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PARTISAN REVIEW
Seamus Heaney:
Edwin Muir, the visionary Orkney poet, wrote an autobi–
ography rather like
Native R ealm.
He was born in the 1880s on
Orkney-really on Ithaca about the time of Telemachus. And he ended up
in Glasgow, in post-nineteenth-century industrial Britain. He said something
like, "Although my chronological age at that time was twenty-two, cultural–
ly I was about five hundred years of age." I think rural and urban are being
specified here a little too neatly; it's anthropological stages rather than topo–
graphical or sociological divisions that we're dealing with. It's not quite-or
not just-autobiographical poetry; it's almost always of the species. And that's
what relates to the language too, the feeling of things being transcended.
Adam Zagajewski:
Doesn't Southern California sort of abolish this contra–
diction? Isn't Berkeley both countryside and city? In California,
Milosz
found a place where there is a kind of balance between the two.
Robert Faggen:
Perhaps, Adam, you could explore the tension between what
one could call Milosz's conservative attachment to an immutable and eter–
nal reality and his restless and relentless exploration of new poetic forms.
Adam Zagajewski :
Yes, Milosz makes the easy classifications and typologies
anachronistic. He is in some respect conservative; he has a conservative
imagination, in which transcendence is the main vault of the imaginary
and real world. But, as you say, he is a modernist of his generation; he
experiments wi th genres both in wri ting poetry and in wri ting essays. And
his political views are not conservative. By abolishing those easy opposi–
tions, he creates an interesting model of the modern man who cherishes
memory, who cherishes truth and transcendence, but who rejects easy
political conclusions such as those of the Moral Majority while accepting
the wonderful complexity of the modern world and modern literature. By
doing so, he is able to abolish too easy and too permanent oppositions.
Edward Hirsch:
Milosz offers us a series of common truths. But in the sec–
ond half of the twentieth century the Emersonian vision has to be modified
by some sort of historical thinking. Milosz offers us such an al ternative--the
opportunity to come up with another model of American literary history,
one that is not written almost entirely out of its relationship and conflict
with English poetry. If you were to take a poll of who actually writes
American poetry, you'd find very few American poets who have their roots
in England. Our language may be rooted in England, but our ancestry comes
from allover the world. When I read Milosz and other Polish poets, and
Hungarian poets, when I read Miklos Radnoti, or Czech poets like Jiri
Orten, I recognized a tonality that seemed familiar to me and that I did not
