CZESlAW MILOSZ
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of man in literature and art. After all, Brecht is primarily a poet of
the Weimar Republic, which begot Nazism, just as in painting
George Grosz is its portraitist. Yes, but surely it is high time now,
sixty-six years after the Russian revolution, to find some optimism
in the poetry of the countries called socialist.
J
u.st as the opinions of
poets often are in disagreement with what issues from their pens, so
rhetoric often passes for poetry and is its temporary substitute. After
the revolution Mayakovsky writes rhetoric amazing in its giantism.
The truth, however, does not reside there but in the soft-spoken
poems of Osip Mandelstam and in those of Anna Akhmatova, who,
in postrevolutionary Russia, saw Dostoevsky's most depressing
forebodings confirmed . Akhmatova wrote, "The prisoner of Omsk
understood everything and gave up on everything." Nor does the
poetry of the countries that were placed in the Soviet orbit after the
Second World War bear out any of the joyous promises made by the
system. On the contrary, irony and sarcasm are distilled by poetry,
for instance in Poland, to a very high degree, though that poetry is
one of rebellion, which fact, paradoxically, keeps it alive.
So we do not seem to commit an error if we hear a minor mode
in the poetry of our century. I suspect that a poet writing in another
mode would be considered old-fashioned and accused of living in a
fool's paradise. Yet it is one thing to live in a limbo of doubt and
dejection, another to like it. Certain states of mind are not normal,
in the sense that they turn against some real, not imaginary, laws of
human nature. We cannot feel well if we know that we are forbidden
to move forward along a straight line, if everywhere we knock
against a wall that forces us to swerve and to return to the point of
departure, in other words, to walk in a circle. Yet to realize that the
poetry of the twentieth century testifies to serious disturbances in
our perception of the world may already become the first step in
self-therapy.
What matters is to gain some distance on certain attitudes too
universally taken for granted, to learn to mistrust some habits we
can no longer even see.
If
it is fashionable today to investigate the
linguistic structures characteristic of one or another historical
period, trying to find to what extent they determine that period's
whole way of thinking, there is no reason why we should not direct
our suspicions against our own century as well. The grounds for
gloom, as voiced by poets, should in a way be taken parenthetically,
at least until we are able to discuss them together with those factors
that are less often mentioned. Since I have hinted at self-therapy, I
