MILOSZ AND WORLD POETRY
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testifY instead to some of what Milosz has offered me as an American poet
and some of what, 1 think, he offers American poetry.
I have loved his work ever since that day in 1973 when I sprung $5.95
for the hardcover Seabury Press edition of his
Selected Poems .
That was a lot
of money to me in those post-student days and 1 carried the book with
me through Europe like a talisman, like a Virgilian guide. With trembling
urgency 1 pored over "Mid-Twentieth-Century Portrait" and "Mittel–
bergheim" in a poorly lit cafe in Vielma. 1 remember the mounting
excitement, the ecstatic drumbeat 1 felt pounding in my head when 1 read
"With Trumpets and Zi thers" in Sartre's cafe in Paris. Those were the
great days of youth, of mispronouncing names and discovering European
capitals. Those were the heady days of one's own first poems of adulthood,
of probing one's ancestry through poetry (our origins are like an anchor
in the deep, Milosz says), and 1 felt deeply fortunate, deeply changed to dis–
cover a poetry initiated into the apocalyptic fires of history, written at the
borders of what can be said, making a profound effort at the unsayable.
There has always been in Milosz's work a fundamental element of cat–
astrophism, a grave open-eyed lucidity about the twentieth century, and
the nobility and humane grandeur of poetry (I admit I've kept that sense
of it despi te the poet's own disavowals). Yet one also learned from him to
distrust rhetoric, to question false words and sentiments. "Try to under–
stand this simple speech, as [ would be ashamed of another," he avows in
"Dedication": "I swear, there is in me no wizardry of words." Milosz's dry
and deceptive simplicity distrusts what Gombrowicz calls " this pharma–
ceutical extract called 'pure poetry.'" One felt his anguished irony (and
there has always been something unwittingly sardonic and disturbingly
antic in his poetry), hi s humility before the perplexing plenitude of reali–
ty, the depth of his quest for clarity, for truth.
America is a fast-paced, forward-looking, technologically driven soci–
ety with no real sense of history, without any true collective memory of
the past. "History is bunk," Henry Ford famously said. The American poet
confronts, 1 suppose, in his or her own person, our profound historyless–
ness, our notorious innocence, our uncanny fai th in the future, in progress,
our religion of success, our materialism. I myself have often tried to write
in what Emerson calls " the optative mood," and nothing comes more nat–
urally to me as an American than the feeling that nature is essentially good.
But Milosz offers us a series of counter-truths that chasten and deepen
the American poetic project. He gives us a poetry of remembrance. He uses
a sense of guilt to summon old stones, those who have come before us. He
bears the burden of memory. He teaches us to consider historical categories,
not the idea of history vulgarized by Marxism, but something deeper and
more complex, more sustaining: the feeling that mankind is memory,
