34
PARTISAN REVIEW
most welcome model, perhaps a model for the future. What a force was
needed to outwit this treacherous century. The force of wisdom and faith.
He is a winner. Thank you.
Robert Faggen:
At this point, I wonder if the panelists have any questions or
comments for each other. One issue that kept coming up was the question
of the idea of art, of high art. Seamus, we're haunted by the idea in Brach's
The Death ofVirgil
that Virgil is burning his poem. And one of the things that
runs throughout Czeslaw Milosz's poetry is the severe questioning of the
idea of art, or an idea of art, and that, to all of you as artists, must be some–
thing that is quite striking. A short poem comes to mind, one that I'm sure
all of you are familiar with, called "Incantation." And it's placed next to per–
haps a better-known poem called
"Ars Poetica?".
"Incantation."
Human reason is beautiful and invincible.
No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,
No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.
[t establishes the universal ideas in language,
And guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice
With capital letters, lie and oppression with small. [...
J
And yet a page later, he writes, in
"Ars Poetica?":
[n the very essence of poetry there is something indecent:
a thing is brought forth which we didn't know we had in us,
so we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out
and stood in the light, lashing his tail.
How do you take the tone, the wisdom, of that first poem
"Incantation," in light of the questioning of poetry in
"Ars Poetica?"
Or
do we take "Incantation" itself as a kind of ironic questioning of the
power of art?
Seamus Heaney:
It's as if uttered from the pulpit. It reaches for the author–
ity of pulpit truth. And something in us wants to rejoice in this utterance.
But I think it is framed; by the end-"their enemies have delivered them–
selves to destruction"-the preacher has taken over. Too confidently. But
the poem is not ironical in any demeaning way. I take it to be an ardent
hope undermined by all that we know surrounds it.
