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PARTISAN REVIEW
from a blank spot on the map, and so in citing the name of Adam
Mickiewicz I cannot expect my readers to have any associations:
that name is virtually unknown in the West. Had I mentioned the
poet Alexander Pushkin it would have been otherwise. But the
greatness of Pushkin is taken on faith, for translations give no idea of
his high quality; his reputation was reinforced by that of the great
Russian prose writers. His Polish contemporary, Mickiewicz, is
equally untranslatable. His verse resumes in a way the whole history
of Polish verse, which first was shaped by Latin classicism, then by
French classicism of the Enlightenment. It is not only poetic
technique that makes Mickiewicz an inheritor of the Enlightenment.
In him, the philosophy of
les lumieres
is both negated and accepted as
a basic optimism toward the future, a millenarian faith in the epoch
of the Spirit. In many countries this seems to provide a link between
the Age of Reason and the first half of the nineteenth century, which
I would call the Age of Raptures. William Blake, a poet hostile to the
rationalism of philosophers, cannot be understood if we bypass his
prophecies on the victory of man in his struggle against the night,
the cold, and the spectral ego.
On the borderline of Rome and Byzantium, Polish poetry
became a home for incorrigible hope, immune to historical disasters.
Only in appearance does that hope date either from the time when
Mozart wrote
The Magic Flute
or from the Age of Raptures. In reality
its roots reach a few centuries further back.
It
seems to draw its
strength from a belief in the basic goodness of the world sustained
by the hand of God and by the poetry of country people. The ma–
jor work of Polish literature is a tale in verse,
Pan Tadeusz
by
Mickiewicz, written in the years 1832-1834 in Paris by a political
emigre. The poem, whose setting is the Lithuanian countryside,
celebrates the delights of gathering mushrooms and preparing tasty
coffee, describes hunts and feasts, speaks with admiration of trees as
if they were persons, and ascribes peculiar meaning to sunrises and
sunsets, which are seen as a curtain rising and falling in a serene and
comic theater of dolls. Unique in its genre, an amazing achievement
in world poetry, the poem has retained its position as the bedside
book of every Polish poet, and may even be responsible for the
contents of this piece.
This leads me back to the Past-Future axis. The fate of poetry
depends on whether such a work as Schiller's and Beethoven's "Ode
to Joy" is possible. For that to be so, some basic confidence is
needed, a sense of open space ahead of the individual and the human
species. How did it happen that to be a poet of the twentieth century
