FruitFly


Czeslaw Milosz is the greatest of the 20th Century Polish poets. Some regard him as the greatest 20th century poet, full stop. His greatness may not be immediately obvious, especially to those of us reliant on translations, though he has been well served in his translators, most of whom are poets of some substance themselves. At first reading, Milosz’s merits were not to me obvious, as I was in thrall to the subjective pyrotechnics of Plath and the punchy, close-up maneouverings of Robert Lowell. But I persisted. Something in me felt challenged by Milosz. He did not compose within a subjective, amoral bubble. He didn’t excuse himself or claim exemption from ordinary human obligations, including moral obligations, on artistic grounds. There’s nothing in Milosz that would appeal to a teenager, for example. When I started to commit to reading his body of work with a view to grasping it, it was a commitment to grow up. Milosz is a total subscriber to what he calls ‘the human experiment’, he doesn’t live in geological time, or pinpoint his co-ordinates within biology, he works from within human history, cultural-time, and refuses to relinquish ground to those who feel superior to others by virtue of their nihilistic viewpoint, a stepping outwith the human. His poetry is a constant search for meaning, and it encompasses the entirety of human civilisation. His mind is first class. He would have made a great philosopher. Or a great economist. Or historian, statesman, or even scientist. But he chose poetry, or, as he says, poetry chose him. And as fate would have it, he was set down on earth at the perfect point in place and time to record the course of the entire 20th Century, to bear witness to its most gigantic insanities: Facism, and so-called Communism. He hoped for ‘a day of comprehension’, an ultimate unveiling when the entire spectacle would at last make sense. A hope that has an eschatological dimension, but also a practical one: because he tried to realise it within his own limited lifetime and and as far as his limited powers would allow. It’s difficult to know what to select from his works, his poems are mostly large and ‘tend towards the condition of prose’, because he did not want to be exclusive. Otherwise, how could he ever hope to comprehend? I’ve chosen a poem from his previously unpublished works, witheld out of kindness, I think. It is a rebuke. It may be addressed to Robinson Jeffares, but at the time I read it, I took it personally.
(To Robinson Jeffares)