Native Realm
He returned to Poland in 1989 and began living between the two continents, settled in Berkeley and Kraków, contributing to the Tygodnik Powszechny. He continued to write intesively until the end of his life, publishing three major volumes of poetry in his later years: It (2000), The Second Space (2002) and Orpheus and Euredice (2002).
Czesław Miłosz died on August 8, 2004 in Kraków. He was buried in the Crypt of Church of St. Stanislaus.
The poet's great oeuvre, created over seven decades, is impossible to describe collectively and concisely. He is a poet of real sensibility and intellect, particularly in his treatment of the everyday, the metaphysics of poetry, morality, history and his own biographical track. Jan Błoński, a critic well-versed in all matters Miłosz, considered his Nobel win and his career in the following excerpt (1980):
The Nobel Prize for Czesław Miłosz is not just a prize for his talent. It's also a prize for resilience and loyalty to the voice inside that led him through the obstacles of history and his own personal experiences. Miłosz's sentences are clear, but his poetry is dark, twisted in its richness. If I were to compare it to any instrument, it could only be the organ. Organs imitate all sounds, but they remain organs. They build a musical whole, just as Miłosz's works build a poetic universe in which irony and harmony curiously co-exist, along with romantic inspiration and intellectual rigor, the ability to employ dozens of images, a characteristic cut of the verse, a remarkable purity of style, devoid of anything superfluous, which paints the world with just a few lines.
Czesław Miłosz's experiences during the war and loss of his homeland had a great impact on his literary output. In his introduction to re-edition of his anthology of wartime poems originally published in 1942, he writes:Personal experiences of individuals are pushed aside or, rather, there are no exclusively personal experiences: each joy, each suffering of an individual reflects something common and broader; "to be or not to be" pertains in the first place to the national, not individual, existence.
For many people in America, poetry belongs to a sphere of "culture", a vague notion associated with "leisure". […] Owing to the tragic history of that nation, a poem, often copied by hand and circulated clandestinely, has been an affirmation of faith in survival and in victory over the oppressors, also by its very nature, a triumphant manifesto of vitality and a bond between ancestors and descendants. Poetry assumed that role already in the nineteenth century, and that is why it was prepared for the ordeals of any modern totalitarian rule. An outburst of underground poetry in Nazi-occupied Poland had, to my knowledge, no analogy in any other country of war-time Europe, with a possible exception of Yugoslavia.
The Writer's Task
Miłosz's Traktat Moralny (Moral Treatise) was a manifestation of the conviction that poetry shouldn't ultimately for linguistic games and the pursuit of "pure lyricism". Rather, it should aim to measure up to the world on a number of levels, to the politics of the moment as well. Both his treatises - Moral and Poetic, along with his 2001 Theological Treatise, written towards the end of his life - are written in clear, understandable language that is "simple" on the grammatical level, and yet require a great deal more erudition from the reader. Formally, the most complex is the Poetic Treatise, which describes the history of Polish poetry and sets up a confrontation between art with nature. It describes Kraków in the times of young Poland and Warsaw of the interwar period and the third part tells about the German occupation, after which the action is transposed from Europe to America. The whole comprises a multi-layered, collage of narration, full of literary and historical allusions, both outright quotations and disguised references. Here the inspiration was T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland, which Miłosz translated during the war. He composes his treatise out of numerous puzzle pieces, citing everyone from Adam Mickiewicz, Tytus Czyżewski and Wallace Stevens to anonymous Polish poets of Jewish heritage, while avoiding sharp segues and one-sided contrasts.
Throughout his works, Miłosz consistently deepens the metaphysical aspect of his poems. He retains his multifarious perspective, while referring to the contrasts between the views of the scientific and spiritual worlds, good and evil, the survival of the weakest and evolution of the species set against religious beliefs. Miłosz captures a very sensual beauty in nature, both wild and domesticated, describing the experience of nature as a moment of ideal joy.
And yet Miłosz does acknowledge the trickery involved in the writer's task, the ability to manipulate what life brings to us. Ethical issues come up when, as Błoński puts it "the aggressive, cruel, contemptuous ego must fire the lyrical flame". This ego, self-love, calls for one to divide the world up into "me" and "them", to consider oneself among the chosen and to treat one's work as a way of accumulating praise. What drives an artist - is it truly the desire to "file a record" of one's thoughts or is it simply conceit? Miłosz says it's both - there's no way to divide high and now natures. This is tied with a deep-seated feeling of guilt. The only medicine - a bitter one at that - is to become aware of one's own insignificance. The perspective that the status of, for example, an immigrant and the awareness of the evanescent nature of things, tapers an ambition that has become to sway out of control.
In his foreword to Miłosz's Selected Poems 1931-2004, published in 2006, Irish poet Seamus Heaney writes that "His intellectual life could be viewed as a long single combat with shape-shifting untruth". With the conviction that art is the creation of a constant, rather than the pursuit of an incomplete reality, arises the pursuit of a "more voluminous" form - flexible enough to hold as many landscapes and personalities as possible in the memory, creating an encyclopedia of memory. In many of his works, Miłosz acts as a music producer, inviting other artists to contribute to a collaborative project of sorts.
2011 marked the bicentennial anniversary of Miłosz's birth, commemorated through a series of events falling under Miłosz Year festivities, organised by the Book Institute. As part of the celebrations and the cultural programme of the Polish EU Presidency that year, the Adam Mickiewicz Institute in Warsaw hosted a series of events honouring the poet around the world, including a series of audiobooks in ten European and Asian languages.
Author: Krystyna Dąbrowska, December 2008. Edited and updated by Agnieszka Lenart, November 2011. For more information, see: Miłosz Year 2011.
