In the wake of the Mexican Revolution and its long aftermath, a distinguished lineage of Mexican poets that were also – and perhaps more importantly – outstandingly gifted essayists, made a sustained effort to reconstitute a national tradition fully inserted in Occidentalism. This chapter examines this great synthesis of the critical poets, beginning with Alfonso Reyes, followed by the Contemporáneos group, and arriving at the major accomplishments of Octavio Paz. The chapter focuses on Paz, establishing the different sources of his ideas on critical poetry and then examining some of his most significant compositions in this vein, with a particular focus on “Himno entre ruinas.”

This chapter considers cultural institutions as major shapers of the poetry of the second half of the twentieth century. Here Octavio Paz is once again crucial, as a cultural broker, the editor of Plural and later Vuelta, and the force behind the creation of major cultural institutions. The roles of poetic institutions are reflected in the careers of major poets like José Emilio Pacheco and Eduardo Lizalde, among the first winners of the Aguascalientes National Poetry Prize. This award opened a poetic period that eventually slowly declined, beginning with the closing of Vuelta to what Malva Flores has termed the “twilight” of the intellectual poets. The chapter also examines the cultural ecology emerging from the subsidies, fellowships, and privileges instituted by the Mexican State.

Scholars have canonically understood Surrealism as having arrived in the Americas in two principal waves: the first involved the interwar discovery of a largely French avant-garde movement by poets, little magazines, and art-world figures in the US and Latin America; the second describes the influx of European “exiles” who crossed the Atlantic as war refugees during World War II. Surrealism was not, however, a solely Parisian or European movement that washed up on American shores. This chapter proposes instead that “Surrealism” designates a multifarious set of poetic and artistic practices invented by and within the Americas, in exchange with European and non-European arts and ideas. The chapter traces some of the refractions and reverberations of Surrealism throughout the Americas, offering a survey of American surrealisms – from Buenos Aires to Fort de France, from Mexico City to Chicago, from Lima to New York City – that disclose a complex set of intercultural reflections and negotiations among modernist poets, artists, and thinkers.

By sheer transgression, Roberto Bolano remapped the Latin American literary canon. Through novels, stories, essays, poems, and interviews, he did it by establishing a dialogue – often rapturous, seldom terse – with the major figures of 20th-century literature. Borges was his center of gravity. He admired Nicanor Parra and Cesar Vallejo. He found Isabel Allende kitschy. Gabriel Garcia Marquez was a merchant of stereotypes and Mario Vargas Llosa, while obviously talented, was in his eyes too professional. He ridiculed Diamela Eltit and plotted to kidnap Octavio Paz. Beyond his affinities, though, Bolano’s oeuvre reads like a who’s who of the continent’s literati. He wasn’t afraid to use fiction to do criticism and vice versa. His spontaneity is a lesson against academic posturing and lazy thinking.

Pablo Neruda’s Macchu Picchu and Octavio Paz’s Tenochtitlán determine how the modern city in twentieth-century Latin American poetry is conceptualized as one shaped by its ruins. This chapter explores how these earlier visions of the city are reconsidered in Latin American poetry from the 1960s and 1970s. It analyzes Rosario Castellanos’ Poesía no eres tú (1948-71) and José Emilio Pacheco’s Irás y no volverás (1973), and how their poems about the Tlatelolco massacre shed light on how Neruda’s Macchu Picchu and Paz’s Tenochtitlán shape modern poetics and their political critique to contemporary violence. Pacheco’s allusions to the icnocuícatl in “La visión de los vencidos” and the use of multiple voices in “Manuscrito de Tlatelolco” link the political ruins of the Mexican state after the massacre to the violent legacy of its colonial past. Castellanos’ defiant response to the massacre in “Memorial de Tlatelolco” problematizes the Aztec historical past and the moral decay of the Mexican state. These poems underscore an ethical and political critique of modernity through a representation of economic, ecological, and political disasters. The urban space in ruins stirs a poetic meditation on the torn self, shaped by a society in crisis.

Pablo Neruda’s Macchu Picchu and Octavio Paz’s Tenochtitlán determine how the modern city in twentieth-century Latin American poetry is conceptualized as one shaped by its ruins. This chapter explores how these earlier visions of the city are reconsidered in Latin American poetry from the 1960s and 1970s. It analyzes Rosario Castellanos’ Poesía no eres tú (1948-71) and José Emilio Pacheco’s Irás y no volverás (1973), and how their poems about the Tlatelolco massacre shed light on how Neruda’s Macchu Picchu and Paz’s Tenochtitlán shape modern poetics and their political critique to contemporary violence. Pacheco’s allusions to the icnocuícatl in “La visión de los vencidos” and the use of multiple voices in “Manuscrito de Tlatelolco” link the political ruins of the Mexican state after the massacre to the violent legacy of its colonial past. Castellanos’ defiant response to the massacre in “Memorial de Tlatelolco” problematizes the Aztec historical past and the moral decay of the Mexican state. These poems underscore an ethical and political critique of modernity through a representation of economic, ecological, and political disasters. The urban space in ruins stirs a poetic meditation on the torn self, shaped by a society in crisis.

Chapter 3 begins with an examination of how anticommunism manifested in Mexico, Guatemala, and Uruguay, highlighting the importance of the National Security Doctrine and the notion of internal enemy, and analyzing the secret police files of Octavio Paz, Frida Kahlo, and Elena Poniatowska, and others, as illustrations of anticommunist paranoia. The examination of anticommunism culminates with analysis of Miguel Ángel Asturias’s collection of stories Week-end in Guatemala and its references to the 1954 coup d’état. The chapter then turns to the Cultural Cold War, using declassified documents from the CIA, to examine the organization of the Continental Cultural Congress (Santiago, 1953), with emphasis on the counter-maneuvering led by the American Embassy in Chile and Pablo Neruda’s role as one of the organizers of the Congress. Finally, it discusses Neruda’s “non-political” poetry at the time, The Captain’s Verses, vis-à-vis his “political” poetry.

This chapter turns to the curatorial role of authors on the countershelf, tracing the impact of Octavio Paz’s sojourn as Mexican ambassador to India (1962–1968) on Indian poets and artists in the little magazine scene of the 1960s and 1970s, including Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Geeta Kapur, and Jagdish Swaminathan. While Neruda often formed the image of the countershelf for South Asian authors, Paz was the nearly invisible engine through which that imaginary consolidated. Paz’s sensibility of “strangerhood” reflected his growing interest in the baroque, a form which emerged to aestheticize the rapidly and radically changing concept of the world in the era of colonial expansion. This same strategy was taken up by several creators of Indian little magazines, among whom Paz helped to establish a very particular idea of world-literary friendship: not an increasingly unified and easily digestible singular style but a series of intentionally disorienting enigmas. Both route through Latin American literature of the 1960s, but the 1970s Indian poets set a very different course for global English, one that the rise of the novelists in the 1980s dramatically interrupted and then, essentially, cut off.