It’s hard to place Octavio Paz in a single category—and if anyone claims to, I’d question their understanding of what he did, and more importantly, who he was. That’s a good place to begin: the difference between what he did and who he was. He wrote long essays in the shape of books, hundreds of poems, critiques, and letters—literary works in their own right. He won the Nobel Prize, which is as objective as it gets. But he won it as a Mexican writer, and what that meant—for us—is purely subjective. 

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He gave voice, pulse, and stature to Mexican literature in a way that hadn’t been done before and hasn’t been done since. How do you measure that?

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There are writers who win prizes for their command of language, for style and form. But Paz belonged to another class: those who go beyond order into meaning, beyond rhythm into essence. Saying he was a poet is accurate. But so is saying he was an essayist, a philosopher, a critic, a diplomat, and a sociologist. More strikingly, he was all those things at their best. Paz didn’t see limits—in writing or in thought. He was, in the highest and most respectable sense of the word, an intellectual. And one of the few who deserves to be remembered.

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He inherited the mysticism of a transplanted church and the spiritual imagination of the pre-Hispanic world—dressed in the Western garments of a third world distorted by colonial modernity. Or more simply: he had Mexican blood. Born in 1914 during the Revolution, he began publishing at 19, just as a new generation across Latin America was devouring literature voraciously, both for knowledge and pleasure. And what a milieu it was: Borges, García Márquez, Neruda, Cortázar, Vargas Llosa, and Paz. El Aleph, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Twenty Love Poems, Hopscotch, Sunstone. Out of the six, four won the Nobel.

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Sometimes, to know a writer, it helps to know their mentors—even those they never met. Paz’s ideas came from many places. Bergson’s time, Heidegger’s Being, Breton’s unconscious, Lao Tzu’s silence. His poetry drew from Valéry, Eliot, Mallarmé, Pound, Rilke, and, of course, Rubén Darío—his Latin American predecessor. He dedicated a full work to Sor Juana, the nun-poet who preceded him by centuries but had a profound impact on him. He admired Sartre, Camus, and Duchamp. He esteemed painters like Rufino Tamayo, Wifredo Lam, and Matta, and was moved by the surrealism of Buñuel’s films. Then there were his wives: the brilliant Elena Garro, with whom he had a Sartre–de Beauvoir kind of relationship, and later, Marie-José Tramini, the Frenchwoman with whom he found depth, resistance, and stability.

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His poetry is rare in its union of mysticism and stylistic precision. It moves from the social and collective to the deeply private. He was surrealist at times, rigorous and conceptual at others, but always intellectually demanding. While he wrote short poems, he excelled in the long form: Sunstone, his most famous work, spans 584 eleven-syllable lines—a number drawn from the Venusian calendar used by Mesoamerican civilisations. 

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His essays, meanwhile, are merciless to the ignorant reader. His language is sharp, elegant, and never ornamental. He isn’t dry or obscure; he is refined and deliberate. From The Labyrinth of Solitude and The Double Flame, he leaves behind a body of work as stylistically rich as it is deep. One could compare it to the conceptual heaviness of the inheritors of German Idealism—Heidegger, Gadamer—but filtered through literature rather than metaphysics, where the mind is invited to roam freely, not guided.

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In the end, after shaping 20th-century literature and thought, Paz returned to Mexico—driven by a conviction. Just as Sartre had taken to the streets for Algeria, Paz did so for Tlatelolco, standing against the massacre of students before the 1968 Olympics. He returned to defend what had once formed him: freedom of expression.

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He remains understudied, especially in the very countries he enriched. The Anglo-Saxon domination of the analytic tradition has shut thinkers like him out of contemporary discussion. But Paz is a wake-up call. The canon is tired; the myths exhausted. Writers and philosophers outside the dominant European tradition—those who built it from the edges—are only now being rediscovered. In them lies an intellectual freshness grounded in rigour and imagination. Octavio Paz is not just one of them—he’s one of the best.