Czeslaw Milosz Research Articles

Jak panująca ideologia uniemożliwia przemianę społeczną

The work tries to analyze how ideology, understood in agreement with the marxist tradition, inhibits any structural social change. The first part of the work is devoted to a description of the capitalist reality in which the well known ideology has been created. In the next chapter, aiming at systematization of the notion of ideology, the Karl Mannheim’s theory of ideology is presented. The main goal of the remaining part of the work is to show how the rise of the modern universal capitalist subject has erased from the view the class resistance against impersonal forces of the global market. To better present this, in the following chapters invoked are the works of the Frankfurt school of Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer, of the french structuralists Luis Althusser and Jacques Lacane as well as works of Slavoj Zizek and Peter Sloeterdijk, which concentrate on the modern cynic attitude. For the historic example of this phenomenon taken is the described by Czeslaw Milosz reality of the stalinist regime, in which the conformist attitude does not significantly differ from the known attitude widespread in the capitalist reality. Pointing out this similarity is the main idea of the present work.

Transatlantic Trio: Empiricism, Evangelicalism, Romanticism, Essays and Reviews 1974–2017 by Richard E. Brantley

Reviewed by: Transatlantic Trio: Empiricism, Evangelicalism, Romanticism, Essays and Reviews 1974–2017 by Richard E. Brantley Renée Bergland (bio) Richard E. Brantley. Transatlantic Trio: Empiricism, Evangelicalism, Romanticism, Essays and Reviews 1974–2017. Culicidae Press, 2017. For all her vaunted solitude, despite her ruthless omissions, Emily Dickinson's poems are surprisingly crowded. Within her stanzas, a wide range of words and ideas meet up; circulate; share a buzz or a song; attempt to seduce each other; oppose each other with fierce politeness; mock; laugh; wonder; converse. The notion of Dickinson as social butterfly on the page, if not in real life, comes in part from Richard Brantley's 2013 Emily Dickinson's Rich Conversation, which offered a compelling reading of Dickinson's intellectual world as packed with theologians, philosophers, scientists, and poets. Now comes Transatlantic Trio: Empiricism, Evangelicalism, Romanticism—which might have been titled Richard Brantley's Rich Conversation. This collection of Brantley's essays, written from 1974 – 2017, is remarkable not only for its wide-ranging erudition, but also for its warmth and wit. Although it is a weighty tome (about 750 pages), it has a light touch. Brantley is a genial companion—intellectually amiable, infinitely curious and profoundly insightful. An epigraph for the preface quotes Czeslaw Milosz: "Early we receive a call, yet it remains incomprehensible, / and only late do we discover how obedient we were." Nested within another quotation (from Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss), these lines are emblematic of the book, both because of the tricky double quotation (Brantley never says no to an exponential allusion), and because they foretell the surprisingly straightforward through lines that pull these essays and reviews into harmony. Over four or five decades, Brantley has listened for the antiphonies—the musical call and response—among theologians, philosophers, scientists, and poets. As he explains, over his career he has made a "concerted effort… to compose a complex harmony of ideas-over-time." The ideas that run through his work are those of John Locke and John Wesley. In every essay or review, in one way or [End Page 94] another, Brantley finds an optimistic assent to both empiricism and evangelicalism in Anglo-American Romanticism. The first section of the book, "Essays, First Series: Backgrounds of British and American Romanticism," includes essays on John Wesley, John Locke, and Jonathan Edwards; the fifth essay in this series is more of a brief summation, explaining that "Anglo-American Romanticism generated language at once empirical and evangelical." With that established, the second series focuses on British authors: Charles Wesley, Samuel Johnson, William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. These essays trace out the "methodistical habits" of the poets, their romantic to late-romantic permutations of the empirical sense-experience of inner, spiritual life. The third series includes seven essays on Emily Dickinson. For Dickinson scholars, these essays may prove the most revelatory: Brantley starts by arguing that Dickinson's works are not only harbingers of twentieth-century modernism and postmodernism, but also (in a time travelling, reverse-causality twist), harbingers of late eighteenth-century romanticism. Declaring that single Dickinson poems contain both Late Romantic and pre-Modern tones, in harmonic counterpoint, Brantley says he values both, but that he is "drawn to the Late Romantic level of her layered language not only because I like it, but because it is neglected." It is a winning formulation of Brantley's optimistically inclusive both / and methodology. Essays on Empiricism, Wordsworth, Wesleyan theology, and late Romanticism follow. The last of the Dickinson essays is the heart of the book. Toward the end of it, Brantley writes "In sum, Dickinson's friends and loved ones, her literary precursors and coevals, her literary beneficiaries, and her aesthetic self-projections define the possibility of personal access to otherness through others." This is the intellectually collaborative, social Dickinson that Brantley has described so well elsewhere, but here his description is focused on the strands of empiricism, evangelicalism, and Romanticism that run together through the collection. To conclude, Brantley glosses "The Soul selects her own Society –" (Fr409), remarking, "Just as society pertains to John Locke's social contract and to John Wesley's Societies alike, so too does this key word denote Dickinson...

Twórczość Tadeusza Różewicza w radiu

In the article I focus on the works of Tadeusz Rozewicz presented on Polish Radio, of which the most numerous are the works of dramatic art adapted for radio, such as: Akt przerywany [The Interrupted Act] , Bia l e ma lz e n stwo [White Wedding] , Kartoteka [The Card Index] , Kartoteka rozrzucona [The Card Index Scattered] , Odej ś cie G l odomora [The Starveling Leaves] , Pogrzeb po polsku [Polish funeral] , Stara kobieta wysiaduje [The Old Lady Sits Waiting] , Ś mieszny staruszek [The Funny Old Man] , Ś wiadkowie albo nasza ma l a stabilizacja [The Witnesses, or our little stabilisation], Wyszed l z domu [He Left Home] . Apart from this, Rozewicz’s one acters have been broadcast as radio dramas titled Teatr niekonsekwencji [Theatre of Inconsistency] . His poetry have been utilised with varying degrees of success, forming the basis for such poetic programmes as Radio w radiu [Radio on radio] , based on a selection of poems from the volumes U ś miechy [Smiles] , or Recykling [Recycling] . A separate group is constituted by programmes forming a kind of tribute to poetic masters: Prus ( Rozmowy w Alei Zdrowia ) or Staff ( Tadeusz R oz ewicz pisze Staffa ). Apart from this, I’m interested in programmes presenting the author’s prose in the collected work Matka odchodzi [Mother Leaves] , and also the cycle of five interviews Dialogi poet o w. Rozmowy o z yciu [Poets’ Dialogue. Conversations about life] , being the result of the meeting of Tadeusz Rozewicz and Czeslaw Milosz in the Teatr Slowacki in Krakow in July 1999. Comparing the radio versions of the texts of these dramas, I arrive at the conclusion that in the majority of cases the directors and engineers of these adapted dramas, falling back on the caveat “based on”, made bold choices, shortening individual scenes or omitting them entirely. In addition, I consider that the creators of these dramas were not attempting to excessively modernise Rozewicz’s art, maintaining their climate, their specific rhythm, based on their fragmentary nature, the sequence of scenes as well as the poetics of collage and recycling.

Zauroczenie i strach. Rozmyślania w hotelowym hallu

INFATUATION AND FEAR [CZESŁAW MIŁOSZ: MUSINGS IN A HOTEL LOBBY] The text is an introduction to an article by Czeslaw Milosz, providing a context for its interpretation and discussing the circumstances in which it was created. It concentrates on particularly interesting themes in the poet’s press correspondence from the late 1940s, which was found in Czeslaw Milosz’s archives and is published here for the first time.

Philosophical aspects of urban strangeness: the case of Vilnius

For the people of Vilnius, it is helpful to consider its image in the eyes of strangers. They reflect the strangeness of Vilnius itself. The concept of strangeness will be developed by considering the related spectrum of these strangers’ acquaintance with the city. We consider images of Vilnius formed by noteworthy Europeans who passed through there or spent some part of their life there, such as Napoleon Bonaparte, Romain Gary, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Lev Tolstoy, Josif Brodsky, Mikhail Bakhtin, Vladimir Toporov, Aron Gurwitsch, and Czeslaw Milosz. For some of them (Napoleon, F. Dostoyevsky), Vilnius was strange as a not yet assimilated territory. For others (L. Tolstoy, J. Brodsky), Vilnius was an important point of transition between geopolitical spheres. For some of them (R. Gary, M. Bakhtin), Vilnius was the environment of their maturation and a springboard to other cities. Vilnius has also been a city of studies and science (for J. G. A. Forster, Cz. Milosz), a city that formed philosophical attitudes (M. Bakhtin, A. Gurwitsch), and a city of heritages: Russian (for F. Dostoyevsky, L. Tolstoy), Polish (Cz. Milosz), German (A. Doblin, J. G. A. Forster), Jewish (A. Gurwitsch), pagan (V. Toporov). By appealing to the above mentioned images, the paper deals with philosophical aspects of strangeness, regionalism, and urban environments.

Leonidas Donskis: from faustian morphologies to criticisms of liquid evil

This paper analyzes the philosophical thoughts of Leonidas Donskis about the evolution of figures of evil in Central and Eastern Europe. The analysis is based on a reading of his theories of the morphology of culture, of the genealogy of ideas, and of the moral imagination. This subject is an integral part of Donskis’s whole intellectual biography, is central to his later researches, and thus partly characterizes all of his investigations. In this paper, after briefly surveying the assumptions of Oswald Spengler’s analysis as well as Donskis’s ideas of Renaissance titans and Enlightenment geniuses, I turn to his analysis of the moral imagination, its features, development, and main conceptions. Donskis discusses problems of the moral imagination on the levels of (1) Central and Eastern European social and political critique and of (2) the analysis of dystopias. The main figures of evil discussed are those of the true believers, the ideological doctrinaires, and the fundamentalists. At first Donskis delved into these topics basing himself on the ideas of Vytautas Kavolis and Aleksandras Shtromas. Differences in views about political leftness (revisionism vs. state nomenklatura socialism) served Donskis in developing his own views on the Soviet heritage and on being a true believer. Here the figures of kanukai (Ricardas Gavelis), murti-bingo (S. I. Witkiewicz), and ketman (A. de Gobineau and Czeslaw Milosz) come into play, as well as the dystopias of Yevgeny Zamyatin, George Orwell, and Aldous Huxley. I pay special attention to Donskis’s expansion of Michel Houellebecq’s dystopia The Possibility of an Island and his picture of the sensitive cynic. The critique of liberal society implicit in Houellebecq’s work provided an additional stimulus and opportunity for Donskis to reflect, together with Zygmunt Bauman, on the problem of the Global Anonymous, adiaphorization, and liquid evil in our contemporary society of alienated consumers. My article ends with a critique of intellectual apocalyptics, including those in Lithuania, who are opposed to Donskis’s picture of a Europe of intellectual and moral giants and geniuses.

Greimas and Giedroyc: fateful postwar prognoses

Even though the Second World War was over, the word was still haunted by the presentiment of another war. This is evident from headlines in the current press, commentaries by political leaders, and private letters. In the period from 1946 to 1950 the Lithuanian and French linguist Algirdas Julius Greimas corresponded with colleagues about his fears that a future military conflict might be coming and about possibilities of evacuating people (first of all, women and children) from that war zone. Strikingly, the Polish writer Jerzy Giedroyc, editor of the literary-political magazine Kultura also received recommendation to move from Europe to the United States in case a war erupted. Equally unexpected is the fact that these two Parisians, Greimas and Giedroyc, were indirectly broght into contact by the writer and poet Czeslaw Milosz. Historical facts that at first sight have been collected eclectically may turn out to demarcate a field of unanticipated discoveries.

Ejemplificar la diferencia desde la literatura: análisis del aporte de Czeslaw Milosz

La hipótesis central de este artículo de reflexión derivado de un proceso investigativo, es que la literatura al ser una narrativa que recrea y escenifica la condición humana, permite ejemplificar las consecuencias de las conductas execrables, así como los alcances para construir una sociedad sobre unos principios éticos y humanistas. En función de esto, se presenta un análisis sobre la forma en que la obra de Czeslaw Milosz genera una reflexión crítica sobre las consecuencias de imponer modelos políticos totalitaristas que niegan la diferencia y, por lo tanto, que excluyen violentamente a quienes exigen su derecho a disentir u opinar.

W obliczu wydziedziczenia. Heterogeniczna tożsamość w prozie Antanasa Škėmy i Czesława Miłosza

FACING DISINHERITANCE. THE HETEROGENIC IDENTITY IN THE PROSE BY ANTANAS SKĖMA AND CZESŁAW MIŁOSZ The article is an attempt to correlate and analyse side by side the work of Antanas Skėma and Czeslaw Milosz. The starting points for the analysis are the shared elements in the writers’ biographies: Polish-Lithuanian roots, multiple migrations, and being torn away from the country of their childhood. Yet, most importantly, it is concentrated in the ontological identity of the issues the authors tackle. The ambiguity of the issues leads—in both cases—to a feeling of alienation, and that translates into the form of the message in their writing. Other elements both characteristic and common for their work include autobiographism, the attitude towards the past including pluperfect, topography—islands of memory—a fascination with folklore, folk imagination, and most importantly: asking uncomfortable questions.

Manicheizmai ir Czesławas Miłoszas: moralinės vaizduotės tyrimas

[straipsnis ir santrauka lietuvių kalba; santrauka anglų kalba] Straipsnio tikslas – apmąstyti Czesławo Miłoszo Ulro žemę manicheizmo istorijos kontekste remiantis moralinės vaizduotės teorija ir moralinės pusiausvyros koncepcija. Straipsnyje analizuojami viduramžių, Renesanso, romantizmo ir XX amžiaus manicheizmai, diskutuojama su Vytauto Kavolio ir Leonido Donskio samprotavimais šiomis temomis. Straipsnio naujumas: atsižvelgiant į Williamo Blake’o ir Cz. Miłoszo samprotavimus, kalbama apie moralinės pusiausvyros koncepciją ir daromos prielaidos dėl personalizuoto ir depersonalizuoto triksterio vaidmens skatinant moralinių pusiausvyrų kaitą. Straipsnyje siekiama apibrėžti moralinių galių funkcionalumą ir disfunkcionalumą moralinės vaizduotės teorijos ribose.

Barańczak i Ulro

The article comprises sketches by Stanislaw Baranczak and Konstanty Jelenski on Czeslaw Milosz’s The Land of Ulro. By comparing these three texts, important features of the thought of each author are described. The main figure is, however, Stanislaw Baranczak: his thoughts on religion and literature.

Świat jako zadanie dla inteligenta. O dwóch wierszach Stanisława Barańczaka (Spójrzmy prawdzie w oczy, Grudzień 1976)

The analysis in this article focusses on two of Stanislaw Baranczak’s poems in the context of the writer’s biography, i.e. the fact that he was an intellectual, poet, translator and essayist, as well as an opposition activist and one of the co-founders of the Workers’ Defence Committee (Komitet Obrony Robotnikow). The starting point is a reference to Czeslaw Milosz's essays entitled Life on the isles and Immorality of art, in which the Nobel prizewinner ponders the role of the poet in the contemporary world. The poems discussed in this article are presented as one of the possible forms through which the 20th-century ethos of the intellectual is realised.

Life in the Writings of Storm Jameson: A Biography by Elizabeth Maslen

Life in the Writings of Storm Jameson: Biography, by Elizabeth Maslen. Northwestern University Press, 2014. 556 pages. After decades of neglect, at best making cameo appearances in lists of little-read writers of the or as a star in recovery scholarship, Storm Jameson might well be on the cusp of a true revival. As part of Northwestern University Press's series Cultural Expressions of II, the second major biography of this always engaging, never flawless, luminary of twentieth-century British letters and political activism may hopefully accelerate a growing wave of critical evaluation to match the historical interest. Jameson was a vital part of world historical events of the 1930s and 1940s, working diligently through the interwar years in the peace movement and serving as a Sponsor in the Peace Pledge Union. In the years leading up to the Second War, she began assisting political refugees from Germany and Eastern Europe, the most famous of these being Czeslaw Milosz, who would be a friend to the end of her life. During the war, Jameson was elected president of PEN, the international organization of writers that, under her leadership, changed from being avowedly apolitical to becoming directly engaged with advocating for social justice against fascist regimes. It was at her behest that PEN would publish An Appeal to the Conscience of the World (1940), urging allied countries and all PEN centers to fight for universal free speech. And it was as PEN's president, though not officially speaking on its behalf, that she would publish her pamphlet End of This War (1941), the document that announced her formal break with the absolute pacifism that was crucial to her activist politics after the Great War. This impressive resume of political activity during a much studied time in European history might have been enough to merit biographical scrutiny, but Jameson was first and foremost a writer, the staggeringly prolific author or editor of seventy books of fiction, criticism, drama, politics, and memoir. Her productivity was spurred along partly by financial need, but unlike other highly productive writers--Georgette Heyer, say, or Jameson's much admired Georges Simenon--she never quite managed to make formulaic genre fiction a forte. Her letters often show a desire to have either more time to spend on a big serious novel or the capacity to crank out hack work that could readily sell. She would have neither. Reading Maslen's biography, one finds a lifelong saga of mixed reviews that fail to fully comprehend the complex, formally experimental, politically engaged fiction that it seems Jameson could not help but write. She also never seemed to be a truly rapid writer, revising heavily and spending fourteen-hour days with her fiction as well as her political activities, along with, as Maslen notes, keeping house for her husband and son. All of Jameson's Yorkshire-bred hardiness and work ethic combines with a distinct challenge for any biographer--the thicket of harsh self-criticism that pervades her letters and her monumental autobiography Journey from the North (published in Britain in two volumes, 1969-1970). Maslen is an adept reader of Jameson's writings, both the published works and the archival materials, and throughout her biography there are signs of the combative approach Maslen takes to her subject, a necessary measure it one does not wish to accept Jameson's nearly constant self-deprecation as fact. For instance, her novel That Was Yesterday (1932), which she sometimes regarded as her first mature work, begins with this disclaimer on the copyright page: A few sentences in this book, chiefly conversational, have been lifted with slight alterations from an earlier novel of the writer's. This earlier book was fortunately not much read: even more fortunately it was printed on quickly perishable paper. The pity is that it was printed at all. This, one thinks, would not inspire confidence in the prospective reader. …

Leaning “well beyond the plumb” of His Native Language: Heaney’s Tone and the International Style

In the last decades of his life Seamus Heaney enjoyed phenomenal worldwide success, outselling, or so it was widely held, all other poets writing in English combined, a fact attesting to the existence of an international component in his work. A close study of the entire body of his poetry, as well as a study of the concurrent poetic interests he himself professed and which other critics have identified, reveals a subtle and gradual shift toward what may be referred to as the “international style”. The reader encounters such a style, prominently manifest, in the work of some of Heaney’s poetic influences, especially Eastern European poets like Czeslaw Milosz and Zbigniew Herbert. This article argues, however, that Heaney’s stylistic shift was too slight to account for the enormity of his international success and asserts instead that his far-ranging appeal is a matter of tone: Heaney’s attitude toward his material, but more so, deep characteristics of his personality – what Ted Hughes refers to as “the ultimate suffering and decision” in him –occupy space below the surface of his work and imbue it with a quality to which readers around the world are drawn.

Leaning “well beyond the plumb” of His Native Language: Heaney’s Tone and the International Style

In the last decades of his life Seamus Heaney enjoyed phenomenal worldwide success, outselling, or so it was widely held, all other poets writing in English combined, a fact attesting to the existence of an international component in his work. A close study of the entire body of his poetry, as well as a study of the concurrent poetic interests he himself professed and which other critics have identified, reveals a subtle and gradual shift toward what may be referred to as the “international style”. The reader encounters such a style, prominently manifest, in the work of some of Heaney’s poetic influences, especially Eastern European poets like Czeslaw Milosz and Zbigniew Herbert. This article argues, however, that Heaney’s stylistic shift was too slight to account for the enormity of his international success and asserts instead that his far-ranging appeal is a matter of tone: Heaney’s attitude toward his material, but more so, deep characteristics of his personality – what Ted Hughes refers to as “the ultimate suffering and decision” in him –occupy space below the surface of his work and imbue it with a quality to which readers around the world are drawn.

Fatality and Identity: Milosz Reads Faulkner

The article highlights the infl uence of William Faulkner’s on Czeslaw Milosz’s writing. The starting point in such an investigation is Milosz’s article written for a Polish journal, while the poet stayed in United States shortly after the Second World War. Titled simply „Faulkner”, it underlines those crucial features of Faulkner’s prose which Milosz himself found symptomatic and inspiring. Two works by Milosz appear to have been particularly infl uenced by Faulkner’s novels: The Issa Valley (Dolina Issy) and Native Realm (Rodzinna Europa). Both focus on the search for identity and the tragic fatality which leads characters onto the brink of madness.

Literatura polska w Japonii

Polish literature in Japan began to gain notoriety, especially since the 1920s. It was connected with the regaining of independence by Poland, thereby increasing contact between those two countries. Thanks to Quo Vadis , Henryk Sienkiewicz became the most famous Polish writer, but before World War II, Peasants by Wladyslaw S. Reymont and excerpts of Ashes by Stefan Żeromski were also translated. In the interwar period Polish artists and clergy (father Maximilian Kolbe) were staying in Japan. After World War II mutual contacts have been revived since 1957. The activity in the field of culture was often ahead of political contacts. Almost all works of Stanislaw Lem, Brono Schulz, Witold Gombrowicz and Witkacy have been translated to Japanese. Also, Polish literature for children and youth is known in Japan. Among contemporary literature the books of Malgorzata Musierowicz have been particularly successful in finding readers. Among Slavists Adam Mickiewicz is well known and increasingly more commented on. In a relatively small range the works of Czeslaw Milosz and Wislawa Szymborska were translated. However, the lack of translations and professional historical and literary elaborations makes it so that the image of contemporary Polish literature in the country is still very limited, albeit there’s still gradual progress.

Voices, Places

Voices, Places David Mason (bio) “There is no capital of the world, neither here nor anywhere else . . .” —Czeslaw Milosz Question: How is Venice like Idaho? Answer: Ezra Pound and Ernest Hemingway. And how are voices like places? They move through us as we move through them. The voices of great writers guide us without telling us where we are going—except, of course, to that most obvious destination of all. We are guided by ambiguity— that’s the way literature works. And the way travel works as well. Travel is a curiosity. We understand it only when we stop moving, sit still, and begin to listen back. These are notes from a journey of surprising correspondences, distant rhymes. Voices, places. They begin at startled dawn and end with an unpacked suitcase, and in between lie impressions both Mediterranean and Pacific. Impressions are presences you cannot hold on to, like lives. Bells We woke each morning to church bells in Nauplion, the beautiful Venetian port in the Peloponnesos and the first capital of modern Greece. The nearest bells beat out a pattern you could dance to: onetwothreefour onetwothreefour onetwothree onetwothree onetwothreefour [End Page 455] Weeks later the bells in Venice were more profound, authoritative, gonging beyond the big domes as if to sound out heaven: God God God God Everything in Venice possessed weathered confidence—even the odd face screaming in silent fragments from a wall. Every corner presented another vision of life with its monsters of grace. Greece had been otherwise: so many of its churches, chapels, and monasteries in remote, unpopulated places. In Mani, the long rough peninsula between snowy Taygetus and the Ionian Sea, the churches used to be left open—no longer possible with the increase in tourism, vandalism, and theft. At one gorgeous little church the bell hung outside in an olive tree. It was off a footpath to the spit of land called Tigani, or frying pan. The anonymous frescoes inside were finely modeled and undamaged. The saints I have forgotten now, but not the silence of the thorny and rocky land, the bell, and the calm sea. That bell was such a small clear voice. There are voices that cut through the detritus of the world, some of them without sound, voices seemingly inside the dome of the mind. These are voices we follow all our lives, too many of them even to name. Among the voices I hear are two Americans with strained relations with their native country, two writers whose stock has fallen, at least in some circles. It is necessary to reread writers whose stock has fallen. Let us follow them awhile. There is no path, but there are footsteps, dark as ink. They will not lead in a straight line, but circle back upon themselves like readings of a poem. There is a memory of bells—goat bells, church bells—weathering in the years. Follow the echoes. Ez What were his earliest memories? What did he know at the end, when they took him to the hospital in Venice? What does dementia erase? We were in Idaho, driving west on Highway 20 past the Craters [End Page 456] of the Moon. We stopped so my wife could photograph the eerie light, the sage against black volcanic buttes and canyons and shrouding clouds. I picked up pieces of pumice like sharp lumps of charred breath. In magic hours, traveling in place means traveling in time, as if a door opens and you see through to the eternal presence. I had premonitions all along that road, notions of connection. On the map I saw Hailey, Idaho, just ahead. Pound was born there. And Hemingway shot himself just up the road, in Ketchum. In Venice not two weeks earlier we had seen Pound’s grave. Maybe this would round out the journey in some way, give it shape. Maybe Venice and Idaho were not so far apart. When we turned north off Highway 20, it was into another state. The wealth of outsiders and ski resort people came into view with the big ranches, the white fences, the bike paths. The bare hills were immaculate. In Hailey we saw the small white...

Robinson Jeffers: poet and prophet

The precipitous cliffs, rolling headlands, and rocky inlets of the California coast come alive in the poetry of John Robinson Jeffers, an icon of the environmental movement. In this concise and accessible biography, Jeffers scholar James Karman reveals deep insights into this passionate and complex figure and establishes Jeffers as a leading American poet of prophetic vision.In a move that would define his life's work, Jeffers' family relocated to California from Pennsylvania in 1903 when he was sixteen. While a graduate student at the University of Southern California he met Una Call Kuster, a student who was the wife of a prominent Los Angeles attorney, and they began a scandalous affair that made the front page of the Los Angeles Times. They eventually married and escaped to Carmel, California to write poetry; there they would spend the rest of their lives.At the height of his popularity in the 1920s and 1930s, Jeffers became one of the few poets ever featured on the cover of Time magazine, and posthumously put on a U.S. postage stamp. Writing by kerosene lamp in a granite tower that he had built himself, his vivid and descriptive poetry of the coast evoked the difficulty and beauty of the wild and inspired photographers such as Edward Weston and Ansel Adams. He was known for long narrative blank verse that shook up the national literary scene, but in the 1940s his interest in the Greek classics led to several adaptations which were staged on Broadway to great success.Inspiring later artists from Charles Bukowski to Czeslaw Milosz and even the Beach Boys, Robinson Jeffers' contribution to American letters is skillfully brought back out of the shadows of history in this compelling biography of a complex man of poetic genius who wrote so powerfully of the astonishing beauty of nature.

“Secure the Bastion of Sensation”: Seamus Heaney’s and Czesław Miłosz’s Poetry of the Everyday

This essay attempts to situate Seamus Heaney’s poetics of the everyday in relation to the work of Czeslaw Milosz, who for many years served as one of his sources of inspiration. Although Heaney frequently treated Polish poetry as a lesson in the poet’s ethical responsibility, he also found in it, thanks to translations, a testimony to amazement at seemingly trite objects and trivial phenomena. A comparative analysis of selected poems confronts Milosz’s and Heaney’s poetry of the everyday with the long tradition of literary epiphanies, paying particular attention to the Romantic and Modernist moments, and to both poets’ turn towards the Dutch masters.