Poem Biography and Analysis

Biography

Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City in March 31, 1914. He was the son of an active politicians journalists who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata. Paz’s Grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather’s library, Paz came into an early contact with literature. Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the U.S.A. to on a Guggenheim Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry. Two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude,and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed the Republican Mexican ambassador to India. In 1968, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government's bloodstained suppression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Paz founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981, the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world, and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982. Eliot Weinberger has written that, for Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought and body, man and nature, I and the other." His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." His is a poetry written within the perpetual motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture. Paz was influenced by D.H. Lawrence, and practiced poetry like it was a religion. He was also greatly influenced by many of his grandparents’ books, due to the massive library he had. Octavio Paz died on April 19, 1998 after suffering from cancer of the spine. His death was announced by no less than the president of Mexico, Ernesto Zedillo.

Poem Analysis

My original impression of the poem based on the title is that there is a bridge that symbolizes something important in Paz’s life that he has expressed his respect and analytic representation of this bridge. The first stanza represent the thing that connects you and me is communication. He is saying that the obstacle is getting between him and he can’t overcome it or get over it. IN the second stanza, by communicating, you connect deep within yourself, and it’s what connects the world. He is saying that entering the obstacle or the "bridge" is like entering yourself, as in a whole new person, and you can connect yourself better with the world, or communicate with another person. Finally, the third stanza, communication is always the primary connecting point between any two things, and it is the best way to connect to anything. It is what we should realize, and it’s what i choose. At the end of the obstacle there will always be a happy ending, which he expresses by the rainbow. The tone is one of peaceful and unity, because all it talks about in the poem is how everything is connected through communication, and communication itself connects the world. It speaks this in a passionate yet pleasant way. The poem never truly shifts to different tones, as the message/theme and style of saying it is the same way. The attitude is repeated in each stanza of the poem. Although, there is a shift in imagery and its representation. In the last stanza instead of using different representations to symbolize communication and its impact as a way of connection. Belief in communication as the key. So in the last stanza, it shifts from emphasis on unification to a claim of satisfaction and decision. The theme is communication is a bridge of connection for the world. Another possible, but subtle theme is that communication is a connection of yourself, as the way you communicate is a characterization of you and is used to further understand yourself and achieve self-realization. Octavio Paz describes communication as the connection, the 'bridge' if you will, between everyone and everything.