Other literary forms
Although it was the poetry of Czes?aw Mi?osz (MEE-wohsh) that earned for him the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature, his work in other genres is widely known among the international reading public. One of his most important nonfiction works is the autobiographical volume Rodzinna Europa (1959; Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition, 1968). Unlike most autobiographies, this volume emphasizes the social and political background of the author’s life at the expense of personal detail. For example, Mi?osz makes but two passing references to his wife in the course of the entire work. Despite such lacunae, it is a work of the utmost personal candor and is indispensable for anyone endeavoring to fathom Mi?osz’s poetic intent. Similarly helpful is the novel Dolina Issy (1955; The Issa Valley, 1981), the plot of which focuses on a young boy’s rites of passage in rural Lithuania during and after World War I. An understanding of the Manichaean metaphysics that inform this work as well as Native Realm is fundamental to a reading of Mi?osz’s poetry.
In an earlier novel, Zdobycie w?adzy (1953; The Seizure of Power, 1955), Mi?osz presented a series of narrative sketches dealing with the suppression of the insurrection in Warsaw by the Germans in 1944, the Red Army’s subsequent advance through Poland, and the eventual seizure of power by pro-Soviet Polish officials. Mi?osz also analyzed Communist totalitarianism in a work of nonfiction, Zniewolony umys? (1953; The Captive Mind, 1953). A large part of this book is devoted to the fate of four writers in Communist Poland and provides a moving account of their gradual descent into spiritual slavery under the yoke of Stalinist oppression. Although Mi?osz designates these men only by abstract labels—Alpha, the Moralist; Beta, the Disappointed Lover; Gamma, the Slave of History; and Delta, the Troubadour—their real identities are easily surmised by anyone familiar with postwar Polish literature.
Some of Mi?osz’s nonfictional works were originally written in English, notably The History of Polish Literature (1969, enlarged 1983). A large section of this volume is devoted to contemporary literature, and it is instructive to read Mi?osz’s critical evaluation of his own stature as a Polish poet. Another valuable work originally written in English is ?wiadectwo poezji (1983; The Witness of Poetry, 1983), which gathers Mi?osz’s Charles Eliot Norton lectures, given at Harvard University during the 1981-1982 academic year. Throughout these lectures, Mi?osz argues that poetry should be “a passionate pursuit of the real.”
More than half of the essays contained in Emperor of the Earth: Modes of Eccentric Vision (1977) are also written in English. Most of the pieces in this collection are devoted to Polish and Russian writers with whom the author shares a spiritual affinity. Among the essays included are two chapters from Mi?osz’s monograph on Stanis?aw Brzozowski, Cz?owiek w?ród skorpionów (1962; man among scorpions), which was published on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the death of this controversial Polish writer. (These two chapters were translated by the author himself, as were some of the other essays that were originally written in Polish.) The “Emperor of the Earth” referred to in the title is a character in a Russian work of science fiction who poses as a benefactor of humankind but who in reality is the Antichrist, a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Mi?osz thus underscores his belief that a religion of humanity often paves the way for totalitarian rule. If there is any thematic unity among the disparate essays included in Emperor of the Earth, it is to be found in the author’s long-standing fascination with the problem of evil.
Mi?osz also published two important collections of essays and what he called a “spiritual autobiography,” Ziemia Ulro (1977; The Land of Ulro, 1984). In these volumes, Mi?osz is inclined toward historical speculation and takes a deeply pessimistic view of contemporary society. The title The Land of Ulro is derived from the poetry of William Blake, where Ulro represents the dehumanized world created by materialistic science. Just as the inhabitants of Blake’s Ulro are destined one day to experience a spiritual awakening, so Mi?osz is hopeful regarding humanity’s ultimate redemption.
Kontynenty (1958; continents) is a collection of works in various genres, including poems, literary essays, diary excerpts, and translations of poetry from several languages. Later, Mi?osz published a similar potpourri, Ogród nauk (1979; the garden of knowledge). This volume is divided into three parts: The first section consists of essays; the second part presents verse translations (with commentary) of French, Yiddish, English, and Lithuanian poetry; and the third and final subdivision contains a translation of the biblical Ecclesiastes together with a stylistic analysis of biblical discourse and its relevance to the modern age.
Mi?osz was very active in translating works from other languages into Polish. His most important translations from French include the poetry of his cousin Oscar de L. Mi?osz and that of Charles Baudelaire. In 1958, while in exile in Paris, Mi?osz edited and translated selected writings of Simone Weil from French into Polish. Having taught himself English in Warsaw during the war years, he later put his talents to good use by translating works of English-language poets such as Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg, and T. S. Eliot. It was Mi?osz, in fact, who produced the first Polish version of Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) in 1946. To promote the fortunes of contemporary poets from Poland, Mi?osz translated from Polish into English. For this purpose, he issued an anthology in 1965 titled Postwar Polish Poetry. He also produced English versions of many of his own poems, working either independently or in collaboration with his students and fellow poets. Working from the original Greek and Hebrew, he rendered the Gospel According to Saint Mark, the book of Ecclesiastes, and the Psalms into Polish, with the goal of translating the entire Bible into a Polish that is modern yet elevated, sharply distinct from the debased journalistic style of many modern translations of the Bible.
Achievements
Prior to receiving the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature, Czes?aw Mi?osz had already won a number of other prestigious awards and honors. When his novel The Seizure of Power was published in France in 1953 under the title La prise du pouvoir, he received the Prix Littéraire Européen (jointly with German novelist Werner Warsinsky). In 1974, the Polish PEN Club in Warsaw honored him with an award for his poetry translations. He was also granted a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1976 for his work as both poet and translator. He received honorary doctorates from the University of Michigan in 1977 and from Catholic University in Lublin, Poland, in 1981, when he finally returned to his native country after thirty years. In 1978, he was selected as the fifth recipient of the biennial Neustadt International Prize for Literature by a panel of judges assembled under the auspices of the editorial board of World Literature Today (formerly called Books Abroad). Mi?osz accepted the award in public ceremonies held at the University of Oklahoma on April 7, 1978.
In a written tribute to his candidate for the 1978 Neustadt Prize, Joseph Brodsky, the eminent Soviet émigré writer and Nobel laureate, declared that he had no hesitation whatsoever in identifying Mi?osz as one of the greatest poets of his time, perhaps the greatest. Mi?osz’s preeminence as a poet in no way stems from any technical innovations to be found in his poetry, as he was actually quite indifferent toward avant-garde speculation pertaining to aesthetic form, and the greatness of his poetry lies in its content. The most remarkable aspect of Mi?osz’s poetry is that, despite his having experienced first hand the depths of humankind’s depravity in the form of Nazi barbarism and Soviet tyranny, it still affirms the beauty of this world and the value of life. From the Commonwealth Club of California, he received two Silver Medals (1988, 1991) and one Gold Medal (2001). He won three Northern California Book Awards in poetry (1984, 1991, 1995), the Robert Kirsch Award from the Los Angeles Times (1990), and a PEN Center USA Literary Award for poetry (1992).
One of Mi?osz’s most impressive achievements was that he continued to produce outstanding new work after the age of eighty. In 1997, he published two volumes of a memoir, Abecadlo Milosza (1997; Mi?osz’s ABCs, 2001), written in a distinctively Polish genre called abecadlo, an alphabetical arrangement of entries on people, places, and events from an individual’s life. His collection of aphorisms, anecdotes, musings, and observations, Road-side Dog, won the 1998 Polish Nike Literary Prize. In 2002, the Northern California Book Awards presented a Special Recognition Award for distinguished contirbution to literature and culture to Mi?osz.
Biography
Czes?aw Mi?osz was born to Aleksandr Mi?osz and Weronika (Kunat) Mi?osz in Šeteiniai, which is located in the Kédainiai province of Lithuania. This area of Europe is a place where Polish, Lithuanian, and German blood intermingled over the centuries, and the ancestry of Mi?osz himself was a mixed one. It can, however, be established through legal documents that his father’s ancestors had been speakers of Polish since the sixteenth century. Nevertheless, Mi?osz had great pride in his Lithuanian origins and even took perverse pleasure from the fact that Lithuania was the last country in Europe to adopt Christianity. The lateness of this conversion, which occurred in the year 1386, permitted the survival of pagan attitudes toward nature on the part of the peasantry, and the influence of this pagan heritage can be detected in much of Mi?osz’s poetry as well as in his novel The Issa Valley.
Like much of Poland itself, Lithuania was part of czarist Russia’s empire at the time of Mi?osz’s birth. Mi?osz’s father, a civil engineer by profession, made a yearlong trip to Siberia in 1913 under government contract and was accompanied by his wife and son. Shortly after their return home, when World War I broke out, his father was drafted into the Russian army as a military engineer and once again took his family to Russia, where they remained for the duration of the conflict. In these years, Mi?osz imbibed Russian to such a degree that proficiency in that language became second nature to him and never deserted him in subsequent years.
After the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, the Mi?osz family returned to the newly independent Baltic states for a few years but finally decided to settle down in the city of Wilno. This city, although once the capital of ancient Lithuania, had long been a predominantly Polish-speaking municipality and was then incorporated into a fully restored Poland. In Wilno, Mi?osz entered a Roman Catholic high school at the age of ten. There, he received exceptionally thorough training in religion, science, and the humanities over the course of eight years. It was also there that Mi?osz received his first exposure to the Gnostic and Manichaean heresies that were to profoundly alter his outlook on life. Nothing in his home life could be said to have inspired the religious rebelliousness that he manifested in high school. His father was actually indifferent toward any form of worship, and his mother, although a devout Catholic, was quite tolerant of other faiths. Mi?osz’s religious revolt, however, stopped far short of atheism, for he lived in a state of constant wonder at the mystery of life and kept expecting an epiphany to occur at any moment.
In 1929, Mi?osz matriculated as a law student at the King Stefan Batory University in Wilno and soon published his first poems in its literary review, Alma Mater Vilnensis. Here, he also became affiliated with a group of young poets who referred to themselves as ?agary (brushwood) and who subsequently founded a journal bearing the same name. While still a student, Mi?osz published a slim volume of verse called Poemat o czasie zastyg?ym (a poem on congealed time), for which he received the poetry award from the Polish Writers Union in 1934. In the same year, Mi?osz obtained a master’s degree in law from the University of Wilno as well as a fellowship in literature from the Polish government, enabling him to study in Paris during the years of 1934 and 1935.
Mi?osz had already been in France on one prior occasion when he and two other students from the university made an excursion to Western Europe in the summer of 1931. One of the highlights of that junket was his meeting with Oscar de L. Mi?osz (1877-1939), a cousin of his from Lithuania and a highly accomplished poet in the French language. As a result of Mi?osz’s obtaining his fellowship, the two cousins were able to see each other often, and the older man exerted a profound influence on his young relative from Poland. Oscar de L. Mi?osz especially enjoyed indulging in prophetic visions of a catastrophe that was about to befall Europe. His cousin’s prophecies struck a responsive chord in Mi?osz, whose own psychological state was somewhat chaotic at this time. When Mi?osz returned to Poland after his fellowship year in France, he published a collection of poems titled Trzy zimy (three winters), in which the theme of personal and universal catastrophe is expressed. Oscar de L. Mi?osz also helped to shape his young cousin’s views on the craft of poetry and fostered his commitment to a poetry anchored in religion, philosophy, and politics.
Mi?osz went on to obtain employment with the Polish Radio Corporation at its station in Wilno. He was eventually ousted from his post as programmer because of pressure exerted by local rightist groups, who considered him to be a dangerous left-winger if not an actual Communist. Although Soviet-style Communism never attracted Mi?osz, his attitude toward Marxist dialectical and historical materialism was a decidedly favorable one at that time. It is also true that Mi?osz did little to conceal his intense dislike for the reactionary politicians who controlled Poland after the death of Marshal Pilsudski in 1935. Fortunately, a sympathetic director of Polish Radio in Warsaw offered him a comparable post in that city, and after touring Italy in 1937, Mi?osz settled down to a successful administrative career in broadcasting. This phase in Mi?osz’s life came to an abrupt halt when the Germans attacked Poland on September 1, 1939. Mi?osz put on a uniform in time to join units of the Polish armed forces in a retreat to the eastern part of the country. This region was soon to come under Soviet occupation as a result of an invasion by the Red Army that was initiated on September 17, 1939, and Mi?osz eventually returned to Wilno.
Wilno had changed drastically since Mi?osz last saw it, for the Soviets chose to award the city to Lithuania as a gesture of goodwill shortly after capturing it. The Soviets, however, gradually increased their control over Lithuania and finally coerced it into becoming a Soviet Socialist Republic in the summer of 1940. When Lithuania was officially annexed to the Soviet Union, Mi?osz concluded that its servitude would, in all likelihood, prove to be permanent, and he resolved to return to Warsaw. At great personal peril, Mi?osz made several border crossings to get back to the part of Poland that the Germans had designated as the Government General.
Despite the horrendous conditions in Warsaw, Mi?osz continued to write poetry and clandestinely published a new volume of verse called Wiersze (poems) in 1940 under the pseudonym J. Syru?. This was probably the first literary work to be printed in occupied Warsaw. It was run off on a ditto machine and laboriously sewn together by Janina Dluska, whom Mi?osz married in 1944 and by whom he was subsequently to become the father of two sons. When the Germans decided to rearrange the holdings of Warsaw’s three largest libraries, Mi?osz managed to get himself hired as a laborer loading and transporting the packing cases, and he spent the next few years engaged in this interminable project. Some form of opposition to the German occupiers was a moral imperative, and he soon became active as a writer in the Resistance movement. In 1942, Mi?osz edited a clandestine anthology of anti-Nazi poetry that appeared under the title Pie?? niepoldlegla (the independent song) and also provided the underground press with a translation of Jacques Maritain’s anticollaborationist treatise À travers le désastre (1941). Almost as an act of defiance toward the German oppressors, Mi?osz began an intensive study of the English language and derived spiritual sustenance from reading poems such as Eliot’s The Waste Land. Eliot’s poem surely must have made appropriate reading at the time of such tragedies as the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in the spring of 1943.
A revolt against the Germans on a much grander scale occurred in the latter half of 1944 as the Red Army reached the outskirts of the Polish capital. The underground Home Army, whose hierarchy was controlled by the London-based government-in-exile, sought to take charge in Warsaw prior to the arrival of the Russian forces and launched an attack on the Germans stationed within the city. Not surprisingly, the Russian response to the insurrection was to cease all military activity against the Germans on the Warsaw front, and the Home Army was left to its own resources to do battle with the vastly superior Nazi forces. Mi?osz himself was not a member of the Home Army because he had no desire to see the restoration of the political establishment that had governed Poland before World War II. Then, as later, he considered the rising to be an act of folly. The bitter struggle lasted more than two months and cost more than two hundred thousand Polish lives. After the surrender of the Home Army, the Germans forced the evacuation of the surviving populace and then systematically destroyed the city, block by block. Caught completely unawares by the outbreak of the rising. Mi?osz and his wife were seized by the Germans as they attempted to leave Warsaw, but after a brief period of detention in a makeshift camp, they were released through the intercession of friends. Thereafter, they were to spend the next few months wandering about as refugees until the Red Army completed its annihilation of the German forces and Poland was at last liberated after more than five years of Nazi rule.
Since Warsaw had been almost totally destroyed, the center of literary activity in Poland had gravitated to Kraków, and it was there in 1945 that a collection of Mi?osz’s wartime poetry was issued in a volume titled Ocalenie (rescue). This work was one of the very first books to be published in postwar Poland. Because of his prominence as a poet, Mi?osz was selected for service in the diplomatic corps and was posted as a cultural attaché at the Polish Embassy in Washington, D.C., from 1946 to 1950. He then was transferred to Paris, where he was appointed first secretary for cultural affairs. In 1951, shortly after the practice of Socialist Realism became mandatory for all Polish writers, he decided to break with the home government in Warsaw and to start life anew by working as a freelance writer in France. The next decade proved to be remarkably productive for Mi?osz. His reasons for breaking with the Warsaw regime were fully set forth in the nonfictional study The Captive Mind as well as in the political novel The Seizure of Power. At the same time, he continued to create poetry of the highest order. His novel The Issa Valley also dates from this period, as does his long poem A Treatise on Poetry.
In recognition of these literary accomplishments, Mi?osz was invited to lecture on Polish literature at the University of California, Berkeley, during the academic year 1960-1961. In 1961, he decided to settle in Berkeley after he was offered tenure as a professor of Slavic languages and literatures. He became a naturalized American citizen in 1970 and eventually retired from active teaching in 1978 with the rank of professor emeritus. Just as he retained his creativity during his years in exile as a freelance writer in Paris, so too did Mi?osz manage to maintain his literary productivity within an academic environment in the United States. Fully one-third of the works included in the edition of Mi?osz’s Utwory poetyckie (collected poems), which was printed under the aegis of the Michigan Slavic Publications in 1976, were written in the United States. His lifetime achievement as a poet received acknowledgment when he was selected as the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980.
In June, 1981, Mi?osz returned to Poland for the first time since his self-imposed exile in 1951. The Polish government, still under Communism, now claimed him, although his Nobel Prize acceptance speech was published only after the anti-Communist sentiments were edited out. Polish presses were now able to publish his poetry, at last making it available in Polish to his native people, many of whom had never heard of their newly crowned national bard. With the declaration of martial law in December, 1981, however, his work was again banned by the government, although some of it remained available in samizdat, or underground, publications. Upon his return to America, Mi?osz began a series of lectures as the Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard University for the academic year 1981-1982. These lectures were later published in The Witness of Poetry.
Mi?osz was incredibly prolific in his twilight years, publishing several collections of poetry, essays, and criticism: As he entered his nineties, Mi?osz continued to publish. His wife, Janina, died in 1986 after a ten-year battle with Alzheimer’s disease. Mi?osz married again and divided his time between Berkeley and Kraków until his death in 2004.
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 Wierzy?ski, Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz, Antoni S?onimski, and Jan Lecho?. 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 Kraków 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.
The ?agary group of poets, to which Czes?aw Mi?osz 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.”
Poemat o czasie zastyg?ym
Mi?osz’s first published book, Poemat o czasie zastyg?ym, 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, Mi?osz 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 Mi?osz’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 Mi?osz 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 humanity’s sinfulness, Mi?osz 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 Mi?osz 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 chrze?cijanin patrzy na getto” (“A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto”). Here, the poet watches as bees and ants swarm 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 Mi?osz is most impressive. Although Mi?osz’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 S?owacki, 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.
?wiat?o dzienne
While in exile in France during the years 1951 to 1960, Mi?osz published two important volumes of verse: ?wiat?o 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, Mi?osz 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 S?owacki. Even so, Mi?osz’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 The Double Man (also known as New Year Letter; 1941) andKarl 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 Mi?osz’s homeland. For this and other reasons, it is ranked very highly among the poetical works in Mi?osz’s oeuvre.
Król Popiel i inne wiersze
The
publication of Mi?osz’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, Mi?osz 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. Mi?osz, 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 Mi?osz’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, Mi?osz 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 that 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 Mi?osz 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. Mi?osz 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, Mi?osz 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, Mi?osz argues that Earth merits a bit of affection if only because of the beauties it contains.
Neither in “Counsels” nor elsewhere in his poetical oeuvre does Mi?osz ever hold God to be the cause of the misfortunes that humans inflict on other humans, 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, Mi?osz 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. Mi?osz does, however, advise his readers not to assume a divine perspective in which humanity’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 zatok? San Francisco (1969; Visions from San Francisco Bay, 1982), Mi?osz objects to the way in which Jeffers, in some of his poetry, demotes the stature of humanity by contrasting people’s pettiness with the immensity of nature. Mi?osz 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 s?o?ce i k?dy zapada
The free-verse style of Gdzie wschodzi s?o?ce i k?dy 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, Mi?osz moves between past and present in a spirit of free association and contemplates the nature ofan 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, Mi?osz’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 Who Have Wronged”
Bridge-building in the reverse direction occurred when Polish workers belonging to the Solidarity movement selected some lines from one of Mi?osz’s poems to serve as an inscription on the monument erected outside the shipyards in Gda?sk for the purpose of commemorating the strikers who died during demonstrations against the government in 1970. These lines are taken from the poem “Który skrzywdzile?” (“You Who Have Wronged”), included in the collection ?wiat?o 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.
The Collected Poems, 1931-1987
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. However, such feeling is terrifyingly fragile in the face of catastrophe, whether natural catastrophes or the everyday catastrophe of human mortality. Mi?osz 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 also the entire belle époque and its nearsighted optimism with the sinking of the Titanic.
“La Belle Epoque,” with its harsh pessimism, is not the conclusion to “New Poems, 1985-1987.” Rather, in the last poem, “Six Lectures in Verse,” with characteristic insight, Mi?osz 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, Mi?osz’s poetry underwent a profound change. The poem “Realism,” in the 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, Mi?osz 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 Mi?osz 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 Mi?osz 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.
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, Mi?osz 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 Mi?osz’s work. This is the “missing panel” of Mi?osz’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 Mi?osz’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 Mi?osz 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?
Second Space
Second Space was published just after Mi?osz’s death. The title comes from the first poem in the collection, in which the author meditates on most people’s loss of belief in the afterlife. Most of the other thirty-one poems in the collection have religious themes as well, although a few, such as “New Age” and “Late Ripeness” discuss old age, and “A Master of My Craft” is a salute to fellow poet Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz, a member of the Skamander group. The shortest poem with only five lines is “If There Is No God,” an argument that even if God does not exist, there are still moral laws by which to live.
The longest poem in the collection, “Treatise on Theology,” covers twenty pages. As the title indicates, it concerns Christianity, especially Catholicism. The narrator describes a young man, clearly based on Mi?osz himself, who is a poet struggling with his religious beliefs and meditating on the mysteries of the Trinity, Original Sin, and Redemption. There are several references to Mickiewicz, a Polish poet who combined elements of the Enlightenment and romanticism; Jacob Boehme, a theologian who was burned at the stake for supporting the astronomical theories of Copernicus; Arthur Schopenhauer, a German philosopher known for his atheistic pessimism; Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish scientist who became a mystic and theologian; and Charles Darwin, the English scientist who developed the theory of evolution.
“Father Severinus” is a monologue by a Catholic priest who no longer believes in God, especially in the necessity of the Crucifixion, and feels guilty for consoling his parishioners with church doctrines in which he no longer believes. He wonders why Christians worship a man who bleeds and why they feel a need for Hell when life on Earth is bad enough. He is envious of the ancient Greeks, who worshiped gods such as Athena, Apollo, and Artemis. He thinks that if he had been at the Council at Nicea in 325, he would have voted against making the concept of the Holy Trinity a critical part of Christian doctrine. The name of the poem is a reference to the Roman Christian philosopher Boethius, whose full name was Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius and whose best known work was De consolatione philosophiae (523; The Consolation of Philosophy, late ninth century).
“Apprentice” is an appreciation of Mi?osz’s distant cousin Oscar de L. Mi?osz, and this poem is the most thoroughly footnoted work in this collection. Czes?aw Mi?osz met his relative in Paris in 1931, developed a closer relationship with him, studied his poetry and catastrophism based on the Book of Revelations, studied Swedenborg under his guidance, and talked to other people who knew him. In this poem, Mi?osz imagines what it must have been like to have been the other Mi?osz and laments that Oscar would have been better off if he had not been born wealthy and lived in Paris for most of his adult life.
Selected Poems, 1931-2004
Selected Poems, 1931-2004 contains more than one hundred poems arranged chronologically. The first poem in the collection is “Dawns,” which belongs to his early period when, under the influence of Oscar de L. Mi?osz, he was preoccupied with catastrophes. The last is “Orpheus and Eurydice,” a modern retelling of the classic myth. In Mi?osz’s version, Orpheus has to deal with automobiles, elevators, and other modern devices on his journey to Hades. The underworld’s entrance, a glass-paneled door, has a sidewalk in front of it, and Hades is several hundred stories below the ground in the form of a labyrinth. Orpheus still carries a nine-string lyre, and he uses his voice to persuade the goddess Persephone to free Eurydice. The poem does not change the ending, but afterward, Orpheus finds consolations in the scents, sounds, and textures of nature.
Other poems include “The World” (1943), which is written in the style of a nursery rhyme and follows a group of children coming home from school. Their mother feeds them soup, a boar’s head comes to life and confronts them, they read poetry and picture books before going to play in the woods, and find reassurance from their father that the night’s darkness will pass. The darkness symbolizes the Nazi occupation, and the children’s father represents God. One year later, Poland was “liberated” by the Red Army, and the Communists replaced the Nazis. In “Mid-Twentieth-Century Portrait” (1945), he portrays a Communist Party official as a hypocrite.
Over the years, Mi?osz wondered whether poetry was a worthy pursuit, and even when he decided it was, he wondered whether he was worthy of it. In “Song of a Citizen” (1943), the speaker wonders whether poetry is worthwhile. “With Trumpets and Zithers” (1965) celebrates life, but the poet despairs over whether he can adequately describe it. In “Secretaries” (1975), Mi?osz compares the work of a poet to a secretary who merely transcribes what other people say.
Mi?osz was always interested in philosophical issues. “Encounters” (1936) argues that mediation is not enough when responding to the world. Whimsical metaphysical questions concern “Magpiety” (1958). When the poet sees a magpie in France, is it improbable that it is the same magpie he had seen years before in Lithuania. In the tradition of Plato, he tries to grasp the essence of the magpie, which he calls “magpiety.” In “To Raja Rao” (1969), Mi?osz traces his development from youthful visionary to a more mature man who rejects both Western rationalism and Eastern mysticism. In “Bypassing Rue Descartes” (1980), Mi?osz rejects rationalism in the tradition of René Descartes.
In “Slow River” (1936), Mi?osz uses multiple voices to show how difficult it is for people to accept nature’s beauty on its own terms. “From the Rising of the Sun” (1973-1974) is a fifty-page poem using not only multiple voices, but also multiple languages, including Polish, Lithuanian, and Byelorussian.