day 15: Meaning, by Czesław Miłosz

Czesław Miłosz is a Lithuanian-born poet who wrote in Polish. He won the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature. He lived through both world wars, spending the years of World War II in Warsaw, Poland. During this time he worked with and wrote for an anti-Nazi organization. Later, he moved to the US, where he taught in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at UC Berkeley.

I found this Paris Review interview with him about a year ago and still think it's brilliant.

INTERVIEWER

Is poetry the proper realm for philosophy?

MILOSZ

It depends what kind of philosophy.

INTERVIEWER

What kind have you found appropriate for your poetry?

MILOSZ

There are some kinds of philosophy that remind me of the circumstance of driving at night and having a hare jump in front of the lights. The hare doesn’t know how to get out of the beam of light, he runs straight ahead. I am interested in the kind of philosophy that would be useful to the hare in that instance.

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INTERVIEWER

You have grappled in your poetry with the question of how a good god can permit evil in the world. Can we justify God through reason, through poetry?

MILOSZ

Shestov said that there are questions that shouldn’t be asked because we have no answers. Simone Weil defended contradiction by what she referred to as a “lever of transcendence.” I myself have been all contradiction; I am composed of contradictions, which is why poetry is a better form for me than philosophy.

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 MILOSZ

This has been a constant problem for me. Literature is born out of a desire to be truthful—not to hide anything and not to present oneself as somebody else. Yet when you write there are certain obligations, what I call laws of form. You cannot tell everything. Of course, it’s true that people talk too much and without restraint. But poetry imposes certain restraints. Nevertheless, there is always the feeling that you didn’t unveil yourself enough. A book is finished and appears and I feel, Well, next time I will unveil myself. And when the next book appears, I have the same feeling. And then your life ends, and that’s it.

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 MILOSZ

I write for an ideal person who is a kind of alter ego. I don’t care about being more accessible. I assess whether my poems have what is necessary, what is proper. I follow my need for rhythm and order, and my struggle against chaos and nothingness to translate as many aspects of reality as possible into a form.

INTERVIEWER

You have called poetry “the passionate pursuit of the real." Have you ever in your work attained “the real”?

MILOSZ

The real, by which I mean God, continues to remain unfathomable.

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Oh, I almost forgot: The introduction to the book of poems by Milosz that I own (Selected and last poems 1931-2004) is written by Seamus Heaney. Part of the reason I picked the poem "Meaning" to read is because of that introduction, where Heaney talks about Milosz believing in the holy force of his art.


"...His life and works were founded upon faith in 'A word wakened by lips that perish.'

This first artistic principle was clearly related to the last Gospel of the Mass, the In principio of St. John: 'In the beginning was the Word.' Inexorably then, through his pursuit of poetic vocation, his study of what such pursuit entailed, and the unremitting, abounding yield of his habit of composition, he developed a fierce conviction about the holy force of his art, how poetry was called upon to combat death and nothingness, to be 'A tireless messenger who runs and runs/Through interstellar fields, through the revolving galaxies,/And calls out, protests, screams.'"