491 - The Witness of Poetry

The Witness of Poetry
By Czeslaw Milosz
Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1983. 121 pp. $8.95.

The winner of the 1980 Nobel prize in literature, Czeslaw Milosz, is a poet whose literary concerns are rich with theological overtones. The Witness of Poetry was originally delivered as the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard. The book is not a remote essay on poetics, requiring an intimate knowledge of contemporary verse, but is accessible to any thoughtful reader. Many great issues of twentieth century faith echo in the fresh, clear voice of a poet who is free of our usual theological jargon and therefore able to help us look anew at the nature of hope, the necessity of eschatology, and the importance of being related to some larger domain of image and myth than the subjective world of the individual.

Milosz keeps breaking beyond purely literary concerns into these public arenas of meaning because for him poetry is "something entangled in transformations of mentality, in everything we are tempted to call the Zeitgeist, though nobody is able to define it" (p. 101). In his opening lecture, "Starting from My Europe," he locates his origins in eastern Europe, "on the very borderline between Rome and Byzantium"

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(p. 4), and explicitly acknowledges the source of the theology that is interwoven with his literary observations. "If one of my themes will be the strange fate of the religious imagination, as well as the fate of poetry when it began to acquire features of a substitute religion, it is precisely because in the gymnasium for several years I studied the history of the Roman Church and dogmatics from thick textbooks that have since been abandoned everywhere" (p. 5).

Milosz believes that the future of poetry is dependent on more than literary fashion and the genius of independent artists. The Zeitgeist must ultimately affirm some perspective of hope. "The fate of poetry depends on whether such a work as Schiller's and Beethoven's 'Ode to Joy' is possible. For that to be so, some basic confidence is needed, a sense of open space ahead of the individual and the human species. How did it happen that to be a poet of the twentieth century means to receive training in every kind of pessimism, sarcasm, bitterness, doubt" (p. 14)?

Milosz answers his question by tracing in subsequent lectures the increasing isolation of the artist, the impact of science, a kind of "mandatory" hopelessness that arose with realism, and the devastations of modern war. Thus his literary reflections become a journey into the contemporary soul, not simply the individual's but the corporate soul of our shared humanity.

This does not mean that Milosz denies the importance of the individual or puts down our peculiar experience--all charges which I believe a cursory reading of him might awaken from our jealously privatistic age. Quite the opposite, he eloquently affirms the acuity of the particular: "that we apprehend the human condition with pity and terror not in the abstract but always in relation to a given place and time, in one particular province, one particular country" (p. 112). Like all poets, Milosz understands incarnational dynamics, but he is concerned about the greater pattern and perspective that poets embody in their verse. Does poetry witness only to the inner experience of the artist or to some grander constellation of meaning?

Drawing on the work of an earlier, distant relative, Oscar Milosz, the author traces how poetry "withdrew from the domain common to all people into the closed circle of subjectivism" (p. 26). The result has been a breakdown between the "Poets and the Human Family" (the title of chapter 2) so that twentieth century verse has become more and more an enclosed aesthetic sphere inaccessible to all except the literati who understand the complexities of its isolated self-expression. Both Oscar and Czeslaw consider this phenomenon to be a tragic rending in the spiritual fabric of our culture and its literary expression.

Oscar, writing in the 1930s saw poetry as " 'a passionate pursuit of the Real' " (p. 25). Mark the capital R -- not just what is personally real, but what is Real in a larger, transcendent sense: " 'That sacred art of the Word, just because it springs forth from the sacred depths of Universal Being, appears to us as bound, more rigorously than any other mode of

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expression, to the spiritual and physical Movement of which it is a generator and a guide … poetry has always followed, fully aware of its terrible responsibilities, the mysterious movements of the great soul of the people' " (p. 25).

Czeslaw then suggests that poetry can only be reconnected to that greater " 'soul of the people' " by moving beyond an exclusive concern with the self to eschatological poetry concerned with "Salvation and Damnation, Judgment, the Kingdom of God, the goal of History--in other words, to everything that connects the time assigned to one human life with the time of all humanity" (p. 37).

Milosz's literary discussion suggests that two of our culture's most popular values--authentic experience and the primacy of the individual--may be at odds with each other. We tend to assume that the more idiosyncratic our experience, the more genuine it is. But in fact, this is to limit the sources of experience and expression to what Oscar Milosz called the " 'paltry ego,' " the " 'often empty and always cramped ego' " (p. 26). The poets--and I would add all of us--must rediscover the world larger than our own private little world, the truth greater than our own private little truth, the reality that is not constricted to the dimensions of our mind and imagination, no matter how lively they may be.

Czeslaw Milosz has no illusions that this will be easy or that mere literary technique can accomplish the task. For what we are dealing with is not merely a breakdown in poetics but with a spiritual malaise. "The twentieth century is a purgatory in which the imagination must manage without the relief that satisfied one of the essential needs of the human heart, the need for protection. Existence appears as ruled by necessity and chance, with no divine intervention; until recently, God's hand used to bring help to pious rulers and to punish sinful rulers. But now even the idea of Progress, which was nothing else but Providence secularized, no longer provides any guarantee" (p. 53).

Note, however, we live in a purgatory, not a hell. Milosz does see redeeming possibilities for the future. His vision is not rooted in some return to the past but in a pattern of liberation that he believes is the developing salient characteristic of our age. "The exceptional quality of the twentieth century is not determined by jets as a means of transportation or a decrease in infant mortality or the birth-control pill. It is determined by humanity's emergence as a new elemental force; until now humanity has been divided into castes distinguished by dress, mentality, and mores. The transformation can be clearly observed only in certain countries, but it is gradually occurring everywhere and causing the disappearance of certain mythical notions, widespread in the past century, about the specific and presumably eternal features of the peasant, worker, and intellectual" (p. 108).

Such a vision might sound foolishly optimistic except that Milosz faces so squarely the brutalities of this century. In the chapter preceding his vision, he traces poetry in Poland during the period 1939-1945,

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showing how people created verse out of the experience of total disintegration. Thus when Milosz turns to talk of "humanity's emergence as a new elemental force," the phrase does not glitter cheaply, but rings true as a word of hope from one who has seen how seemingly hopeless humanity can be and who knows the terror and violence that flow in human veins.

Milosz helps us to hear how some of the major issues that have occupied twentieth century theology resonate in the experience of a significant poet. He elucidates how important it is that the individual creative act be related to a larger realm of meaning. Although he is affirming this in the context of poetry, it is easy to see the analogous realities in preaching, particularly to the new styles of proclamation that stress the interweaving of the preacher's story with God's story. Through these lectures, preachers can glimpse how a great practitioner of the "sacred art of the Word" balances his inward vision with a sense of connectedness to the whole human family.

Milosz's "passionate pursuit of the Real" is an inspiring witness to what it means to see and hear and say the truth with precision and power.

Finally, but most importantly, here is an affirmation of hope that springs from insights into the soul, from an awareness of the pain and devastation of our age, from a broad historical and literary perspective that points to this good news: humanity is redeemable.

Thomas H. Troeger
Colgate Rochester Divinity School
Rochester, New York