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By Joseph Bottum (in The Weekly Standard) Submitted by iwan pritchard Date: 2004 Aug 23 Comment on this Work [[2004.08.23.15.09.28573]] |
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"We drove before dawn through frozen fields," Czeslaw Milosz once wrote.... The red wing was rising, yet still the night. And suddenly a hare shot across our path. One of us pointed to it with his hand. That was long ago and both are dead: The hare and the man who stretched his arm. O my love, where are they, where do they lead, The flash of a hand, the line of movement, the swishing icy ground?" Milosz's death this month at age ninety-three could hardly be called early or unexpected. And yet, perhaps because he was most of all a poet of memory--of the precise detail, stubbornly held for years against the blind wash of time--his death now seems to me unbearable: a real thing, a good thing, wrenched away, as though a warning that nothing from the past survives. "O my love, where are they, where do they lead, / The flash of a hand, the line of movement, the swishing icy ground?" Czeslaw Milosz was a miracle: a young man promoted by old aristocratic Poland for his talent and then shunned for his liberalism; an anti-Communist whom the Communists first promoted for his work against the Nazis and then scheduled for destruction; a refugee in Paris who found intellectuals in the free world more consistently Stalinist than intellectuals behind the Iron Curtain; a professor in America who discovered that California is simultaneously the most beautiful place on Earth and the meaningless end of civilization; a poet whose natural inclination was neoclassicism, born in the age of modernism. Through long years, he thought of himself as a failure: a man destroyed by the attacks of the Soviets in Eastern Europe, the back-biting figures of the French intellectual world, and the uninformed professoriate of America. But his friendship with the archbishop of Kracow--and the archbishop's election as Pope John Paul II--kept him in touch with Polish life, and he became one of the premier promoters of the anti-Communist movement Solidarity. The Nobel Prize for literature in 1980 brought him recognition even the Communists could not ignore. During a visit to Poland after thirty years of exile, he received a welcome of parades and awards that shocked him. Lech Walesa--another friend--had ordered a line of Milosz's inscribed on the Gdansk memorial for the shipyard workers shot by the Communists: You who harmed a simple man, do not feel secure, for a poet remembers. Milosz did not know before his return how important he had been to the oppressed Poles. MILOSZ WAS BORN June 30, 1911, to the Polish gentry in what is now Lithuania. The publication of his first book when he was twenty-two led to a scholarship to study in Paris. A second book of poems followed in 1937, but the Polish establishment began to turn against him for his liberal view of reform--until the Nazi invasion in 1939. Perhaps his most anthologized poem, "A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto," describes life under the Nazis and the destruction of Warsaw. During the war, he worked in a library and wrote for the anti-Nazi underground. It was during this period, as well, that T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets appeared, and, as can be seen in Milosz's first volume after the war, Rescue, Eliot taught the Polish poet how to incorporate classical leanings into modern poetry. Eliot also taught Milosz a way to write serious Christian poetry. "If I were asked to say where my poetry comes from I would say that its roots are in my childhood, in Christmas carols, in the liturgy of Marian and vesper offices, and in the Bible," he later explained. It remains a mystery why the new Communist government appointed him to the diplomatic corps in 1946, but tipped off at the Polish legation in Paris in 1951 that he was to be included in the next round of purges, Milosz refused an order to return to Warsaw and defected. His 1953 prose work The Captive Mind examined the lives of intellectuals who sell themselves to totalitarianism. But poetry remained central. His 1965 anthology Post-War Polish Poetry introduced the world to the fact that a golden age of poetry was happening in Polish during the second half of the 20th century. What explanation can there be for this? While every other European poetry was in decline, Poland produced two Nobel Prize winners--Milosz himself and Wislawa Szymborska--and several other major poets, particularly Zbigniew Herbert. Perhaps the explanation is that in Poland, it still mattered. Poetry was an aesthetic object with historical consequences, and the Poles still read poetry for its truth: You who harmed a simple man, do not feel secure, for a poet remembers. And now Milosz is gone: a witness, a rememberer. "I imagine the earth when I am no more," he wrote. "Nothing happens, no loss, it's still a strange pageant, / Women's dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley. / Yet the books will be there on the shelves." --Joseph Bottum |