The Poet's Work: An Introduction to Czeslaw Milosz. by Leonard Nathan; Arthur QuinnReview by: Madeline G. LevineSlavic Review, Vol. 52, No. 1 (Spring, 1993), p. 134Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2499603 .

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134 Slavic Review

The Poet's Work: An Introduction to Czeslaw Milosz. By Leonard Nathan and Arthur Quinn. Cambridge: Harvard Univer-sity Press, 1991. xi, 178 pp. Index. $29.95, hard bound; $9.95, paper.

Let us begin with some clarifications: both the title and the subtitle of Leonard Na- than's and Arthur Quinn's new book may be somewhat misleading. By "the poet's work" the authors mean not such workshop matters as style, versification strategies, lexicon and so forth, but the broad philosophical questions that are implicitly or explicitly pursued in both the verse and the prose writings of the poet. Their "intro- duction to Czeslaw Milosz" is actually an introduction only to those works of Milosz that are available in English translation. A very large and representative portion of the entire coIrpus is available in translation, however, mostly in versions that have been approved, if not actually worked on, by Milosz. By nlow, Milosz belongs to American as well as to Polish poetry. The authors' linguistic limitations in approaching Milosz are not, therefore, a significant handicap for the kind of broad-gauge analysis that they pursue in their study.

The Poet's Work explores Milosz's development as a writer who has grappled throughout his career with issues of enormous moment: the inadequacy of language to represent the particularities of existence; the inadequacy of essentially linear lit- erary forms to represent the multi-layeredness of our experience of the world; the ephemerality of human existence; God's apparent absence from the world; the splen- dor and the brutality of the natural and the social world.

The great virtue of The Poet's Work is that its authors treat Milosz seriously as a religious writer. They refuse to dismiss as mere metaphor his insistent exploration of the demonic at the core of existence, and they discuss the dualism of this "ecstatic pessimist" clearly and sensitively. They approach his work with an excellent first chap- ter on that "neglected" collection of essays, Visions front San Francisco Bay (1969)- neglected because "Milosz's visioIn of ouI predicamen-lt is enough to make any coI- placent reader wince." After this introduction, their book is structured chl-onologi- cally, which is a reasonable approach but one that inevitbly leads to a great deal of tiresome repetition, especially since the authors are at pains to demonstrate an un- derlying unity of philosophical concerns. In their integrated readin-g of Milosz's poetry and prose, Nathan and Quinn are particular-ly good at drawiing attentionl to the cen- trality of the dialogues that Milosz has engaged in with other writers over the years and at demonstrating the resonances of those dialogues in the poet's work. A central theme in this discussion is the attractiveness for Milosz of both the stark manicheain vision and the workshipful ecstatic (Swedenborgian) visioIn of this world, an apparen-t coIntr-adictioin which the poet resolves, when- he is at peace with himnself, by celebrating what is. "I stare and stare. It seems I was called for this:/To glorify things just because they are" (from "Blacksmith Shop," Provinces: Poems 1987-1991 [1991], published too late to be considered in The Poet's Work).

Avid readers of Milosz will find nothing to object to and little that is new here. The Poet's Work cannot compete with the probing analyses of Aleksander- Fiut's Moment wvieczny: Poezja Czestava Milosza (1987)-available in English as The Eternal Moment: The Poetry of Czeslaw Milosz (1990)-or with Ewa Czarnecka's riveting transcript of her conversations with the poet about his life and work, Podro6ny swiata: Rozmowy z Czestawemn Miloszem. Komentarze (1983). But they, too, will profit from the authors' discussion of Milosz's search for a looser, mor-e inclusive, mixed verse/prose form that would contain a multiplicity of temporal perspectives and a polyphony of competing voices-a search that culminates in the "the relentlessly polyphonic" Unattainable Earth (1986). One wishes that the author-s had paid some attention in this context to Milosz's prodigious work as an anthologizer and translator (into and from Polish), an aspect of his creative work that has not yet received the critical attention it deserves. A more important wish: that in their solemn and intelligent discussion of what Milosz is about, the authors had also managed to convey the captivating beauty of his poetry. Sadly, this does not come across.

MADELINE: G. LEVINE

University of North Carolina

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