A Poet Worthy of Protest -- by Robert Pinsky

[HuckleB]

A Poet Worthy of Protest

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/26/opinion/26pinsky.html


"When I heard that protesters were going to demonstrate at Czeslaw Milosz's funeral tomorrow at the Mariacki Church in Krakow, it was easy for me to imagine the great poet's laugh. The protesters do not think he was Catholic enough, or Polish enough. He raised such antagonisms all his life. As a kind of byproduct of being a great writer, devoted to ultimate things - call him an Eschatological Humanist - he drove authoritarians crazy. In the 1970's, Czeslaw knew that the Soviet authorities in Poland were beginning to rehabilitate his reputation when an official reference work alluded to him - unmistakably, though not by name - as one of several poets in his generation who were of no particular significance.

He was living in Berkeley, Calif., at the time. He shared this information with his American friends and colleagues, coloring it with his booming laugh, a deep bark of pleasure that was simultaneously hearty and ironic. The sound of it was infectious, but more precisely it was commanding. His laughter had the counter-authority of human intelligence, triumphing over the petty-minded authority of a regime.

...

By maintaining a stubborn loyalty to his language and his native province, he had become a world poet. By cleaving to seemingly outmoded convictions of his childhood and youth - belief in reason, love of nature, the cosmopolitan views of his uncle Oscar Milosz, an important French poet - he survived the lethal ideologies of Nazism and Soviet Communism. By tending to his work, and by the turns of fortune, he had now somehow, beyond his own expectation, outlasted the great brutal monolith and its attempts to edit him out of history.

...,

His prose book "The Captive Mind" is not so much anti-Communist as an account of the traps, compromises, self-deceptions and suicidal hypocrisies of writers and intellectuals in a police state. Anyone who supposes that poets or scholars are by their nature moral guides as people will find a generous but unwavering corrective in "The Captive Mind." The book survives not only the Soviet system, but also the fall of the system.

..."

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Possibly the finest elegy to Czeslaw Milosz that I've read. Thank you, Mr. Pinsky.