Analysis
The principal group of Polish poets in the period between the two world wars was known by the name “Skamander,” after the title of its official literary organ. The Skamander group consisted of a number of poets with very disparate styles and diverse interests, and its members included such renowned literary figures as Julian Tuwim, Kazimierz Wierzyński, Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz, Antoni Słonimski, and Jan Lechoń. Since the Skamanderites were viewed as belonging to the literary establishment, younger poets formed movements of their own in opposition. A group now designated as the First Vanguard was centered in the city of Cracow during the 1920’s and derived much of its aesthetic program from the ideas propounded by the Futurists in Italy. Around 1930, many new literary groups sprang up in various parts of Poland, and these groups are today known collectively as the Second Vanguard. Building on the formal innovations of the First Vanguard, its members generally sought to intensify the social and political dimensions of poetry.
Poemat o czasie zastygłym
The żagary group of poets, to which Czesław Miłosz belonged while a student at the University of Wilno, was part of the Second Vanguard. Because of the apocalyptic premonitions expressed in their poetry, the Wilno group soon came to be labeled “catastrophists.” Miłosz’s first published book, Poemat o czasie zastygłym, represents a youthful attempt to write civic poetry and is often marred by inflated political rhetoric as well as by avant-garde experimentation in both language and form. Apparently, Miłosz himself recognizes its overall shortcomings, since he chose to exclude the work from the edition of his collected poems published at Ann Arbor in 1976.
Trzy zimy
His next work, Trzy zimy, is largely free from the defects of the previous one and constitutes a decided advance in Miłosz’s development as a poet. Despite his continued reliance on elliptical imagery, these poems frequently attain a classical dignity of tone. This quality is even present when Miłosz gives vent to forebodings of personal and universal catastrophe. One of his finest poems in this vein is called “Do ksiedza Ch.” (to Father Ch.) and is passionate and restrained at the same time. Here, after describing a world being destroyed by natural calamities as a result of man’s sinfulness, Miłosz ends his poem on a note of reconciliation. Shared suffering will, he says, reunite longtime antagonists, and the last pagans will be baptized in the cathedral-like abyss.
Ocalenie
Such premonitions of catastrophe turned into reality after the outbreak of World War II. The poems that Miłosz wrote during the war years in Poland were gathered together and published in 1945 under the title Ocalenie. Among the works in this collection are two outstanding poems that deal with the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto. The first is “Campo di Fiori” and begins with a description of this famous square in modern-day Rome. The poet recalls that Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake on that very spot before a crowd that resumed its normal activities even before the flames were completely extinguished. The scene then shifts to Warsaw, where the crowds also carry on with mundane matters on a beautiful Sunday evening even while the ghetto is ablaze. The loneliness of the Jewish resistance fighters is then likened to the solitary fate suffered by Bruno. The poet, however, resolves to bear witness to the tragedy and to record the deeds of those dying alone, forgotten by the world.
The second poem is called “Biedny chrześcijanin patrzy na getto” (“A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto”). Here, the poet watches as bees and ants swarm...
(This entire section contains 3220 words.)
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over the ruins of the Ghetto. He then spots a tunnel being bored by a mole, whose swollen eyelids remind him of those of a biblical patriarch. Guilt overwhelms the poet as he wonders if in the next world the patriarch will accuse him of being an accomplice of the merchants of death. This guilt is less that of a survivor than of one who regrets that he was unable to help a fellow human being in his hour of need.
Many other poems in the collection focus on purely personal themes, but it is in his role as a national bard that Miłosz is most impressive. Although Miłosz’s poetic style is generally modern in character, the reader frequently encounters traces of the diction and phraseology associated with great Romantic poets such as Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Słowacki, and Cyprian Norwid. Any avant-garde preoccupation with finding new modes of linguistic expression could only have appeared trivial in the light of the horrendous events that overwhelmed the poet and his nation during the war years.
Światło dzienne
While in exile in France during the years 1951 to 1960, Miłosz published two important volumes of verse: Światło dzienne (daylight) and A Treatise on Poetry. In the first of these works, the poet dwells on political grievances of various sorts. One of the best of these political poems is titled “Dziecie Europy” (“A Child of Europe”). After a bitterly ironic opening section in which the poet reminds those who managed to live through the war how often they sacrificed their honor as the price of survival, he goes on to ridicule the belief in historical materialism and implies that the doctrine of the inevitability of socialism rests more on the use of force against all classes of society than on the laws of history. To those who are compelled to live in a Communist state, he offers a counsel of despair: If you wish to survive, do not love other people or the cultural heritage of Europe too dearly.
A Treatise on Poetry
In his A Treatise on Poetry, Miłosz surveys the development of Polish poetry in the twentieth century and discusses the role of the poet in an age of crisis. A work of about twelve hundred lines, it is unrhymed, except for a few rhymed insertions, and employs a metrical line of eleven syllables with a caesura after the fifth syllable. The meter is quite familiar to Polish readers because of its previous appearance in major literary works by Mickiewicz and Słowacki. Even so, Miłosz’s style here is classical rather than Romantic. A dissertation of this kind that employs verse has, to be sure, a number of contemporary counterparts, such as W. H. Auden’s New Year Letter (1941) and Karl Shapiro’s Essay on Rime (1945), but the genre had not been used in Polish literature since the Renaissance. A Treatise on Poetry is, therefore, considered to be in the nature of an innovation in Miłosz’s homeland. For this and other reasons, it is ranked very highly among the poetical works in Miłosz’s oeuvre.
Król Popiel i inne wiersze
The publication of Miłosz’s Król Popiel i inne wiersze (King Popiel and other poems) in 1962 was closely followed by a second volume of verse titled Gucio zaczarowany (Bobo’s metamorphosis) two years later. In both works, all formal features associated with poetry are minimized. Stanza, rhyme, and regular meter tend to disappear, and the poet veers toward free verse. The title poem in the first work tells the story of Popiel, a mythical king from the time of Polish prehistory who was said to have been devoured by mice on his island fortress in the center of a large lake. In recounting this legend, Miłosz makes the reader aware of the narrow mode of existence that must have been the lot of Popiel and his kingly successors, for whom possession of territory and material objects was of overriding importance and to whom all cosmological speculation was alien. The pettiness of Popiel’s end mirrors the pettiness of his thought.
Gucio zaczarowany
Much longer and much more complex is “Gucio zaczarowany” (“Bobo’s Metamorphosis”), the title poem of the subsequent collection. Miłosz, with the assistance of Richard Lourie, has himself translated the work into English and is thus responsible for its current title; a more literal rendition of the original Polish would be “enchanted Gucio.” (Gucio is one of the diminutive forms of the name Gustaw.) The poem itself has eight sections; in the seventh, an individual called Bobo (Gucio) is transformed into a fly for a few hours. As a result of this experience, Bobo often has difficulty adopting a purely human perspective on matters. All of the other sections of the poem likewise involve the problem of reconciling various perspectives. In the final section, the poet explores the psychological tensions that arise between a man and a woman as they mutually recognize the impossibility of penetrating the private universe of another person’s mind. In place of understanding, they have no recourse but to posit humanity and tenderness. The dialectical tension in this poem, and its resolution, is quite typical of Miłosz’s cast of mind, for he intuitively looks at the world in terms of contrary categories such as stasis and motion or universal and particular. Similarly, in many of his poems, a sense of apocalypse is juxtaposed to a feeling of happiness.
Miasto bez imienia
In Miasto bez imienia (city without a name), a collection of verse published in 1969 and translated in the 1973 collection Selected Poems, Miłosz does much to clarify his view of poetry in the works titled “Ars poetica?” (“Ars Poetica?”) and “Rady” (“Counsels”). The opening lines of “Ars Poetica?” are used by the author to proclaim his desire to create a literary form that transcends the claims of either poetry or prose. Nothing short of this, he declares, is capable of satisfying the demoniac forces within the poet which inspire the content of his work. There can, however, be no assurance that the daimon will be an angel, for a host of Orphic voices compete for possession of a poet’s psyche. Over the years, so many invisible guests enter a poet’s mind that Miłosz likens it to a city of demons and reminds the reader how difficult it is for anyone who writes poetry to remain only one person. Still, he personally eschews the morbid and expresses his disdain for confessional poetry of the psychiatric variety. Miłosz is committed to the kind of poetry that helps humankind to bear its pain and misery, and he underscores this belief in “Counsels.” Younger poets are hereby cautioned against propagating doctrines of despair. This earth, Miłosz insists, is not a madman’s dream, nor is it a stupid tale full of sound and fury. He himself concedes that this is a world wherein justice seldom triumphs and tyrants often prosper. Nevertheless, Miłosz argues that the earth merits a bit of affection if only because of the beauties it contains.
Neither in “Counsels” nor elsewhere in his poetical oeuvre does Miłosz ever hold God to be the cause of the misfortunes that man inflicts upon man, and he likewise absolves the deity of responsibility for any of the other evils that befall human beings in this world. His conception of God has much in common with that to be found in the writings of the Gnostics and Manichaeans, for which he first developed a partiality while still a high school student in Wilno. Hence, Miłosz is frequently tempted to view God as a perfect being who is completely divorced from all forms of matter and who is, therefore, not responsible for the creation of the material universe. In that light, everything that has a temporal existence can be said to be under the control of a Demiurge opposed to God. Miłosz does, however, advise his readers not to assume a divine perspective in which man’s earthly tribulations are to be seen as inconsequential. In “Do Robinsona Jeffersa” (“To Robinson Jeffers”), a poem included in his essay collection Widzenia nad zatoka San Francisco (1969; Views from San Francisco Bay, 1982), Miłosz objects to the way in which Jeffers, in some of his poetry, demotes the stature of man by contrasting his pettiness with the immensity of nature. Miłosz prefers to remain true to his Slavic and Baltic heritage, in which nature is anthropomorphized, rather than to adopt an inhuman view of the universe such as the one propounded by Jeffers.
Gdzie wschodzi słońce i kędy zapada
The free-verse style of Gdzie wschodzi słońce i kędy zapada (from where the sun rises to where it sets) sometimes borders on prose. The author, in fact, freely juxtaposes passages of verse and prose in the title poem, an explicitly autobiographical work that is almost fifty pages long. In the seven sections of this poem, Miłosz moves between past and present in a spirit of free association and contemplates the nature of an inexplicable fate that has brought him from a wooden town in Lithuania to a city on the Pacific coast of the United States. True to his dialectical frame of mind, Miłosz’s attitudes alternate between forebodings of death and affirmation of life. “Dzwony w zimie” (“Bells in Winter”), the final section, contrasts the Wilno of his youth, where he was usually awakened by the pealing of church bells, with the city of San Francisco, whose towers he views daily across the bay in the winter of his life. The entire poem is an attempt to bridge the gap between his expectations as a youth in Poland and the realities of his old age in America.You
“You Who Have Wronged”
Bridge-building in the reverse direction occurred when Polish workers belonging to the Solidarity movement selected some lines from one of Miłosz’s poems to serve as an inscription on the monument erected outside the shipyards in Gdańsk for the purpose of commemorating the strikers who died during demonstrations against the government in 1970. These lines are taken from the poem “Który skrzywdzileś” (“You Who Have Wronged”), included in the collection Światło dzienne, and run as follows:
You, who have wronged a simple man,
Bursting into laughter at his suffering . . .
Do not feel safe. The poet remembers.
You may kill him—a new one will be born.
Deeds and talks will be recorded.
For a poet in exile, it must have been a source of profound satisfaction to learn that his words had been chosen by his countrymen to express their own longing for a free and independent Poland. Verse that previously had been circulated clandestinely in samizdat form could now be read by everyone on a public square in broad daylight.
“La Belle Époque”
Like the other long serial poems, “La Belle Époque” from “New Poems, 1985-1987,” which appears at the end of The Collected Poems, 1931-1987, mixes verse and prose, speaks in multiple voices, and moves freely in time, along the way pointing out the intersections of personal fate with history. The poem returns over its seven sections to a few central characters. The poet’s father and the beautiful teenage Ela seem to represent for the poet the inevitable human tendency toward empathy and connection; he identifies so closely with each that he feels he “becomes” them. Yet such feeling is terrifyingly fragile in the face of catastrophe, whether natural catastrophes or the everyday catastrophe of human mortality. Miłosz relates with necessary, quiet detachment, for instance, the fact of the execution of Valuev and Peterson, train passengers engaged in a debate over mortality, each feverishly in pursuit of his own truth. The poem’s final section asserts the fragility of not only the individual human, but the entire belle époque and its nearsighted optimism with the sinking of the Titanic.
“Six Lectures in Verse”
“La Belle Epoque,” with its harsh pessimism, is not the conclusion to “New Poems.” Rather, in the last poem, “Six Lectures in Verse,” with characteristic insight, Miłosz goes beyond the contradiction of mortality to a new recognition: that the facts of history and mortality are forgotten in that moment when sensuous reality is far more present and more “real” than any concept we have of it.
Facing the River
From the mid-1980’s to the mid-1990’s Miłosz’s poetry underwent a profound change. The poem “Realism,” in the 1995 collection Facing the River, gives some indication of the source and direction of his poetic goals. Admitting that the language humans use to tame nature’s random molecules fails to capture eternal essences or ontological reality, Miłosz still insists on a realm of objectivity embodied in the still life. Abstractionism and pure subjectivity are not the final prison for the triumph of the ego, and Miłosz recalls Arthur Schopenhauer’s praise of Dutch painting for creating a “will-less knowing” that transcends egoism through “direct[ing] such purely objective perception to the most insignificant of objects.” So Miłosz proceeds in “Realism” from the still life to the idea of losing himself in a landscape:
Therefore I enter those landscapes
Under cloudy sky from which a ray
Shoots out, and in the middle of dark plains
A spot of brightness glows. Or the shore
With huts, boats, and on yellowish ice
Tiny figures skating. All this
Is here eternally, just because once it was.
“The Garden of Earthly Delights: Hell”
This is remarkable because the preceding poem, “The Garden of Earthly Delights: Hell,” completes the series of meditations—written more than a decade earlier and published in Unattainable Earth—on Hieronymous Bosch’s terrifying painting of the same title. In moving from the scene of worldly hell to the Dutch still life and landscape, Miłosz conveys his desire to move beyond the tragic and egocentric to the sensuous, yet peaceful and eternal.
“The Garden of Earthly Delights: Hell” is, in fact, one of the most frightening poems in this, the most hell-haunted of all of Miłosz’s work. This is the “missing panel” of Miłosz’s meditation on Bosch’s painting, “The Garden of Earthly Delights.” Sensitive to such details in the painting as “a harp/ With a poor damned man entwined in its strings,” one feels Miłosz’s own painful skepticism of the worth of a life in art. Here he takes one of the most painful jabs at his own endless pursuit of the real as hiding fear of death:
Thus it’s possible to conjecture that mankind exists
To provision and populate Hell,
The name of which is duration. As to the rest,
Heavens, abysses, orbiting worlds, they just flicker a moment.
Time in Hell does not want to stop. It’s fear and boredom together
(Which, after all, happens) And we, frivolous,
Always in pursuit and always with hope,
Fleeting, just like our dances and dresses,
Let us beg to be spared from entering
A permanent condition.
This is the ironic version of what he says in “Capri”: “If I accomplished anything, it was only when I, a pious boy, chased after the disguises of the lost Reality.” The question for Miłosz is when the “chasing” stops that carried him forward in time, out of his past, and now back into his past. Where is the final reality beneath “dresses” and “disguises,” metaphors for the changing forms of history and of his own art?