CZESLAW MILOSZ
369
People in Poland dreamed during the war: about journeys, about a
beautifu l future Warsaw, about the taste of freedom, about food and
drink. These were very human dreams, and if I gave them expression,
creating images of cities where it was permitted to debate openly about
the republic (poets of arcadian myths love ancient Greece), or about a
marble Warsaw of the future filled with song, sculpture, food and drink,
this only demonstrates that I li ved in harmony with the population, that
I was no different from anyone else.
Sometimes the world loses its face. It becomes too base. The task of
the poet is to restore its face, because otherwise man is lost in doubt and
despair. It is an indication that the world need not always be like this; it
can be different.
Nec suplex turba timebat iudicis ora sui.
Do arcadian elements lead to nonconformity? We need to make some
distinctions. There are two types of nonconforming. One is nonconfor–
mity to the life of society, a severing of the individual from his ties with
the collective, abandonment of the obligations that a particular person
owes his society. Given the present trend toward a lively interest in pub–
lic life after the experiences of the war, there is little probability that this
is a threat for writers . Personally, I am appalled by the passion with
which I read newspapers (apparently these political passions begin at a
certain age).
The other sort of nonconformity, the refusal to share the moral
approbation of evil, is every poet's privilege. I know Europe, every
month I am getting to know America better, and I see no reason why I
should have to accommodate myself and cry out that everything is for
the best in the best of all possible worlds. I have too much heart and
liver for this. When I wrote in the introduction to
Rescue
that I accepted
the salvational goal of poetry, that was exactly what I had in mind, and
I still believe that poetry can either save or destroy nations.
In conclusion, I appeal to Kazimierz Wyka. He wrote that I am a
loner of an artist. That is true, but it is bad, because it seems to me that
I perceive my own road better than my literary abilities allow. In sorrow
I assert that at the present moment Polish literature is entering upon a
renaissance of Romanticism. Critics on the left, professing to be
Humanists, do what they can to urge writers in this direction. They are
not Humanists, however, but Romantics masquerading as Humanists,
wolves in sheep's clothing, and they are each fixated on the notion that
each one of them is Erasmus of Rotterdam.
