[The works in "Selected Poems" have] been, in the wake of the Nobel, reviewed less as poems than as the work of a thinker and political figure; the poems tend to be considered en masse, in relation either to the condition of Poland, or to the suppression of dissident literature under Communist rule, or to the larger topic of European intellectual history…. [The new collection, "The Separate Notebooks," contains] poems written as early as 1934 and as late as 1980. Its appearance offers an occasion for a consideration of Milosz's work as a modern poet….

Apparently, there takes place frequently in Milosz's poetry that rise in temperature which comes when two words that have never before lived side by side suddenly mingle—provoking what we feel in English when we read of Marvell's "green thought," Traherne's "orient and immortal wheat," Donne's "unruly Sun," or Keats' "sylvan historian." This breaking down of "natural" compartments is one of the most powerful effects of poetry, which by its concision and free play can represent better than most prose the fluid access of a daring and unhampered mind to its own several regions. Such linguistic versatility—combining words that have never been combined before, but doing it with a sublime justice and propriety, so that the effect is not a jolt but a confirmation of rightness—gives perhaps the highest pleasure that poetry exists to confer. But in reading Milosz we are barred, as foreigners, from knowing that pure bliss of the newly created linguistic object as a reader of the mother tongue knows it. We are also barred from hearing the indispensable falls of sound and cadence.

If we cannot hear Milosz's native euphonies, and if we miss many of the surprising and (we are told) immensely touching effects of his diction as he searches into long-forgotten or darkened corners of the Polish past and brings them, by a word, into an alignment with the present, what can we bear away from a reading of the poems? We find in them, first of all, a truncated autobiography (to be read against the autobiographical essays of "Native Realm"). The poetic autobiographer, like the prose one, is reticent…. He is not a "confessional" poet; his voice is, one might say, disinterestedly personal. For Milosz, the person is irrevocably a person in history, and the interchange between external event and the individual life is the matrix of poetry. Like most lyric poets, Milosz was probably not by nature very much a social being, but, given the situation of his life, he cannot help being a historical one. There is an eerie solitude in Milosz; it sometimes seems that he has suffered the twentieth century all alone, vividly aware of historical cataclysms—those he saw in person (the war, the Nazi occupation of Warsaw, the subsequent Russian occupation, and Communist rule in Poland) and those of Europe in general—yet living in catastrophe as a hermit…. (p. 138) There are two convictions, both of them mentioned in Milosz's introduction to "Native Realm," that are important for his poems. The first is that "one can get at man only obliquely, only through the constant masquerade that is the extension of himself at a given moment, through his historical existence." All of Milosz's poetry has, even if sometimes unwillingly, this historical grounding: through circumstance humanity is made visible. At the same time, it is the second conviction that seems to me the more important in isolating Milosz's idiosyncrasy as a poet: he says that if the "chaotic richness" of "the particulars of our fate" did not exist "we would not constantly be aspiring to form achieved by a process of elimination." Milosz offers this as an axiom, and for him it is: form is the achievement, by the poet, of a paring away, of a refinement of original multiplicity into elemental leanness…. Milosz is a stern poet; forbidding and austere lines appear in most of the poems. But they rarely occur alone; they are accompanied by a relenting, a thawing mildness. And it is in this peculiar balance between a juridical, frowning severity and a lyrical, melting attachment that Milosz's power to unsettle us lies. Of course, there are other characteristic aspects of his writing; the one most often remarked on is a gift for classical aphorisms. The aphoristic, or gnomic, sentence offers a linguistic form for Milosz's historical irony—an irony that sees, by virtue of historical length and breadth, beyond the individual case, even if that case is one's own. Poets with a tendency to universalize become (at their worst) deprived of an individual voice; poets who forget that their own fate is part of the common lot fall into self-pity. Milosz's grimness has not blunted the antennae of his painful sensibility; and, conversely, his own exposed nerves have not fatally distracted him from the historical events he has recorded almost involuntarily.

Milosz is more intellectually conscious of his own aesthetic than many poets are. He says, for example:

        Particular existence keeps us from the light
        (That sentence can be read in reverse as well).

The struggle between a clarifying, if inhuman, light and the darkness of particular fate underlies everything that he writes, and provides, in fact, an endlessly fertile resource for invention, as particulars and light dispute each other for room in his work.

From the start, Milosz was a natural ecstatic, destined for intense and radiant perception. (One of the aphorisms reads, "From childhood till old age ecstasy at sunrise.") But everything in his life after his childhood was a scourging of his natural temper. (pp. 138-39)

Milosz reads like a soul who has received a wound from which he has never recovered: an air of doom now hangs over every moment of joy, so that the simplest happiness appears always as a reprieve or furlough from an evil sure to reassert itself. The precariousness of life and writing is always felt in Milosz; his contemporaries who died or were killed or were silenced (not only in Poland but in all of Europe) contribute to the voice he has become—a voice almost necessarily that of a generation rather than (or as well as) that of a single man. The "I" who speaks many of the poems speaks for all who witnessed the dissolution of Europe…. Milosz finds transparently simple ways of expressing the evaporation of materiality and spirituality alike. As bombs render one's native streets unrecognizable, and as all codes of ethics fall at once, space swarms and letters flicker and vanish: Milosz's free pillaging of all historical eras opens out his canvas. It is only by such an oblique treatment of the destruction of Warsaw that Milosz succeeds in treating it at all.

As [Stanislaw] Baranczak points out, Milosz rejects symbols in favor of metonymy and synecdoche, those figures of speech which represent a whole by a thing allied to it or by a part of it. The originality with which Milosz finds the briefest of words for inner events is one of the reasons to read him. "The years have transformed my blood," he says, "and thousands of planetary systems have been born and died in my flesh." As in the best poets, we feel this account to be not figurative at all but the most literally truthful way of saying what has happened. What is this changing set of interplanetary relations but a concise history of a Polish intellectual's inner life from the forties to the sixties? The sort of change Milosz wants to describe can only, for him, be described in those terms usually reserved for the life and death of immensely long cycles; what we gain from his language is a sense of indecent speeding up, as one inner galaxy after another is conceived, brought to being, and annihilated.

His own compulsion to write sometimes drives Milosz to bitterness and anger…. He finds himself condemned to "odious rhythmic speech/Which grooms itself and, of its own accord, moves on." If such passages testify to the guilt of the survivor, they testify as well to the tormenting distance every poet feels between the miraculous Aaron's rod of art and this world "where men sit and hear each other groan." (pp. 139-40)

In the surpassingly beautiful "The World: A Naïve Poem," a sequence of twenty poems written in 1943, Milosz renders a past of depth and profound feeling in the simplest measures and the simplest words available to a poet, as though only the first syllables of the mother tongue could be words deep-rooted enough for the deepest of primal experiences. "The World" is the most opalescent of Milosz's sequences; it exists as pure light against a background of abysmal darkness, preserving that doubleness of perspective—extreme joy recalled in extreme despair—which is Milosz's unique discovery in the art of poetry….

All of "The World" is written in primer style. It is a style in which, one feels, it is impossible to lie, or even to shade the truth. Blake, one of Milosz's masters, knew this when he wrote his songs.

In "The World," the sweetness of Milosz's recollection passes from the visual and the personal to the religious, with three childlike poems on the three highest, or "theological," virtues—faith, hope, and love—which make up the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth poems of the sequence. After that, the child goes abroad to the forest and sees the skies, the kingdom of the birds, who live in a "free, high, shining place," here he first grasps the possibility of far voyaging. In the single frightening poem, the child becomes Blake's little boy lost in the forest, but, as in Blake, he is found by his ever-watchful and kind father. The security and beauty of the world as it should be, and as we all feel it could be if it were governed by faith, hope, and love, is the theme of the father's rescue of the trembling child. This poem, the most radiant and sacred of the sequence, is called "Recovery;" it must be remembered that it was written in the devastated landscape of Warsaw in 1943. The father speaks:

   Here I am—why this senseless fear?
   Soon now the day will come, and night will fade….

To imagine this steady parental reassurance in the most simple and fundamental words of the mother tongue, in the metres immemorially present in hymn and nursery rhyme, is to remind oneself of what this father's voice must sound like in its original Polish, as it embodies the oldest dream of all, underlying our most primitive infant memories—that the universe is, as Carlyle said, not a charnel house but godlike, and our father's. Since this dream is the mythical projection of a faith in being, of a hope for reality, and of a reciprocal love, the poem stands firmly as an essay in archetypal forms, as a predication of the deepest values, and as an anguished personal memory of an incinerated culture. (p. 140)

It is clear … that Milosz has a powerful inner investment in antagonism. In his poetry, cultures are set in opposition; world views clash; existence struggles with annihilation; learning vanquishes, and is vanquished by, ignorance; laughter and weeping succeed each other; contempt vies with grief. Milosz is not a writer of one chief emotion (as we might think of Blake as chiefly a poet of indignant vision, or of Crane as supremely a poet of Platonic longing). It seems sometimes that Milosz's poems should split open from the sheer internal pressure of their confined contents. What is confined is often at the same time both mysterious and intelligible, if hard to acknowledge. The sequence "Album of Dreams" is a striking group exhibiting this pressure. The dreams retold are dated, as if to give them the force of testimony:

                       NOVEMBER 23
 
               A long train is standing in the station and the platform is empty.
               Winter, night, the frozen sky is flooded with red.
               Only a woman's weeping is heard. She is pleading for something
               from an officer in a stone coat.

In this brief glimpse, there is both a general emptiness of landscape and a fullness in the tableau of suppliant and officer; there is both purpose (the long train) and negation of intent (the empty platform); there is darkness and yet a suffusion of blood suggested in the red sky; there is the original, silent scene and the shocking intrusion of weeping and pleading; there is the abject humiliation of the woman and the adamant implacability of the stony officer. Such antagonisms are sensually, aesthetically, ethically, and intellectually unbearable. A more sentimental poet might have represented the hopeless woman and the inhuman officer as a tableau of social protest, but in Milosz's dream logic the woman and the officer represent, philosophically speaking, the irresistible force and the immovable object, and it is that conjunction (philosophically inconceivable) which the aesthetic of the poem must mirror, and does, in its irreconcilable items of presence and absence, reality and surrealism, flesh and stone, silence and the sound of agony. In little, this is the pattern of the best of Milosz's work. To read it is to feel that one's interior being will crack from incorporating such incompatible pressures.

A strong-minded poet of this sort risks an almost vicious power if he permits one force-field to dominate, unmitigated by another; and Milosz's poems of lethal scorn, though memorable, sin perhaps in allowing no shelter from their commination. (p. 143)

Milosz's later poems—those collected in "Bells in Winter" and "The Separate Notebooks"—incorporate long ruminations on self, body, language, the past, good and evil. They can seem less pure and less corrosive than the earlier poems, though any true comparative judgment could be made only by a Polish-speaking reader. Milosz's dark spirit of mockery lives in them side by side with his racked religious yearning. His gibes and his prayers vie with each other for room, his macabre visual caprices co-existing with his ineffable simplicity of recollection. It is almost impossible to convey the turbulence of mind produced in a reader by such a succession of mental and visual leaps; that turbulence is the aesthetic on which Milosz stakes his claim. (p. 144)

Milosz's elaborate inner system of grids is in one sense the common possession of any European intellectual—the grid of history, the grid of class structure, the grids of manifold visual experience, the grid of plural ethnic and religious allegiances. But in Milosz the grids are curiously permeable to each other, and the mobile flickering of language darts from one to the next, impelled by a rapid and nearly inhuman intelligence keeping a violent welter of feeling just barely in subjection. Milosz speaks both from within the Heraclitean flux and from above it. (p. 145)

There are no direct lessons that American poets can learn from Milosz. Those who have never seen modern war on their own soil cannot adopt his tone; the sights that scarred his eyes cannot be seen by the children of a young provincial empire. A thousand years of history do not exist in American bones, and a culture secular from birth cannot feel the dissolution of the European religious synthesis, on which Milosz dwelt in "The Witness of Poetry," his recent Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard. But the work of Milosz reminds us of the great power that poetry gains from bearing within itself an unforced, natural, and long-ranging memory of past customs; a sense of the strata of ancient and modern history; wide visual experience; and a knowledge of many languages and literatures. Not, as in Pound, the self-conscious allusiveness of the autodidact, returning obsessively to the books of his formative years, but, rather, the living and tormented revoicing of the past makes Milosz a historical poet of bleak illumination. (p. 146)