Poetry & Politics~Czeslaw Milosz

I would like to share with you so much about contemporary poetry, but I do not have the time in this college course.

So I will do my best by introducing you to one of the finest poets of our age. This poet may best typifiy the heart of poetry in Eastern Europe over the last 50 years. The poet's name is Czeslaw Milosz.

Although growing up and living in a country with totalitarian rule, Milosz wrote poetry that challenged the state; he chose, as many other Polish writers did at the time, political poetry. But this enterprise--merely publishing your own thoughts about the government or society--could land you in prison or grant you an execution. And yet as Milosz himself admits in this interview with Malgorzata Anna Packalén, Polish writers had to be political.

Without doubt Polish literature’s constant struggle with history. There is simply no other country in Europe that suddenly disappeared from the map for over 100 years as Poland did in 1795, when it was partitioned between Russia, Prussia and Austria. After a brief respite between the First and Second World Wars, Poland lost its statehood again in 1939 when it was divided in an agreement between Hitler and Stalin. All of this is complicated, of course, and it isn’t easy to explain to foreigners the martyrdom of Polish literature and its struggle for liberation, especially if you want to avoid unnecessary pathos. But we Poles are all too aware of the heavy burden that history has forced upon us. Polish writers were thrown into all this against their will, and these historically difficult situations also meant that they were forced to take a political stand.

While battling the regime with words and ideas that challenged his homeland's totalitarian regime, Milosz defected to the France, seeking political asylum from the People's Republic of Poland. In 1960, the poet joined the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley. And by 1980, Milosz won the Nobel Prize in Literature--the highest writing honor internationally--the very year that Poland was experiencing the end of Communism. So it was understandable that in 1989, Milosz began dividing his time between Krakow and Berkeley. In 2004, he died while in Poland at age 93.

So why should a poet be so political?

Because justice and honesty matter to the poet. As the American poet Robert Hass has written, for a poet to be political he or she must

make images of justice: make ideal images or make outraged images or just do witness. There are all the usual tasks . . . It’s part of the job of being a poet, but you’ll always feel a little bit like a voyeur and a tourist writing those poems. And a little uneasy reading them. But the choice is that or silence, and so you do it . . . The trick—I’ve seen it in Milosz’s work especially—is to write very honestly about the actual dilemmas, which means thinking about them clearly, which means not flattering yourself that you know what the solutions are . . .

Notice Hass' reference to Milosz. Why does he refer to Milosz? As Milosz himself wrote:

What is poetry which does not save
Nations or people?

Obviously, poetry has some mission that is political and spiritual, according to Milosz. Is there a reason, given Milosz' Polish background, that poetry would be so political? Or is this political bent a poet's duty? Please discuss.