Octavio Paz Poetry Quotations

To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.

Any reflection about poetry should begin, or end, with this question: who and how many read poetry books?

Poetry is the experience of liberty. The poet risks himself, chances all on the poem's all with each verse he writes.

Poetry, whatever the manifest content of the poem, is always a violation of the rationalism and morality of bourgeois society.

Surrealism is not a poetry but a poetics, and even more, and more decisively, a world vision.

Poetry is not a genre in harmony with the modern world; its innermost nature is hostile or indifferent to the dogmas of modern times, progress and the cult of the future.

What characterizes a poem is its necessary dependence on words as much as its struggle to transcend them.