„Lekcje biologii”, czyli Miłosz czyta Szymborską

Abstract

Summary Wisława Szymborska has a prominent presence in Czesław Miłosz’s essays, criticism, interpretations and anthologies. This article presents an overview of Miłosz’s assessment of her work. For the first time he turned to her poetry in ‘A Biology Lesson’, one of his lectures delivered in 1981/1982 at Harvard. To illustrate his point about modern man’s existence in a world determined by laws of nature and stripped of eschatology Miłosz quotes Szymborska’s poem ‘Autonomy’. Later, it is her poem ‘A little girl tugs at the tablecloth’ that acquires for him a programmatic importance. Nevertheless, a close analysis of his dialogue with Szymborska shows that in spite of some thematic and poetic common ground their philosophies of life are widely different. Miłosz’s misgivings about the ‘scientific worldview’ in Szymborska’s ‘poetry of consciousness’ are in fact an expression of a dispute about metaphysics and a defense of a Christian imagination.