Milosz' Defense of Poetry

...the influence which is moved not, butmoves " Ifthoseofuswho read present-day bardsdonot yet accept them as the unacknowledged legislators of the world, we still recognize that in our era they speak, as no one else has, to the fragility of our lives "What surrounds us, hereandnow, is not guaranteed," says Milosz "It could just as well not exist—and so man constructs poetry out of the remnants found in ruins...

...Ever hopeful, Milosz foresees a revolutionary change of heart that will transform society Its agents will be the very technologies that have, so far, been the enemies of the humanities "Never before have the paintings and music of the past been so universally accessible through reproductions and records Never before has the life of past civilizations been so graphically recreated, and the crowds that now visit museums and galleries are without historical precedent ' Milosz trusts that this marks "a newly acquired historical conscience," which will turn away from narrowly rationalistic thought as a solution to our problems and toward a Romantic reaffirmation of man's limitless potential In this new age, "Humanity will increasingly be turning back to itself, increasingly contemplating its entire past, searching for a key to its own enigma " Poets will once more be the interpreters of a shared culture, because the old division between bourgeois complacency about received ideas and bohemian angst will have ceased to exist Milosz urges a rebirth of "humanity as an elemental force conscious of transcending Nature, for it lives by memory of itself, that is, in History " Milosz' provocative thesis is hard to pass judgment on I suspect many Americans who read this book will share my unease at his reservations about scientific thinking True, we have not experienced the pseudoscientific "reason" used by totalitarian states to justify oppression Instead, however, post-Sputmk school children in this country of ten absorbed a very romantic vision of science that is compatible with Milosz' theory of poetics (think of the environmental movement's insistence on the interdependency of all hfe, and the popularity of Lewis Thomas and Annie Dillard, who put forward the same hypothesis) In addition, some American writers have attempted to formulate "poems of science" that blend humamstic concerns with Darwinian understanding Successful examples are found in A R Amnions' painstaking observations of the interrelation of natural minutiae, and in the panoramic vision of "God Biology" from James Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover Furthermore, The Witness of Poetry is marred by a certain crankiness common to prophets Consider Milosz' "intuition" that there will be no nuclear war because mustard gas was not used in World War II Poets portray themselves as seers from time to time—William Blake, Shelley, William Butler Yeats, even Milosz' own relative, the French symbolist poet of Lithuaman origin, O V deL -Milosz, come to mind But the nasty economic ravings of Ezra Pound remind us that mere inspiration is not enough Fortunately, Milosz' case does not depend on the accuracy of his political or military hunches Poets "apprehend the human condition with pity and terror not in the abstract but always m relation to a given place m time, in one particular province, one particular country " The Polish poets who wrote during World War II recorded details that encapsulated mmd-bogghng brutality on a huge scale They kept alive the knowledge that mass suffering remains a personal tragedy, not to be dismissed by its statistical vastness It is precisely because poets are not sociologists that they remain vital The good ones continue to record what they see, not what others would make them understand The witness of Milosz is the enlightenment of Shelley, who wrote of poets as "the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present, the words which express what they understand not, the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire...

...Writers & Writing MILOSZ' DEFENSE OF POETRY BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL Many readers these days readily admit that they do not enjoy most contemporary poetry, such writing, apparently, appeals largely to an elite Even the champions of modern verse agree that its tone is gloomy, sometimes apocalyptic, and that its preoccupations boil down to a few vanationsonman'salienatedcondition Periodically,acnti-cal curmudgeon will accuse poets of being a society of laundresses so busy taking in each other's washing that they have forgotten the general audience entirely Where Homer and Shakespeare offered something for everyone, the argument runs, modern poets revel in the role of misunderstood artist In this view, the ancient reverence for poetry as a means of interpreting our natures and the world around us has passed Yet today's indifference is not new Percy Bysshe Shelley was so maddened by an 1820 version of it that he wrote a blistering defense of his profession, insisting that poets, far from being isolationists, were the barometers of "the spint of the age" and "the unacknowledged legislators of the world " Now Czeslaw Milosz, the exiled Polish poet who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980, has revoiced Shelley's messianic manifesto in The Witness of Poetry (Harvard, 121 pp ,$8 95) In six essays (presented as the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard in 1981 -82), Milosz proclaims that art remains "a more accurate witness than journalism" for gauging the mood of the times Future historians will read poems to determine how people in our century really felt, noting that the pessimism of T S Eliot and Robinson Jeffers about the state of civilization more accurately foretold world war than did the upbeat projections of "experts " Poetry is involved with a "passionate pursuit of the Real," Milosz believes Although governments bombard us with ideological generalizations and manipulate thought by debasing language, "no science or philosophy can change the fact that the poet stands before reality that is every day new, miraculously complex, inexhaustible, and tries to enclose as much of it as possible in words To be faithful to a detail makes for the health of poetry " Milosz does not expect that American readers will immediately agree with him "My corner of Eastern Europe, owing to the extraordinary and lethal events that have been occurring there, comparable only to violent earthquakes, affords a peculiar perspective As a result, all of us who come from those parts appraise poetry shghtly different [sic] than do the majority of my audience, for we tend to view it as a witness and participant in one of mankind's major transformations Before Milosz reveals the nature of this metamorphosis, he speculates about the causes behind the "schism between the poet and the great human family " Poets, like children, experience the world through the images received by their senses Modern theories of physics, however, have taught us to discredit much of this evidence We are asked to reject what we see—a motionless flat earth enclosed beneath the dome of the sky—in favor of a mass of technical information taken on faith Milosz points out that the conflict between our impressions and what we have learned leads to a "progressive subjectivism that becomes manifest when we are imprisoned in the melancholy of our individual transience " Forced to accept that we are only one ot the species produced bv "Nature in its incredible prodigalitv" instead ot lords ot the universe, we tend to lose taith in personal immortality We may eventually be persuaded that we, or others, are as expendable as flies and cockroaches This perception of life is at war with the traditional humanities "At school, contradictions are perpetuated by such subjects as literature and history, where a certain coded system of values persists, values difficult to reconcile with scientific objectivism As to poetry, it must shift for itself as best it can in the new conditions where imagination is losing its foundation, that is, its vision of the central place of man, and of any given individual, in space and time ' Milosz sadly sees our century as " a purgatory in which the imagination must manage without the relief that satisfies one of the essential needs of the human heart, the need for protection Existence appears as ruled by necessity and chance, with no divine intervention " Worse, a pervasive relativism has been striking at the foundation of every system of universal ethics Faced with this state of affairs, it is little wonder that poets have become inward and sohpsistic Despite the uncertainty, the 20th century has provided "a most simple touchstone for reality physical pain " According to Milosz, Poles discovered during the Nazi occupation —as well as in the course of their recent struggles—that "poetry became as necessary as bread " This is because poets recorded the suffering and contradicted the false optimism of propaganda In a culture that substitutes an allegedly scientific pragmatism for an unflinching poetic sensibility, where the facts themselves can be shaped and distorted to order, poets can be counted on to remember the way we were...