Czesław Miłosz: Trapped in Dark Times

Standing in the ruins of St John’s Cathedral in Warsaw on a spring day in 1945, Czesław Miłosz asked himself what he was doing there: ‘You swore never to be / A ritual mourner’. At the time the poem was written, however, he felt his duty was inescapable, for like Antigone’s the circumstances were ‘beyond the power of endurance’.

During forty comfortable years of California ‘exile’, Miłosz grew to feel trapped by ‘this burden’. He lived in a globe of his Polish years: a poet-witness to the horrors of the Second World War, a prose anti-communist of the Cold War. What freed him was the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature in October 1980. The acclaim lessened the criticism of his years of serving (or of renouncing) the communist Republic of Poland. The award chimed with the times. Poland had been made ‘fashionable’ by the 1978 election of a Polish pope (John Paul II) and the establishment of ‘Solidarity’, Poland’s first independent trade union.

Suddenly acknowledged a major poet, Miłosz would conclude his later book-length Conversations with Ewa Czarnecka and Aleksander Fiut by describing how he felt that the label ‘historical poet’ made him uncomfortable, because ‘the proportions are distorted’. He preferred to acknowledge another self: ‘the meditative poet’. ‘Everything we’ve been talking about,’ he said, ‘may be reducible to my discomfort when my image is too noble.’

This same frustration was spelt out less equably in Miłosz’s letter to the New York Review of Books (2 June 1988) in response to a long, ...