of government. Milosz himself, as evidenced by his
writings in such works as The Captive Mind,
viewed Communism as a dehumanizing system;
he wrote about its dangerous allure in Europe.
Having spoken out through his political writings
against Communism, Milosz, who by now had
settled in Berkeley, California, found his works
banned in his native land by the Soviet Communist
party. Soviet control of Poland and Lithuania was
finally relinquished in 1990, with independence
being gained the following year.
Critical Overview.
‘‘From the Rising of the Sun’’ has the reputation
of being a complex, challenging work. Accord-
ing to the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky (as
quoted by George Gomori in theIndependent
in a 2004 obituary of Milosz), ‘‘From the Rising
of the Sun’’ was ‘‘perhaps themagnum opus’’ of
Milosz. Milosz’s Berkeley colleagues Leonard
Nathan and Arthur Quinn, in The Poet’s
Work: An Introduction to Czeslaw Milosz, regard
‘‘From the Rising of the Sun’’ as ‘‘a deliberately
obscure initiation into a final wisdom, in which
the poet occupies the role of priest, of mysta-
gogue.’’ What appears to be confusion and dis-
order becomes clear and coherent when the
poem is understood in this way, Nathan and
Quinn state. The critics then take the approach
of dissecting the poem section by section and
analyzing the way the themes and techniques of
each section dovetail. The effect produced, they
argue, is one in which harmony of the ‘‘multi-
vocal clash of voices’’ is elusive but nevertheless
offers ‘‘tentative, personal hope.’’
While the work is not often examined sepa-
rately from Milosz’s poetic oeuvre (body of work)
as a whole, when it is studied alone a thematic
approach is often used. Aleksander Fiut, in a
1987 study of Milosz’s poetry titledThe Eternal
Moment: The Poetry of Czeslaw Milosz, explores
portions of ‘‘From the Rising of the Sun.’’ Fiut
focuses on the themes Milosz develops in the
work and maintains that Milosz posits the imag-
ination and the ‘‘cult of the particular’’ against the
pull of nihilism and the temptation toward impi-
ety. For Milosz, Fiut maintains, Lithuania is a
spiritual homeland to which the poet longs to
return. Fiut additionally explores elements of
Milosz’s nature poetry through an examination
of the ‘‘Diary of a Naturalist’’ section of ‘‘From
the Rising of the Sun.’’ In this section, Fiut iden-
tifies a sense of disillusionment that he argues the
hero of the poem experiences in his encounter
with nature.
Other critics have commented more gener-
ally on the overarching themes of Milosz’s work.
Jaroslaw Anders, writing in a 2005 introduction
toLegends of Modernity: Essays and Letters
from Occupied Poland, 1942–1943(a collection
of essays by Milosz), observes that Milosz’s writ-
ings were shaped by a ‘‘sense of Europe’s spiri-
tual crisis, and his own crisis of faith.’’ This
understanding, Anders states, led to Milosz’s
‘‘lifelong preoccupation with religious and meta-
physical subjects.’’ Similarly, Edward Mozejko,
in an essay on Milosz’s writings from the 1988
collection of essaysBetween Anxiety and Hope:
The Poetry and Writing of Czeslaw Milosz,
stresses that throughout Milosz’s works there
exists ‘‘a surprising continuity and a consistency
rarely found among writers.’’ Yet the critic also
observes that despite this harmony and the con-
sistent exploration of metaphysical themes,
Milosz’s poetry is characterized by a complex
intermingling of voices, times, places, andCoffin with the body of Czeslaw Milosz(AFP / Getty
Images)From the Rising of the Sun