Poet in the New World. Poems 1946-1953

Poet in the New World. Poems, 1946-1953 by Czesław Miłosz. Translated and edited by Robert Hass and David Frick. New York: Ecco, 2025, 143 pp. $28 (hardcover)

 Most American readers who encounter this new collection of translations from the Polish will rightly assume that the "New World" of the title refers to the United States, a valid assumption considering that they were largely written during the period that Miłosz, having secured Polish Diplomatic Service posts in New York,  Washington D.C., and later Paris, found himself in a Western culture far different from "the most unhappy land" ("In Warsaw") he left behind in the grim, rubble-strewn aftermath of the Warsaw Uprising.  But in The Captive Mind (1953) [i]  — the poet’s reflection on the dilemmas and compromises created by Moscow's imposition of socialist realism on Poland's literary life, and an articulation of his philosophy on the interaction of art and political ideology — postwar Eastern Europe and the world as a whole have entered a new era. Miłosz frequently refers to the totalitarian "New Faith" emanating from Joseph Stalin's "Imperium" or "the Center" that will not only affect Polish society in the sphere of granular interpersonal relations ("A smile that appears at the wrong moment, a glance that is not all it should be can occasion dangerous suspicions and accusations" [TCM, 54]) but will reshape global politics for the next century, engendering a divisive, violent rivalry for dominance between Eastern and Western powers, all under the overarching threat of mutually assured atomic destruction.          

The poems in Poet in the New World reveal Miłosz's internal struggle with a wrenching dichotomy: how to choose between acknowledging (and by doing so resisting) his time's sociopolitical realities while remaining true to the poet's call to be "the ambassador of dreams" ("Treatise on Morals"). He needed to somehow walk the tightrope between pain and paean, between polemic and epiphany. To do this, he had to reverse the prevailing Soviet definition of poetry from "the individual temperament refracted through social convention" to ""social convention refracted through the individual temperament" (TCM, 56).  Miłosz's deep reading and translation of Shakespeare, Blake, Wordsworth, T.S. Eliot, and other Western writers led to an appreciation for literary aesthetics (if not a personal aspiration to someday attain their canonical status), but he had been an activist since before the war, unafraid to express antiracist and leftist views. After the Soviet incursion, Polish writers and artists faced tremendous pressure to interpret Moscow's "New Faith" in a positive light or else face the consequences. Miłosz saw many of his literary contemporaries submit to authority in order maintain their precarious lives and livelihoods, but at the expense of their artistic integrity: "Caught between contradiction and contradiction, / He [the compromised poet] produces a new choice, / And what he chooses is never what should have been"  ("Two Men in Rome").          

Retreating into wholly aesthetic or decorative poetry in the face of authoritarianism was no solution — "I was witness to misfortunes, I know what it means / To cheat life with the coloring of memory"  he writes in "On the Song of a Bird on the Banks of the Potomac" — but a dishonest escape from reality and a betrayal of one's social responsibility in difficult times.  Highly conscious of his esteemed reputation among Poland's literati if not of a potentially wider literary legacy, he writes: "Those who write anything in the Polish tongue / other than tender odes, threatening to no one, / Can expect nothing in return but hatred" ("The Faust of Warsaw," 119). That he still wrote poems in Polish some years after arriving in America suggests that his audience was the readership he left behind in Europe, a signal that he hadn't abandoned them or forgotten their hardships. He depended on the writing of poetry to keep himself honest. As he admits in The Captive Mind, "My poetry has always been a means of checking on myself." (TCM, 216)          

For a poet so attuned to the infinite beauties of nature and their prominence in his prewar memories, it was difficult not to find solace in descriptive lyricism and "the coloring of memory," and indeed Poet in the New World quivers with ants, butterflies, midges, cardinals, bees, hummingbirds, and a kaleidoscopic palette of blossoming  flowers. Though living in major U.S. cities, Miłosz writes often of the natural beauty he finds there:

In pink fingers of magnolia,
In the downy softness of May,
In the leap from branch to branch
Of a bird, pure colored, a cardinal,
Between breasts of calm rivers
Lies this city,
Into which I ride with a bouquet of stiff roses
On my knees, like a Jack of Hearts,
Shouting for joy of spring
And the shortness of life.

("The Journey")

At the same time, however, the relative peace of the city, even its public parks, fails to banish memories of what he has witnessed. "Summer Movies in Central Park" begins idyllically enough: 

Trees spring from the ancient bedrock
And the sprays of leaves fall like chords.
When nature becomes a theater,
The silvery machinery of the skyline shifts. 

but soon gives way to an unshakeable memory of a ravaged Warsaw:

The water rushing along the road flutters
The dress on the corpse of a woman,
As the city descends long days and nights
Into legend, which won't compensate for its disasters. 

After fifteen ever more meditative stanzas on war and destiny, the poem concludes on a note that is almost ironic in its modest resignation:  

There are, according to the Greek philosophers,
Seven stages to the journey. We may not be familiar
With them all, so let this wandering road
Through the ashes be your chosen path. 

And receive as a gift an afternoon's description
Of this excessively proud land
And with it my hope that books will preserve
This little drawing of Central Park.

But then the accomplishments of poets (little drawings) can be nothing but modest when measured against the achievements of those whose work changes the course of civilization. In "To Albert Einstein" — whom Miłosz had met in his diplomatic capacity — he laments, "I regret being so little able / To help people value the great beauty of the world."    

That limitation, if it can be considered so, is in Miłosz's case a matter of conscience and philosophy.  If, as he writes, "order is inconstant. / Chaos encompasses our intentions" ("Siegfried and Erika"), then the positive influence of a poet, no matter how well-intentioned, may be chimerical.  Beauty and horror can intermix, and one wonders if William Blake's "The Sick Rose" may have influenced Miłosz's "Earth":

A butterfly lighting on your flowers stains its wings with blood,
Blood gathers in the mouths of tulips,
Shines, starlike, inside a morning glory
And washes the grains of wheat.  

The poem is addressed to Poland itself, where the recollected images of the poet's innocent youth have been infected and corrupted by the invisible worm of experience. "This age, set ablaze by human bodies" ("My Mother's Grave") cannot be redeemed by bucolic imagery or disingenuous if well-meaning representation. Ideals need not be abandoned as long as one recognizes the repeated sacrifices and commitments needed to reach them: "The precious virtue of freedom remains / And it need to be won every day" ("To Laura").

One might imagine, twenty years after Miłosz's death and eighty years since the end of World War II, what the poet would have made of contemporary Gaza, whose staggering destruction echoes the ruined landscape of Warsaw in 1945. He would no doubt be dismayed, though not surprised, at how humanity remains plagued by its presumed need to-kill-or-be-killed, at how the opposition of artist and politician remains. No doubt he would be cheered, though, by the work of Mosab Abu Toha, the Palestinian poet now living in the U.S. and, like Miłosz, writing of the tragedy wracking his Gazan homeland.  Abu Toha's poem "Memories are Flowers" seems to consciously reverse Miłosz's "Earth" and Blake's "The Sick Rose," investing positive memories with the power to endure: "No matter how deeply / inhumed the bones, / the worm of sweet memories / shall find their way."  Consider these lines in the context of Miłosz's ""O my friends, / Speakers of different languages, / If we are given disaster / a dream will outlast it" ("Paris, 1951”).

Translators Hass and Frick are to be commended for finding a register that conveys Miłosz's passion, anxiety, and intellect in a way that reflects both the poet's inner turmoil and his faith in the power of poetry to offer some measure of strength in the face of evil, its capacity to find, as Miłosz did in the ruins of Warsaw, "A few morning glories / Among the ashes" ("Treatise on Morals").

1.  Abbreviated here as TCM. Page numbers refer to the 1990 edition published by Vintage International.

Reviewer Fred Muratori’s three full-length poetry collections are Despite Repeated Warnings, The Spectra, and A Civilization. His poems and short prose have appeared in such journals as Redivider, Cloudbank, The American Journal of Poetry, and Gargoyle.