lives of the young poets

Politics was not our sole passion. We were even more attracted by literature, the arts, and philosophy. For me and for a few of my friends, poetry turned, if not into a public religion, at least into an esoteric cult wavering between the catacombs and the conspirators’ basement. I found no contradiction between poetry and revolution: they were two facets of the same movement, two wings of the same passion. This belief would link me later to the surrealists. The plural avidity: life and books, street and cell, bars and loneliness in crowds in cinemas.

—Octavio Paz, Itinerary (Harcourt, 1999), translated by Jason Wilson [33]