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Article: Book Review / Love: in the hands of the poets
- Article from:
- The Independent (London, England)
- Article date:
- June 30, 1996
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright 1996 The Independent - London. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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THE SHY or diffident lover is a staple of courtly romance, as
is the faithful swain who never gives up hope. Octavio Paz had so
much trouble writing down his thoughts of love that this book has
been all his life in the making. Luckily for us, he persevered. The
reader's gratification, being delayed by 40 years or so, is all the
more intense for the wait.
Paz charmingly confesses in his Preface his trouble in coming to
the point. He began this work, he tells us, as an adolescent,
serving his apprenticeship as a writer of love poems; love has
taken up obsessive residence in his poetry ever since. Then, in
1960, he wrote 50 pages on de Sade, an essay that began the
attempt, which comes to ...