Writing Poetry Can Endanger Your Health - Part Seventeen: The Poet as Diplomat by Dave Jaffe

    The Poet As Diplomat :  by Dave Jaffe: Part One


       "Poor Mexico," one high level Mexican government official is supposed to have said. "So far from God. So close to the United States of America." Octavio Paz, a great Mexican poet, might have said the same at least in his youth. Yet as he grew older, most of his political disputes were tangles with left wing opponents who supported anti-America revolutions.
     Paz started out as a left-winger.  One of his grandfathers was a progressive and his father was a supporter of the Mexican Revolution that erupted in 1910 and ended in 1920. In 1937 following in his family's progressive foot steps, he dropped out of law school to work on a school for the sons of peasants and workers.
     By his teens Paz was writing poetry and was influenced at first by the poetry of American-born Thomas Stearns Eliot, known as 'T.S. Eliot'. Eliot was a conservative, at least in his politics. Under the influence of Eliot's poetry, Paz wrote a long poem whose title in English translates as 'Between The Stone and The Flower'. Still, in the late 1930's Paz went to Spain to support the Spanish Republic in its war with Franco's right-wing armed forces.
      In 1943, by now a married man, Paz went to the United States on a Guggenheim Scholarship. He studied at the University of California at Berkeley.
     Two years later he joined the Mexican diplomatic service. He was posted to many places including New York City, France Tokyo, India and Switzerland. He rose in the diplomatic ranks but still kept writing. While in Paris he wrote one of the great books on Mexico called in English 'The Labyrinth of Solitude'.
      "Mexicans are not a gay (meaning 'happy) race but a tragic one," wrote the great Mexican painter Rufino Tamaya.. This is because  "of their long history of foreign domination." Octavio Paz, whose life overlapped with Tamayo, would have agreed. Paz in this book, saw Mexicans as people who kept their feeling hidden through solitude and ceremonies.
       End of Part One: (To be Continued).