M ILOSZ'S WO IU !) TODAY
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Emig rati on, a diffi cul t and we ighty experi ence, paradoxicall y gave him
renewed vigor; it strengthened and deepened hi s vo ice. Califo rnia became
the prove rbi al " Archimedes po int," providing ac ute vision-ot Europe, of
Poland , and of communi sm-because it was coming trom without. It also
gave him the chance to be unive rsal and to liberate himself from provin–
ciali sm, from th e barren entanglement with the "R ed Mo nster." Poland
was hi s homeland and thus hi s exil e was felt even more keenly.
Mil osz is both a poet-expl orer and poet-legislato r of new forms and
ways of speaking. He has expanded poetry's borders. In sea rching fo r a
more "spacious form," he fres hens and revives old li terary genres and mod–
ernizes th em. At the same time, as in
Road-side Dog,
he cons tructs n ew
forms. By revivin g di scourse in poetry, he resto res to it the abili ty to speak
of even th e mos t diffi cult and compl ex issues . Mil osz indi cates and deter–
mines th e farthes t reaches and poles of poeti c speech, from a Norwidian
hi stori cism ("Oeconomi a Divina ") to Kochanowski 's " poetry faithful to
reality" ("Gift"), from prophecy and great synthesis ot the epoch ("Child
of Europe") to the pure delight o f epiphany ("Happin ess"), from the aus–
tere moral climate of a trea ti se to the evangeli cal simplicity ot the naive
poems in "The World ."
Mil osz's poe try can bes t be described as the enormous delta of a g rea t
river. T he bo undari es and expanse of the del ta are equivalent to the
boundari es of speech. The river' s main current is the " pure current" of the
Poli sh language; its numerous branches, tributari es, streams, and sources
create th e compl ete map of modern Po li sh poetry.
Th e Poli sh school of poetry, as Mil osz himself calls it, took two very
different trai ts trom him : hi erarchy of values and gravity of subj ect matter,
and th e weighty issues and gravity o t the poeti c word . Th e main current
of the Miloszian river is the continui ty, into our time, of the line crea ted
by hi s predecesso rs, the sixteenth -century poe t Jan Kochanows ki and the
nineteenth -century poet Adam Mi cki ewi cz.
Th e word " rescue" (the titl e of Mil osz's bes t known volume o f poe t–
ry) has two mea nin gs in Poli sh: rescue, as in bein g rescued fr om something,
and survival, as in being saved for somethin g. "What is pronounced
strength ens itse lf. / What is not pronounced tends to nonexistence"
(" R eading th e Japanese Poet Issa"). Thi s poe try rescues fr om nothingness;
in naming, it saves the world ; th ere is mo re of the wo rld because it has been
named. And it saves us, too, £i-om nothingness-for bein g. Thank you.
