OCTAVIO PAZ
Who Reads Poetry?
This reflection began with a question divided into two parts. The first
was quantitative: How many readers of poems are there? As we have seen,
this numerical part of the question by itself is meaningless. The number of
readers varies with different societies and periods, and varies within each
period; it varies even for the same poet. The esoteric, unreadable Eliot,
read by a clique of eccentrics in 1920, in 1940 becomes Bishop Eliot,
who is listened to worshipfully by multitudes.
How many?,
to make sense,
must be considered together with the second part of the question:
Who?
What sort of people read books of poems? The
Who?
includes the
How
many?
Or, rather, it dilutes it, so that the number ceases to be a number.
The question
Who?
implies, first, a plurality of places: Where, the
country, the city? And it introduces the dimension of time: When, which
century, what year? And finally, the where and when are related to social
class, political and religious affiliation, and an economy, a culture. The
where and when turn into a history. The nature of the public that reads
or listens to poems is a historical question.
An
awesomely large subject,
and one impossible to explore in an essay of this type. But it is
altogether possible to point out certain ideas, to outline some sort of
hypothesis. My aim here is more modest: to offer a few suggestions and
conjectures, in the hope that they will prompt someone to write, in the
not too distant future, a study of the state of poetry as the twentieth
century draws to a close.
I begin at the very beginning, with Homer, who is the origin of
Greece and therefore of our poetry. His great poems, his heroes, and his
moral code were the aesthetic and ethical archetypes for Greeks and
Romans. In a manner of speaking, the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
were the
Bible and Vedas of the Hellenes. Children and adolescents, as they
learned arithmetic or exercised at the gymnasium, also recited the ancient
hexameters. In the grandiose endeavor to Hellenize Rome, it was abso–
lutely necessary that there be a poetic founding text equivalent to the
Homeric poems. But the
Aeneid,
written at the zenith of Rome's history,
was not so much a creation as a re-creation, not an origin but a conse-
Editor's Note: ''Who Reads Poetry?" is excerpted from
Th~
Otha Voiu: Essays
0,.
Modmt
Poetry
by Octavio Paz.
La
OITa Voz :
Po~ia
y
Fi,.
d~
Siglo
10 1990: Octavio Paz. Derechos
exclusivos de edicion en espanol reservados para todo
el
mundo CO 1990: Editorial Scix
Barral, S. A. English translation copyright
<0
1991 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. To
be published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.
