Octavio Paz and the Essay: Consciousness and Transparency

Octavio Paz was a visionary thinker of his century. The present work explores decisive traits of his own definition as a poet and essayist and in the opening of a creative and critical trajectory representative of the artist and writer's transformations of the time. The echoes of his experiences, sociability practices, and readings, as well as from his sensitivity and critical lucidity, resulted in that Octavio Paz contributed, since his first prose, to the reconfiguration of the essay as a genre. This article proposes to read some essays of the Mexican writer in dialogue with the reflections of great reformers of the essay and criticism in the twentieth century. The search for a deep dialogue between poetry and history, the effort to critically rethink tradition, the demand for authenticity and freedom in the work of the writer, led to a new poetics of thought and a new relationship between consciousness and transparency.