Poetry of Czesław Miłosz

Czesław Miłosz was a Polish-American literary figure who won the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature and is considered the greatest modern Polish writer.

In 1960, he moved to the United States to work as a visiting lecturerer at the University of California, Berkeley[4] where he met many of the poets with whom he would later collaborate to translate his poetry into English.

[8][9] The young Miłosz held and often vocalized strong opinions that the work of Żagary should be foremost of social and political import rather than self-consciously formal and preoccupied with aesthetics.

This second collection adopted a much more mystical (what scholars would later call "pantheistic")[12] quality; this change in focus was likely a product of his continued friendship with Oscar Miłosz who was vocally anti-modernist.

Oscar believed that the decadence of the early 20th century and its over-emphasis on individualism had moved contemporary writing away from the metaphysics and collective awareness necessary for truly great poetry.

[13] Following his graduation in 1934 and the informal dissolution of Żagary, Miłosz spent a year in Paris where he was introduced into several of the then-major Parisian artistic cohorts.

[15] As political tensions rose in the following months and years, Miłosz maintained his left-leaning sympathies but gradually found himself increasingly disenchanted with the Polish-Communist movement.

In 1939, he wrote, "Reading articles by young Marxists, one suspects that they really wish for this period to herald a future which sees the total demise of art and artistry.

"[16]Despite his disavowal of the mainstream Polish-communist movement, Miłosz was labeled a communist sympathizer (probably due to his engagement with Jewish and Belarusian radio guests) by nationalist elements within the Wilno station, and he felt compelled to leave his position.

The confluence of these factors in 1938-1939 - his new and influential friendships, his growing affection for the woman to whom he would be loyally bound for half a century, the intensifying animus prescient to the start of World War II - prompted a fundamental change in Miłosz.

Miłosz's misanthropy (he had theretofore thought of humans as "beasts")[19] softened into a deep sympathy for individual people ("small souls") lost or forgotten within enormous political apparatuses.

Miłosz viewed art that was only interested in itself as unethical, negligent, and self-defeating, and he held that an artist had a fundamental, ontological obligation to engage directly with the human condition.

The influx of refugees into Kraków (200,000 people at the beginning of the war up to 500,000 after its end), where Miłosz was living at the time, brought with it a rise in crime.

[26] In addition to excelling in his diplomatic position, Miłosz became actively involved in organizing and attending events related to the American arts community.

[7] The brief school of Catastrophism relayed a particularly apocalyptic type of Pantheism which Miłosz later attributed to immaturity, especially in stark contrast with the subsequent homebound cataclysms of WWII Poland.

[33][34] The duality of Miłosz's Pantheistic-Christian ontology largely manifests in his depictions of the natural world which oscillate between treatment of the Earth as a source of beauty and instruction and flinching from it as a site of random violence and the assimilation of the individual into irrelevancy.

[35] Of this contradiction, Miłosz wrote, "When my guardian angel (who resides in an internalized external space) is triumphant, the earth looks precious to me and I live in ecstasy; I am perfectly at ease because I am surrounded by a divine protection, my health is good, I feel within me the rush of a mighty rhythm, my dreams are of magically rich landscapes, and I forget about death, because whether it comes in a month or five years it will be done as it was decreed, not by the God of the philosophers but by the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

When the devil triumphs, I am appalled when I look at trees in bloom as they blindly repeat every spring what has been willed by the law of natural selection; the sea evokes in me a battlegound of monstrous, antediluvian crustaceans, I am oppressed by the randomness and absurdity of my individual existence, and I fell excluded from the world's rhythm, cast up from it, a piece of detritus, and then the terror: my life is over, I won't get another, only death now.