LECTURE 19
THE POETS OF POLAND: MILOSZ, HERBERT, SZYMBORSKA
1. THE NAZI PROJECT
In the First World War, all of the major European nations had taken the field on behalf of imperialism and nationalism, the two major issues in contemporary international politics. They did so even though imperialism had not made a vital contribution to their economic prosperity, and although it was impossible to redraw the map of Europe along strictly national lines. The enormous power of the image of a homogeneous national community had become apparent as early as the nineteenth century, when nationality began to supplant dynastic legitimacy as the organizing principle of the European community. The dream of economic self-sufficiency through imperialism arose in the same period, and was reinforced by the Great Depression.
Once in power, Hitler and the Nazis began to implement their extreme programs of imperialism and nationalism. They committed themselves to a break with the world economy and sought to establish a self-contained, independent economic unit that could wage war on a world scale. And they explicitly set themselves the goal of a homogeneous national community, to be achieved by population transfers and (eventually) by extermination.
The German occupation of Belgium during the First World War had been unprecedented in its brutality: it included the shooting of hostages, the destruction of churches and libraries, and the near-starvation of the civilian population. But the Nazi occupations of the Second World War produced occupations of far greater brutality and scope. The extreme imperialist program designed to achieve economic self-sufficiency in practice turned into a vast system of slave labor. And the extreme nationalist program to achieve ethnic homogeneity produced not only expulsion or ghettoization of whole populations but genocide.
In Poland, for example, Hitler sent execution squads along with his troops with orders to shoot the Polish leadership class, the aristocracy, the intelligentsia, the priests, and the politicians. The goal was to turn Poland into a vast pool of ignorant slave labor. A decree of October 1939 subjected all Polish men and women from eighteen to sixty to "compulsory public labor." By 1942 the Nazis had brought more than a million Poles to Germany as laborers, and meanwhile they had confiscated the most fertile farmland in Poland and settled German farmers there. One in five of the entire Polish population perished during the war, including three million Polish Jews. Poles remain proud that Poland alone in Nazi-occupied Europe produced no "Quislings," no puppet regime to collaborate with the Germans. However, this was partly the result of Nazi policy, which did not contemplate a client state in Poland, but rather an enslaved one.
It's not surprising that the resistance in Poland was more broadly based than it was in, say, France. "To stay alive, Neil Ascherson has written, "required not only luck but lawbreaking, and most of the population was involved in black marketeering, rackets in stolen German supplies, theft from German-run factories and offices, bribery and forgery of every kind of document. An intense solidarity developed among Poles, who devised elaborate alarm systems and code-words to warn each other of nearby Germans or a round-up in the next street" (See, for example, Zbigniew Herbert's brilliant poem "Our Fear.")
As they had done in the 19th century, when the Russians occupied most of the country, Poles established an underground state, including schools, law courts, and a clandestine army. The aim of the "Home Army" was to prepare for an insurrection on a national scale, which would come into the open and liberate Poland as foreign assistance approached. Unfortunately, that foreign "assistance" appeared in the form of the Red Army, which, under Stalin's orders, stood on the outskirts of Warsaw while the Nazis brutally crushed the uprising there in August 1944 (just as they had crushed the uprising of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943). The Rising, intended to last only a few days before help arrived, went on for two months of desperate street fighting that cost 200,000 lives and left the capital in ruins.
During the war the Home Army harbored escaped Allied prisoners, and set up a spectacularly successful intelligence service. It provided the Allies with details and even large fragments of German weapons: the vital Enigma machine that encrypted German messages, and the V-1 pilotless aircraft and the V-2 rocket, which Hitler hoped would win the war even as late as 1944-45. In spite of its shortage of weapons, the Home Army's sheer size and scope enabled it to tie down large German forces, to kill 150,000 German soldiers over the course of the war, and to threaten German lines of communication with the Eastern Front.
In a series of lectures he gave at Harvard after winning the Nobel Prize for literature, the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz remarked: "The poetry of the twentieth century inherited the basic quarrel between bohemian and philistine. It was not the best preparation for the encounter with a reality that grew more gigantic and more ominous with every decade, increasingly eluding the grasp of the mind." Because Poland is situated geographically between Germany and Russia–which is to say, in the 1930s and 1940s, between Hitler and Stalin–Polish poets were forced to confront the catastrophe of their country and the Holocaust. And Milosz was among the first to do this, in a series of poems whose major themes were the magnitude of loss and the absurd privilege of survival. As he wrote in his "Elegy for N.N.": "We learned so much, this you know well:/how, gradually, what could not be take away/is taken. People. Countrysides./ And the heart does not die when one thinks it should./ We smile, there is bread and tea on the table."
"In the poetry of Milosz and his East European contemporaries," Sven Birkerts writes, "brevity is a kind of shorthand for the enormity of the unspeakable. Adjectives and adverbs are very often eschewed in favor of nouns and verbs–the most rudimentary linguistic tools." By the nineteenth century, Milosz believed, poetry had lost its original sacred function, mediating between gods and mortals. Poets tried to compensate by turning their art into a religion: art for art's sake. But in doing so, such advanced poets as Mallarmé had lost contact with the broad public and with the "bardic" function of poetry. In the extreme conditions of twentieth-century history, however, the poet's attitude toward language changes. According to Milosz, "it recovers it simplest function and is again serving a purpose; no one doubts that language must name reality, which exists objectively, massive, tangible, and terrifying in its concreteness." Birkerts again: "Disaster thus renews the bond between word and thing, and the poet, as servant of the word, is in a position to bring poetry out of its terrible isolation."
The poet once again becomes a bard, the conscience of the community, but he or she must avoid rhetoric. But how? With restraint, humility, irony, brevity, clarity, and honesty. The Polish poets resemble Akhmatova and Brecht is this respect: that is why they are so popular in their own country and why their verse translates so well into English. And the poet confronts contemporary history: as one of our best commentators on poetry, Helen Vendler writes, "for Milosz, the poet is irrevocably a person in history, and the interchange between external event and the individual life is the matrix of poetry."
Milosz writes in Polish, but he was born in 1911 in Lithuania, which would become part of the resurrected Polish state after the First World War. The son of a civil engineer and the nephew of a famous poet (Oskar Milosz), he completed his university studies in Wilno (now Vilnius), the principal city of Lithuania. The Lithuanians, Milosz tells us, were, like their Baltic neighbors the Latvians and Estonians, closer in culture to the Scandinavians than the Slavs, and their language, surviving for many centuries among the peasantry, was closer to ancient Sanskrit than any other European language. But there were few speakers of that language in the capital, where Polish, Belorussian and Yiddish were the principal dialects. Wilno was a beautiful Baroque city, located at the confluence of two rivers and surrounded by hills, and therefore compact in comparison to Warsaw. Like Prague, it had an ancient Jewish quarter, a labyrinth of narrow streets dating back to the Middle Ages, but this one was still flourishing and Yiddish-speaking. Wilno was a "multicultural" city, which spelled trouble in the era of ferocious nationalisms. By the time he published his first book of verse, "Poem of Frozen Time," at age 21, Milosz was a leader of the Catastrophist group of poets, who were so named because of their prediction of impending worldwide disaster.
Milosz describes how disaster overtook Lithuania: "On June 15, 1940, Soviet tanks rolled in, implementing a secret clause of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of August 23, 1939. Imagine the United States invaded and occupied, imagine 30 million citizens deported to labor camps in the frozen wastes of northern Canada near the polar circle, Such, more or less, was the proportion of losses in this small country of 2.5 million." But by the time this catastrophe occurred, Milosz was in Warsaw, the Polish capital, where an even greater disaster was imminent.
There is a basic tension in Milosz's work between his native impulse as a lyric poet–to celebrate the world–and his responsibility as a witness of successive catastrophes. No one has described that tension better than Helen Vendler: "It is in the peculiar balance between a juridical, frowning severity and a lyrical, melting attachment that Milosz's power to unsettle us lies. From the start, Milosz was a natural ecstatic, destined for intense and radiant perception. But everything in his life after his childhood was a scourging of his native temper, forcing his gaze onto war, death, and the murder of the Jews, and the moral impossibility of life in devastated cities, where one stole and cheated and lied to live; later he was to know the betrayals of truth and of old loyalties under the Communist regime. Milosz reads like a soul who has received a wound from which he has never recovered: an air of doom hangs over every moment of joy, so that the simplest happiness always appears as a reprieve or furlough from an evil sure to reassert itself. The precariousness of life and writing is always felt in Milosz; his contemporaries who died or were killed or were silenced contribute to the voice he has become–a voice almost necessarily that of a generation rather than that of a single man."
On the one hand, Milosz constantly underlines his amazement at the sensuous beauty of the world: "You watch what is, though it fades away,/ And are grateful for every moment of your being." Many of his poems, ecstatic in tone, offer epiphanies–sudden illuminations of the beauty of the goodness, truth, or beauty hidden behind the external appearance of things. On the other hand, there is his preoccupation with the mystery of evil, especially in its twentieth-century form: "The twentieth century has given us a most simple touchstone for reality: physical pain." By which he means, of course torture and genocide, among other horrors. "The task of poetry is precisely to bring into relief this irresolvable paradox and to find the means of expression that would be able to cover the infinite distance between admiration and abomination, between metaphysical rapture and ethical repulsion" (Stanislaw Baranczak).
Milosz wrote his most beautiful sequence of poems, "The World," against the background of the Nazi occupation. Here he "renders a past of depth and profound feeling in the simplest measures and the simplest words available to a poet, as though only the first syllables of the mother tongue could be words deep-rooted enough for the deepest of primal experiences" (Vendler). But soon he began to adopt a variety of voices, "to pursue the ideal of dissolving his individual voice in an all-encompassing polyphony, to 'multiply' himself and 'inhabit' objects and people, so that finally the voice of the poet speaks on behalf of all the things of this world, all the forms of our being, past and present, dead and alive" (Baranczak).
Consider for example the complex perspective of "A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto," one of Milosz's poems about the Nazis' destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto. Who is that "guardian mole"? Some red-eyed recording angel, some patriarchal historian? The answer isn't clear, but the presence of this mysterious figure within the poem challenges us to ponder the relation between the reality of evil and the recording of history.
Milosz's poems about the horrors of the Second World War are now nearly fifty years old, and he himself is about to turn ninety. He is still publishing poems and memoirs, more than ever a wintry and brooding figure, but still one of our greatest writers, and one of the last survivors of the intellectual resistance. He has outlived Hitler by 56 years, and Stalin by 48.
The image of the besieged city is pervasive in his work. Born in 1924, he was 15 years old when the Soviets annexed his hometown, the ancient city of Lvov, in September 1939. Two years later the Nazis marched in, and at the end of the war Stalin reclaimed the city and retained it within the borders the Soviet Union. The young Herbert moved to central Poland, but for him the state of siege continued: "A brilliant mind, thoroughly educated in art history and philosophy, he had to take a variety of bizarre and pitifully paid jobs–such as designer of protective wear in something called the Bureau of Research and Projects of the Peat Industry" (Stanislaw Baranczak). Herbert wrote most of his poems while his country was one of the Soviet Union's satellite states. Perhaps that is why his poetry is so full of irony: an ironic attitude, notes poet-critic Donald Davie, is one way of keeping one's dignity in a situation of impotence.
Baranczak, Herbert's biographer and the best commentator on the poetry, calls him "a fugitive from Utopia." The impossibility of human perfection is a key theme of his essays as well as his poetry. There is hope in the poetry but it's hope without a guarantee of success or salvation. Like Mandelstam, he has a cosmopolitan imagination, deeply rooted in Western culture. But he regards himself an exile from that culture, living across the border in the "gray" world of Communist Poland. It's a problem of "disinheritance." The poet yearns for the heritage of the West and regards himself as its custodian, but he and his fellow citizens live in a stifling world of bureaucratic inefficiency, economic decline, and official mendacity. It's certainly not as bad as the situation Mandelstam faced, living in the era of Stalin's terror, but it's bad enough. Squalor, not terror, is the fundamental condition of Herbert's Eastern Europe.
The poetry often takes the form of an ironic contrast between a mythical or biblical past and a bureaucratic present. Yet he complicates that opposition: "his imagination has never really been able to shake off the "grayness" with which years outside the Garden [of Western culture] had tainted it. The almost religious reverence he has for Greek temples, Gothic cathedrals, and the art of Piero is always accompanied by his sober view of the dark sea of human bestiality and foolishness that surrounded those isolated islands" (Baranczak). For example, his beautiful essays on Dutch art history insist on the mechanisms of snobbery and speculation that fueled the art market.
"Herbert understood very early that his antinomian vision could flourish only if he maintained a constant equilibrium between opposing values: only if he let them clash without exposing his role as a referee, and without ever declaring the victory of one or the other" (Baranczak). As a moralist, he offers no promises or final victories. "We are told straightforwardly what the deal is: for the fleeting exhilaration of getting off our knees and 'going upright' most probably nothing but lots of punishment; for the brief moment of certainty that we did the right thing, an almost certain defeat" (Baranczak). On the other hand, hope remains as long as a single person of integrity survives. As writes in the brilliant "Report from the Besieged City": "if the City falls but a single man escapes/he will carry the City within himself on the roads of exile/he will be the City."
Another excellent appreciation of Herbert comes from the South African novelist J.M. Coetzee: "His peculiar strength resides in his dryness to the point of dessication: in a removed, cerebral stance expressed in ironies that mask the most intense ethical and indeed lyrical passion. What one learns from Herbert is not a body of ideas but a certain style, hard, durable: a style that is also an approach to the world and to experience, political experience included."
Like Herbert's, hers is an aloof, wry, disenchanted voice. Born in 1923, she is Herbert's contemporary rather than Milosz's, and published her first poem in the year the war ended. In 1953 she joined the staff of a literary magazine and remained there until the crackdown on Solidarity in 1981, at which point she began to write for the underground press of that period. Like Herbert she reacts against the romantic and nationalist strands in Polish poetry and adopts the Central and Eastern European strategy of sly allegory and worldly parable.
She avoids autobiography and confession, never calls attention to her gender, and uses an informal, conversational idiom. She offers little that is specifically Polish in her poetry aside from the language itself. "Szymborska's voice often resembles that of a kindly teacher offering advice. Or else of a puzzled layman mulling over some astonishing fact disclosed by modern science, some striking aspect of nature or of human behavior. Certainly, her poetry is reflective, but it is far from being philosophically abstruse. Sidestepping the big issues of politics and history, she records the kind of amateur speculations which occur to all of us at one time or another" ((Clair Wills). But she too belongs to the "intellectual resistance": human obstinacy in the face of death is one of her great themes.
Once again, Helen Vendler is our best commentator. "Despite her aesthetic fastidiousness, and the intellectual haughtiness that is natural to her, Szymborska reluctantly admits, in her most famous early poem, that her 'final exam' will be a historical and ethical one: as long as there is cruelty, her voice must be at the service of the suffering. The universality of suffering is Szymborska's chief life-theme, and reiterative narration (interspersed with epigram) is her usual rhetorical mode. Every poem by Szymborska is a struggle against taking common ways of expression for granted, or thinking that a single phrase can cover all the possibilities…. It may be that Szymborska's resolute impersonality, anonymity and allegorical stance were forced into being by Polish censorship; but it is equally possible that her view of lyric as that which describes the irreducible human invariables evoked her geometrical abstraction of voice and her aloof narrations 'from above.' In a time when it is being metaphysically denied that any human universals exist, it is salutary to read Szymborska on the ancientness of human evil. Mercifully, Szymborska also notes the perpetual resurgence of hope and the deep rewards of human attachment."
"Again, and as ever, …the most pressing questions/are naïve ones." Who cleans up the rubble after the fighting is over? What do all those statistics really mean? How do we cope with death? She won the Nobel Prize in 1996, and is another example of a great twentieth-century poet who has earned the affection of a broad audience by posing "the most pressing questions" in a language of deliberate simplicity.
RECOMMENDED:
Sven Birkerts, "Czeslaw Milosz," in The Electric Life: Essays on Modern Poetry (New York: William Morrow, 1989).
Czeslaw Milosz, The Witness of Poetry (Harvard, 1983) and "For Vilnius," The New Republic, 18 June 1990.
Helen Vendler, "Czeslaw Milosz," in The Music of What Happens (Harvard, 1988).
Stanislaw Baranczak, "Searching for the Real," in Breathing Under Water and Other East European Essays (Harvard, 1990).
Zbigniew Herbert, The Barbarian in the Garden (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1986) and Still Life with a Bridle: Essays and Apocryphas (New York: Norton, 1993).
Stanislaw Baranczak, A Fugitive from Utopia: The Poetry of Zbigniew Herbert (Harvard, 1987) and "The Power of Taste," in Breathing Under Water.
Helen Vendler, "Unfathomable Life," The New Republic, January 1, 1996.
Clair Wills, "How Real is Reality?" Times Literary Supplement, September 17, 1999.