MILOSZ'S WORLD TODAY
101
Milosz is not a poet such as Mallarme (whom he despises with good
reason), who dreams of one absolute masterpiece. His strength lies in what
musicians call working the theme, ceaselessly correcting and altering our
worldly being. But such a literary act can only be successful if one has
enormous stores of words and usages at one's disposal, if one is invested in
literary tradition. Where did this adeptness come from? Perhaps one could
answer, as Brodsky did at his trial, "Why, I think.. .it's from God." God
acted indirectly by repeating the formula already proven by Mickiewicz.
"City Winter" has remained the most beautiful poem of the Polish
Enlightenment, which in no way distorts his romantic
Ballads and
Romances.
For almost ten years, Milosz played with various
avant-garde
ideas only
to
surprise readers in "The World" as a poet of aesthetic (and moral) equi–
librium, grounded in more than li terary tradition. The sources of this
beauty are both the juxtaposition of words, as the symbolists and avant–
gardists claimed, and the excellence of the imitation, as the traditionalists
claimed. Yet Milosz belonged to the Second Vanguard, to a wave of poets
who joined formalistic provocations to revol utionary slogans. He was even
labeled a Catastrophist. But Europe in the thirties was awaiting a cata–
clysm, and it would have been hard for artists and poets not
to
sense it.
Milosz's li terary youth ended at the time of the apocalypse, in 1941-43.
In
1943 Milosz was irrevocably certain that the real calling of the artist
or the poet is imitation.
In
other words, poems are not born of poems,
beauty does not come ft·om the clash of words, and truth is not the reflec–
tion of an individual ego or simply a remembrance of a poet's dream. He
rarely reveals these convictions, and when he does, he does so cautiously
and shamefacedly.
Milosz stubbornly emphasizes the val ue of hierarchy as the basis of the
creative process. A poet should know how to distinguish between the trivial
and the significant, the accidental and the essential. This does not mean that
he underes timates the trivial or, more generally speaking, the singular; on the
contrary, his attention to the specific gives his work its special radiance, the
radiance of a singular revelation.
In
Milosz's opinion, the detail (if appropri–
ately placed and val ued) revivifies and reanimates. Thus even the trivial or
scandalous can renew itself in an unexpected context: for instance, the
inspection of cheerful Parisian girls or the menstrual troubles of his cousins.
At the opposite pole, Milosz does not refrain from pathos, as in
"Campo dei Fiori" and other poems written between 1965 and 1974.
Pathos usually appears in reference to individual destinies of defeated or
forgotten people.
In
other words, he rectifies the injustice or imbalance the
world has not been able to set right. Thus, even he can speak about reac–
tivating or honoring a genuine hierarchy.
