City Without a Name (Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Czesław Miłosz
- First Published: 1969
- Type of Work: Lyric
- Genres: Poetry, Lyric poetry
- Subjects: West, U.S., Native Americans or American Indians, Death or dying, Poland or Polish people, Euthanasia or right to die, Time, Deserts, Cities or towns
The Poem
“City Without a Name” is a long, biographical poem in free verse divided into twelve sections. The speaker, the poet Czesław Miłosz, is physically traveling through Death Valley, California, but the landscape of memory and the people who inhabit his own personal city of remembrance, his “city without a name,” are emotionally and spiritually more real to him than the heat, sand, and salt of the desert. The first sections of the poem set up this juxtaposition between past and present in which, paradoxically, it is the present that seems motionless and almost...
[The entire page is 1469 words long]
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