Reading Miłosz
Betsy Sholl on Czesław Miłosz
I started reading Czesław Miłosz in the 1980s in grad school. It wasn’t exactly a crush, more like finding a brilliant teacher who both shows what you lack and makes you eager to learn. Reading him was a way of entering another culture and seeing my own in a new light. Much of his work was already available in translation—poems, essays, novels, critical writings like The Captive Mind and The Witness of Poetry. I read it all, moved by the gravitas and irony, the authority and self-laceration, the supple shifting of tones. Many of us were drawn to Eastern European poets for those qualities. We felt the breadth and depth in their work, the weight of history and moral purpose. The poetry that many of us at that time had been trained in was focused on the concrete, the subjective, and almost exclusively on personal experience. While there were exceptions, for the most part the predominant poetic voice at the time seemed to be immediate and ahistorical. For poets like Miłosz, however, the hells they witnessed during World War II and the Stalinist regime exploded the barriers between individual and society, between art and politics. He was a poet of enormous range, from the spare lyric to almost operatic sequences, richly layered with history and moral reckoning. Immersing myself in that work was a journey into immensity.
My writing may not have changed very much. How could it?—I didn’t have his life. But my sensibility changed. The world became more complex, nuanced, and historical. My motivations changed. I wanted to engage in a bigger conversation, beyond my personal history. Near the end of his memoir Native Realm, Miłosz speaks of “life made into thought, the ardor that upholds belief in the wider usefulness of our individual effort.” The possibility of being true to artistic principles and to a wider usefulness has been inspiring to me. In that way, I was a pupil, and Miłosz was my teacher from afar—from Vilnius, from Aquinas, from the Warsaw Uprising, from Stalinist Poland, from a deep love of the land, from exile and his own personal demons and longing.
When you read a poet’s work intently over years that voice begins to live inside you. Passages come to mind, sometimes the words, sometimes the rhythm of thought. I take walks with Miłosz, agree and disagree, ask questions. I reread essays. I recall images and his remarkable ability to make tonal shifts. I think of the painter friend he wrote about in The Separate Notebooks, who opened his studio to hide Jews during the war and was killed for it. I think about his comment that poetry is “the passionate pursuit of the Real.” I recite lines from “A Magic Mountain,” a poem about exile, about fearing his own irrelevance, his sense of injured ambition and pride. “Fame will pass me by, no tiara, no crown?” he rails, and then in the next stanza:
Until it passed. What passed? Life.
Now I am not ashamed of my defeat.
One murky island with its barking seals
Or a parched desert is enough
To make us say: yes, oui, si.
“Even asleep we partake in the becoming of the world.”
Endurance comes only from enduring.
With a flick of the wrist I fashioned an invisible rope,
And climbed it and it held me.
Betsy Sholl served as Poet Laureate of Maine from 2006 to 2011. Her tenth collection of poetry, As If a Song Could Save You, was published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2022.
Photo of Czesław Miłosz © the Nobel Foundation
