Here as elsewhere in Milosz’s essays, he scruti-
nizes himself: ‘‘It is easy to understand the anger
of the oppressed, the anger of slaves,’’ he writes
in the section on ire, ‘‘particularly if you yourself
have lived for several years inside the skin of a
subhuman. In my century, however, the anger of
the privileged who are ashamed of their privilege
was even louder. I am fairly well acquainted with
this anger.’’ Therein lies the sin of the successful,
he warns, as ‘‘well-fed, rosychecked [sic] people
have often gotten entangled in duplicity when
they pretended they were suffering.’’
A reader unfamiliar with Milosz’s lively,
tender, wry, self-deprecating, and often hilarious
poetry might come away with a false impression
of the poet from this brief description ofBegin-
ning with My Streets,or indeed from the volume
itself. For this reason I recommend that a read-
ing of the essays accompany an excursion into
the poems, which are luckily available in both
The Collected Poemsand inProvinces....
Source:Suzanne Keen, Review ofThe Collected Poems:
1931–1987,inCommonweal, Vol. 119, No. 19, November
6, 1992, 3 pp.
William Lach
In the following interview, Milosz talks about his
upbringing in Lithuania and the spiritual under-
pinning of his poetry.
In a small club room at the Ritz-Carlton
Hotel, Czeslaw Milosz is seated on a sofa having
tea, surrounded by several academics from uni-
versities in the Boston area and a representative of
the City Council. The Polish Nobel Prize-winning
poet is in town today to give a poetry reading in
the Lowell Lectures at Boston College. A short,
but not slight, older man, Mr. Milosz sits quietly
while the others discuss the political events in
Eastern Europe: the collapse of the Berlin Wall
a few weeks earlier and the lifting of travel restric-
tions for Czech citizens that very morning. When
I enter the room, Milosz lets me know that he will
speak to me in a few minutes’ time. For a moment
there’s an awkward pause, a shuffling of chairs
and places as everyone suddenly realizes Milosz’s
presence. I’m reminded of a passage by Milosz
himself on the social awkwardness of the artist,
‘‘ill at ease in one place, ill at ease in the other—
always and everywhere ill at ease—who managed
to distance himself by spinning, cocoon-like, his
incomprehensible language.’’
Born in 1911 in Wilno (Vilnius), Lithuania,
to Polish and Lithuanian parents, Czeslaw
Milosz’s reticence during the morning’s discus-
sion reveals the experience of one familiar
enough with the unpredictability of the political
situation in Eastern Europe to be wary of mak-
ing definitive comments about it. After receiving
a degree in law at the age of 23, Milosz became
involved in underground circles in Warsaw with
the coming of the Nazis to Poland in 1939. When
the war ended, he served in the Polish Foreign
Service, eventually leaving his post in Paris in
1951 to reside in the West thereafter. He estab-
lished his literary reputation through the publi-
cation of political and literary essays, several
semi-autobiographical novels and, most nota-
bly, several volumes of poetry, his most recent
being The Collected Poems 1931–1987, pub-
lished by Penguin Books in 1988.
This most recent selection of Milosz’s poems
is an especially revelatory selection in its repre-
sentation of both the devastating and hopeful in
his work. ‘‘Proof,’’ a poem written in Berkeley,
Calif., in 1975 begins, ‘‘And yet you experienced
the flames of Hell./You can even say what they
were like: real,/Ending in sharp hooks so that
they tear up flesh/Piece by piece, to the bone.’’
On the facing page, also written in Berkeley in
the same year, is ‘‘Amazement,’’ which reveals a
different tone entirely, opening with lines whose
detailed simplicity is characteristic of Milosz’s
work, ‘‘O what daybreak in the windows! Can-
nons salute. The basket boat of Moses floats
down the green Nile./Standing immobile in the
air, we fly over flowers:/Lovely carnations and
tulips placed in long low tables.’’
Milosz’s depictions of an earthly hell and a
present-day paradise reveal, in their coexistence
within his creative scheme, a sense of traditional
Judeo-Christian morality often shunned in the
work of many modern artists. I ask Milosz how
he retained this traditional sense of ethics in aI HAVE BEEN OBSERVING SO MANY
DESTRUCTIONS, SO MANY RUINS, NOT ONLY IN THE
PHYSICAL SENSE, BUT IN THE SPIRITUAL SENSE,
AND I NOTICED THAT RUINS IN THE HUMAN MIND
PRECEDED PHYSICAL RUINS.’’FromtheRisingoftheSun