Poetry of Czesław Miłosz

Miłosz's work enjoyed wide recognition in Poland (both before and after his defection) despite governmental disavowal and state-sanctioned subversion of his writing.[3] Miłosz's receipt of the Nobel Prize in 1980 marked the beginning of his wider international fame. Publishers issued reprints of his prose works, but the public at-large tended to treat his poetry as a monolith until the mid-1980s when scholars, some of them students of Miłosz, published specific treatments of his poetry.^[5]

Miłosz's writing (specifically his poetry) evolved over the course of his career from the political surrealism of the Catastrophists into writing broadly interested in metaphysics and polyphony.^[1] The wartime violence of the early and mid 20th century in Poland, particularly the extreme violence of World War II, deeply and irrevocably imprinted on Miłosz, especially in his earliest writings.^[6]

Background

Miłosz became actively involved with literature as a law student at the University of Vilnius where he studied from 1930-1934. In 1931 he helped found the short-lived poetry group Żagary (Lithuanian for "brushwood")^[7] alongside likeminded left-leaning poets, such as Jerzy Zagórski, Teodor Bujnicki, and Jerzy Putrament.^[2] These three poets have been subsequently labeled as the Catastrophist school of poets, defined by their surreal, dreamlike content and apocalyptic anxieties regarding the future of Europe and the Earth.^[8][9] The young Miłosz held and often vocalized strong opinions that the work of Żagary should be foremost of social and political import rather than self-consciously formal and preoccupied with aesthetics.^[10]

In 1931, Miłosz briefly visited Paris where he met his cousin

"Reading articles by young Marxists, one suspects that they really wish for this period to herald a future which sees the total demise of art and artistry. They are preoccupied solely with sniffing out betrayal and class desertion, and are so zealous in poking around to establish whether someone had written 'God' with a capital 'g'. In this great revisionist utopia, there will be nothing left to read except a few books by Wanda Wasilewska."^[16]

Despite his disavowal of the mainstream Polish-communist movement, Miłosz was labeled a communist sympathizer (probably due to his engagement with

It was also during this period of time that Miłosz met Janina (Janka) Dłuska who would become, in the near future, his wife (though she was married at the time). The confluence of these factors in 1938-1939 - his new and influential friendships, his growing affection for the woman to whom he would be loyally bound for half a century, the intensifying animus prescient to the start of World War II - prompted a fundamental change in Miłosz. Miłosz's misanthropy (he had theretofore thought of humans as "beasts")[19] softened into a deep sympathy for individual people ("small souls") lost or forgotten within enormous political apparatuses. ^[20] In 1938, he published in quick succession two articles, "Almost the Dusk of the Gods" and "The Lie of Today's Poetry," which argued that poets had scrubbed all the humanity from their art by refusing to reveal their inner life and by being too concerned with art for art's sake. Miłosz viewed art that was only interested in itself as unethical, negligent, and self-defeating, and he held that an artist had a fundamental, ontological obligation to engage directly with the human condition.^[20]

TO BE CONTINUED

Poetry

Subject Matter

Miłosz's poems perennially reflect the pain and destruction of his wartime experience, but they also orbit Miłosz's concern about the absence of moral law in his contemporary landscape.^[3]

Form

Critical Reception