The Last Giant

His subsequent two decades in the Foreign Service both nurtured Paz's hatred of all isms and crafted his poetry. In Japan he absorbed haiku and its clarity. In Paris, he immersed himself in the surrealists. And in India, he found a dualism in Hindu thought that was sympathetic to his own beliefs. Paz saw in mestizo Mexico a coexistence of Indian and Spanish, life and death. In his poem ""Eagle or Sun?'' he talked about the two sides of the Mexican coin. ""Burnt water'' was a recurring image in his poetry. He best expressed the duality in his 1957 poem ""Sun Stone,'' which had 584 lines like the days of the circular Aztec calendar and contemplated death, time and love. Paz wanted to be remembered as a love poet.

MANY WILL REMEMBER HIM, rather, as a political voice. When the Mexican government massacred hundreds of protesting students in 1968 before the opening of the Olympics, Paz quit his job as ambassador to India, and became a national hero. Mexican intellectual Carlos Monsivais remembers reaching the poet on a crackling phone line in India a few days later. Paz expressed his outrage by reading him a new poem; poetry and politics for him were forever entwined. But Paz didn't always couch his views in lyrical stanzas. He broke with Monsivais and others over the socialist revolutions in Cuba and Nicaragua. He compared the left's beloved Fidel Castro to Chile's vilified military dictator Augusto Pinochet and he dismissed Nicaragua's revolution as ""inconsequential.'' Pro-Sandinistas burned Paz in effigy outside the U.S. Embassy after he was misquoted as calling for an American invasion of Nicaragua.

The poet loved to quarrel, especially about politics. He would take on anybody on any topic. ""It was hard to speak to him, especially on the phone,'' says literary critic Christopher Dominguez. ""There was always an argument.'' Whether he was discussing Ming vases or ""The Simpsons'' (later in life, his favorite TV show), he was in it to win. ""Sometimes his criticism crossed the line to impertinence, as if God had conceded the truth to him,'' says Mexican writer Paco Ignacio Taibo I.

Paz's opinions were not always welcome, but they were weighty. ""No one was read more by politicians than Octavio Paz,'' Monsivais says. The government sought his views. But his influence came at a price. He accepted a stipend from the government. During former President Carlos Salinas's halcyon years, critics of Paz said he became a shill for the government and free trade. As someone steeped in the Mexican revolution, he still had faith in Mexico's ailing institutions. A self-described ""disillusioned leftist'' turned libertarian (he despised the term ""conservative''), Paz believed in opening markets. But many thought he was used by Salinas to win credibility. He earned the derisive nickname ""Pazcarraga'' because of a cultural TV series on Televisa, the media giant owned by government apologist Emilio Azcarraga. ""He succumbed to the temptations the oligarchy offered him,'' says Cuban novelist Lisandro Otero.

Most forgave Paz his transgressions. ""You could hate part of Paz, but never all of him,'' says Monsivais, who concedes that the poet turned out to be right about the ""philanthropic ogre'' of socialism. His only lasting feud, with Carlos Fuentes, was personal, not political. In a 1988 article published both in The New Republic and in Vuelta, the influential literary magazine Paz founded in the 1970s, Paz disciple Enrique Krauze called Fuentes a ""guerrilla dandy,'' a ""foreigner in his own country,'' and called his work ""insubstantial.'' Aguilar, who runs Nexos, a rival literary magazine, says that the article was ""silliness'' and that ""Paz started it.'' Since then, Fuentes had not said a word to Paz, his dear friend and mentor for 38 years. ""It is a shame that Fuentes's bitterness and vanity didn't let him put this aside,'' says Dominguez.

Mexico's temperamental intellectuals do agree on one thing: no one will replace Paz as poet-in-chief. The age of Mexican giants is ending. Last year both Televisa's Azcarraga and the labor movement's longtime leader, Fidel Velazquez, died. With Paz's death, says Aguilar, ""the Mexican corporatism of labor, mass media and, now, culture, is over.'' Says Monsivais: ""The role of the intellectual has been democratized. There are no more prophets.''