A Poet Worthy of Protest
By ROBERT PINSKY

Published: August 26, 2004


Pinsky, Robert


Milosz, Czeslaw


Poetry and Poets


Nobel Prizes



Cambridge, Mass.

When I heard that protesters were going to demonstrate at Czeslaw Milosz's
funeral tomorrow at the Mariacki Church in Krakow, it was easy for me to imagine
the great poet's laugh. The protesters do not think he was Catholic enough, or
Polish enough. He raised such antagonisms all his life. As a kind of byproduct
of being a great writer, devoted to ultimate things - call him an Eschatological
Humanist - he drove authoritarians crazy. In the 1970's, Czeslaw knew that the
Soviet authorities in Poland were beginning to rehabilitate his reputation when
an official reference work alluded to him - unmistakably, though not by name -
as one of several poets in his generation who were of no particular significance.

He was living in Berkeley, Calif., at the time. He shared this information with
his American friends and colleagues, coloring it with his booming laugh, a deep
bark of pleasure that was simultaneously hearty and ironic. The sound of it was
infectious, but more precisely it was commanding. His laughter had the
counter-authority of human intelligence, triumphing over the petty-minded
authority of a regime.

Being a forbidden was an old story to him. He had survived the Nazi occupation
of Poland, as many of his close friends did not. He survived his confrontation
with the postwar Communist government, and his choice of exile. After the war,
his imagination survived through decades as an émigré artist: an anomaly, a
Polish poet in America. In "Magic Mountain," a poem published in 1975, he wrote:
"Fame would pass me by, no tiara, no crown?" Meaning: he could survive an exile
artist's fate, the likelihood that recognition would be sparse. In a poem titled
"My Faithful Mother Tongue," he wrote of the Polish language: "You were my
native land; I lacked any other."

Then he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980, the year of Solidarity in
Poland. Lines from his poems appeared on banners, and on a famous monument in
Gdansk. An edition of his poems was allowed, and in a time of food shortages and
short money, queues of people waiting to buy the book extended for blocks.

In Berkeley, Czeslaw sometimes showed his friends a three-panel cartoon from a
Warsaw newspaper: first panel, a man walking along while reading a book, with
another, sinister figure lurking around the corner; middle panel, the hidden
figure leaps from the shadows to stab the walking man in the back; in the final
panel, the killer walks away from the bleeding corpse, reading the stolen book,
with its cover now visible: "Milosz Poems." From the poet displaying this little
artifact, those characteristic barks of laughter - skeptical, but undeniably
pleased.

By maintaining a stubborn loyalty to his language and his native province, he
had become a world poet. By cleaving to seemingly outmoded convictions of his
childhood and youth - belief in reason, love of nature, the cosmopolitan views
of his uncle Oscar Milosz, an important French poet - he survived the lethal
ideologies of Nazism and Soviet Communism. By tending to his work, and by the
turns of fortune, he had now somehow, beyond his own expectation, outlasted the
great brutal monolith and its attempts to edit him out of history.

The cosmopolitan, eclectic side of his imagination might have been formed not
only by Oscar Milosz but by his childhood home city of Vilnius - then Wilno, in
Polish - which was Jewish and Polish and Lithuanian, a lively intellectual
center. After his triumphant return, a return that for decades seemed beyond
possibility, he was honored in a Vilnius that is no longer Jewish or Polish, but
altogether Lithuanian. Gradually, he left Berkeley for Krakow, a university city
that unlike Warsaw survived the war with its ancient buildings intact.

His prose book "The Captive Mind" is not so much anti-Communist as an account of
the traps, compromises, self-deceptions and suicidal hypocrisies of writers and
intellectuals in a police state. Anyone who supposes that poets or scholars are
by their nature moral guides as people will find a generous but unwavering
corrective in "The Captive Mind." The book survives not only the Soviet system,
but also the fall of the system.

I visited Czeslaw in a Krakow hospital last month, a day before his 93rd
birthday, a couple of weeks before his death. He greeted me with a familiar
mixture of courtliness and attentive self-examination: "I am very moved you have
come to visit me. Fortunately, I am conscious."

As these characteristic words indicate, the spirit and mind were as ever, though
the body appeared too weak for writing, maybe even for dictation. To the
question, "Czeslaw, have you been composing sentences in your head? Are you
writing in your mind," he responded, "Nooo" - the syllable prolonged in a
crooning, Slavic way - "only absurd bric-a-brac."

The homely French phrase, so amusingly placed, demonstrated his subtle command
of English, a language in which he chose to write only one poem ("To Raja Rao").
Then he chose to give an example of the bric-a-brac, a dream he had that day, in
the hospital: "I dreamed I was in 18th-century Boston," he said. "Arguing with
Puritans."

Then, "Everybody was in uniform!" - the old laughter booming, with its sense of
absurdity and purpose, appetite and revulsion, grief and renewal: an essential
sound of the 20th century, persisting in an unsurpassed body of work. The
enemies of that great voice could not silence it in exile; their baffled, angry
protests cannot muffle its triumph at home.

Robert Pinsky's most recent book of poems is "Jersey Rain." He was poet laureate
of the United States from 1997 to 2000.