, of
the cardinal principle of romantic and symbolist poetry : analogy.
The poem was a totality propelled — impelled — by the comple-
mentary action of affinities and oppositions among its parts. A
triumph of contiguity over succession. Or more exactly, given that
the poem is language in motion, a fusion of contiguity and suc-
cession, the spatial and the temporal. Later, at the other extreme
of avant-garde poetry — surrealism — both analogy and humor
reappeared in a manner that was even more conspicuous and direct.
All the great poetic, erotic, and metaphysical themes of romanti-
cism were accepted by the surrealists and carried to their limits.
The axis of the two great poetic movements of the first half of the
century — simultaneism and surrealism — was the same as that
of romanticism: the vision of universal correspondence and the
consciousness of rupture — the consciousness of death. The ambig-
uous relation of romanticism to Western religious tradition and to
the revolutionary political movements — affinity and transgres-
sion — similarly reappeared in nearly all the great poets of our
century. Modern poetry, since its birth, has been simultaneously
an affirmation and a negation of modernity.

III. THE POETRY OF CONVERGENCE

With a certain regularity, voices appear warning us of the
approaching end of our societies. It seems that modernity has
[PAZ] Poetry and Modernity 73

nourished itself on the successive negations it has engendered,

from Chateaubriand to Nietzsche, from Nietzsche to Valéry. In
the last twenty-five years these voices announcing calamities and
catastrophes have greatly multiplied, They are not the anguished
expressions of a despairing outsider or an outcast minority; they
are widespread popular opinions that reflect the state of the col-
lective spirit. The temper of this century makes one think, at times,
of the terrors of the year 1000 or of the dark visions of the Aztecs,
who lived under the threat of the cyclical end of the cosmos.
Modernity was born proclaiming the future as a promised land;
today we are witnessing the decline of that idea. No one is sure
of what awaits us, and many wonder if the sun will rise tomorrow.
There are so many ways by which the future has been discredited
that it is impossible to list them all: some foresee the depletion of
our natural resources, others the contamination of the planet, others
the spread of famine, others the petrification of history by the uni-
versal establishment of totalitarian ideocracies, others the nuclear
holocaust. It is evident that nuclear deterrence has kept us from a
Third World War, but for how long? At the same time, even if
we succeed in avoiding catastrophe, the mere existence of atomic
weapons literally explodes our idea of progress, whether as grad-
ual evolution or revolutionary leap. Even if the bomb has not yet
destroyed the world, it has destroyed our idea of the world. Mod-
ernity has suffered a fatal wound; the sun of progress has set on
the horizon and we still cannot see the new intellectual star that
will guide us. W e do not know if we are living in a twilight or
a dawn.
Modernity identified itself with change, conceived of criticism
as the agent of change, and identified both with progress. For
Marx, revolutionary insurrection was criticism in action. In the
realm of literature and the arts, the aesthetic of modernity, from
romanticism to our own time, has been the aesthetic of change.
The modern tradition is the tradition of rupture, a tradition that
negates itself and, by so doing, perpetuates itself. The discovery
74 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

of the arts of other civilizations — India and the Far East, Africa
and Oceania, pre-Columbian America — has also been seen and
experienced as ruptures with the central traditions of the West.
Today we are witnessing the sunset of this aesthetic of change.
The art and literature of this fin de siécle have slowly lost their
powers of negation; for some years these negations have been
ritualized repetitions, formulaic rebellions, ceremonies without
transgression. It is not the end of art: it is the end of the idea of
modern art — that is, the end of the aesthetic founded on the cult
of change and rupture.
Criticism, with some delay, has noticed that in the last forty
years we have entered into another period of history and another
art. W e hear a great deal about the crisis of the avant-garde, and
the expression postmodernist era has become popular for our time.
It is a label as ambivalent and contradictory as the very idea of
modernism. That which follows the modern cannot help but be
ultramodern: a modernity even more modern than yesterday’s.
People have never known the name of the age in which they live,
and we are no exception to this rule. To call ourselves postmodern
is merely a way of affirming our modernity by saying that we are
very modern. And yet what has been called into question is the
linear concept of time and its identification with criticism, change,
and progress — time opening out to the future like a promised
land. T o call ourselves postmodern is to continue being the pris-
oner of successive, linear, and progressive time.
If the term postmodern is mistaken, what can one say about the
word used by Anglo-American critics to describe contemporary
art: postmodernism? For these critics, the word modernism desig-
nates that conjunction of works, authors, and tendencies evoked
by such names as Joyce, Pound, Eliot, William Carlos Williams,
Ernest Hemingway, and others. Nevertheless, nearly everyone
knows that in Spanish what we call modernismo is the first literary
movement of Latin America and Spain. The modernists were
Rubén Darío and Valle-Inclán, Juan Ramón Jiménez and Leopoldo
[PAZ] Poetry and Modernity 75

Lugones, Jose Martí and Antonio Machado; with them our mod-
ern tradition begins, and without them our contemporary literature
could not exist. In reality, the various movements, works, and
authors that the Anglo-Americans encompass under the term mod-
ernism were always known in France and in the rest of Europe, as
well as in Latin America, by a term that is equally vague: the
avant -garde. To ignore all this, giving the word modernism ex-
clusively to a movement in the English language, is to reveal a cul-
tural arrogance and historical insensitivity. The same occurs with
the word postmodernism as a designation of the art and literature
of the United States and other countries. This is not a useless dis-
tinction, nor does it reflect any sort of hackneyed nationalism: the
question of modernism is not a debate over words but over mean-
ings and historical concepts. More exactly, the world is a world of
names. To take them away is to take away our world.
For the ancients the past was the golden age, the natural Eden
that we lost one day; for the moderns, the future was the chosen
place, the promised land. But it is the present that has always been
the time of poets and lovers, Epicureans and certain mystics. The
instant is the time of pleasure but also the time of death, the time
of the senses and that of the revelation of the beyond. I believe
that the new star — that which has yet to appear on the historical
horizon but which has already been foretold in many indirect
ways — will be the star of the present, the star of now. Men and
women will soon have to construct a morality, a politics, an erotics,
and a poetics of present time. This change toward the present
naturally involves the body, but it need not and should not be con-
fused with the mechanical and promiscuous hedonism of the mod-
ern Western societies. The present is a fruit in which life and
death are combined,
Poetry has always been the vision of a presence in which the
two halves of the globe are reconciled. A plural presence: many
times, in the course of history, it has changed its face and name;
and yet it remains, throughout all these changes, as one. It has not
76 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

been erased by the diversity of its apparitions. Even when it has

been identified with the void, as occurred in the Buddhist tradition
and among certain modern poets in the West, it manifests itself —
a paradoxical sign — as a presence. It is not an idea: it is pure
time. Time without measure: this singular, unique, particular time
that is passing by right now and that has passed by endlessly since
the beginning. Presence is the incarnation of the present.
On various occasions I have called the poetry of this time that
is beginning the art of convergence, and I contrasted it with the
tradition of rupture: “The poets of the modern age sought the
principles of change; the poets of the age that is beginning seek
the unalterable principle that is the root of change. W e wonder
if the Odyssey and À l a recherche du temps perda have anything
in common. The aesthetics of change emphasized the historical
character of the poem. Now we ask: is there a point at which the
principle of change will be fused with that of permanence? . . .
The poetry that begins with this century’s end neither begins nor
returns to its starting point: it is a perpetual re-beginning and a
continual return. The poetry beginning now, without beginning,
is seeking the intersection of times, the point of convergence. It
asserts that between the cluttered past and the uninhabited future,
poetry is the present.” I wrote those words fifteen years ago.
Today I would add, the present is manifest in a presence and the
presence is the reconciliation of the three times. A poetry of recon-
ciliation: the imagination made flesh in a present without dates.