Czeslaw Milosz’s Passion for “Place”

Abstract

In his poetics, the emigre poet Czeslaw Milosz explains the title of the published work: “I have titled this book The Witness of Poetry not because we witness it, but because it witnesses us”.¹ The testimony that the poetry of our time gives is not encouraging, to say the least. It reveals emptiness, insignificance, downright despondency in our lives, and in some cases takes a perverse delight in debasing humanity. This is hardly news. But Milosz’s treatise is more than a personal grouse about these bad days or a scholarly analysis of historical cause and effect. The Witness of Poetry reveals that the crisis of our day is not merely a result of social-political failure but a fundamental failure in human knowing, which is, of course, the subject of Husserl’s teleohistorical reflection, the Crisis. Actually, the poetics is a small book, and Milosz’s enormous achievement can only be gauged by examining his other autobiographical and poetic works. If we examine more closely the seemingly exclusive and reclusive Milosz, who has claimed to write — in Polish — for a few literati only, we will see an artist who has won a world-wide audience (and the Nobel Prize) because of his courage and skill to engage “the scientific world-view in a fundamental dialogue”. Moreover, he aims to be not an advocate of this or that social or political cause but a true “functionary of mankind”.