Product Description

New and Collected Poems: 1931–2001 celebrates seven decades of Czeslaw Milosz's exceptional career. Widely regarded as one of the greatest poets of our time, Milosz is a master of probing inquiry and graceful expression. His poetry is infused with a tireless spirit and penetrating insight into fundamental human dilemmas and the staggering yet simple truth that "to exist on the earth is beyond any power to name."

Czeslaw Milosz worked with the Polish Resistance movement in Warsaw during World War II and defected to France in 1951. His work brings to bear the political awareness of an exile -- most notably in A Treatise on Poetry, a forty-page exploration of the world wars that rocked the first half of the twentieth century. His later poems also reflect the sharp political focus through which this Nobel laureate never fails to bear witness to the events that stir the world.

Customer Reviews (11)

New & Collected Poems: 1931-2001 Czeslaw Milosz
I purchased this book to use in a workshop on the poet, and found it to be an excellent resource. Almost his whole collection of poetry and prose is in a single volume.

The everlasting past.
Guilt rides with Milosz, from beginning to end. No measure of success can expiate his self-perceived sin. His literary prowess cannot dispell it. A great, but burdened writer.

Perfect
It's amazing how beautifully Milosz's poetry translates into English. For those of us who are in love with poetry of nature, history, and love itself, this is the perfect addition to any library.

To see from soaring above and down to the last detail A great Poet describes the world
It is difficult often to take to heart a poet in translation. It is difficult too for the modern reader to focus on a Poet who does not dwell in his own subjective consciousness, and does not have 'I' at the heart of his world of perception. For these reasons it took me time to 'get into' these poems but once I did I felt in the presence of a specially wonderful world of poetry, an especially rich and observant sensibility. The 'wake- up' poem for me was one of Milosz's most famous, 'Campo dei Fiori'. In this poem Milosz compares the square in Florence in which Giordano Bruno was burned with the square in Warsaw close to the burning Warsaw Ghetto. He richly details the life which goes on all around in the two squares, and the indifference of all to the great suffering.
"Someone will read as moral
that the people of Rome or Warsaw
haggle, laugh, make love
as they pass by martyrs' pyres.
Someone else will read
of the passing of things human,
of the oblivion
born before the flames have died."
In this same collection Milosz has a set of three small remarkable poems one on Hope, one on Faith, and one on Love.
"Love means to learn to look at yourself
The way one looks at distant things
For you are only one thing among many.
And whoever sees that way heals his heart,
Without knowing it from various ills-
A bird and a tree say to him. Friend.

Then he wants to use himself and things,
So that they stand in the glow of ripeness.
It doesn't matter whether he knows what he serves.
Who serves best doesn't always understand.'

Milosz wrote poetry for seventy years, and his poems line by line do not cease to surprise. He shows an astonishing combination of intellect and feeling. His poems are rich with observations of the external world. Naming the things and the phenomena of the world seem in one way at the heart of his vision.
But it should not be forgotten that his poetry has a strong political and historical dimension. He was one who sympathized deeply with the victims of the Nazis, who fought against Communist oppression. His poems show a feeling for an understanding of freedom. They are also rich in religious feeling though this comes mediated by ironyand questioning.
Milosz is too a Poet deeply in touch with the earth, who sees it in detail and from afar at once. In his Nobel Speech he quotes the writer Selma Lagerlof who said that the way of the Poet is to at once fly above reality and at the same time be down close observing it. This double - perception of seeing from afar and seeing from close- up pervades all those long- lined multi- stanzad poems so remote from what has been much poetry in our time.
Milosz's work is full of surprise and irony, and can suddenly wake the reader to a sense of revelation in delight.
I have not even in this review begun to hint at the riches of this incredibly wonderful book of poems - poems of a great poet indeed.

I can't bring myself to put it on the shelf
Milosz came highly recommended: by Anna Akhmatova, Irina Ratushinskaya and Joseph Brodsky! (I even think that I read that Pasternak was a fan late in life!)

The cover blurb says that he contains the twentieth century within himself like no other poet, and this certainly is true. But this is not primarily "historical" poetry. It covers deep issues, but remains intensely honest, open, personal, experiential and biblically spiritual. Having said all of that, I don't do Milosz's poetry justice. It is not there for anybody's encyclopedic curiosity of "honest Christian experience". It is a scalpel that cuts open his own heart, and mine. Repeatedly. Clearly. Without descending into the self-consciously avant-garde. He opens me in more ways than I sometimes think I want to be opened. ... Read more

Product Description
The best known prose work by the winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature examines the moral and intellectual conflicts faced by men and women living under totalitarianism of the left or right. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (21)

Must Read for Fan's of Orwell or Those Interested in Polish Culture
Great book for fans of Orwell.I've heard Orwell read this Noble winning story prior to writing 1984.The Author's life gave him unique insights into the subject matter, beyond that of these systems's victims.

A Well-Written Study of Intellectual Oppression
Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote from the Soviet Union, Vaclav Havel from Czechoslovakia, and Czeslaw Milosz from Poland, but they all lived under the shadow of Communism, and thus they wrote about the same things.Czeslaw Milosz (who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980) defected from Poland in 1951, and his book "The Captive Mind" attempts to justify and to explain his defection.

"The Captive Mind" is a description and analysis and critique of Communism's mind-workers, its writers.Milosz starts with an interesting question:given the totalitarian aspects of Communism, why did not all the writers defect to a land when they can write whatever they want?The answer is that Communism, more than the West, respects the word as a power for propaganda, and treats writers very well.In fact, there's hardly any resistance, and it's truly striking how the whole intellectual class was ready and willing to prostitute itself to the demands and directives of the Center in Moscow.Some of this can be blamed on fatigue and disillusionment resulting from World War II, some to opportunism, most to apathy.(Also, the natural human instinct to just get along, rather than to cause friction.)Milosz makes it clear that as a writer his conscience cannot permit him to live in such a state of affairs, and thus he chooses exile.

Towards the end of the book, Milosz criticizes Pablo Neruda.As a former Polish translator of Neruda's poetry, Milosz believes that the great poet ought to write what he knows:in other words, he should continue to criticize the oppression of his native land, but shouldn't because of that be too ready and willing to praise the Soviet Union.

While Milosz does not overtly praise America, there is always that bias in his writings.Alexis de Tocqueville discusses the difference between America and European dictatorships in his book "Democracy in America."The great Frenchman claimed that while European dictatorships may demand your body America demands your soul.Intellectuals living under dictators know all too clearly what's wrong with the system, all engaged in double-think (thinking one way and behaving another), and are guilty of cynicism and opportunism, but not stupidity and ignorance.But what can we say about a culture that happily watches "Entertainment Tonight" and "Family Guy," and believes their civilization to be the height of humanity?

The Communist threat to humanity has come and gone, but what's left is a much more nefarious menace.

A Captivating Book
An excellent, if short, book analyzing artisan associates of the author who make conversions, adaptions, and protestations to the Communist regime. Those who don't die by suicide or execution tend to become cynics, knowing they mouth hollow phrases for a corrupt regime and receive undeserved praise for crud they produce because they've either lost the ability to produce deserving work or such work would be reactionary.

mind-forged manacles
A book that memorably explores "the ways that people tried to cope with the nonsense and lies of the Communist system," as Hooman Majd described it.

The Brutal Truth
We'll probably never truly understand how so many millions of people could capitulate to the extreme ideologies of fascism and communism, from the intellectual act of stifling one's own independent thoughts to the emotional act of apologizing for repressive regimes. But this insider's account is a fascinating and disturbing look at the mental suffering of those living under imposed philosophies. While Milosz largely criticizes communism here, don't fall for political simplicity because he also examines fascism (which is not the polar opposite of communism) and extremism in general. Milosz examines the painful coping mechanisms of the thinking person oppressed by ideologies that were not just unyielding but half-baked, with philosophical demands shifting with the winds of politics and history. The book is built around vignettes of four writers Milosz once knew - former independent thinkers who either subsumed their passion in support of the state or fought the power, always with saddening results. Unlike most politically oriented books, Milosz didn't bother with ivory tower theory or stiff erudition, and spoke with the independent mind that was crushed by ruthless ideology. He escaped, but the societies he covered are still to this day buried under the culture of the captive mind. [~doomsdayer520~] ... Read more

Product Description
The autobiography of the Nobel laureate

Before he emigrated to the United States, Czeslaw Milosz lived through many of the social upheavals that defined the first half of the twentieth century. Here, in this compelling account of his early life, the author sketches his moral and intellectual history from childhood to the early fifties, providing the reader with a glimpse into a way of life that was radically different from anything an American or even a Western European could know.

Using the events of his life as a starting point, Native Realm sets out to explore the consciousness of a writer and a man, examining the possibility of finding glimmers of meaning in the midst of chaos while remaining true to oneself.

In this beautifully written and elegantly translated work, Milosz is at his very best.
... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Humanizing companion to more formal histories of eastern Europe
Really a superb book. I agree with all the other reviewers, and don't have much to add because I don't want to be redundant. Just a few things:

As a Jew, I particularly enjoyed the discussion of the university and political climate in Wilno of the 1930s. It sounded to me so much like its modern North American counterpart in numerous cities, and I could really feel how much was lost when this world ended, its natural evolution stopped dead in its tracks. Milosz is such an astute, balanced observer, bringing to light a more optimistic picture of a past that became understandably buried by the tragedies that soon followed.

His other gift is to humanize the historical currents that were driving eastern Europe towards Communism. He explains the political and social pressures that influenced the period's intellectuals, without ever becoming pedantic. The prose exudes such a beautiful sense of warmth and humanity.

Near the end he becomes rather Hamlet-esque. He admits that he fears readers will see him as such, and I have to say, it rang a bell for me because he goes on and on into eloquent contradictions. But perhaps this is an allegory for his state of mind at the time, when he was contemplating whether to defect to the West and leave his native country for good?

The conclusion seems to just trail off......I was disappointed with it, because he starts into themes that he had not explored in depth beforehand. Weak. I fear I may have missed something. But otherwise, a fabulous book and I'm so glad that I read it.

an excelent essay about life and History in Poland and Lithuania
A very instructive and interesting book about eastern Europe, being the author's existencial autobiography. The book gives important informations about less known issues, like Oskar Milosz poetry.Not to be missed by anyone who likes Czeslaw Milosz's work.

Look homeward brother
The test of a truly great book is when you long NOT to finish it.A hundred pages to the end, then fifty, and you slow your tempo down to a page-a-day, then a paragraph, and then finally, just a couple of sentences as to prolong the pain, the pleasure.Milosz's autobiography par excellence, Native Realm, is one such book. And much more than that.A modern Odyssey, it traces the tempestous voyages of one of this century's greatest poets, one of Europa's finest sons.

Subtitled 'A Search for Self-Definition,' Native Realm unfolds as a diary of one who lived through some of the twentieth century's bleakest moments, two world wars, the complete destruction of a city (Warsaw) and the near-complete extermination of a people (Poland's Jews).Milosz takes us step by step down into the inferno of his century, into the quagmire of his homeland.A sorrowful Virgil, Milosz guides us through each cavern of a very personal hell.Born in one of Europe's most forgotten and mystical corners, Lithuania, Milosz recounts the recipe of his own European-ness, a Lithuanian mother and a Polish father of Sorbian descent.His family was of one petty gentry and thus, young Milosz's youth was a cloudless one of innocent expeditions into the dense Baltic forests of pine and spruce.Milosz reminisces with a slight tinge of nostalgia, painting pictures of an Eden-like world where man and surroundings were linked in a symbosis of mutual respect and awe.Milosz's homeland was a ethnically heterogenous one where Lithuanian, Pole, Byelorussian and Jew lived in an amicable tension, each bringing precious ingredients to their common feast.The kitchen of this feast was the city that more than any other left its brand on Milosz's psyche: Wilno, known today as Vilnius, capital of the Lithuanian republic.Here, Milosz revels in his reveries through narrow cobble-stoned streets and over an equally bumpy Catholic education which also left its mark on the man.Conflicted with his deep love for Creation, Milosz never gave up his faith in and awe of the Creator.Smithing his own highly individualistic faith, Milosz remained skeptical of the new creed of salvation that spread the good news to depression-racked Europe: Communism.

One of this book's richest chapters focuses on Marxism and Milosz's cautious rejection of its monolithic message, and another one picks apart the nation that carried this evangel to its furthest extreme, Russia.Milosz analyzes Russia and her people much like Dostoevsky did with Poland and the Poles in House of the Dead, with a grudging respect and a candid admission of distaste.Pole and Rus, brothers who are separated by a spiritual fence and only too happy to stay on their perspective sides. Milosz embraces his Polish, Roman roots and draws a marked line in the sand between him and the Byzantine east.Yet, Milosz remains fair and does his best to present the all sides of the Russian bear, from the red-bearded, vodka-breathed soldier in the Tsarist army who befriended young Milosz to the 'kind-hearted' Red Army Ivans who shot their German captive so as to save him from the cruelties of a Russian winter.

The most gripping part of Milosz's story is his description of life in hell, that is of surviving the Sodom and Gomorrah ofNazi-occupied Poland. Milosz squeaked out an minimalist existence in the nightmare of Hans Frank's General Gouvernment, the Nazi-controlled part of Poland.Amidst the starvation and daily executions, Milosz kept his sanity and humanity intact by etching out his poems, all the while painfully aware that things were a whole lot worse over the ghetto wall.Milosz never tries to escape his culpability in not doing more. He remarks, 'To live with one's cowardice is bitter.' Bitter indeed, but the reader feels the hopelessness of the situation and asks himself/herself, 'Would we have done any different?'Milosz lets us stare at the answer.

Native Realm's secret not only lies in its almost hyponotic ability to sweep the reader along the tumultous waves of 20th century Eastern Europe, but most of all, in its captain's steerage.Milosz's prose beams with the simple elegance of his poems. Every word solid and right in its place.Every sentence either rings with near-Homeric concreteness---hiding in Warsaw's sewers during the Uprising, " The women closed the metal cover over us, and inside we immediately began to suffocate.It was quite theoretical: in the light from the electrical bulb I saw the mouths of fish thrown up on the sand and heads withering on stems of necks," or with aphoristic sting, "Westerners like to dwell in the empyrean of noble words about spirit and freedom, but it is not often that they ask someone whether he has enough money for lunch."

Such gems lie like amber on a beach. You reach one and you just want to sit, admire, examine and give blessings for the happiness burning in your hand.But all good things must come to an end, as does Milosz's eloquent tale of self-discovery. After the cauldron simmered down, Milosz escaped to America and found a fresh, new world where opportunity lay for the taking and nature smiled with the purity of Paradise.But his sojourn remained a tentative one as Europa beckoned constantly. Eventually, Milosz succumbed to his homesickness. "Europe herself gathered me in her warm embrace...Europe, after all, was home to me."

A fitting end to this eloquent dissection of what it means to be European, to 'become' European. Czeslaw Milosz has finally reached home, to that pantheon filled with those rare few who have succeeded in over-coming self, sect, and narrow nationhood to be worthy of the title, 'European.'Montaigne and Goethe, welcome home your brother to his rightful native realm.

Astonishing auto-biography of the ultimate Eastern European
If you want to better understand Europe and European history of the 20th century, this is a book to read. Milosz is a Nobel prize-winning poet and writer. This book is his autobiography. He was born in 1911 on the territory of the former Russian Empire. He comes from the Polish-Lithuanian family and is an ultimate Eastern European.He also knows America and Western Europe well.

His knowledge of the European history of the 20th century is nor from the books, but something he lived through himself. Milosz traveled to Siberia with his father. He survived both World wars. He studied in France before WW2 and spent the war in Warsaw, where he witnessed destruction of Warsaw after the upraising.Milosz seems very observant, honest, and has a tendency to self-reflection, which makes the narrative even more interesting.

He had many dangerous adventures during the war years and he remembers and describes them in great detail.Many of his remarks about Russia are right on target (as Russian I can confirm that). This is great and unique book of the ultimate Eastern European. Definitely worth reading if you are interested in the history of this part of the world. ... Read more

Product Description
This book is a survey of Polish letters and culture from its beginnings to modern times. Czeslaw Milosz updated this edition in 1983 and added an epilogue to bring the discussion up to date. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Standard Polish Literature history Survey
This volume became the standard text of Polish literary history in English when first published in 1984 because it was the only modern one and written by the leading western expert on the topic.I used it in a Polish literary history survey course and compared it with the standard Polish texts of that era of less than free expression in Poland.While necessarily not as encyclopedic as thebooks from Warsaw or Krakow, it covered the highlights, and there are many of them, of the entire sweep of the topic, including a section on himself.It is still the standard in English.There may be something from the new Poland that supersedes it, but I don't know.It is vital for understanding the rich tradition of literature in Polish that has always been treated on the margins of world literature.For example, it helps to put Chopin's Ballades into perspective and enrich one's understanding of his intellectual milieu before he left Warsaw to join the Polish emigration--and Milosz covers that as well.Buy it. ... Read more

Product Description

Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz's most recent collection Second Space marks a new stage in one of the great poetic pilgrimages of our time. Few poets have inhabited the land of old age as long or energetically as Milosz, for whom this territory holds both openings and closings, affirmations as well as losses. "Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year, / I felt a door opening in me and I entered / the clarity of early morning," he writes in "Late Ripeness." Elsewhere he laments the loss of his voracious vision -- "My wondrously quick eyes, you saw many things, / Lands and cities, islands and oceans" -- only to discover a new light that defies the limits of physical sight: "Without eyes, my gaze is fixed on one bright point, / That grows large and takes me in."

Customer Reviews (6)

Accessible poems; illuminating faith
I normally avoid poetry because it's often inaccessible. Happily, I think I "get" most of Milosz's poems. As a person of Polish heritage like Milosz, I appreciate his respect for Catholicism as well as his skepticism. His healthy, but not uncritical faith is enlightening.

Second Space
Poems by a Poet still alert and active but knows that death is near ... what whould you be thinking of, Milosz's thoughts are very ... they stay with you

a short and thoughtful collection
The cover says: Translated by the author and Robert Hass. In the case of a single poem, "Eyes," the translation is by Milosz and Renata Gorczynski. Milosz decided to teach at the University of California at Berkeley in 1960, won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1980, and was still humble enough to have a professor of English help translate these poems into the current literary standard for English verse. It is easy to read, and 102 pages of poems is a short book. The concern with our culture spans more than centuries. I only knew a small part of his religious history before reading this book, which also made me curious about the importance of Adam Mickiewicz and "mystical lodges," as a footnote on page 94 delves into another "look for an esoteric interpretation of Christianity."

The master craftsman speaks to us posthumously
Milosz is a master of the craft.This collection published posthumously reminds us all that he richly deserved the Nobel Prize. How many poets can we point to that were writing after the age of 90? Milosz is humble about his perceptions of the world but his horizon is vast--enough to take in both faith and doubt in the same work. Of very special note in the collection is the poem "Eyes."

"My most honorable eyes, you are not in the best of shape.
I receive from you an image less than sharp, . . . "

"Eyes" is a poem of depth and true insight, which tells us something about a way of looking at the world as one moves on in life, "away from the fairgrounds of the world."There is an inner life, a deep inner truth which takes in all. It is a vision at once mystical and secular.

Milosz is a master, straddling eras and cultures. What can a 90-plus-year-old poet tell us about sexuality and desire? Amazing things--revelations, truly. But don't expect the cheap sensuality of popular culture.

Milosz and his poems have endured throughout our lives and will remain with us for a very long time. In Second Space he opens up a space that is rich and exciting.

Milosz'Second Space
"Second Space" is a collection of thirty-two poems on religious themes by Czeslaw Milosz (1911 -- 2004) written when the poet was in his 90s.The poems are heavily autobiographical in tone, meditative, and reflective.They deal with Milosz' struggle for religious, and in particular Catholic, faith in a world of secularism, mechanism, and suffering.They also describe the conflict in Milosz' own life between the call to the religious life and the lure of the world, with its natural beauty, and human sexuality.Milosz tries to reconcile the tensions among these two polarities.

The book is dense and richly detailed with allusions to Polish poets, to Milosz' relatives, particularly to his cousin Oscar Milosz (1877-1939) a French poet and diplomat, and to the mystical thinkers Jacob Boehme and Emmanuel Swedenborg, who have deeply influenced Milosz and his approach to religious questions.

The book is divided into five parts.The first part consists of a series of short poems discussing the poet's struggle for religious meaning.In many of these poems, Milosz revisits and reflects upon his life. The title of the book "Second Space" derives from the first poem of the collection in which Milosz laments the difficulty of conceiving of a "second space" in our modern world -- the space of both heaven and hell. Milosz writes in a clear style with many striking figures and phrases.Thus, he concludes his poem, "The Old Women" with the benediction: "May the day of your death not be a day of hopelessness,/ but of trust in the light that shines through earthly forms."

The second part of the book is a series of eleven interior monologues by "Father Severinus," who describes himself in the first poem as "a priest without faith".In these poems, Father Severnus meditates on the importance, mystery, and difficulty of a spiritual life as he describes his own internal struggles and the struggles of some of the people who come to him for help.

The third part of the book is in Milosz' own voice and consists of 23 poems forming a "Treatise on Theology." These poems are in the voice of the layperson -- the poet himself -- rather than of Father Severnus, but the themes and preoccupations are the same.They are epitomized in the final poem of this group, "Beautiful Lady" in which Milosz describes his responses to the appearances of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes and Fatima.

The fourth part of the book, "Apprentice", is the poet's tribute to the work of his cousin, the French poet Oscar Milosz.This poem is richly personal and allusive, and Milosz accompanies it with extensive notes. I found it helpful to read the poem first with the notes followed by a reading straight through without the notes -- which tend to interfere with the text.

The book concludes with what to may mind is its best section, a brief retelling of the "Orpheus and Euridice" legend in modern garb with Milosz himself as the protagonist.Orpheus in this retelling struggles with the loss of religous conviction as much as with the loss of his beloved. There is an eloquent pasage in this poem in which Milosz describes the goal of his poetic endeavor:

"He sang the brightness of morning and green rivers,
He sang of smoking water in the rose-colored daybreaks,
Of colors: cinnabar, carmine, burnt sienna, blue,
Of the delight of swimming in the sea under marble cliffs,
Of feasting on a terrace above the tumult of a fishing port,
Of the tasts of wine, olive oil, almonds, mustard, salt.
Of the flight of the swallow, the falcon,
Of a dignified flock of pelicans above a bay,
Of the scene of an armful of lilacs in summer rain,
Of his having composed his words always against death
And of having made no rhyme in praise of nothingness."

"Second Space" is a moving valedictory volume by a great Twentieth Century poet. ... Read more

Product Description
"I went on a journey in order to acquaint myself with my province, in a two-horse wagon with a lot of fodder and a tin bucket rattling in the back. The bucket was required for the horses to drink from. I traveled through a country of hills and pine groves that gave way to woodlands, where swirls of smoke hovered over the roofs of houses, as if they were on fire, for they were chimneyless cabins; I crossed districts of fields and lakes. It was so interesting to be moving, to give the horses their rein, and wait until, in the next valley, a village slowly appeared, or a park with the white spot of a manor in it. And always we were barked at by a dog, assiduous in its duty. That was the beginning of the century; this is its . I have been thinking not only of the people who lived there once but also of the generations of dogs accompanying them in their everyday bustle, and one night-I don't know where it came from-in a pre-dawn sleep, that funny and tender phrase composed itself: a road-side dog." --Road-Side Dog
... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

"Either people's gratitude and respect or an embittered man's four walls."
Czeslaw Milosz's "Road Side Dog" is a somewhat uneven and mind numbingly powerful treatise from the Polish giant, counted "Righteous Among the Nations" for his resistance to the Nazi regime (which included attending underground lectures and getting Jews fake baptismal certificates) and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, written when he was 87.As wrought with doubt and agony as "Second Space", a perhaps lesser work, these 208 pages contain perhaps more wisdom concerning faith and life than a 1,000 page theological treatise by anyone writing today.

Despite being serious as cancer, Milosz is also hilarious.His hangman's humor, the best kind, emerges occasionally--a kind of world weariness borne of love.His epitaph for youthful narcissism: "To believe you are magnificent.And gradually to discover that you are not magnificent.Enough labor for one human life." "Learning", pg. 60Who beyond a certain age cannot relate to this?

Milosz is adamant, despite being a believer's believer, puts a sharp emphasis upon the ignorance of human beings and our inability to know very much at all: "You have no idea what is going on in the heads of people who walk by you.Their ignorance is hard to imagine and it can be discovered only by accident.This does not mean you are wise and they are stupid: simply that everyone garners information up to a certain level only, and is unable to reach higher.Space is limited, and they be unaware of what is happening in the next street.Also, time is limited, and events, which for you happened yesterday, for them are sunken in the fog of an indefinite past.Thus TV, print can transform and alter as they please everything that is and has been.We should wonder not at the power of propaganda but at the modest amount of knowledge which somehow gets through."( "You Don't Know",pg. 91)This little aphorism seems to me more pertinent today than ever, when people believe for instance that the President is a card carrying member of the Communist party when he passes a bill to assist the poor.How confused can we get?

His Christianity is not the product of stale dialectics or absurd Creationism.He believes because, not in spite of, the horrors he witnessed."An atheist should accept the world as it is.But then whence comes our protest, our scream: "No!"Precisely this excludes us from Nature, determines our incomprehensible oddity, makes us a lonely species.Here, in a moral protest against the order of the world, in our asking ourselves where this scream the defense of the peculiar place of man begins." (pg. 103)

This is straight from the bleeding heart of a man also made of iron.Gold.Unreservedly recommended for all.

Musings of a master
Milosz writes so sparingly, so effortlessly and with such whimsicality (one cover reviewer refers to Milosz' essential "elusiveness") that one is simply not aware of technique.I am reminded of the way that the notes of a Mozart symphony or Bach cantata seem to spring forth in perfect order yet with absolute spontaneity.Having recently read the novel "The Issa Valley" I was not disappointed in "The Road-side Dog" although the form is completely different.The latter consists of a collection of one paragraph to several page prose vignettes and similarly sparing poems.If a great short story writer takes the reader on a journey and communicates insights in in several pages, Milosz in this book does the same in no more than several paragraphs.Discovering Milosz in the last 12 months has made a wonderful impact on my literary life.

Philip Pogson

Perhaps even worthy of "wise"
Milosz has given us another wonderful book - one firmly planted in memories but not obcessed with the past.A wonderful section is devoted to poetic ideas that he has never written which he offers as potential ideasfor those who are younger.Unlike many who espouse religion, he is veryopen regarding sexual desires and as such he appears to be a whole andgenuine person not a literary front.As for the quality of his poetry andprose, there is a reason he was awarded a Nobel Prize for Literature - thisbook confirms the appropriateness of that award.

Milosz is a reader's delight.
He is able to see into the human heart and condition from childhood to old age and then to describe its humor, wonderment, joy and sadness in poetry-like prose.Guaranteed to claim a permanent place in your reading"heart." ... Read more

Product Description
A comprehensive selection of essays--some never before translated into English--by the Nobel Laureate.

To Begin Where I Am brings together a rich sampling of poet Czeslaw Milosz's prose writings.Spanning more than a half century, from an impassioned essay on human nature, wartime atrocities, and their challenge to ethicalbeliefs, written in 1942 in the form of a letter to his friend Jerzy Andrzejewski, to brief biographical sketches and poetic prose pieces from the late 1990s, this volume presents Milosz the prose writer in all his multiple, beguiling guises.The incisive, sardonic analyst of the seductive power of communism is also the author of tender, elegiac portraits of friends famous and obscure; the witty commentator on Polish complexes writes lyrically of the California landscape. Two great themes predominate in these essays, several of which have never appeared before in English: Milosz's personal struggle to sustain his religious faith, and his unswerving allegiance to a poetry that is "on the side of man."
... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

To Begin Where I Am
this book had some insightful essays by Milosz, like his poetry, his essays were engaging, interesting, an off-angle point of view

Elegant and Sophisticated Prose
I highly recommend this volume to anyone.Along with his recently published New and Collected Poems(Ecco Press), Milosz stands tall as one of the most accomplished writers in the modern era.This volume of essays is highly personal and eloquent.His prose style is immediate and vivid, capturing insights of history and the "poetic."His work on Jeffers is remarkable.This is a poet of our time--his thought triumphs over despair and the ills of the human condition.He has witnessed some of the most deliberate atrocities in world history--his essays evoke a wisdom based on personal remembrance-and there is no better vision of our predicament than what is offered here.

A Poet's Religious Humanism
Czeslaw Milosz is a renowned writer of both poetry and prose. He received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1980.In his long life, he has seen and written about many of the events of the Twentieth Century, including the Russian Revolution, the Holocaust, the Warsaw Uprising, and the rise and fall of communism. He served as a diplomat from Poland to the United States following WWII. Among his books is an incisive critique of communism titled "The Captive Mind".

"To begin where I am" is a selection of Milosz's essays published between 1942 and 1998, some written initially in English, but most written in Polish.The essays are wide-rangingin theme and capture a great deal of the scope ofMilosz's passions.The good introduction to the book by Bogdana Carpenter and Madeline Levine point out that Milosz "has centered his writings on a few fundamental philosophical questions: the meaning of history; the existence of evil and suffering; the transience of all life; theascendance of a scientific worldview andthe decline of the religious imagination." The essays are well-arranged into four main sections.

The first group of essays titled "These Guests of Mine" is primarily historical and descriptive in character. I enjoyed particularly Milosz's description of Wilno(Vilna) in his "Dictionary of Wilno Streets."

For me the heart of the book is in the second and third parts, titled "On the Side of Man" and "Against Incomprehensible Poetry."We learn a great deal about a writer by his discussions of those who have influenced him.In this book,Miloscz's essays on the American poet Robinson Jeffers, on the Russian philospher Lev Shestov, and on the French theological thinker Simone Weil are highly thoughtful.They reveal a writer both struggling for a commitment to religion, to Catholicism in particular, in the face of a scientific and material worldview which he finds inconsistent with it, and a writer committed to humanism, to the best in man and culture.They are an inspiring and difficult set of commitments, and Milosz discusses them eloquently.

In Part 3 of the book, the centerpiece is the title essay "Against Incomprehensible Poetry".In this essay, Milosz develops insights from W.H. Auden and makes them his own.Auden had said "there is only one thing that all poetry must do,it must praise all it can for being and for happening." (p.381). This insight becomes the basis of a critique of much obscurantism in modern poetry.We are privileged to hear, in the book, a discussion of the continuing value of poetry and informed discussion of many poets worth knowing, from Whitman, Blake,and Jeffers to many of Milosz's Polish contempories.These latter writers are unknown to me, but Milosz makes one wish for them as companions through his discussions.

The fourth part of the book. "In Constant Amazement", is brief and consists of a collection of aphorisms. The aphorism I found most striking discusses the nature of human sexuality.It begins: "Men and women carry within their imagination an image of themselves and of others as sexual beings and often that is the only thing that humanizes them." (p. 436)

This book helped me with my own thinking and reflection.I hope it will help you with yours as well. ... Read more

Product Description
To find my home in one sentence, concise, as if hammered in metal. No to enchant anybody. Not to earn a lasting name in posterity. An unnamed need for order, for rhythm, for form, which three words are opposed to chaos and nothingness.
-- Czeslaw Milosz ... Read more

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Memories, dreams and reflections from the Nobel Laureate

The ABC book is a polish genre-a loose form related to a hypertext novel-composed of short, alphabetically arranged entries.In Milosz's conception, the ABC book becomes a sort of autobiographical reference book, combining entries concerning characters from his earlier work with references to some of his memory poems. He also writes of real, historical figures like Camus who were particularly influential during his formative years, and of broader topics such as "The City," "Unhappiness," and "Money." Another fascinating entry in Milosz's bold opus, Milosz's ABCs is an engaging tribute to a brilliant mind.
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Milosz ABC's
the book was a bit of a disappointment.I love his poems but so far this book,after some browsing just sit on the shelf

What I learned from this ABC book...
Most entries in this alphabetized soup of cultural what's what and who's who are devoted to fellow Lithuanians and Poles--names that will be obscure to most readers.However, there are some exceptions.The late poet, Joseph Brodsky, merits his first admirable mention on page 8 when Milosz mentions Brodsky's resignation from the Academy of Arts & Letters.(He is mentioned again on pages 136 and 247).Did you know that Dosteovsky hated London, "the capital city of capitalism?"Milosz held major antipathy toward Simone de Beavoir--the woman and her writing."I could not forgive her and Sartre their baseness in their joint attack on Camus" (apparently Camus was a lone ally of his at Gallimand Publishing).He's right on the money as he coins Berkeley's "anticonformists" in his "'Blasphemy" entry:"I became sufficiently acquainted with the herd thinking of leftists and its fruit in the form of political correctness."There are cruel, uncalled-for comments on Polish writer Maria Dabrowska.The first negative mention of writer Witold Gombrowicz is on page 22 when he declared that French is a superior language to Polish language;on page 215 Milosz even calls Gombrowica a "demon."Then I learned that Wilno was an important center of Jewish culture "...on a world scale."Milosz unwittingly writes a paen to Wilno in the Witold Hulewicz entry.Noticeably absent from the ABC's is the late writer Jerzy Kosinski who only earns a snide aside early on in the text.Milosz burns Arthur Koestler, albeit in a 5-page entry (one of the longest in the book);he burns him by basically saying that he suffers from Small Man Syndrome.Admiring words describe Polish Studies professor Manfred Kridl (you MUST read what happened to Kridl when appointed to Columbia University on p. 177).Milosz is complimentary to the works and personhood of poet/writer Denise Levertov.And the yukky Henry Miller?Milosz declares "If there were no Miller, there would probably be no Allen Ginsberg" (okay, I'll take my chances).He proposes that Darwin borrowed some philosophy from Schopenhauer.And did you know that American writer Jack London held socialist views?And was widely translated in Russian?My two fave entries in ABC's are "Obligations" and "Stupidity of the West."Within the former are his strident feelings about base Polish culture:he hates the peasant dances and he gets tired of Chopin getting drug out for every occasion.In the latter (Stupidity), he laments the lack of imagination in the West "...that Los Angelos should not even exist...it horrifies me."The Yalta tragedy comes up as does 1992 Bosnis with the West ignoring THAT holocaust.Apparently Carl Jung was skeptical of the Western mind's ability to grasp Eastern spirituality...and that's it folks.A few of the things I learned in Milosz's ABC's!

More for the friends.
Autobiography in alphabetical form: the author remembers the friends (mostly) and the foes he met, and the places he lived in or visited during his long life.
I feel that this book is more written for the people he met themselves, or for their friends and descendants, rather than for outsiders like me, who don't know 80 to 90 % of the subjects or items treated; although some comments on, for instance, Amalrik, Henry Miller, Schopenhauer or Walt Whitman are worth-while reading.
On the other hand, some very well known names, like Witold Gombrowicz, are left out.
There is one big thread in the lives of all these commemorated people: war and revolution.
Only for insiders. ... Read more

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This major prose work, originally published in English in 1985, is both a moving spiritual self-portrait and an unflinching inquiry into the genesis of our modern afflictions. A man who was raised a Catholic in rural Lithuania, lived through the Nazi occupation of Poland, and emerged, first in Europe and then in America, as one of our most important men of letters, speaks here of the inherited dilemmas of our civilization in a voice recognizable for its honesty and passion.
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for intellectual elite outcasts
I was looking for information about a chapter of Notes from the Underground by Dostoevsky about Jesus that was deleted by a censor when the book was first printed and never restored, so the chapter is now lost forever. I wanted to find something about the chapter in The Land of Ulro by Czeslaw Milosz, but I could not. I have been doing a lot of reading on Bakhtin recently, which considers Dostoevsky the leading artist for modern interaction with religious ideas, but The Land of Ulro has a blend of obscure intellectual strands that differ from the others while remaining aware of the crippled nature of attempts to get a utopia up and running so far. I don't think we are out of the woods yet, and trying to picture Jesus with our set of trees with limbs that only reach so far when spectacular growth is needed to pay back any money that has already been spent is not just comic.

Compare Ulro, a realm of spiritual pain, to Gombrowicz
There are particular paths in the field of intellectual history that are so famous, after years of study, anyone is likely to expect certain names to appear in a certain order.For those familiar with the work of William Blake, Czeslaw Milosz's title THE LAND OF ULRO suggests an explanation of a particular vision in some obscure prophetic and poetic work.A scholarly approach would include an index in which all the pages mentioning Ulro could be identified and checked sequentially or by particular topics to clarify how Ulro is understood in this book.But actually, Czeslaw Milosz is a poet, winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature, who summed up the twentieth century in a book called ROAD-SIDE DOG (1998) by remembering a slow trip by two-horse wagon."And always we were barked at by a dog, assiduous in its duty.That was the beginning of the century; this is its end."(NEW AND COLLECTED POEMS (1931-2001), p. 645).

Rather than being an intellectual history, this is more like a memoir of intellectual roots that was written in Polish (ZIEMIA ULRO) in 1977, and a Preface in English by Czeslaw Milosz dated 1984 apologizes for "too many allusions to poets and critics unavailable in English translation."(p. vi).The translator Louis Iribarne provides notes on pages 277-287 for many of the names in the text, and seems particularly knowledgeable about Witold Gombrowicz (1904-69) on pages 277-278 and characters from his novel FERDYDURKE Professor Pimko and Miss Youthful on page 279.The poet Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855) has a ballad "The Romantic" on pages 97-99, translated into English by W. H. Auden.Considered "The first in Polish literature to bear the title of a *wieszcz*--a vatic bard endowed with the properties of a charismatic national leader" (p. 282) Mickiewicz is also explained with reference to his major works, including a play in which "its poet-hero Gustav [is] reborn as the rebel Konrad."(p. 283).People who have already read FERDYDURKE as a comic romp on the Polish pride in Polish poets might approach THE LAND OF ULRO as a more serious contemplation of the same theme by someone who deserves the respect that comedy lacks.

Gombrowicz and Czeslaw Milosz were both educated in law before achieving fame as authors who spent much of their lives in the West.THE LAND OF ULRO attempts to explain how the study of literature is so much like a dog chasing its own tale that legal studies seem closer to reality.The ultimate state of our culture is suggested by the reflection in this book on seeing a photograph of Albert Einstein on the wall of a restaurant.

"I stared up at the face, recalling how moved, how humbly respectful I had been, when many years ago I had made his acquaintance at Princeton.To me he was not only a scientist; he had stepped quite suddenly from the pages of ARS MAGNA and LES ARCANES."(p. 226).

That observation is from the end of section 35 of this book.Section 31 begins with the observation, "In 1924 a small book by Oscar Milosz was published in Paris under the Latin title ARS MAGNA.It consisted of five chapters or, as he called them, `metaphysical poems,' the first of which was written in 1916.LES ARCANES, written in 1926 and published in 1927, is both a sequel to and an expanded version of the first book."(p. 187)."Both make fiercely difficult reading, exasperating . . ."(p. 188).Section 16 began with the identification of "my distant cousin, Oscar Wladyslaw Milosz, who wrote under the name of O. V. de L. Milosz."(p. 61).Skipping over section 34, I noticed a mention of Milton that I had long expected to find during the book's many references to William Blake:

"The rebellion of the angels, which begot the power of evil, was, in effect, a catastrophe affecting the whole of creation, even if it did not produce another, equally powerful extreme opposed to good.The first catastrophe is closely related to the second, the sin of our parents.In Dante's DIVINE COMEDY the earth's center is occupied by the fallen (literally, headlong from heaven) angel, Satan.Milton's PARADISE LOST treats the rebellion of angels as a cosmic catastrophe.William Blake, though poetically indebted to Milton, `corrects' him by exonerating Satan, because, said Blake, he rebelled against a false God, the autocratic Jehovah.For Blake, as I have said, the catastrophe occurred with the breakup of the unity of the human-divine family."(pp. 214-215).

Section 26 begins with, "To speak of Swedenborg is to violate a Polish taboo that prohibits writers from taking a serious interest in religion."(p. 135).For one thing, his books were in Latin."But a reading public of enlightened, philosophically minded ladies and salon wits, either ignorant of Latin or deficient in it, now had to be addressed in the new international language of French."(p. 141).Near the end of section 26, summarizing his visionary style, "The tension between Swedenborg's pedestrian style, stripped of poetic fancy, and the substance of his message conceals a richness difficult to name, before which we stand as before Escher's geometric drawings exploiting the paradoxes of three-dimensional space.Despite the cloying repetitiveness and manifold tautologies, Swedenborg makes profitable reading, even if one is in no way moved to become a Swedenborgian."(p. 147).Section 28 reveals, "Blake was born in 1757--the year of the Last Judgment, according to Swedenborg--and the significance of his birth date was not lost on him."(p. 158).Blake's THE BOOK OF THEL (1789) is like:

He who has never tasted bitterness
Will never taste sweetness in heaven.(p. 163).

Blake's great poem "Milton" is quoted on pages 172-174, compared to a Swedenborgian maxim, and quoted again on pages 179-180, without specifically mentioning the poet Milton, except as Northrup Frye binds "when Blake and Milton elaborate theories of history" (FEARFUL SYMMETRY, p. 195) (Milosz, p. 182). ... Read more

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Amazing poetry
I first encountered Milosz when a poem of his was printed in Harper's about eight years ago. Stunning stuff, so I've always kept an eye out for his works. About two months ago, I was on a silent retreat in the Berkshires, and a copy of this volume was on the library shelf. A great companion for days of autumn silence and solitude. Milosz considers the big subjects, the essential questions. So it was perfect food for my contemplative brain. At a time when I am steadily losing interest in modern free verse poetry that reads more like dull and fragmentary journalism than anything really beautiful, Milosz in this collection reminds me that the form is not dead but vibrantly alive (though the poet himself is no longer with us.) Great book - highly recommended.

Let the Endgames Begin
PROVINCES finds Polish Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz confronting the quandaries of old age. Milosz has always been a philosophical poet, and he is so in these poems--but often here his philosophizing turns to the topic of philosophy's failures. In poems such as "Conversation with Jeanne" and "December 1," he tells us that the philosophical and theological arguments that impressed him when he was younger do so no longer. Indeed, several poems, such as "Blacksmith Shop" and "In Common," abandon abstract contemplation in favor of celebrating the physical world. This concern with things for their own sake is also embodied in his poem "Linnaeus," which offers a tribute to the inventor of modern taxonomy.

As W.B. Yeats does in his late poems, Milosz writes from the perspective of being a widely admired poet grown old. These poems dramatize his internal conflicts, including his doubts about his life's work: he refers to himself in the first, second, and third persons, and some poems openly take the form of internal conversations. These are powerful poems of old age, as often self-ironizing as self-elegizing.

Reading translated poetry can be a matter of making allowances, but that's not the case here: Milosz's collaboration with translator Robert Hass results in memorable English renderings of the Polish originals. ... Read more

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This stimulating collection of essays, mostly concerned with subjects taken from Slavic literatures, is at once scholarly and reflective. The volume opens with a true story, "Brognart," which is a confession of the author's remorse based on conflict with French intellectuals. "Science Fiction and the Coming of the Antichrist" concerns Vladimir Solovyov. "Krasinski's Retreat" is another return to the author's student readings, which attempts to determine how a Polish romantic poet could write in 1833 a drama on the approaching world revolution. "Joseph Conrad's Father" sketches the biography of a poet and revolutionary and also throws some light upon the fate of the hero of the last chapter. ... Read more

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Selected Poems: 1931-2004

Customer Reviews (1)

Calling Us Back to Ourselves
What I love most about reading modern poetry is the open friendliness of the poets.I usually have two or three books in the works and picking them up and reading them is like sitting down with the poets in my kitchen and having a wide ranging conversation with a really smart friend over coffee.Not Milosz.Reading Milosz is like enjoying an evening in someone's formal living room, silent as an invited guest should be.It is a privilege to read these poems.Here is a contemporary who lived through it all and was not ground to dust.Here is a survivor who grew suspicious of all -- ALL -- easy solutions and was absolutely confident that, whatever The World threw at him -- and by extension, at us -- he could wrap his mind around it.Seamus Heaney's introduction says Milosz was "tender toward innocence, tough-minded when faced with brutality and injustice."In the end, he retained his awe of the natural world and his believe in the holiness of everyday things.In short, when Milosz sees us being distracted by the insistence of externals, people and things that feast on our enegy leaving us with nothing, he calls us back to ourselves, the point from which everything is adorned with meaning for each of us, the context in which even the most horrible is endurable. ... Read more

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What is Man?
Yes to the above. A classic coming-of-age story that, as do the great ones, asks the question, What does it mean to be a man? (Think of Gilgamesh or Huck Finn or precious young Werther.) A question mediated here between two European aristocratic types: There is the guy-man, Pan Romauld, who triumphs with the ladies and as a hunter/killer of birds (so very much the European aristocrat). And there is the whole man, Grandfather Surkont, who does not hunt and is generous to those in his charge--and he has a library!! As well, there are the abundant (perhaps too much so), brilliant, luxurious, and precise descriptions of the natural world of northern Lithuania. In this he joins several East European writers, not only his compatriot Henry Sienkiewicz, but also Paustovsky and (alas!) Gregor Rezzori, this latter with his descriptions of the natural glories of the Bukovinian Carpathians.A fine work of autobiographical fiction in a grand tradtion.

A masterpiece of the inner life..
Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature,Czeslaw Milosz here writes deftly
yet with the right amount of passion about the child,Thomas. What an inner
life,what thoughts,what dreams,this child has. He soars with Aurora.then
blends with the trees in his beloved Issa Valley. What poetry in writing..
I was enchanted as you will be,too.Let Mr. Milosz and the Issa Valley wrap you in it's gentle and mercurial embrace.
M.Baker

Nature under the microscope!
Renowned Polish-Lithuanian poet, Czeslaw Milosz crafts his poetry with prose-like clarity and his prose with flowing rhythm and sententious weight.His coming of age novel, 'The Issa Valley' is a stunning example of how the mediatative lyric can be woven into a novel.

The novel takes place in the wild forests of central Lithuania near to where Milosz spent his youthful summers at the manor houses of his grandparents.The central character, Thomas, an adolescent school-boy of an aristocratic Polish family is sent away to his grandparents for the summer.Grandfather Surkont is the model of noblisse oblige, a Polonized Lithuanian aristocrat who strives to keep his household and his villagers happy despite the violent changes which threaten to engulf this forgotten paradise.The time is just after the Great War, when the newly-formed Republic of Lithuania is struggling with itsindepedence after centuries of foreign domination, by the Russians on a state level, by the Polish landowners on the local level.Polish 'pan,' Thomas, is abruptly thrown into a fresh and vibrant world completely foreign from the fast-paced city life he has known until now.Here in the villages and manors around the Issa River, the world is pagan and Lithuanian.Ancient spirits and gods dwell in the minds and souls of the Lithuanian peasants who people Thomas's new world.And most of all, Thomas meets up with his newest passion, that which teaches him more than any school-book ever could, the rich and primeval natural world.

More than anything, Milosz's novel is a giant mediatative prose poem on the shape and workings of nature.Sentence after sentence drips with near religious reverence for the water-lillied, cobalt-colored Issa, for the inpenetrable jungles of black pine, home to the bullet-headed snipe, siena-shaded mule deer, the fearsome black-bodied, red-hooded forest vipers whose lethal injection will put the strongest of men down before he can whisper, 'Holy Jesus, home to an infinite variety of bird and bug.Thomas is immediately captured by such an environment and sets out to become a 'naturalist.'In the Issa valley that means 'hunter.' Thomas soons attaches himself to the local hunter, Romauld, who initiates Thomas in the arts of tracking, waiting and dropping prey.Thomas hungers to learn this ancient art but fails dismally.Always a step behind, a little too hestitant to pull the trigger, he fails to make the big kill.Until the squirrel.Thomas' deliberate wounding of his unsuspecting and innocent victim causes a painful enlightenment.Through his tears of remorse and agonizing pang of guilt, Thomas grows up in a moment.He has taken life, thereby losing his Adam-like innocence.This two-page metaphor for the fall of man is in itself worth the whole book.

This seminal climax in Thomas' life underscores Milosz's central theme: we are all inextricably attached to our environment, slaves of the brutal and beautiful outside world that holds us in her hand.The natural world forms the backbone, muscle and tissue of this novel.The characters whom surround Thomas's microcosm are mere pawns of omnipotent nature and through them, Milosz makes his creed clear: accept your place in the nature of things or woe is your lot.Magdelena covets the village priest and finally gets her wish, but at a dire cost. Ostracized from her surroundings, she choses suicide and her ghost haunts the village until she finally finds her place again.Balthazar, the manor's forester, covets a life not his, more land, more money, a prettier wife.A dangerous desire.One which eventually leads to madness, mayhem and murder.

Milosz sketches these characters with a light brush.Milosz leaves out emotional depth for the sake of proving his teleology.Thus, the characters, Thomas included, often seem like indistinct shadows cast in the background.But Milosz's sun, the portrayal of nature in all its savage colors, nonetheless burns an indelible image on the brain if not the heart.'The Issa Valley' is not only a vibrant and melancholy journey around that world that surrounds us but a detached, yet oddly moving, examination of those passions within us which hunger to connect with something greater.Those longing for such a journey would do well to pick up 'The Issa Valley.' ... Read more

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Interrelated essays by the Nobel Laureate on his adopted home of California, which Lewis Hyde, writing in The Nation, called "remarkable, morally serious and thought-provoking essays, which strive to lay aside the barren categories by which we have understood and judged our state . . . Their subject is the frailty of modern civilization."
... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Works even as a translation.
I'm a native Pole, so it's easy for me to say "Milosz is great".I can read his works in the original language he has written them in,however, as person who uses the English language on the daily basis, I canalso say "He is the poet of the world". In this book, Miloszshows his talent at its best.Descriptive, enigmatic and feeling. Thankyou for that, Czeslaw,this books expressed your feelings so eloquently thatit helped me express mine. ... Read more

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Fascinating look at the origins of Modernism
There are several aspects to 'Legends of Modernity' that make it worth recommending - the immediacy of its subject matter, its relevance to today, the lively mind of the author - but above all, I'll have to admit to developing a sense of hero worship for Czeslaw Milosz since I've read it.These essays, written in Warsaw in 1942-43 during the Nazi occupation, were his efforts to discover "Why ...the European spirit succumb(ed) to such a devastating disaster".Watching footage of smiling German crowds cheering Hitler as he stormed through his tirades, I have often wondered the same.Political theory and historical events do not give me satisfactory answers. Perhaps there are none, but Mr. Milosz's inquest into the spirit of his times, written from amidst the rubble, is an amazing intellectual record - not only because of his insights, which are certainly interesting stepping stones for further thought, but for the man's grit and tenacity and faith.

'Legends of Modernity' is not an account of Mr. Milosz's experiences during the occupation - that is rarely commented on.Instead, it is an attempt to make sense of events, and its basic thrust is that the particular madness of both National Socialism and Stalinism did not arise circumstantially, but that they flourished because the cumulative effect of humanistic ideas over the centuries had slowly and almost imperceptibly prepared the modern mind to accept destructive ideologies as not only natural but desirable.The author's contention is that this build-up of humanistic ideas, these 'legends', is the skeletal structure on which Modernity is constructed, which in turn set the stage for the various destructive isms of the early and mid twentieth century.

That specific observation is probably not groundbreaking, not now or then, though the usual bogeymen for this argument are Nietzche, Marx, and Darwin.Those three have a role to play, according to Mr. Milosz, but only at the end of a long chain - what I found surprising, and fascinating, was how the author connected his 'modernity legends' to people with which I would not normally have associated them.Daniel Defoe, Balzac, Stendhal, André Gide, and even William James all take center stage, and illustrate, through their literature, examples of the legends and myths that facilitated man's rejection of a supernatural force as a limiting factor on his behavior.Though I understood some of these authors and their roles in the formation of modern thought, I'd never before considered them as Mr. Milosz does here - as a linked group reflecting the blow each generation gavein turn to the wedge that society was driving between God and man.

The first strike of the wedge's tip is almost unnoticeable.Robinson Crusoe, somewhat of a prodigal before his shipwreck, discovers religion and a moral life away from 'wicked' society, and away from the communal aspects of the church.As Jaroslaw Anders sums up nicely in the introduction, "The human soul becomes its own government and its own church".The succeeding essays follow this basic idea as it develops and changes through the years, leading up to the pragmatism of William James, which sweeps aside objective truth and only recognizes the 'truth' of action.The concluding essays, while still relevant, are not as linearly connected, dealing with the experience of war, and critiques of religious and artistic thought and individuals in the interwar decades of the twenties and thirties.

The author isn't really in the business of drawing dogmatic conclusions, though it isn't difficult to see where his sympathies lie, especially when you consider the wartime correspondence between Mr. Milosz and Jerzy Andrzejewski, also included in this volume.I have never been interested enough in the personal letters of any figure to read a volume dedicated to it, so I have no experience with which to compare this small selection.Their archival value seems evident, and they do give insight into both men and their thought processes during the occupation, but overall I thought this section weaker than the preceding essays.Much of the argument between the two concerns rationalism and irrationalism, and the role of Catholicism and faith between these two techniques, but their exchange sounds weighty and ponderous to me, almost affected.

It isn't necessary to accept all of Mr. Milosz's arguments to appreciate this collection - I didn't, but I found that just by reading the way he framed them that I had a clearer picture of the various ideas and movements (and how they are connected) leading up to the twentieth century.Too often, with these sort of discussions, I find myself sinking into a pit of jargon from which I can't break free.That doesn't mean 'Legends of Modernity' was easy for me either, just that there didn't seem to be an artificial barrier between author and reader.

Finally, as I read through these essays, I developed a distinctly favorable impression of Czeslaw Milosz, apart from his intellectual powers.This is harder for me to articulate, but I think of him as a role model for the thinking man - a man who didn't lose himself to the madness that surrounded him.

Well, here we (still) are ..
What is striking about this collection of essays is their modernity. Nothing dated here. Each essay explores specific "legends" through which modern Man gradually painted himself into a corner. Each of the Legends carries a specific toxin. It's disturbing to sense the accuracy of Milosz's deductions about the insanity he was watching (WWII and the Gulags), not as blips, or abnormalities, but as the natural culmination of trends that began with the alleged liberation of Man from irrationality. The problem is that so little has substantially changed since the middle of the 20th century. These are long-term changes, and if this is an accurate analysis, very little stands in the way of further manifestations. Perhaps we should examine current events in a different light.

The letters between Milosz and Andrzejewski add the element of personal debate to the essays. The whole book, notes from an apocalypse, might be expected to bear a "historical" patina. Instead it testifies to how similar we are conceptually to the people of that era.

What the greatest poet of the 20th Century was worried about under German occupation
When Abbe Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes was asked what he did during the French revolution, he responded "J'ai vecu"--"I survived".For many, that was exactly their ambition when they found themselves in Nazi-occupied Warsaw between 1939 and 1944 and it often involved daily heroism. But today we admire those that joined the armed resistance, the couriers that kept the links with the Government- in-Exile, the teachers that taught in underground schools, and the intellectuals who sought to protect the Polish culture that, in the Nazi scheme of things, had no business existing.

"Legends of Modernity" is a collection of eight essays by Milosz and an exchange of nine essay-length letters between Milosz and Jerzy Andrzejewski written in 1942-43.For a reader who would not pay attention to where and when these essays were written, but who was merely interested in the history of European ideas and wanted to observe a keen intelligence at work, there is plenty here to keep him fascinated.

"The basic theme, threaded through numerous digressions, is an attempt to clear the field of convictions about man's natural impulses and also about the natural conditions of his life--not without the hope that by destroying the legends he creates about himself, it will be possible to locate the surest footing.The chapter about Daniel Dafoe is aimed against belief in natural goodness outside of civilization.The chapter about Balzac describes the evil spell cast by civilization conceived of as an automatic process subject to laws of natural evolution.The chapters about Stendhal and Andre Gide grapple with the position of an individual who identified the laws of nature with the laws of human society, and taking it further, arrived at a cult of power.The chapter about William James criticized the acceptance of fictions and legends as a normal condition that we cannot move beyond.The fragment from Tolstoy's "War and Peace" is used as an example of disillusionment with civilization and the miseries connected with this disillusionment. Marian Zdziechowski makes his appearance as a specimen of religion founded on the innate demands of the heart.The rather long sketch about Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz shines a light on metaphysical theories of art." (From Milosz's 1944 Preface)

While the essays are quite detached and calm, the letters to and from Andzejewski are less so.Their chief theme is the crisis of the Western Civilization and the role that the Catholic Church might have in rescuing it.The feeling of being affected by what was happening in the streets outside is somewhat easier to discern.

One can read this book to be dazzled by the display of critical wisdom by a 30-year old author. Or, one can remember that the writer was a simple laborer in 1942 when this book was written, and one could look at this book as an assertion of independence from the everyday reality, however horrible. In this sense, the book ought to be read alongside books such as Bartoszewski's "1859 Dni Warszawy" or Szarota's "Okupowanej Warszawy Dzien Powszedni".

Josif Brodsky saw Milosz as a 20th centuryJob.Nothing less.

(Originally written for the Polish Library in Washington DC)

Perfect for intellectual poet exile thinking
Czeslaw Milosz, who won a Nobel Prize for literature in 1980, after becoming a professor at the University of California at Berkeley in 1960, lived in Warsaw when it was occupied by the Nazis during the winter of 1942-1943, and wrote the essays and letters now translated into English in LEGENDS OF MODERNITY during that winter.The book does not have an index, and the Contents on pages v-vi only includes the names of four Polish authors, one of whom (the Catholic writer Jerzy Andrzejewski 1909-1985) wrote four letters to Czeslaw Milosz which are included on pages 160-172, 187-201 (dated September 1, 1942), 213-225, and 239-244.Notes to the 1996 Polish Edition on pages 259-262 reveal that the letters were exchanged in a café in the center of Warsaw, a coffeehouse with two pianos where the bartender was film director Antoni Bohdziewicz.Though the Notes to the Essays on pages 263-266 include French, Dutch, and German writers, the only American cited in "The Boundaries of Art" might be Edgar Allan Poe (n.5, n. 6, and n. 7, p. 265).William James is mentioned in "Absolute Freedom" in connection with Nietzsche, André Gide, and breaking with "Platonism," the traditional understanding of good and evil.(p. 54).The fascist movements were the first examples to come to mind of man-God themes.(p. 55).

As a poet, Czeslaw Milosz has a very intellectual approach to political difficulties in historical times.Rather than attempting to locate the themes which I found interesting in the essays, I would prefer to adopt a bad analogy for the history of the twentieth century and attempt to apply thoughts from Milosz to explain the aspects of the analogy which relate to the contents of this book.Having just done a little research on videos that are currently available about Evel Knievel, I would like to apply his assertion that he was like a Roman general who believed that what was considered impossible would eventually be done.One famous stunt involved a motorcycle jump over the fountain at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas.As I remember the video clip shown in the movie starring George Hamilton, Evel Knievel was flying prone over his motorcycle with his hands on the handlebars when the rear wheel of the cycle came down on the short side of the lip at the far edge of the fountain, bouncing the motorcycle up into the vulnerable underside of Evel Knievel's body, busting bones and rendering Knievel unconscious for a month.The stunt had a certain appeal because many people had seen the fountain at Caesar's Palace and were genuinely curious about what a motorcycle could do besides wheelies.Whatever terror Evel Knievel may have felt, he was clearly outnumbered by the crowd who wanted to see the stunt accomplished or the splatter that would result otherwise.

The first essay in Legends of Modernity, "The Legend of the Island," on Robinson Crusoe's island, is about being able to free "himself from the evil influences of the crowd," (p. 8)."The Legend of the Monster City" examines Balzac's celebration of "The observer, smiling benignly at the picture of mindless desires and mindless efforts, is like a child standing over an anthill.He inserts a stick and is delighted with the insects' chaotic scurrying.The crazier the actions of his victims, the more they lead to total infatuation"(pp. 22-23).The third essay, "The Legend of the Will," discusses THE RED AND THE BLACK by Stendhal."Julien Sorel is totally consumed by ambition."(p. 36)."And he gave tit for tat, with hatred and contempt."(p. 44).As a fellow exile-to-be, Milosz shows great appreciation for "The matter of Stendhal's national defection (he considered himself spiritually a Milanese, not a Frenchman) demonstrates how much effort he invested in extracting himself from the authority of others' opinions, how painstakingly he selected his privileged position, a position on the sidelines."(p. 44).

Religion is the main topic considered from William James's THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE in "Beyond Truth and Falsehood."The same essay ventures into "a contradiction that was the driving force of Byron's creative work."(p. 68).Being able to identify the source of creative tension is like Evel Knievel's ability to conceive of stunts that people would like to see, however dangerously the actual experience might turn out to fall short of the perfect expectation."Is this the inevitable consequence of the collision of several value systems appearing in a simplified form between the hour of history and the hour of religion?I think not."(p. 69).Dangerous myths include "the myth of labor or the myth of the dictatorship of the proletariat, propagated by the various branches of Marxism."(p. 72).

An essay, "The Experience of War," in which "we are condemned to self-examination" (p. 75), takes a stab at Pierre Bezukhov in Tolstoy's WAR AND PEACE in which, "A vague imperative, incomprehensible even to him, crystallizes into a bizarre decision:Pierre decides to stab Napoleon, the author of all his fatherland's woes."(p. 77).Similarly, "To be sure, there is no truth, no beauty, no goodness--but there is German truth, German beauty, and German goodness; and thus the void was filled, and within the confines of the new canon there was room for heroism, dedication, friendship, and so forth."(p. 82).The following essay, "Zdziechowski's Religiosity," considers flirtatiousness as adopting a particular mentalité totally lacking in the statement written in 1922 that, "We are a small part of Europe, we are linked with her fate, we are infected with the same diseases of communism and nationalism as she is, and together with her, biting at each other in a mad rage, we are rushing headlong into the abyss."(p. 91).Key to understanding the identity of dogma is that it "is constantly acquiring new forms, is continually realized anew, and by the very necessity of struggle in a changing historical environment, it profits from new ways of understanding the world."(p. 93). ... Read more

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The Nobel Prize-winning poet Czeslaw Milosz began his remarkable A Treatise on Poetry in the winter of 1955 and finished it in the spring of 1956. It was published originally in parts in the Polish émigré journal Kultura. Now it is available in English for the first time in this expert translation by the award-winning American poet Robert Hass.

A Treatise on Poetry is a great poem about some of the most terrible events in the twentieth century. Divided into four sections, the poem begins at the end of the nineteenth century as a comedy of manners and moves with a devastating momentum through World War I to the horror of World War II. Then it takes on directly and plainly the philosophical abyss into which the European cultures plunged.

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A great poet's most important work
This long and complex poem poses the explicit against the inexplicit, the aesthetic against the historical, nature against culture and history, history against freedom and human aspiration. The preface prescribes a simple enough formula for poetry: plain language "in the mother tongue," images, rhythm, dreaminess. But it notes that poetry written to this formula "was bypassed by the dry sharp world." That world is Poland of the first half of the twentieth century. The problem posed by this treatise is how poetry can account for reality, specifically the reality of history, and still function aesthetically. The problem occurs not because an allegiance to history is an adequate response to human difficulties-individual memory, freedom, and universal aesthetic ideals are superior to it-but because history represents a necessity that must be adequately acknowledged. The simple answer is that poetry must include the actual world, and not settle for merely recording emotions, as some of the poets of Milosz's youth did. But this is more easily said than done. Talented poets, many of them named in the Treatise, have failed to find adequate ways of accounting for historical reality. Negotiating between aesthetic idealism and coruscating rationalism, uniting "Freedom and Necessity," is the task Milosz sets for himself. The poem is divided into four parts, plus the brief preface. "Beautiful Times," the first section, depicts Krakow, the seat of polish culture, around 1900. The second section, "The Capital," set in Warsaw, assesses poet by poet the state of Polish poetry before the Second World War, and criticizes its inability to account for the massive rush of history that was about to occur. The third and most powerful section, "The Spirit of History," depicts through scenes of the Occupation in Poland the terrible consequence of Nazi and Polish idealism. Both represent the failure of history, culture, and language to form coherent and realistic world-views: Nazi idealism undermined by inhuman brutality, Polish idealism betrayed by incoherent and outdated romanticism. The last section, set in Pennsylvania, considers America as an escape from history and culture into nature, which Milosz finds "hostile to art," and examines the implications for a poet of being in such a place (he would soon return to Europe) after the great failure of poetry and culture embodied in the war.

A reading experience and textual event not to be missed.
Every poet should read this seminal work. And if you're not a poet, you should read "A Treatise" to understand poetry, learn history and tune into your inner self. It is a reading experience and a textual event that should not be missed.Milosz has written one of the great poems of our century. It is a shame that it took half a century to get the full English translation out, which corrects a serious deficit in the cultural terms of trade between Poland and the English-speaking world. It is as if Shakespeare's Hamlet or Othello has only just been translated into Polish. If you're familiar with "The Wasteland" of TS Eliot, you will compare "A Treatise on Poetry" very favourably to to the 1922 modernist classic.Indeed, it is an improvement on Eliot's masterpiece in four crucial respects. First, "A Treatise" maintains an overall structure and form that the amorphous "Wasteland" lacks. The English translation may not have retained the metrical structure of the original, but conveys the sense of form Milosz carefully constructed to carry his theme.Second, although the poem manipulates myth and symbols to register the brutal truths of our century, it does not shy from recording historical events or capturing the drama of individual lives. Despite its wide historical canvas, stories of our innermost being are told and you will enter the skin of real lives long consigned to dust. Third, the poem addresses you at several levels. Its tone ranges from the bright, breezy and hopeful to the elegaic and tragic and downshifts to a deep and quiet understanding.The modulations in mood and voice are exceptionally rendered, making the reading of the poem an experience in itself. Fourth, "A Treatise on Poetry" lives up to its title without ever being ponderous, technical or trite. Reading the detailed notes to illuminate the symbolic shorthand of the verse enhances your reading experience. With an intimate understanding of Polish poetry, its pracititioners and their interaction with the driving forces of the first half-century, Milosz offers a compelling portrait of poetry's potential, its limitations, and its reach. You will come away despairing of humanity, but sanguine about the value and use of poetry. In conclusion, Milosz has written a great work of art that defies easy paraphrase, facile criticism or quick comparisions. It must simply be experienced. I am quite confident that it will be considered one of the greatest poems of our century in the years ahead. ... Read more

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When a European poet becomes an expatriate living in America, what adjustments and sacrifices should he make? What should he resist? By the same token, how should English-speakers modify their expectations when they read his work? Donald Davie considers such questions and others in this first book on the 1980 Polish Nobel laureate who has been living in the United States for twenty-five years. According to Davie, Milosz holds to a conviction that the responsible poet today, whether under totalitarianism or in the free world, cannot afford to write only poetry that is lyrical, because to do so is to give up using language to change society. In this way he raises questions that have to do not only with himself as a Pole and with Polish literature specifically but with poetry generally, including its present status and its foreseeable future. His work, Davie argues, is more ambitious than American and British readers have yet realized and demands that they radically rethink many of their preconceptions. ... Read more