Abstract
In his poetics, the emigre poet Czeslaw Milosz explains the title of the published work: “I have titled this book The Witness of Poetry not because we witness it, but because it witnesses us”.1 The testimony that the poetry of our time gives is not encouraging, to say the least. It reveals emptiness, insignificance, downright despondency in our lives, and in some cases takes a perverse delight in debasing humanity. This is hardly news. But Milosz’s treatise is more than a personal grouse about these bad days or a scholarly analysis of historical cause and effect. The Witness of Poetry reveals that the crisis of our day is not merely a result of social-political failure but a fundamental failure in human knowing, which is, of course, the subject of Husserl’s teleohistorical reflection, the Crisis. Actually, the poetics is a small book, and Milosz’s enormous achievement can only be gauged by examining his other autobiographical and poetic works. If we examine more closely the seemingly exclusive and reclusive Milosz, who has claimed to write — in Polish — for a few literati only, we will see an artist who has won a world-wide audience (and the Nobel Prize) because of his courage and skill to engage “the scientific world-view in a fundamental dialogue”. Moreover, he aims to be not an advocate of this or that social or political cause but a true “functionary of mankind”.
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Notes
The Witness of Poetry: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, 1981–82 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 4. Hereafter cited as Witness.
The Land of Ulro, trans. Louis Iribarne (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1984), pp. 157–8. Hereafter cited as Ulro.
Witness, pp. 44–5.
Witness, p. 90.
Witness, pp. 91–2.
Witness, p. 10.
Ulro, pp. 269–72.
The Separate Notebooks, trans. Robert Hass and Robert Pinsky (New York: Ecco Press, 1984), pp. 211–2. Hereafter Notebooks. Excerpts from “Notes”, From the Rising of the Sun, and “The Wormwood Star”, copyright © 1988 by Czeslaw Milosz Royalties, Inc. From The Collected Poems, 1931–1987, first published by The Ecco Press in 1988. Reprinted by permission.
Notebooks, p. 87; Ulro, pp. 156–7.
Witness, p.48.
Ulro, p. 137; Witness, pp. 144–5.
New York Review of Books, 5 May 1981, pp. 14–5.
Ulro,pp. 14–5; 44.
Native Realm, trans, Catherine S. Leach (Berkely: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 91–107.
Ulro, pp. 269–72.
Bells in Winter, trans. Czeslaw Milosz and Lillian Vallee (New York: Ecco Press, 1978), p. 56.
The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), pp. 70–1. Given as Crisis.
Native Realm, pp. 277–8.
“What is Mine?” from Visions from San Francisco Bay, by Czeslaw Milosz, trans. Richard Lourie (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982), pp. 70–3. Hereafter Visions. Quotations reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc., who own the Copyright © 1975, 1982.
Ulro, p. 171.
Witness, pp. 43; 46–7.
Native Realm, pp. 87–8; Crisis, p. 66.
Crisis, p. 53.
Crisis, p. 60.
Crisis, p. 51.
Crisis, p. 58; Witness, p. 46.
Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology, trans. Edward G. Ballard and Lester E. Embree (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967), p. 13.
Native Realm, p. 121.
Native Realm, p. 126.
Native Realm, p.295.
Crisis, p. 59.
Native Realm, p. 45.
Native Realm, p. 139.
Ricoeur, p. 67.
Crisis, p. 50.
Crisis, p. 59.
Native Realm, p. 280.
Visions, p. 63.
Ulro, p. 11.
Crisis, xxxv.
Emperor of the Earth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), p. 215.
Native Realm, p. 300.
Native Realm, p. 41.
Native Realm, p. 35.
Crisis, p. 116.
Ulro, p. 77.
Ulro, p. 147.
Native Realm, p. 80.
Witness, p. 43.
Visions, p. 65.
Witness, p. 52.
Ulro, p. 95.
Crisis, p.17.
Emperor of the Earth, pp. 225–6.
Native Realm, pp. 80–1.
Witness, p. 68.
New YorkReview of Books, pp. 11–5.
Witness, p. 66.
Witness, pp. 109–10.
Witness, pp. 73–4.
Crisis, p. 210.
Witness, p. 42.
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© 1990 Kluwer Academic Publishers
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Airaudi, J.T. (1990). Czeslaw Milosz’s Passion for “Place”. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) The Elemental Passions of the Soul Poetics of the Elements in the Human Condition: Part 3. Analecta Husserliana, vol 28. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2335-5_20
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2335-5_20
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