32
PARTISAN REVIEW
that is so powerful that it generates poetry. So much so that the main
impression I gain from rereading Czeslaw Milosz's selected or collected
poems is the encounter with an exceptional force, a force that informs all
of his poems and, in a different way, all of his essays. What is this force? I
think it's not possible to name it, to define it. One can only try to get a
li ttl e nearer to it.
By chance, I've found two sentences by the French poet Paul Claudel,
in his book
Memoirs Improvises,
which can serve as a kind of motto for this
talk and for the process of looking for the main thing in Milosz's work.
Claudel said, "What really matters is not to be defeated; what really mat–
ters is not to become like this unhappy Verlaine, or Villiers de l'Isle-Adam,
whom I met at Mallarme's, not to become a defeated one. I want to be a
winner." And it came into my mind that in a somewhat different way,
Milosz wanted to be a winner. To be a winner definitely meant something
different for Claudel than for Milosz, though even Claudel had
to
take into
consideration energies that were still at work when Milosz's generation
went into action. Anyway, I don't intend
to
establish a parallel between
Claudel and Milosz; it wouldn't make much sense.
So, what had it meant for Czeslaw Milosz to win? It had nothing or very
little to do with his career, or career-oriented thinking, but had everything to
do with having started the literary activity in a treacherous moment, in a
treacherous century, in line with the confines of an ambivalent literary move–
ment called "modernism," and in a country whose political identity was just
formed or reformed, and whose future, as seen in the thirties, was dark. To win
meant just to survive, physically and spiritually. To survive as a poet, you had
to deploy a leftist line, a Marxist one, or a right-wing one, a nationalist one.
The trap of narrow politicking, the trap of shallow aestheticism, the trap of
passivity, of narcissism, of whining. Even the poems fi·om the thirties that
were written under the sign of the so-called "catastrophism" were defiant,
almost arrogant, in their pessimism. And they already had this metaphysical
edge that would remain a constant mark of Milosz's poetry. This force
showed itself both in the defiance and in the fact that the poems fi·om the
thirties transcended the given, limited situation. And then, a bit later, poetry
written under the Nazi occupation operated in a somehow similar way, tran–
scending the cage of the si tuation, though these poems were no more
arrogant. With it came, again a little bit later, the Hegelian temptation, the
Manichean temptation, and again later in poems like "Mittelbergheim" the
search for solace from the universe, the same universe whose opaque solidity
was so threatening for the catastrophist. The late fifties, the sixties, and the
seventies bring about the majestic parade of the poems that enchant the read–
er by their masterly blend of the philosophical duality with the duality of
their aesthetic presentation. The philosophical and the religious duality
