TEACHING MILOSZ: THE EVOLUTION OF A POET By Ira Sadoff *** The Montréal Review, February 2025 |
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Cezlaw Milosz (2019) by Czapliński - Jakubczak (STALOWA Gallery) I first met Cezlaw Milosz in 1980, shortly after he won the Pulitzer Prize. He came to Colby College -- where I was teaching -- as part of a tour publicizing his new book of poems. I introduced him at his reading and lecture, and served as one of his hosts at a faculty dinner. “Served” is probably an accurate description of my experience: he never learned anyone’s name, and to my recollection never asked anyone a question: he simply pontificated, highlighting his own importance. Milosz was by no means the only visiting poet who seemed self-absorbed and self-centered, but given his age, almost seventy, and his origins (he hadn’t grown up in our narcissistic celebrity culture), his demeanor was a little surprising. Later I’d heard from other host writers on his tour that they’d had very similar experiences with the poet; Milosz himself alluded to his arrogance in a few later poems. The next time we met, in 1998, we were both serving on a panel and lecture at the National Holocaust Museum on the subject of “Is Writing Poetry Barbaric After the Holocaust?” He was accompanied by his second wife, Carol Thigpen, a Professor at Emory College in Atlanta. He warmly greeted me and rose to shake my hand. “Ira Sadoff, Seneca Review,” he said, mentioning a literary magazine I had edited probably some twenty-five years before. But he had obviously taken the time to look me up. He went through the same welcoming ritual with the other poets on the panel, Gerald Stern and Marge Piercy. When he gave his talk, I sat next to Carol: she seemed attentive to his every movement and word, not like a fan, but as someone who loved him and worried about the frailty of her ninety plus year-old husband. We talked about his health a little as he rose to the stage: she had suggested the trip from Berkeley to D.C. might be too taxing for him. It turned out that Carol would die before him, in 2002. Finding love late in his life, Carol casually said, had changed them both. Losing that love must have been costly, and Milosz’ late poems reflected the urgency of both experiences. What’s the point of these two self-referential anecdotes? I’m well aware of the dangers of drawing correspondences between the artist and his or her lyric work, but these two experiences gave me an additional context to approach his work. Teaching Milosz’ work became a project in the evolution of a poet, his shift from being a more rhetorical, moralistic and didactic poet to one who aspired to the democratic, placing a higher value on human community. Facing uncertainty and contingency in his life had undermined the earlier rhetorical stances in his poems. Since he never really resolved his lifelong conflicts over faith and doubt, good and evil, and the problem of time, human life became existentially more precious to him, as did his embrace of the material world. At a time when young students are forging their identities (focusing primarily on the self), searching for “answers” or certainty, it might be valuable for them to consider how complex, contradictory, and unwieldy experience continues to be, and how, as they face their own mortality, it’s both possible and necessary to accept change and process. Edward Said’s On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain supplies a contrarian view of the late work of great artists, one I believe that applies to Milosz’ work. Eschewing the “accepted notion of age and wisdom in some last works … reflect(ing) a special maturity, a new spirit of reconciliation and serenity [or] a miraculous transfiguration of common reality,” Said asks, “What of artistic lateness not as harmony and resolution but as intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction?” An artist’s anxiety surrounding imminent knowledge of death often leads his or her late work to competing, fragmentary, and irresolvable truths. As Michael Wood culls from Said in his introduction, Beethoven, for example, “knew too much, from too many sources, for a unified culmination to have been possible.” Said, quoting his mentor Adorno on Beethoven, reflects, “His late work still remains process, but not as development; rather as a catching fire between extremes, which no longer allow for any secure middle ground or harmony or spontaneity.” Rembrandt’s late self-portraits provide another artistic example of increasing complexity, self-doubt, difficulty, and fragmentation: the thickness of paint and the blank or underpainted sections of canvas exemplify resistance to harmony and completion. Said believed the outcome of the “artist fully in command of his medium nevertheless abandons communication with the established order of which he is a part and achieves a contradictory, alienated relationship with it. His late works constitute a form of exile.” A look at Milosz’ early poems, especially the first translations published by Seabury Press in 1976, reveals an often didactic, more cerebral, guilty, and ironic Milosz (though in the anthology Postwar Polish Poetry, he scolds his contemporary and lifetime competitor Zbigniew Herbert, who remained in Poland, for some of those very same traits). Here is an excerpt from the scathingly ironic poem, “Incantation”:
In the shadows of this poem lies Milosz’ experience with the Nazis in World War Two, as well as his time as a cultural attaché for Poland during the Stalin-influenced years. This history led him to being an ardent anti-Communist for the rest of his life. But this poem hardly relies on either lyric or dramatic narrative strategies to persuade: it is highly rhetorical, virtually devoid of the particular and sensory. Though smart and wrathful, its didacticism is well defended. Compared to the late work, its overwhelming intellect makes the poem arid and bitter, the latter consciously so. Perhaps his most famous “Dedication” -- a more particularized and stronger poem -- would serve as a more direct example of the earlier work. The poem begins with a plea: “You whom I could not save, / Listen to me.” It moves toward closure with:
Here the irony is maintained, but this ars poetica, couched in terms of self-aggrandizement and small-mindedness, laments the diminishing power of poetry (his own as well as others) to transform not only his native Poland but humanity itself. A later poem, “A Conversation with Jeanne” (a friend and philosophy professor at the University of Geneva), from the later collection Provinces (1991), foreshadows Milosz’s wrestling with lateness. Refusing or being deprived of harmony and salvation, he “accepts” the “things of this world,” merely “because they exist,” essentially because of their material and sensual pleasures. He does not doubt that “this poor earth was not enough,” but he also feels liberated by that insufficiency. Rather than ending up exiled, as Said suggests for poets for whom the late style leaves unreconciled, Milosz comes down from the mountain of wisdom and grows “smaller…more free.” On the other hand, the complex image also suggests he’s aware of disappearing. But in the interim, he also admits “I don't know how to care about the salvation of my soul,” and “I don't pretend to the dignity of a wise old age.” His acceptance then, is tentative, free of dogma, but incomplete; his closure relies on an older strategy, beholding the enormity of the natural world. In his last book, that balance often won’t hold.
In Milosz’ collection “This,” published in 2000, the repression lifts: Milosz’ more defended didacticism breaks down. Most visibly in the title poem, the lyric speaker faces his own mortality, and denounces his past attempts to repress or control it or his destiny. No act of will, whether praising the sensory and natural world, or denouncing human evil, can supplant the vexing problem of his own death. “Writing has for me been a protective strategy/” he says, “Of erasing traces.” Of his “ecstatic praise of nature, he adds “I confess my ecstatic praise of being/ Might just have been exercises in the high style./ Underneath was this, which I do not attempt to name.” What he’s been keeping from himself, what is too unfathomable to name, of course, is mortality itself. The poem moves toward uncovering the cost of this recognition, concluding with a series of frightening metaphors and similes. This desperate, serializing process, similar to the strategy Neruda uses in “Nothing but Death,” at once approaches but never quite defines or comprehends the inescapable experience of knowing he’s going to die.
In the late poems of Second Space, published posthumously a month after his death in 2004, when Milosz reexamines the sensory and sensual world he’d previously praised, those feelings become more ambiguous and complex. In one way, life becomes more precious knowing how little time he has left. The incredibly moving “Late Ripeness” – although the most faith-affirming poem in Second Space -- reflects Milosz’s changing views of self and flux and the material world. The poem is charged with humility: the entire movement of the poem is earthward, from the general to the particular and intimate, from the large to the small, from the agency of the individual to the acceptance of the democratic:
Here everything is in motion and flux: his ninetieth year is “approaching,” his former selves are “departing,” and he sees himself as a painter, his job to describe the world better (note the comparative here). The serial details move from the large (“countries”) to the small (“gardens” and “bays of seas” -- although here the garden also has mythic proportions). His job as an artist has been assigned to him: there is no greatness about it. He has “descended” to the human community, attached by pity and grief and our inability to use even a small percentage of our gifts. He invokes the democratic, first in religious terms (as children of the king) but the affirmation becomes more diffusely defined in “where we came from.” The details in the penultimate stanza, parallel to the images in stanza 3, enact the timeless– in Whitmanian fashion, reminiscent of a passage in “The Sleepers” when the hero is bashed against the rocks – by alternating the intimate with the historical and metaphorical world of the ship. The final metaphor, although paraphrasing the biblical Matthew 20:8, concentrates on the earthly and democratic: we are all “workers in the vineyard”; we don’t rise up: we experience simultaneity independent of the hierarchies of consciousness (“all men and women living at the same time” -- the tense “would be a worker” creating an indefinite and ever-present temporality). The temporal elements of the poem in the penultimate stanza both gather up and prepare for that modest labor: it’s as if all human wishes (small and large, partial and unfulfilled, the challenging as well as the ordinary) dwell in each of us and need be released in and for the human community. Implied in the end of that stanza is that osmotic process (Whitman often works this way) that brings the dreams of others inside us while we’re still on earth: that’s as close to a working definition of love as a reader will find in Second Space. In the title poem, heaven serves as much as a metaphor as a literal space; the speaker’s imagination brings him there in the opening stanza. Oddly enough, in the “Hanging gardens,” he imagines a pre-fall paradise, not a site of virtue and sin. The stanza ends with a sublime moment, one where pleasure and pain are fused: the soul “tears,” the body “soars.” Only memory (as opposed to imagination or vision) brings him back to the up and down of traditional Christian belief.
The middle of the poem performs an amazing series of leaps: after his conviction about ascension, the speaker begins to question a loss of faith, and then the concepts of heaven and hell seem to have vanished: finally, the speaker sees salvation as entwined with the pastoral meadow (a reflection of those hanging gardens). In truth though, the garden’s no long pastoral, pre-fall. The consequence of that loss disorients the speaker: things are no longer in their proper place. The speaker provides an image of the earthly in smearing the faces with coal, but also demands ritual. Ultimately, the poem’s lamenting closure suggests that this “second space,” whether it is imaginative space (without which the impalpable is unrecognizable) or a more literal heavenly space, has been stolen from the earth. The tragic appeal, the plea, the supplication implied in “implore,” reflects the speaker’s powerlessness to retrieve the afterlife and salvation. In a much slighter poem, this acknowledgment of the secular is made explicit in a witty and ironic rhetorical flourish. Responding to Dostoievski’s quotation from The Brothers Karamozov, even acknowledging the death of God, Milosz suggests that our duty -- a product of our shared frailties and grief dramatized in other poems – remains to care for the human community.
In “Werki,” a poem grounded in a small town in Milosz’s Lithuanian past, space, memory and the temporal again become sites of conflict. The poem opens with another pastoral scene, where the manmade music blends with the natural. In this seemingly timeless idyllic place, we find “a large view” of the moving river.
But in the second stanza, the idealistic speaker is disturbed by the uncorrectable: he desires to save those who have already died (most likely in the Second World War), but the memory also leads him to wonder about what’s become of them. They reside in an “unknown country.”
With Swedenborg, the poem reenters the timeless and the spaceless – that which material truths cannot explain -- but we must also remember that Swedenborg was a body mystic. Further, we understand that the speaker has not yet experienced the other-worldly (“For there, as one has been, so one sees”); he must therefore call on his imagination to conjure a version of it. The speaker’s imagination lets him wander, again in that osmotic fashion, between the palpable and impalpable world of the “other side.”
In the speaker’s imaginative dreams, where the spiritual resides, time is rusty-golden: the autumnal image turns the speaker’s air above the river to wine. The miracle resides in dream and imagination: the pastoral pleasures of childhood. If we have any doubt about the secularization of the spirit here (or at least its deinstitutionalization), the last stanza refuses the church’s notion of salvation and damnation: whether it’s the muse or the forces of conscience, of the unconscious or a God, the guide is left ambiguous. Milosz offers a still more ambiguous vision of imagination in “Eyes,” a poem that is in many ways appears to hold on to transcendence, suggesting primarily a Wordsworthian understanding of “the world is too much with us.” In his inner vision, he is able to conjure an illuminating vision of the many “similarities” of humans without effacing their small – and unspecified --dissimilarity.
Tonally, there are a number of distressing elements in the world of this poem, especially in the adjectives “dim” and “less than sharp.” No longer can Milosz compare his eyes to “a pack of royal greyhounds,” no longer do they create “wondrous” spaces. His being sick of the loud surfaces of the metaphorical circus of the world brings him to his similitudes. And if his gaze is pointed toward a single brightness, which is spiritual redemption, it comes at a great cost: the pleasures of human community (as other poems affirm, much of what he missed earlier in his life), painted with the metaphor of the circus, must be dismissed.
One can see the closure as an acceptance of the inevitability of death (his embracing or being embraced by it), or one can see -- because his loss is so great -- a less reliable and exiled narrator, forced to withdraw from sensory pleasures, in denial. In other poems Milosz views the imagination in a much more skeptical light, as in “Advantage.” Reflecting on his embattled past, and his illusory sense of power and certainty, he looks critically at his past need for recognition, competition, and revenge. Here his imagination serves as a vehicle of misguided power: only in his mind and poem might he “direct” or orchestrate” the characters from his past -- or at least so he thinks at the beginning of the poem.
Retrospectively, he recognizes himself as a smug young man, the man we saw in the early didactic poems, and perhaps the man I first met: “arrogant out of misery and shyness”; his pretentious moral superiority, based on the theories of Schopenhauer, must in the present tense acknowledge those who had experiential knowledge of the dark “disreputable zone,” a place, it seems, where we are most human but also capable, as in the case of the speaker, of great cruelty.
Then this speaker, this “chaplain of shadows,” allows for none of the transcendent longing of other poems in the collection. Instead of mocking the ordinary, as he did as a vain young man (wanting himself to be immortal through poetry and individual genius), he diminishes the importance of his judgments or his reputation after death. The redeeming closure of the poem, a half-revelation of negation, suggests that it is neither power nor authority he sought; rather, as his acknowledgment of Ed and Nina’s relationship reveals, his desire for continuance was connected to love, a begrudging respect for the ordinary human community, and perhaps even those dark spaces (fantasy in the Platonic sense, but also connected – by the disreputable zone – to the conjugal pleasures of the body).
Here memory serves as superego and revision: ringing at the end of the poem is the half-bitterness of “So what if I won’t perish entirely” (if the soul ascends) or “If I leave an oevre, since the balance / is uncertain.”
The speaker claims “weak faith”: his feelings change from day to day. The lines “Since they believe, they help me to believe / in their existence, these incomprehensible beings,” is syntactically ambiguous: the line break indicates their faith helps him to believe, but belief turns toward the human with “in their existence” and is further undercut by “these incomprehensible beings.” That phrase ambiguously connects both the heavenly spirits and the believers. Milosz uses memory -- what he was taught as opposed to what he believes -- to try to place the faithful, but he suggests they are supposed to be “slightly” inferior to angels. And in the stanza about the statue of Mary, true faith seems to belong to an innocent child. Even though the speaker simultaneously claims to be a skeptic and to embrace by a leap of faith the contradiction between his “private faith” and “the religion of rite,” the impetus for this complicated shift is the following couplet:
Humans restore his spiritual faith, but only evidenced in an earthly faith in song and the sensual “vein of ecstasy” (the sublime) pulsating in their throats. Throughout the collection, divinity embodied in the earthly combats the implied ugliness and injustice of both history and an abandoning God; it provides both the scaffolding and limitations of Milosz’ faith, a faith that faces death both with the courage of skeptical investigation and with a lament for the passing of earthly pleasures. Milosz explores that uncertain balance throughout most of the poems in Second Space. He dispenses with accusation and rhetorical wisdom, and if he uses irony it is often self-effacing, a reflective confession, an acknowledged mistake. In the touching and witty poem “Non Adaptation” he begins feigning helplessness, being fated; in the third stanza, though, he begins to question his agency, his hypersensitivity to his own pain, his dedication to an imagination based on flight and a desire to pin down a descriptive truth:
At the end of the poem Milosz resists closure: his regret is in absenting himself from the sensory world of the present, his displacement of love, projecting onto other women his desire to right the wronged past of his sister. What is even more complex is the final couplet, his acknowledging that his respect for religion, his “paradise,” was tied to grief, loss, and the need for reconciliation. In the past tense, it serves as an emblem of regret: dwelling in grief and loss, it offers neither transformation nor earthly love.
That longing for the earthly love of the senses, its urgency and vitality, had been replaced by use and a longing to return to innocence, to undo the past. What is most complicating in this couplet is his use of “respected” in the past tense. On the one hand it honors a post-fallen world of grief and pain; but on the other hand, the past-tense phrase also implies he may no longer respect this reverence for the funereal. This regret is heightened -- and religion contributes to it -- because when his lover dies he has lost the possibility of loving a woman with his five senses. In the final poem of the collection, “Orpheus and Euridice,” many of the contesting truths of the collection come to light and are reconfigured in the aforementioned radiating love. Initially, one might think of Wallace Stevens’ “The World as Meditation” as a source for the poem, but Milosz is less interested in fidelity to ideas than he is in an idea about fidelity: his faith and commitments are to the earthly. The allegorical poem suggests Adorno’s “fractured landscape” wrestling with death “in a refracted mode as allegory” in terms of his will to survive unbearable loss. But this lyrical poet’s interest in myth, as one sees from the very first line, resonates primarily as triggering metaphor and not so much as archetype. “Standing on flagstones on the sidewalk at the entrance to Hades” reminds one of Charles Simic’s ironic personifications, but this poem, filled with dedication and struggle, serves rather as elegy and ode.
These straightforward lines (excepting the ironic “like a medical condition”) bring the conflict into action: how to retain that humanizing love in the face of the loss of its embodiment. Not only does the speaker partakes of the sublime with “her,” but the reflected lover here acts as conscience as well as a source of passion and transforming identity. In the interim, he is lost on earth, an earth he no longer recognizes. And like a modern Dante, he moves through a personal hell, but in this case confronting his own lingering and useless guilt:
….
The quatrain beginning “He felt strongly his life with its guilt” foreshadows Orpheus’ labor to shed that guilt. His shame neither corrects nor moves anyone else; it merely hinders his own capacity to embrace experience itself. From this point on the speaker wavers, confronted with new difficulties: the acknowledgment of earthly pleasure, and the urgency of all his failing senses. Armed with his lyre, he is able to defend against the abyss of nothingness:
Confronted with the question of whether or not he really loved Euridice, the speaker is forced to inhabit the fact of her death, which ultimately shakes his faith:
Here Milosz reaffirms the discovery made by many of the poems in the collection: his desire to be privileged and immortal, to be exempted from the human, had been costly to himself and to others. In his dreamlife, his unconscious, the will to power and selfhood drops away. To be defenseless, then, without the armor of identity or the special artist, to experientially understand we are all going to die and we have lost the hope for “resurrection” (here it serves as an illusion), allows him to live with his heart full but still without his love. Faith and doubt occur in equal doses in this poem, and the last stanza provides no culminating wisdom. Instead, the speaker acknowledges “How will I live without you” at the same time his senses are fully awakened (reminiscent of the paradox of Keats’ speaker toward the end of “Ode to a Nightingale”).
In that modest final couplet, he recognizes that his redeeming love made it possible for him to love the earth. He acknowledges all the shattering vulnerability it provides as well as the grief and pain of the earthly (“everything cried to him”); then in that final couplet he retrieves some sensory pleasure from the “sun-warmed earth.” The sun-warmed earth seemingly becomes a perfect emblem, a blending of the spiritual and the sensual, the earthly and the transcendent. That this tentative redemption takes place on earth also affirms the materiality of love. The import of sleep here, though, is ambiguous, suggesting multiple readings: not only embracing the earth but also confronting death. It affirms his exhaustion after reenacting the trauma of his lost loved one. But it also reflects a lament, a “hanging on,” a reluctance to let go of the earth. For the earth is not only sun-warmed but also the burial site for his love, and that ultimately tore into and exhausted him. For him to live without that love in the world embodies both the frailty of his redemption and his capacity to survive his solitude. This final poem, in its longing to sustain his faith in love when he’s lost that love, brings Milosz to the very precipice of life itself; at the end of his life, he’s been granted both the knowledge of love and the tragedy of its loss. Power and recognition hold no sway. Milosz’ faith in imagination as well as the spirit in this last book is equivocal; simultaneously, his need for affirmation is more urgent and insistent. In his most lively and moving poems he shows remarkable flexibility. But these late works not only lead the author to exile: while the poems exemplify “Adorno’s fractured landscape [as] only one of the ways in which late works quarrel with time and manage to represent death in a refracted mode, as allegory,” they also embrace a tragic but effluent human community. In poem after poem, humans suffer injustice, uncertainty, grief and pity, humility and conceit; but in Second Space, these experiences lead Milosz to humility, to a shared sense of suffering, anxiety, and incompletion. They also give him a necessary self-awareness and a gift: to be able to move, as the poet Jon Anderson says in In Sepia, “from judgment to compassion.” ***
*** MORE FROM THE TEACHING SERIES “VIVAS TO THOSE WHO HAVE FAIL’D”: TEACHING WALT WHITMAN by Stephen Haven The Montréal Review, January 2025 *** |
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