other voice

I am asserting that poetry is irreducible to ideas and system. It is the other voice. Not the word of history or of antihistory but the voice that, in history, always says something else—the same something since the beginning. I don’t know how to define this voice or explain what it is that constitutes this difference, this tone which, though it doesn’t set it altogether apart, makes it unique and distinct. I will say only that it is strangeness and familiarity in person. We need only hear it to recognize it.

—Octavio Paz, “Latin-American Poetry,” Convergences: Essays on Art and Literature (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987)