Milosz vs. the Rat Rhymers

...Recent national and international history fairly shouts from its lines...

...Old World cities, a toy, the forests of one's homeland, one's beloved dead—these are some of the things preserved in the poet's memory...

...Yet Des Pres never mentions Pound...

...Informed by his vision of contemporary horrors—his previous book, Survivors, dealt with concentration camps—his prose rings eloquent...

...Some even claimed the power to kill rats with verse...

...Besides such obvious counterexamples as Robert Lowell and the Beats, the names of Phillip Levine, Galway Kinnell, W. S. Merwin, and Amy Clampitt come to mind...

...That which is no more...

...Milosz' clear-eyed perceptions of minutiae convey something of the quality of a Chagall painting: dreamlike scenes of lost towns and rituals, shining in primary colors...

...Alas—or A chone, as the Celts used to say—history proves otherwise...

...No matter, says Des Pres, that does not exempt them from the need to take on political concerns...

...In contrast to Des Pres, I am not sure our poetry needs mending...

...Much as I disagree with Des Pres on many points, I salute his plea that we all ought to speak as if words had vital or lethal power, as if poetry could move mountains...

...In 1951 he went into exile in Paris...

...This is an attractive proposition...

...Yeats remained truthful to his times...

...Now, with the appearance of The Collected Poems, J931-1987 (Ecco, 511 pp., $30.00), he is available in his primary medium to readers of English in greater variety than ever before...

...As for the contention that Romanticism advocates retreat or escape, Shelley's proclamation that poets are "the unacknowledged legislators of the world" is refutation enough of that...

...Des Pres believes the bardic role provides an example modern poets might well follow...

...I've always thought of literature as a fierce vote for the future," avows Des Pres, noting sadly that many writers already seem to be composing earth's valedictory...

...What if one should protest that few U.S...

...In 1596, Edmund Spenser noted "amongst the Irishe acertain kind of people called Bardes which are to them in stead of Poets whose profession is to sett fourthe the praises and dispraises of menne in their Poems and Rhymes...

...Before his untimely death last November, Des Pres endeavored to find a more viable tradition...

...An exquisite and deservedly famous poem about childhood's innocence in the face of horrors, "The World," appears for the first time in the author's translation instead of the elaborate Pinsky-Haas version...

...N? poet in recent times has reflected more profoundly on art and culture than Czeslaw Milosz, the winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize for literature...

...Poetry must perpetuate particulars— places, individuals, the old faiths and philosophical systems —for too soon "Memory closes down her dark waters...

...Of course, Yeats' conservative leanings favored elitist rule by a cultured aristocracy, and his nationalism seduced him into sympathy with fascists...

...Up to this point in the book (about halfway through) Des Pres argues with subtlety and skill...

...Ironically, the critic's hostility to Humanism puts him in the company of Christian fundamentalists who believe that too much tolerance promotes moral weakness...

...Milosz was born in Lithuania in 1911 and grew up in Poland...

...or "Rose-colored cup and saucer, / Flowery demitasses: / You lie beside the river/Where an armoured column passes...

...poets have endured similar oppression or persecution by their government, or war at home...

...Des Pres is notably hasty, too, in dismissing contemporary poets for being oblivious of world events in their works...

...Des Pres makes a good case for it by using the example of W. B. Yeats, who certainly considered himself heir to the bardic tradition...

...with the nightmare spectacle of politics...

...Millennialists like him, however, don't frame their arguments carefully—they don't believe they have the time...

...Despite the uncertain dignity of translation," he writes, these witnesses to the travail of our century have become widely known especially "because they are acquainted...

...a decade later he settled in the United States, where he has for many years been a professor of Slavic literatures at the University of California's Berkeley campus...

...One clear stanza can take more weight Than a whole wagon of elaborate prose...

...Yet Milosz' precious artifacts also include the poetic tradition of Adam Mickiewicz and Jan Gawinski, Poland's Roman Catholic educational system, and the fragile nationality of Lithuania...

...Much of the flavor of his Polish may be lost in translation, but many vivid images come through anyway: " Krakow was tiny as a painted egg /Just taken from a pot of dye on Easter...

...Milosz' cultural distance from Americans is forcibly brought home by the title page of The Collected Poems, which displays a photograph of an unidentified city bristling with oddly shaped towers and onion spires topped with crosses...

...That stanza, from his "Treatise on Poetry" (1956), is a key to Milosz' poetic intentions...

...This pictorial fidelity embodies a desire: "What do you want...

...Hearing it, you should be able to see Apple trees, a river, a bend of a road, As if in a flash of summer lightning...

...He was on hand to help inspire Ireland's uprising, to eulogize its martyrs, and finally to curse the civil war that followed independence from Britain...

...The variety and range of his work is astounding: It includes essays, novels, criticism, and translations of the verse of his compatriots...

...The results of his search come to us from thetomb, as it were, in Praises & Dispraises: Poetry and Politics, the 20th Century (Viking, 246 pp., $18.95...

...Bards belonged to a chieftain's retinue...

...Whenever we read, we enter a foreign country with its own landscapes, customs, associations, and presuppositions...

...Like Shelley, he believes that in the last analysis poets legislate for us whether they are acknowledged as doing so or not: Novels and essays serve but will not last...

...Des Pres' four examples of bardic antidotes to Emersonianism are Bertolt Brecht, Breyten Breytenbach, Thomas McGrath and Adrienne Rich...

...The section on McGrath makes a number of interesting points, yet here again Marxism is presumed to be more important than artistic effectiveness...

...Poetry that evades our being-in-the-world affords no happy fortitude, no language to live by, gifts that have always been thepoet's job...

...Even his earlier verse seems intent on preserving the texture of a vanishing world: First, plain speech in the mother tongue...

...Surely this cautionary example of the dangers of a poet turning political accounts for some current timidity among American and British writers...

...Can this be the poetry Des Pres called for...

...Furthermore, Des Pres' touting of these two comes across as the Leftist counterpart to Rightist propaganda...

...But Brecht and Breytenbach, whose writings are in German and Afrikaans respectively, cannot very well demonstrate trends in the cultural histories of British or American poetry...

...As a contrast to our own transcendental solipsists, Des Pres begins by invoking the names of foreign poets: Pablo Neruda (Chile), Yannis Ritsos (Greece), Nazim Hikmet (Turkey), Czeslaw Milosz (Polish Lithuania), and Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva and Boris Pasternak (USSR...

...I want it to exist...

...Against W. H. Auden's defeatist dictum that "Poetry makes nothing happen," he reminds readers that words have the power to bless or curse...

...The late Terrence Des Pres claimed that most American verse remains "Emersonian in spirit, still enamored of self, nature, and escape to worlds elsewhere...

...For too long we have talked as if good writing and "real life" existed on parallel planes...

...begins a recent elegy...

...Unfortunately, the second part amounts to a disappointing jumble of unsupported assertions and ellipses...

...Yet here is a poet whose verse has been inscribed on Solidarity's defiant monument in Gdansk, whose name is synonymous with aspirations for freedom in his two homelands...

...Des Pres points out that Yeats' "capacity for rage" endowed him with "the visionary means to grasp the political character of the century he lived in": the "Second Coming" of world wars, holocausts, and weapons that threaten the existence of the planet...

...Unquestionably, though, our reading and criticism do, and the first half of Praises & Dispraises offers a provocative attack on American attitudes toward literature...

...Still, a stubborn honesty prevented his art from confusing dreams with achievements...

...The true enemy of man is generalization," heinsists...

...By evoking Truth in defiance of propaganda—or its twin, advertisement—strong poetry can shape our conscience...

...In discussing Adrienne Rich, Des Pres occupies himself with defending her feminist polemics rather than analyzing her verse, as if the value of her ideas superseded the merit of their form of expression...

...Milosz' laments hardly constitute "a fierce vote for the future...

...It is hard to escape the conclusion that this book is really making a case for poets espousing certain dogmas of the Left, not for poetic political consciousness as such...

...He apparently took it for granted that Rat Rhymers would never employ their skills for chieftains on the totalitarian Right...

...His Catholicism runs counter to the Marxist ethic Des Pres found so persuasive...

...There are further reminders in his poems: "We who grew up in baroque cities...

...All during the discussion of Yeats, I kept expecting Praises & Dispraises to allude to the career of the other· political Modernist, Ezra Pound...

...This is especially true when reader and writer share no common cultural heritage...

...Milosz himself oversaw the assembling of this beautifully prepared volume, collaborating with a number of distinguished translators, as well as poets Robert Pinsky and Robert Haas...

...Probably not...

...Nor does Milosz rank as a Rat Rhymer, one who destroys with words...

...But what...

...Who says American poetry is disengaged...