How We Co-Create and Recreate the World: Octavio Paz on Sor Juana, Poetry as Rebellion, and the Creative Collaboration Between Writers and Readers

“A work responds to the reader’s, not the author’s, questions.”

All societies are both the creators of their myths and are created by them. All artists are the makers and remakers of our myths of meaning — myths we co-create whenever we engage with art. The best of them transmigrate across societies and epochs, naming what is difficult to name and difficult to bear, touching other lives — often lives wildly different from the artist’s — with that luminous longing for elemental truth that is the...