Zbigniew Herbert’s Lessons for the Twenty-First Century

Zbigniew Herbert, fot. A. Jałosiński/Forum, full-width, Zbigniew Herbert, photo: Aleksander Jałosiński / Forum, Zbigniew Herbert’s Lessons for the Twenty-First Century

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Like his modernist peers, Herbert doubted poetry's power to drive societal change, yet he rejected 'art for art's sake', insisting poets must humbly uphold human dignity. His writing, rich with historical awareness and moral integrity, bears witness to the struggles of the downtrodden, making it a powerful tool against the distortions of history. In our era of misinformation and global crises, Herbert's insights offer a crucial perspective on the vital role of poetry, making this article a must-read for understanding its impact today.

Most of the modernist writers who – in spite of their movement’s overall anti-Romantic inclinations – might have fostered a soft spot for Percy Bysshe Shelley and his lofty notion of poets as the 'unacknowledged legislators of the world', nevertheless ended up acquiring a significantly more disillusioned view of their chosen profession by the time of the mid-twentieth century. Famously, W. H. Auden went as far as to claim that Shelley must have been unknowingly describing the role of secret police rather than that of mere wordsmiths; he went on to reiterate this position in his 1973 elegy for W. B. Yeats, where he explicitly stated that poetry 'makes nothing happen'. However, Auden was far from being the only writer grappling with the practical limits of their craft and its diminishing socio-political influence; after all, the events of the preceding decades had all but proven to the representatives of the European literary scene that the art of poetry – or, indeed, any form of art at all – is powerless to stop the blood-greased wheels of history from turning. How, then, should one define the moral and practical duties of those who actually find themselves facing down the unthinkable? As it is, some particularly notable attempts at formulating the – or at least an – answer to this uneasy question can be found in the writings of another twentieth-century giant of letters: Zbigniew Herbert.

Herbert’s place in the Polish literary pantheon is comparable to that of Auden in the Anglophone one; both writers primarily (albeit not exclusively) concerned themselves with the issues revolving around the Western civilisation and the inherent antinomies of its cultural, intellectual, and – perhaps most importantly – historical heritage. Furthermore, Herbert happened to share Auden’s scepticism regarding poetry’s potential to enact any substantial changes on a societal scale – as he once stated, such high-reaching aspirations seem to him utterly 'conceited'. That is not to say that Herbert was one of the proponents of ‘art for art's sake’; he was always careful to express his distaste for those practitioners of his craft who choose to lock themselves in their ivory towers. In his view, poets have a moral imperative to remain humble and conscious of their own limitations, but also unflinching in their dedication to preserving human dignity. Significantly, Herbert’s poetic attention was not limited to his own compatriots; rather, his loyalty lied with the broadly defined defeated and downtrodden of the world. The oft-anthologised Report from the Besieged City (Raport z oblężonego Miasta) serves as a particularly apt statement of such a position; although the poem’s basis in Polish history is undeniable, Herbert appears to conflate the struggle of his nation with that of other subjugated peoples:

those marked by misfortune are always alone

Dalai Lama’s defenders Kurds Afghan mountaineers

(Trans. Czesław Miłosz)

Such an all-encompassing approach brings to mind one of the most famous images of Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History: the ekphrasis of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus. In Klee’s crude sketch Benjamin saw a representation of none other than the Angel of History, who, suspended mid-flight and unwittingly propelled forward by the forces of progress, turns his back to the future and – overtaken by abject terror – chooses to face the wreckage of the past. Nevertheless, he appears helpless to stop the piling up of catastrophic events; at the end of the day, even the Angel of History is reduced to little more than an unwilling witness of the march of progress and unable to do anything – save for grieving those trampled underneath. It would not be an exaggeration to compare the role of Benjamin’s Angel to that which, according to Herbert, befits any poet worth his salt: he, too, ought to fix his gaze on those left behind by the relentless procession of history.

Zbigniew Herbert with his wife Katarzyna, House of Creative Work ZLP, 1972, photo: Erazm Ciołek / Forum

Crucially, Herbert also believed that the aspiring poet in question should neither hope to gain the recognition and approval of his peers nor seek personal catharsis through his work – giving testimony on behalf of those even less fortunate than himself ought to be the purpose in and of itself. Herbert himself best exemplifies this practice in what is arguably his most celebrated work – The Envoy of Mr. Cogito ('Przesłanie Pana Cogito'):

Go where those others went to the dark boundary

for the golden fleece of nothingness your last prize

go upright among those who are on their knees

among those with their backs turned and those toppled in the dust

you were saved not in order to live

you have little time you must give testimony

(Trans. John Carpenter and Bogdana Carpenter)

As is stated later in the poem, the most that such a poetic envoy can even hope to achieve is claiming his place among 'the cold skulls' of his heroic (yet unequivocally doomed) 'ancestors: Gilgamesh Hector Roland' – and even that is bound to happen only after a lifetime

Zbigniew Herbert, 'Pan Cogito', photo: Wydawnictwo A4

of enduring the 'whip of laughter with murder on a garbage heap'. Herbert’s allusion to those heroes of the distant past points to a recurring theme in his poetic oeuvre: he oftentimes turned to classical narratives in order to illustrate the innate and unchanging nature of human struggle. Paradoxically, then, it is often their historical bent that makes his works come across as timely and universal. Nowhere is this quality more evident than in poems like 'Transformations of Livy' (Przemiany Liwiusza) or 'Mr. Cogito on the Need for Precision' (Pan Cogito o potrzebie ścisłości), where he approaches the past in a proto-deconstructive way that remains in line with his sense of solidarity with the vanquished:

(...) we were willing to be moved by the defeat

of the Samnites Gauls or Etruscans

we counted many of the names of peoples turned to dust by the Romans

buried without glory who for Livy

were not worth even a wrinkle of style

those Hirpins Apuleans Lucanians Osunans

also the inhabitants of Tarentum Metapontis Locri

('Transformations of Livy', trans. John Carpenter and Bogdana Carpenter)

How many Greeks were killed at Troy

– we don’t know

to give the exact casualties

on both sides

in the Battle of Gaugamela

at Agincourt

Leipzig

Kutno

And also the number of victims

of terror

of the white

the red

the brown

('Mr. Cogito on the Need for Precision', trans. John Carpenter and Bogdana Carpenter)

And so one is once again reminded of Benjamin, who similarly advocated for 'brushing history against the grain'.

In Herbert's view, bearing witness is not a passive act; rather, it is a form of resistance against the forces that seek to erase or distort the past in order to further their own agendas. He did not take his role of a poetic chronicler lightly, and, as he asserted multiple times throughout his career, he was highly distrustful of anyone – even if their affiliations or beliefs might happen to overlap with his own – who aims to fashion his poetic account into a political weapon. Unsurprisingly, he often stressed the importance of linguistic clarity and 'semantic transparency' (a term he borrowed from Edmund Husserl); by choosing precise and unambiguous language, Herbert sought to protect the integrity of his testimony and ensure that its message could not be easily co-opted for propagandist aims. Moreover, in today’s era of post-truth, Herbert’s steadfast commitment to a highly intentional use of language – as well as his awareness of its double-edged nature – make for a much-needed poetic refuge from the cacophony of misinformation, half-truths and outright lies that pervade contemporary discourse.

Carolyn Forché, photo: Dimitrioos Kambouris / Getty Images

It seems clear that, in many ways, Herbert’s philosophy of poetry was indeed ahead of its time. After all, it was not until 1993 that the term 'poetry of witness' was popularised by the American poet Carolyn Forché in her magisterial anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness. Forché’s definition of 'poetry of witness' encompasses works that arise from direct and first-hand experience with historical events – more often than not calamitous ones – and present these personal testimonies in a way that bears witness to the suffering, injustice, and human resilience inherent in those conjunctures. It is therefore no wonder that Forché chose to include several Central and Eastern European poets in the anthology, even dedicating an entire section of it to works chronicling the years of political repression in the Eastern Bloc; naturally, Herbert was prominently featured therein.

It is, however, vital to also note the poet’s lifelong ambivalent relationship to the accolades

Zbigniew Herbert, photo: Wydawnictwo Dolnośląskie

bestowed upon him by the representatives of the Western literary scene; as well-intentioned as they might have been, they nevertheless lacked the personal stake in what was unfolding behind the Iron Curtain. As Maureen McLane, an American poet and critic, pointed out in one of her reviews for the Chicago Tribune, English-speaking writers to this day tend to 'browbeat' themselves with their Central European and Russian peers, envying their 'world-historical seriousness' borne from traumatic historical circumstances. Herbert alluded to this kind of semi-patronising (yet borderline voyeuristic) attitude of his 'unhappily marginalized, conspicuously unoppressed neighbours' (as Clare Cavanagh once termed them) in the aforementioned Report from the Besieged City:

I avoid comments keep emotions under control describe facts

they say facts only are valued on foreign markets

In the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the resulting war, as well as the humanitarian crisis on a staggering scale which has been unfolding in Gaza, there has been an unprecedented increase in demand – coming from members of the general public and academia alike – for English-language translations of works by Ukrainian and Palestinian poets. However, they are not being sought out on grounds of their artistic merits (the existence of which is indisputable), but rather because they might aid in satiating the Western audience’s craving for a visceral connection to those distant tragedies. Herbert, then, appears to not only have foreseen many of the developments that were to take place in the broader field of Western humanities – such as the emergence of the fields of memory and trauma studies – but also some of the ethical pitfalls implicit to them.

Zbigniew Herbert, 1974, photo: Bohdan Majewski / Forum

As much as the world at large has changed in the years following the poet’s death in 1998, the broader machinations and forces shaping it have stayed more or less the same; consequently, his theories about the role and purpose of poetry ring just as true today as they did during his lifetime. Although we might have left the twentieth century – with all of its calamities – behind, the promised 'end of history' nevertheless did not come to pass; and so Herbert’s writings can continue to serve as a crucial point of reference in understanding and confronting the challenges and crises of our era.

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