Zbigniew Herbert

Zbigniew Herbert is….another Polish poet! The 20th Century is not Eliot’s, nor is it Auden’s, or Lowell’s, all three of whom made an immense intellectual effort to traverse and map our most violent and innovative century yet. In some sense they were not really at ground zero. They were historians, with the connotation that term has of distance and overview, of peripheral safety. Or maybe sometimes journalists, in a moderate democracy… The Poles, however, live in a country more ravaged and fought over back and forwards than any other, perhaps, at least in ‘the West’. Like Milosz, Zbigniew Herbert bears witness. His poetry has a moral function. We in ‘the West’ have an aversion to attributing any function to art, other than to shock, amuse, offer oblique commentary and generate money. But Zbigniew Herbert uses his poetry almost like a mass spectrometer, to break down and to analyse, to help make sense of his situation. He rejects the lyrical ego, that subjective ‘I’ that sits at the generative centre of so much western poetry, and which rests it’s truth telling function on notions of a subconscious that somehow equates to a deeper reality. He is different from Eliot, Auden and Lowell in his relationship to history and the literature of the past in that he is not a creator of worlds ransacking these disciplines for material. Instead, his outward perspective is a matter of survival, and his poems are the by-products of an ongoing need to make sense of his environment. To this end he has a character, Mr Cogito, an Alter Ego, who he deploys as a cartoon thinker. Like Descartes, he often starts from first principles, or none at all: this allows Mr Cogito access to the history and culture of European civilisation, without being tramelled by it, so his investigations are ideologically free. This makes his bafflements, and conclusions, or findings, eminently sane. Having said that, however, I am not going to select from the Cogito poems, but instead choose a poem famous as a statement of self-abnegating responsibility, a rebuke to romantic posturing.

[Why The Classics]