The Witness of Poetry (The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures)

About this book

Czeslaw Miosz winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature reflects upon poetrys testimony to the events of our tumultuous time. From the special perspectives of "my corner of Europe " a classical and Catholic education a serious encounter with Marxism and a life marked by journeys and exiles Milosz has developed a sensibility at once warm and detached flooded with specific memory yet never hermetic or provincial. Milosz addresses many of the major problems of contemporary poetry beginning with the pessimism and negativism prompted by reductionist interpretations of mans animal origins. He examines the tendency of poets since Mallarm to isolate themselves from society and stresses the need for the poet to make himself part of the great human family. One chapter is devoted to the tension between classicism and realism; Milosz believes poetry should be "a passionate pursuit of the real." In "Ruins and Poetry" he looks at poems constructed from the wreckage of a civilization specifically that of Poland after the horrors of World War II. Finally he expresses optimism for the world based on a hoped-for better understanding of the lessons of modern science on the emerging recognition of humanitys oneness and on mankinds growing awareness of its own history.