Rarely in the Spanish-speaking world has anyone covered the different sides of world culture with such breadth as Octavio Paz, and reflected with such depth on the problems, contradictions and tragedies of both the past and his own time. Rarely has anyone managed to achieve such a balance between critical rigor and poetic intuition, between thought and passion. It would not be an exaggeration at all to say that the essayistic work of Octavio Paz, inseparable from his poetry, is counted among those literary works that, in the words of the Mexican poet himself, "manage to answer those questions that vaguely, without clearly succeeding to formulate, each person sets himself".