He read voluminously.  He studied, worked at study, at being a scholar, all his life.  He absorbed many cultures, many vectors of thought.  Yet at the same time, he never lost his child’s eye for the simple and beautiful landscape.

His innovations include his daring experiments with combining prose and poetry that we see in Unattainable Earth.  He experimented with having a poem on a page, then a paragraph of prose “commentary” below the poem.  He tried inserting quotes and whole poems from Whitman and other poets, right there in “his” poetry book.  He tried formatting texts (were they poems?  Prose pieces?) which were series of one-line sentences, separated by white space.  He explored every boundary between poetry and prose.  He wrote a series of “lectures in verse.”  He was a great formal innovator in this way.

He explored paradox of content.  He would move from religious belief to nihilistic doubt, sometimes in the same poem.  He wrote fantastical poems imagining strange scenes from the future.  He wrote poems of his history, of history many lives before his.  He ranged through time and space. 

He co-translated books of poems by Zbigniew Herbert, Aleksander Wat.  He wrote a chilling, furious, calm and resigned indictment of those aspects of Eastern Bloc oppression he most despised, called The Captive Mind.  He wrote books that experimented with fragmentary prose or prose-poem form, including Road-side Dog and Milosz’ ABCs.  He edited a fine anthology, A Book of Luminous Things.  He wrote books of essays.  There is a book called Conversations with Czeslaw Milosz which is basically a giant, run-on interview, fascinating reading.  He wrote other non-poetry books.  And we have the books of his poems.

From the aforementioned book, Conversations with Czeslaw Milosz, some examples of his fascinating, fascinated mind:

My nature is not all of a piece, yet in my poetry I frequently display a desire to settle in my native city, spend my life there with a woman I love as my wife, walk to the corner store, and meditate on the word “is.”  That’s utopia, needless to say. . .

[I]n her memoirs Nadezha Mandelstam said that a person should have a sense of sin, and that Osip Mandelstam had a deep sense of his own sinfulness and man’s in general.  Perhaps a poet should have a sense of sin; perhaps it’s not all that stupid. . .

To tell the truth, anyone subject to the laws of the earth—meaning the laws of transience, aging, sickness, and death—should curse fate.  What else can he do?  What is fate—you live a little while, then suddenly it’s goodbye?  Why is it like that?  This is the anger of earth.  I try to find some other, higher law—in religion, in art.  An opposing sphere.  Because, after all, I should live forever and always be happy. . .

[F]or the pre-socratics, poetry and philosophy were inseparable—one and the same. . .

[I]t’s difficult to rid your mind of the pain in nature.  Gombrowicz was obsessed with that.  He wanted to write a play about the suffering of a fly, but he died before he could.  It’s difficult even to imagine what the play would have been like. . .

A few things we note here.  One, he is open as to the inside of his mind, his speculations, and yet he does not touch upon the autobiographical, the personal in that sense.  Reading his poems you see hardly nothing in the way of direct relating of the events, say, in his marriages.  His love life, romantic personal life, is only touched upon fleetingly, indirectly.  He is more shy or diffident about putting his personal life into the poem than was, say, Lowell.  This might relate to his old-world background, growing up in Europe, where it might have been thought vulgar or unsavory to reveal too much of certain parts of one’s own private life.  He addresses this aspect of himself in the book of conversations, saying “there’s a certain modesty about those things, a desire to keep one’s private life apart.”  I think this approach works for him because it is organic to his background, the cultural norms he grew up with, his personality instincts.  Likewise, I think a poet such as Sharon Olds succeeds with a totally contrasting method because she, too, is being organic to herself.

Two, note how his thought twists and turns back on itself, with sophisticated irony.  The phrase “That’s utopia, needless to say” at the end of the first block I quoted above, is an ironic countermovement against what he had just finished saying.  In other words, his mind is quick, labile, likes to change direction.  We see a very similar ironic turn at the end of the third block I quoted, where he says “I should live forever and always be happy.”  This twisting and turning is a clue as to why he prefers writing poetry to writing philosophy.  He enjoys the twist, the turn, move and countermove.  Poetry provides the most flexible structure of language to make these movements.  So, he tends to work, in his poems, in a very distinctive mode of meditational or reflective lyric. 

He uses many clever methods to keep his poems fresh and interesting even while interjecting philosophical notions.  The great danger of philosophical poetry is abstraction.  Poetry lives on particulars; sharp imagery, sensuous touches, are what make a poem go.  Philosophy, on the other hand, tends to be based upon a certain removal and abstraction away from particulars.  “Objective correlative” is a philosophical phrase, not a poetic one.  But Milosz is very clever at using traditionally poetic, lyric devices such as sensuous particulars, brilliantly clear images, and dramatic or landscape framing, to keep the poem a poem, not a piece of boring philosophy.  For example:

Let us not talk philosophy, drop it, Jeanne.
So many words, so much paper, who can stand it.
I told you the truth about my distancing myself.
I've stopped worrying about my misshapen life.
It was no better and no worse than the usual human tragedies.

For over thirty years we have been waging our dispute
As we do now, on the island under the skies of the tropics.
We flee a downpour, in an instant the bright sun again,
And I grow dumb, dazzled by the emerald essence of the leaves.

We submerge in foam at the line of the surf,
We swim far, to where the horizon is a tangle of banana bush,
With little windmills of palms.
And I am under accusation: That I am not up to my oeuvre,
That I do not demand enough from myself,
As I could have learned from Karl Jaspers,
That my scorn for the opinions of this age grows slack.

I roll on a wave and look at white clouds.

You are right, Jeanne, I don't know how to care about the salvation of my soul.
Some are called, others manage as well as they can.
I accept it, what has befallen me is just.
I don't pretend to the dignity of a wise old age.
Untranslatable into words, I chose my home in what is now,
In things of this world, which exist and, for that reason, delight us:
Nakedness of women on the beach, coppery cones of their breasts,
Hibiscus, alamanda, a red lily, devouring
With my eyes, lips, tongue, the guava juice, the juice of la prune de Cythère,
Rum with ice and syrup, lianas-orchids
In a rain forest, where trees stand on the stilts of their roots.

Death, you say, mine and yours, closer and closer,
We suffered and this poor earth was not enough.
The purple-black earth of vegetable gardens
Will be here, either looked at or not.
The sea, as today, will breathe from its depths.
Growing small, I disappear in the immense, more and more free.

(“Conversation with Jeanne”). 

You can see several of his devices at work in this poem, including:  1)  the dramatic framing, as the poem opens by setting up a dramatic scene in which the poet-speaker is lounging around some tropical isle, talking with his friend Jeanne; 2) touches of bright clear imagery, invoking multiple senses, for example, “red lily” or “guava juice” or the many others found here; 3) a clear progression through the poem, a progression of argument but expressed really more with sensuous particulars and images than with dry philosophical abstractions; 4) careful use of white space, pacing of the stanza breaks, to show this progression.  Thus he is able to put across the philosophical lyric much more effectively than some other poets. 

One thing that is striking about Milosz’ poems is how well they translate.  A lot of this might have to do with his felicity in choosing and working cooperatively with his translators, including the American poet Robert Hass.  I think some of it also has to do with the fact that clear simple imagery tends to translate well from language to language—consider the pristine plain images found in a Cavafy poem, and how well Cavafy tends to translate. Also, I think that Milosz translates well because there is always a thick, believable, solid, real philosophical-meditational content going on in his poems.  This content comes across well and stands up well independently of the music of the poem.  Another example of a poet who seems to translate well because of the thick, solid content of her work would be Szymborska.  By contrast, Joseph Brodsky, for example, does not seem to translate over as well into English.   In any event, for whatever reason, Milosz in English is amazingly self-reliant; it never feels like you are reading translations; Milosz in his second language is a lot better than most poets in their first.

When we think of the calm reflective tone of the older Milosz, the professor in California, we may forget the amount of tension and turmoil he experienced in his younger life.  He was an eyewitness to World War II, the descent of the Iron Curtain across eastern Europe, and the brutal effect that communist oppression had on the arts and literature in his homeland which ultimately led him to flee, eventually ending up in the United States.  We forget some of the extremities that he lived through because of his unwillingness to be bluntly autobiographical in his writing.  He tends to distance things just a little from raw autobiography through a philosophical or meditational filter.  So we have to dig to learn about his actual biographical details. 

His family was Lithuanian, but his father moved the family to Poland between World War I and II.  He spent much of his youth in the town of Wilno.  He was influenced poetically by a 1934 stay in Paris.  During World War II we know that he was involved with Polish radio and resistance publications in Warsaw.  However, he was also flat broke, and it is said he sold woman’s underwear, sausages, cigarettes and whiskey on the black market to survive.  Nor did it get a lot easier emotionally once the war ended.  This excerpt from his book The Captive Mind gives some flavor of the tumultuous events he lived through:

One afternoon in January 1945 I was standing in the doorway of a peasant's cottage; a few small-caliber shells had just landed in the village street. Then, in the low ground between the snow-covered hills, I saw a file of men slowly advancing. It was the first detachment of the Red Army. It was led by a young woman, felt-booted and carrying a submachine gun. Like all my compatriots, I was thus liberated from the domination of Berlin - in other words, brought under the domination of Moscow.

Hitherto, I had had no strong political affinities, and was only too ready to shut myself off from the realities of life. But reality would never let me remain aloof for long. The state of things in Poland inclined me toward left-wing ideas. My point of view can be defined negatively rather than positively: I disliked the right-wing groups, whose platform consisted chiefly of anti-Semitism. During the Nazi occupation I, like my colleagues, wrote for the clandestine publications, which were especially numerous in Poland. My experiences in those years led me to the conclusion that, after the defeat of Hitler, only men true to a socialist program would be capable of abolishing the injustices of the past, and rebuilding the economy of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. My feelings for Russia were none too friendly. Pole and Russian have never loved one another, so I was no exception to the general rule. The exceptions were those - and some of my friends were among them - who before or during the war had become disciples of Stalin.

Such, then, was my state of mind as I watched the Russian girl with her submachine gun advance in my direction. To her, I was one of the millions of Europeans who had to be "liberated and educated." Perhaps I was even a member of the bourgeoisie . . . but that could not have seemed likely, since the shabby worker's overall which I was wearing was all I possessed in the world. . .

Those who thought that they might succeed, while remaining within the Eastern bloc, in keeping clear of total orthodoxy and maintaining some degree of freedom of thought, have been defeated. The peasants' leaders were defeated, Masaryk was defeated, the socialists who tried to collaborate were defeated, Rajk was defeated in Hungary, Gomulka in Poland . . .

In the end, I found myself driven to the point where a final choice had to be made. . .

Now I am homeless - a just punishment. But perhaps I was born so that the "Eternal Slaves" might speak through my lips. Why should I spare myself? Should I renounce what is probably the sole duty of a poet only in order to make sure that my verse would be printed in an anthology edited by the State Publishing House? My friend accepts naked terror, whatever name he may choose to give it. We have parted ways. . .

You can hear in the tone of this passage, which is more tense, less calm than the tone of his later poems and writings, just what he went through.  He saw more than his share of war and political oppression, and lost friendships and became an exile from his own country.  After he emigrated from Poland, he ended up teaching at the University of California at Berkeley and was there during the 1960s and the hippie and antiwar movement.  What a culture shock it must have been for Milosz to see the flower children and student protestors on the Berkeley campus after years of living in the drab, bland conformist communist eastern bloc society.  Again, we do not really have anywhere (that I have seen) in Milosz’ writings a clear autobiographical record of his experience of these events.  While his writing is personal in the sense of taking us into his personal meditational reflections, these tend to be reflections of a philosophical or metaphysical sort, as opposed to direct statements about what is going on in his life.  Who knows, perhaps his philosophical and metaphysical facility comes out of the fact that he is so squirmy about talking about his lovers, wives, kids, that sort of thing.  For example, in one interview, Milosz said he might have chosen to live in California because “it gave me a perfect feeling of estrangement and isolation” which was “part of being alive in the 20th century.”  Here, we see him formulating a philosophical thought behind which, implicit and unsaid, stands an unstated chunk of his autobiographical life – the loneliness and strangeness he must have felt, teaching Slavic at Berkeley, with his short haircut and old-world manners to a class full of longhairs.

We get another glimpse of how the years in Berkeley in the 60s must have affected him in his poem “To Allen Ginsberg,” which describes how “I lived in the America of Moloch, short-haired, clean-shaven, tying neckties and drinking bourbon before the TV set every evening.”  We see a glimpse of the autobiographical Milosz here.  He is reflecting back and trying to reconcile his differences from Ginsberg and his appreciation for him.  He writes how he envies Ginsberg’s “courage of absolute defiance, words inflamed, the fierce maledictions of a prophet.”  He adds how “your journalistic clichés, your beard and beads and your dress of a rebel of another epoch are forgiven.”  He concludes, “Accept this tribute from me, who was so different, yet in the same unnamed service.”  It is a touching poem and shows how Milosz, in this case, seems to prefer to approach a difficult autobiographical subject through reflection and memory years later as opposed to raw undigested reaction at the time of the events. 

He is a great poet of memory.  His poems of old age are remarkable in the clarity of their invocation of childhood scenes.  He wrote one of the best bodies of work of old age of any recent poet.  He was still experimenting, changing, searching, to the end.  In his Nobel Speech in 1980 he gives us some sense of the ceaseless questing and becoming that marked his progress:

Every poet depends upon generations who wrote in his native tongue; he inherits styles and forms elaborated by those who lived before him. At the same time, though, he feels that those old means of expression are not adequate to his own experience. When adapting himself, he hears an internal voice that warns him against mask and disguise. But when rebelling, he falls in turn into dependence upon his contemporaries, various movements of the avant-garde. Alas, it is enough for him to publish his first volume of poems, to find himself entrapped. For hardly has the print dried, when that work, which seemed to him the most personal, appears to be enmeshed in the style of another. The only way to counter an obscure remorse is to continue searching and to publish a new book, but then everything repeats itself, so there is no end to that chase. And it may happen that leaving books behind as if they were dry snake skins, in a constant escape forward from what has been done in the past, he receives the Nobel Prize.

So, his style was always changing, he was always questing, with a vague sense of ongoing dissatisfaction, always trying to improve.  And yet, another thing that is remarkable about Milosz is the essential continuity between his poetry from the beginning to the end.  For example, take this poem, written in Wilno in 1936 when he was only 24 years old (he was born in 1911):

We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.

A red wing rose in the darkness.

And suddenly a hare ran across the road.

One of us pointed to it with his hand.

That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,

Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.

O my love, where are they, where are they going

The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.

I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

(“Encounter”). 

In this poem we hear the classic Milosz voice.  It is a remarkable poem and reflects the sense of meditational wonder and a long view of history that we easily associate with the older Milosz.  Yet clearly from this poem, it was present in the younger Milosz as well.  The basic texture of voice and turn of mind in this early poem are found unchanged in his very last poems more than 60 years later.  Compare the basic voice-tone in that poem he wrote in 1936, to the closing of his last poem, “Orpheus and Eurydice,” in his last book, Second Space, which was published after his death on August 14, 2004 at the age of 93:

Sun. And sky. And in the sky white clouds.
Only now everything cried to him: Eurydice!
How will I live without you, my consoling one!
But there was a fragrant scent of herbs, the low humming of bees,
And he fell asleep with his cheek on the sun-warmed earth.

This poem was written after the death of his second wife, who was a good deal younger than him, in 2002.  Again we see the alchemy of a certain deferral or refusal to track the personal in a documentary manner, at work.  I only know that the poem is about the death of his wife from reading other commentators and reviews.  None of this autobiographical gloss is evident on the face of the poem.  He is too shy, diffident, unwilling to say these facts in a poem.  But instead, the powerful forces and emotions manifest themselves in his text via strong tangents into the mythological, the metaphysical, the lyric.  In the case of Milosz, the refusal to actually name his wife in the poem, leads in some strange alchemical way to a stronger naming of a mythological figure, here, Eurydice. 

He frequently said that he felt a strange sense that his poems were given to him by what he called a “daemon” or “daimonion” – not necessarily something malevolent like the word “demon” conventionally means, but instead hearkening back to the greeks and their belief that poets were inspired by a god or “daemon” who spoke through them.  In his poem, “Ars Poetica,” he expands on his poetics:

I have always aspired to a more spacious form

 that would be free from the claims of poetry or prose

 and would let us understand each other without exposing

 the author or reader to sublime agonies.

 In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent:

 a thing is brought forth which we didn't know we had in us,

 so we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out

 and stood in the light, lashing his tail.

 That's why poetry is rightly said to be dictated by a daimonion,

 though its an exaggeration to maintain that he must be an angel.

 It's hard to guess where that pride of poets comes from,

 when so often they're put to shame by the disclosure of their frailty.

 What reasonable man would like to be a city of demons,

 who behave as if they were at home, speak in many tongues,

 and who, not satisfied with stealing his lips or hand,

 work at changing his destiny for their convenience?

 It's true that what is morbid is highly valued today,

 and so you may think that I am only joking

 or that I've devised just one more means

 of praising Art with the help of irony.

 There was a time when only wise books were read

 helping us to bear our pain and misery.

 This, after all, is not quite the same

 as leafing through a thousand works fresh from psychiatric clinics.

 And yet the world is different from what it seems to be

 and we are other than how we see ourselves in our ravings.

 People therefore preserve silent integrity

thus earning the respect of their relatives and neighbors.

 The purpose of poetry is to remind us

 how difficult it is to remain just one person,

 for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,

 and invisible guests come in and out at will.

 What I'm saying here is not, I agree, poetry,

 as poems should be written rarely and reluctantly,

 under unbearable duress and only with the hope

 that good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instrument.

According to Seamus Heaney, the above poem was written by Milosz in just 20 minutes – surely proof in itself of “daimonic” inspiration.  Heaney also in an essay gives us a glimpse of the very old Milosz.  It is very moving:

For quite a while now, those who knew Czeslaw Milosz couldn't help wondering what it was going to be like when he was gone. In the meantime, he more than held his own, writing away for all he was worth in Kraków, in his early 90s, in a flat where I'd had the privilege of visiting him twice. On the first occasion he was confined to his bed, too unwell to attend a conference arranged in his honour, and on the second he was ensconced in his living room, face to face with a life-size bronze head and torso of his second wife, Carol. His junior by some 30 years, she had died from a quick and cruel cancer in 2002, and as he sat on one side of the room facing the bronze on the other, the old poet seemed to be viewing it and everything else from another shore. . .

Milosz is a writer I keep coming back to.  I do not lose interest in his poems.  Their clarity of imagery is appealing.  Their mixture of the lyrical and the philosophical is entrancing.  Their formal innovation explores what can be done in our postmodern, post-free verse landscape.  There is much that can be learned from him, and much to be gained from reading his works.  He shows us what can be done outside of narrative form.  He shows us that if we so wish, there is a legitimate way to write from the heart and intimately, without necessarily having to disclose all the intimate details of our own lives if we don’t want to.  Through his essays, translations and anthologies, he also offers us a window back into the work of many other poets, especially eastern European, whom we otherwise might never have grown to know.  He is a true father figure of contemporary poetry and his poetry does not bring evil or despair into the spirits of his readers even though his poems do plumb the depths of moral doubt and outrage.  Consider:

-- When I die, I will see the lining of the world.

The other side, beyond bird, mountain, sunset.

The true meaning, ready to be decoded.

What never added up will add up,

What was incomprehensible will be comprehended.

-- And if there is no lining to the world?

If a thrush on a branch is not a sign,

But just a thrush on the branch? If night and day

Make no sense following each other?

And on this earth there is nothing except this earth?

-- Even if that is so, there will remain

A word wakened by lips that perish,

A tireless messenger who runs and runs

Through interstellar fields, through the revolving galaxies,

And calls out, protests, screams.