Czeslaw Milosz
STARTING FROM MY EUROPE
Many learned books on poetry have been written, and
they find, at least in the countries of the West, more readers than
does poetry itself. This is not a good sign, even if it may be explained
both by the brilliance of their authors and by their zeal in
assimilating scientific disciplines which today enjoy universal
respect. A poet who would like to compete with those mountains of
erudition would have to pretend he possesses more self-knowledge
than poets are allowed to have. Frankly, all my life I have been in the
power of a daimonion, and how the poems dictated by him came
into being I do not quite understand. That is the reason why, in my
years of teaching Slavic literatures, I have limited myself to the
history of literature, trying to avoid poetics .
Yet there is something that comforts me and justifies, I think,
my presence in the chair of poetry at Harvard. I have in mind the
corner of Europe that shaped me and to which I have remained
faithful by writing in the language of my childhood. The twentieth
century, perhaps more protean and multifaceted than any other,
changes according to the point from which we view it, a point in the
geographic sense as well. My corner of Europe, owing to the
extraordinary and lethal events that have been occurring there,
comparable only to violent earthquakes, affords a peculiar
perspective. As a result,
all
of us who come from those parts appraise
poetry slightly differently than do the majority of my audience, for
we tend to view it as a witness and participant in one of mankind's
major transformations. I have titled my new book
The Witness of
Poetry
not because we witness it, but because it witnesses us.
Both individuals and human societies are constantly
discovering new dimensions accessible only to direct experience.
This also applies to the historical dimension, which we apprehend
unintentionally and even against our will.
(It
does not occur through
Excerpted by permission of the publishers from
The Witness of Poetry
by Czeslaw
Milosz, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, copyright
©
1983 by the
President and Fellows of Harvard College.
