The Witness of Poetry / Edition 1

by Czeslaw Milosz

Overview

Czeslaw Milosz, winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature, reflects upon poetry’s 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 man’s animal origins. He examines the tendency of poets since Mallarmé 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 humanity’s oneness, and on mankind’s growing awareness of its own history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674953833
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	01/01/1984
Series:	The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures , #38
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	128
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Czeslaw Milosz was the first Slavic poet to hold the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship at Harvard University. He was Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Emeritus, at the University of California, Berkeley.

Table of Contents

1. Starting from My Europe

2. Poets and the Human Family

3. The Lesson of Biology

4. A Quarrel with Classicism

5. Ruins and Poetry

6. On Hope

Index

Editorial Reviews

[Milosz] speaks in The Witness of Poetry with the sort of quiet, preeminent brilliance that makes his defense [of poetry]…a classic for our time.

Saturday Review

By the strength of its condensed and lucid exposition, The Witness of Poetry provides us with a key to Milosz’s poetic historiosophy, philosophy, and aesthetics. Of course, Milosz’s entire work offers one of the most profound responses to the dilemmas of our century.

New Criterion

Milosz is at all times direct, even simple. He has the ability to return the pleasure of poetry to ordinary readers, and in his prose, as here, he makes you suspect that the great intellectual sin of our time may be a fear of the obvious.

Vanity Fair

[Milosz] speaks in The Witness of Poetry with the sort of quiet, preeminent brilliance that makes his defense [of poetry]...a classic for our time.-- "Saturday Review"

By the strength of its condensed and lucid exposition, The Witness of Poetry provides us with a key to Milosz's poetic historiosophy, philosophy, and aesthetics. Of course, Milosz's entire work offers one of the most profound responses to the dilemmas of our century.-- "New Criterion"

Milosz is at all times direct, even simple. He has the ability to return the pleasure of poetry to ordinary readers, and in his prose, as here, he makes you suspect that the great intellectual sin of our time may be a fear of the obvious.-- "Vanity Fair"

From the Publisher