CZESLAW MILOSZ
179
means to receive trammg in every kind of pessimism, sarcasm,
bitterness, doubt? In this respect there is no great difference between
the years of my youth and the present time, when the century is
drawing to its close . Perhaps the specific trait of these last decades is
that negative attitudes have become so widespread that the poets
have been overtaken by the man in the street. As a youth I felt the
complete absurdity of everything occurring on our planet, a
nightmare that could not end well-and in fact found its perfect
expression in the barbed wire around the concentration camps and
gas chambers . Brought up on Polish romantics, I obviously had to
search for the causes of that contrast between their open future and
our future laden with catastrophe. Today I think that, while the list
of dreaded apocalyptic events may change , what is constant is a
certain state of mind. This state precedes the perception of specific
reasons for despair, which come later.
Let us take a few American examples. In a country whose
founding fathers professed the philosophy of the Enlightenment,
Walt Whitman was no anomaly. He was a poet for whom the future
was as open as it had been both in the Age of Reason and in the Age
of Raptures. But a couple of decades after his death, everything
changes. The expatriate poets hate the present and the future; they
turn their eyes to the past .
It
is difficult to find any tomorrow in
T.
S. Eliot's
The Waste Land,
and where there is no tomorrow,
moralizing makes its entrance . They very chaos of ideas in his friend
Ezra Pound's
Cantos
proclaims a reactionary political option .
Robinson Jeffers, self-exiled to the shores of the Pacific, hostile to
society, creates visions of a heroic "inhumanism," in which there is
no place for the dimension of the future:
Observe also
How rapidly civilization coarsens and decays; its better
qualities, foresight, humaneness, disinterested
Respect for truth die first; the worst will be last
("Teheran" in
The Double Axe)
Though quite differently-I would say inversely-motivated, Allen
Ginsberg's
Howl
crowns the history of Whitmanesque verse which
once served to sing of the open road ahead. Instead we now have
despair at the imprisonment of man in an evil civilization, in a trap
without release.
It
is not easy to separate this loss of hope from the causes
eithe~
advanced by writers or guessed at by critics. I assume that we are
