Poetry for Students, Volume 35

one ever rode the sky and the earth as she did in this radiant and sky-bright mind of hers. She loved all things because all thi ...

run with. She was an intoxicated being, drunken with the little tipsy joys of the simplest form, shaped as they were to elude al ...

In Music After a literary career that spanned seven decades and included a Nobel Prize in 1980, Czeslaw Milosz saw his Provinces ...

a region of Poland. His father, Aleksander (a civil engineer) and mother, Weronika, were also of Lithuanian descent. Although th ...

becoming disillusioned with socialist politics, he abruptly left his position and officially defected to France in 1951, there t ...

suit is new, only worn once, and perhaps has been starched for the event. The groom is cele- brating the event but may be uncomf ...

Themes Existence and Meaning Using a vision evoked from the music of a flute and drum, the speaker suggests thought-provoking id ...

the speaker’s vision evokes the universal question of the meaning and purpose of people’s lives. Cycle of Life and Death To comp ...

of the groom’s suit. Intimacy of warm cheeks and the comforts of home serve to leaven the somewhat bleak scene and elicit a sens ...

postmodernist thought concerning personal truths and the meaning of individual lives within the larger context of history. Postw ...

focused on the transcendent beyond the natural world and tried to imagine and convey a reality beyond the scope of human percept ...

and also in the 2006 posthumous collection Selected Poems, 1931–2004.InareviewofSelected Poems,Publishers Weeklyproclaimed that ...

mean nothing more than the air that comes out of people’s mouths. They also put their hands to work, believing that life is long ...

husband’s suit suggests iniquity. These images contrast with the supposedly happy occasion of a wedding. The speaker’s reference ...

the poem stressed the futility of existence on earth. He now observes that the spirits are kept alive by those left behind. Life ...

His poetry covers not only these spiritual beings, but also the Bible, prayer, the afterlife and the whole wide sweep of Christi ...

and other poems, Milosz chides ‘‘sweet theolo- gians’’ whose rarified proof texts are so much straw in the face of human agony. ...

Czeslaw Milosz was born in Szetejnie in 1911 and raised in Wilno, both of which are in present-day Lithuania. His family was par ...

writing. Second, the depth of his humility and poverty before faith. In one poem, he addresses God wryly, say- ing, ‘‘It seems t ...

concludes with a plea and a stipulation: ‘‘Let reality return to our speech. / That is, meaning. Impossible without an absolute ...