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PARTISAN REVIEW
question of what our planet will look like when there are no more people
["The Thistle, the Nettle '} More and more frequently and with greater
and greater freedom, he visits worlds beyond.
In
"Creating the World," he
watches as "Celestians at the Board of Projects" multiply naked forms of
beings that make them laugh.
If
the Charon of the imagination rows him
to the other side, he will describe-wi th humor, and not quite in keeping
with a Christian imagination-the posthumous adventures of a certain
soul, as in "Happening Elsewhere."
Milosz has a special interest in the boundaries between a work and its
author, the permanence of art and its accidenta l nature-that is, the his–
torical changeability of standards by which art is judged. Even as a
student, he tells us in "A Lecture," he was irritated by the pretensions of
hermetic
avallt-garde
poetry, which separated itself highmindedly from the
crimes of the twentieth century. Time, however, seems to crown victori–
ous those who, like Paul Valery, polish the crystalline form of their poems,
avoiding the "unreasonable affairs of mortals." A basic lack of reconcilia–
tion to the world as it is, as well as remaining "in the same unnamed
service," is call ed "the practice of composing verses." This allows him to
understand someone as different from himself as Allen Ginsberg ["To
Allen Ginsberg"].
In
keeping with Heraclitus's recommendation, Milosz's recent vol–
umes recall contradictions, and meditate on the puzzling interdependencies
of components of being. Milosz would certainly repeat after the philoso–
pher of Ephesus, not just that "it is not possible to step into the same river
twice" (an allusion is contained in "Elegy for N. N."), but that "we step
and don't step into the same river."
Couldn't one, the poet seems to ask, derive some artistic and intellec–
tual profit even from collective failures and mistakes? The horror and
lameness of the twentieth century can also be instructive. Numerous vic–
tims of "dictators' dreams" might rise above those who are "unwilling to
think of the punishment that awaits / All those who are too much in love
with life" !"At Yale"]. The river of his youth "with heaps of garbage on
its banks, with the beginning of pollution" warns against "the longing for
ideal places on the earth" ["Capri '}
Milosz is ruled by two clear, mutually exclusive, tendencies. First, the
striving to abbreviate and condense meaning, a distinct conciseness cou–
pled with clarity and simplicity. He draws a figure with just a few strokes
or evokes what is conventionally called the spirit of the epoch. Second, the
inclination
to
make a text ambiguous. Between the crystal-clear images are
silences and dark places as in the cycles of poems "At Yale," "Far Away,"
and "To My Daimonion." He moves between paradoxes. At times, the
meaning of the poem is undermined by his own commentary, as in
