Czesław Miłosz

Articles About Czesław Miłosz

Twentieth-Century Polish Poets on Poetry

September 27, 2009

“Our planetary reality has split in two into the so-called West and the so-called East, and I have drunk from both one and the other poisoned well. I have also become convinced that the puzzle of the thirties still cries out for a solution.”

-Czesław Miłosz

I find myself intensely drawn to twentieth-century Polish poets. Having borne waves of tragedy in the last century, from the Holocaust to oppressive Soviet occupation, the country itself seems have been flung into a kind of national existential crisis. And so, its sensitive and intelligent poets grapple deeply and boldly with questions of faith and reason, tragedy and hope, nihilism and meaning. Many of them, like me, are fascinated with the allegorical dimensions of the Book of Job, with Nietzschean philosophy, with reconciling the tragedies of the great World Wars with the sometimes inexplicable beauty of this world. In short, they face down the deepest questions about what it means to be alive.

Yet I do not think it is only me, or only Polish poets, who must come to terms with these questions. Triggered by the worldwide disillusionment brought about by the global spectacle of the Second World War (brilliantly explained by Miłosz in The Witness of Poetry), it seems that Postmodernism is the first stage of grieving our collective loss of faith in centrality and certainty. I believe we can, and must, move past this stage by confronting the deep questions that surfaced in this time. We must heal the unspeakable wound.

Even as reconciling personal grief has been an inescapable task in my personal life, I see these same questions refusing to go unresolved in our modern world. In America, and worldwide, we are faced once again with an economic crisis stemming from the inherent problems of capitalism, and once again we regard those who offer a worldview more inclusive of the common good with deep skepticism and fear of tyranny. Religion and scientific reason continue to reinforce their differences. Generativity again takes a back seat to instant gratification in our culture. And all of it has been syndicated, and accelerated, by increasingly more sophisticated technological systems of disseminating information. Yet none of these systems, no matter how good their search algorithms, provide the means to make human meaning from this glut of data. And so, the great questions of the early twenty-first century are actually only the great unresolved questions of the last century.

Nowhere do I find more careful consideration of these questions than from Polish poets. What an unexpected kinship, and how reassuring, to read how they, too, found freedom in poetry, a declaration of their humanity capable of transcending the difficult circumstance of being human in a world that continues to shrink, even as the weight of history increases.

Now, I will let them speak for themselves. Here are some excerpts I found particularly insightful from the excellent compilation Polish Writers on Writing, edited by Adam Zagajewski:
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By Robert Peake | Posted in Books, Insights, Poetry | Also tagged Adam Zagajewski, Anna Kamieńska, Bolesław Leśmian, Ryszard Krynicki, Stanisław Barańczak, Stanisław Brzozowski, Wisława Szymborska, Zbigniew Herbert | Comments (2)

Defining Great Poetry

April 27, 2009

“In art, you’re free.”

–Marvin Bell

One of the delights of my web presence is that I sometimes get emails from writers and readers fairly new to poetry. Recently, a young marketing executive in Singapore wrote to me. In our most recent exchange, he rightly points out that, especially in the US, there seem to be countless poets, poetry awards, and poets with awards. How, then, do we define great poets or poetry? He gave me permission to answer publicly, on this site.

In doing so, I first have to admit that I do not feel qualified in any way to define great poets or poetry. I can really only comment on the poets and poems that are great within me. I have been giving this some thought, and have identified a few common characteristics.

Voltaire is reputed to have said, “Verses which do not teach men new and moving truths do not deserve to be read.” That’s a bit harsh. But I am inclined to agree that poetry does involve its own kind of “truth.” It is not a factual truth, but more what Seamus Heaney called “a ring of truth within the medium itself,” since, according to Emily Dickinson, a poet “tells all the truth but tells it slant.” I also think poetic truth needs to be both new and moving in order to reach toward greatness.

Some would argue that newness, especially innovation in language, is all that matters. I think, instead, that innovation is actually a by-product of great poets seeking after new truths (which are often, in fact, old truths newly arranged). The quality of moving the reader in some way is, to me, essential. This does not need to involve an intense emotional outpouring. But if the reader is the same before and after reading the poem, then the reader has not been moved, and the poem can hardly be said to have fulfilled its potential for greatness.

Seamus Heaney and Czeslaw Milosz are two poets I think are great. Among other things, Heaney mostly wrote about The Troubles in Northern Ireland, and Milosz mostly wrote about occupied Poland during World War II. The combination of their position in history, and the profound ways in which they related to such difficult subject matter, make it clear why they were both awarded the Nobel Prize.

I believe there is an energy and intensity that comes with discovering poetry as a means to reconcile life’s difficulties, and then discovering how much one needs such reconciliation, or, at least, creative freedom. However, the drive to write does not necessarily require such epic circumstances. Emily Dickinson wrote poems of remarkable ingenuity and skill in the midst of a repressive life as a Victorian spinster. In fact, I think that anyone sufficiently sensitive to the circumstances of the world in which we live has all the encouragement necessary to seek the solace poetry can provide.

The most common characteristic I can identify among those poets I consider great is their absolute hunger for the freedom in art. It is this quality that galvanizes talent, effort, patience, endurance, and everything else I find inherent within those poets I most admire. It is true, as Marvin Bell points out, that in life we are not free, and even the most privileged life can be a burden. But in art, we are free, and this freedom, and the poetic truth that issues from this free space, can touch to others in ways that are great inside of them as well.

By Robert Peake | Posted in Insights, Poetry | Also tagged Emily Dickinson, Marvin Bell, Seamus Heaney | Comments (4)

Czeslaw Milosz’s “Preparation”

October 15, 2007

There are many taboos in poetry. Some of them cycle in and out of fashion. For example, in the wake of so much confessional poetry of the last few decades, many contemporary poets now spurn an insecure, dramatic speaker in favor of the quiet power that comes from a more detached, objective presentation. In fact, a large part of the modern mindset eschews sentimentality, even subtly detected, as unpoetic.

Reading Czeslaw Milosz’s “Preparation,” I am reminded of Marvin Bell’s credo: “Learn the rules, break the rules, make up new rules, then break those rules.” Consider the poem:

Still one more year of preparation.
Tomorrow at the latest I’ll start working on a great book
In which my century will appear as it really was.
The sun will rise over the righteous and the wicked.
Springs and autumns will unerringly return.
In a wet thicket a thrush will build his nest lined with clay
And foxes will learn their foxy natures.

And that will be the subject, with addenda. Thus: armies
Running across frozen plains, shouting a curse
In a many-voiced chorus; the cannon of a tank
Growing immense at the corner of a street; the ride at dusk
Into a camp with watchtowers and barbed wire.

No, it won’t happen tomorrow. In five or ten years.
I still think too much about the mothers
And ask what is a man born of woman.
He curls himself up and protects his head
While he is kicked by heavy boots; on fire and running,
He burns with a bright flame; a bulldozer sweeps him into a clay pit.
Her child. Embracing a teddy bear. Conceived in ecstasy.

I haven’t learned yet to speak as I should, calmly.

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By Robert Peake | Posted in Insights, Poetry | Also tagged Polish Poetry | Comments (2)

Back in London and the Polish-English Interchange

August 15, 2007

Had a great trip down to the South coast, the highlight being a sword fight with a four-year-old on the bowling green of Carisbrooke Castle. We crossed the Solent in the kind of gale that threatened the Fastnet Race. Unfortunately, that meant we couldn’t take the hovercraft–but the fast catamaran only pitched and rolled during the slow going in and out of port. Good thing, too–Val and I were stuffed on two enormous portions (“Those are the mediums?!”) of fish & chips as well as tea and Turkish delight.

I have been reading Zbigniew Herbert on the train, trying to get past the translation. Apart from stunning poems like “Five Men” and “The Pebble,” most of the poems I have read so far smack of romantic Slavic intillectualism and an out-of-tune surrealism. I wonder if his work focuses more on language and lyric device to make what seem like generalizations come alive in new (linguistic) ways. In any case, it is a far cry from Adam Zagajewski, whose poems in Mysticism For Beginners are tight and self-contained–a kind of Eastern European Ted Koozer with a deeper connection to history and a more philosophical bent. Still, I’m ploughing through Herbert poems by the hundreds, hoping to get more inside this poet, hoping to read beyond the language barrier and into the mind of the man that has written poems that make my jaw drop open with their fierce, unflinching gaze.

Meanwhile, it is evident that since I was here three years ago, Polish people have immigrated to the UK in great numbers. There are now Polish grocers and restaurants just down the street. On the tube today, young Poles were poring over a glossy Polish-language magazine sporting the latest PC gaming equipment and games. According to Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish that contemporary poets employ is only nominally different from its medieval counterpart–making their poetic tradition vastly more accessible and vibrant than our own. (Imagine if Chaucer and Shakespeare wrote in English-as-we-know-it.)
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By Robert Peake | Posted in Insights, Poetry, Travel | Also tagged Adam Zagajewski, London, Polish Poetry, Zbigniew Herbert | Comments (1)

Czeslaw Milosz and the Hope of Poetry

April 29, 2007

“I have defined poetry as a ‘passionate pursuit of the Real.’”

-Czeslaw Milosz, The Witness of Poetry

After finishing The Witness of Poetry, I found myself mourning the loss of a man I never met and mourning, most importantly, a mind and spirit so capable of characterizing the poetics of the past century–and thereby helping us understand a bit more of ourselves. Milosz seems to have defined the major dialectic forces at work in twentieth century poetry: language versus mimesis, classicism versus realism, science versus imagination, alienation versus “the human family” and West versus East. Owing to Poland’s unique, liminal situation in the interplay of so many of these forces throughout Europe, Milosz speaks with a kind of visceral authority about such broad characteristics of poetry in the past century.

He is not without bias in describing these dynamics. Fortunately for me, his biases run along similar veins to my own, so I frequently felt he was expressing many of my own latent thoughts and beliefs in a much more articulate and compelling way. Regarding science supplanting imagination as an organizing principle for our lives, he points out:

… science not only contributes to the perfecting of ever more lethal means of conducting war. It also penetrates the very fabric of our collective life, causing transformations whose range still eludes our comprehension. The pollution of the mind by certain images, those side effects of science, is analogous to the pollution of the natural surroundings by technology derived from the same science.

and much later, in relating to the horrors of the twentieth century–from the holocaust to the atomic bomb–he points out the stakes in such a dynamic are not merely aesthetic, but that, “It is possible that we are witnessing a kind of race between the lifegiving and the destructive activity of civilization’s bacteria, and that an unknown result awaits in the future. No computer will be able to calculate so many pros and cons–thus a poet with his intuition remains one strong, albeit uncertain, source of knowledge.”
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