CLARE CAVANAGH
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Juliusz Slowacki, Zygmunt Krasinski-Polish poets have apparently
wielded precisely the power that Shelley covets in his famous "Defense
of Poetry." After Poland vanished from the map of Europe following the
partitions of the late eighteenth century, these writers became their bat–
tered nation's acknowledged legislators. But if modern Polish history is
any example, the losses that foster acknowledged bards and prophets
may not offset the gains. Poets took the place of the state when Prussia,
Austria, and Russia divided Poland between them, erasing it from the
map of Europe for over a century. Poets fought and died in the Home
Army that opposed the Nazi invaders during World War
II.
And poets
served as the moral "second government," in Solzhenitsyn's phrase, that
countered the illegitimate regime imported from Soviet Russia following
the war. They enjoyed a prestige and popularity that their Western coun–
terparts could only dream of.
Not surprisingly, modern Polish poetry has produced a spectacular
series of poems demonstrating the possibilities of creation from loss, as
poets struggled to infuse a bleak postwar reality with what Mandelstam
calls "teleological warmth" by creating lyric forms
to
take the place of
the domestic shapes and human habitations shattered by one atrocity or
another. Two of the poems I'll quote here come from Czeslaw Milosz's
translations in his anthology
Postwar Polish Poetry.
The first is Leopold
Staff's "Foundations":
I built on the sand
And it tumbled down
I built on a rock
And it tumbled down.
Now when I build, I shall begin
With the smoke from the chimney.
The next is Miron Bialoszewski's "And Even, Even
If
They Take Away
the Stove," which he subtitles "My Inexhaustible Ode to Joy":
I have a stove
similar to a triumphal arch!
They take away my stove
similar to a triumphal arch!!
Give me back my stove
similar
to
a triumphal arch!!!
