CZESLAW MILOSZ
From To
Begin Where I Am
A Semi-Private Letter about Poetry
E
VERY AUTHOR SHOULD BE SENSITIVE
to criticism, should ponder it
for a long time and draw conclusions from it. This statement is
not as obvious as it might seem. There have been periods in the
history of literature when a dismissive attitude toward criticism was
part of the writer's toolbox and progress was made despite it. Critics are
sometimes more susceptible to stylish and purely transitory slogans than
the authors they discuss, and flogging their "isms," they construct a
ponderous machine which is
slow
to move forward . Finally, young writ–
ers, if they are too responsive to criticism,
lose
more than they gain,
because their vision, strongly felt, but imperfectly conceived, draws
down upon them thunderbolts, which they may easily attribute to the
vision itself, rather than to its flawed execution.
Despite all these permutations, at this particular moment there are, in
my opinion, special conditions which demand that critics and authors
assume equal responsibility for establishing the voice of Polish litera–
ture. There's no helping it; a heavy block of iron cannot be lifted single–
handedly. Therefore, we must observe with some alarm the absence of
literary criticism in Poland and the gray space that book and theater
reviews occupy in the weekly papers. And this is occurring at a time
when, as I have said, the conditions are right for authors and critics to
take each other seriously.
I was moved to write this letter by the serious and flattering review
of my book of poems
Ocalenie
(Rescue) published in the May
[1946]
Editor's Note: Excerpted from
To Begin Where I Am: Selected Essays
by
Czeslaw Milosz edited and with an introduction by Bogdana Carpenter and
Madeline G. Levine. To be published in October by Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, LLC. Copyright ©
2001
by Czeslaw Milosz. Translation and Intro–
duction copyright
©
2001
by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.
All
rights
reserved.
