As part of the campaign accompanying the launch of Andrzej Franaszek’s Miłosz: A Biography translated by Aleksandra and Michael Parker for Harvard University Press, this piece was submitted to a Chicago Bookstore site.
It offers a reading of Czeslaw Milosz’s most remarkable, enduring sequences, ‘The World: A Naïve Poem’, which was written in 1943, when the poet was in his early thirties. It evokes a time and place that at first seems prelapsarian, yet beneath its surface pastoral ‘glints’ with ‘many other tones’ (Robert Hass Twentieth Century Pleasures, 185). Its first appearance, Seamus Heaney reminds us, was as one of a cluster of clandestine publications from ‘a hand-press in Warsaw’ in the fourth year of the Nazis’ occupation of the city when ‘concentration-camps were opening like hell-mouths all over Europe’ (‘Secular and Millennial Milosz’, in Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001, 412). Despite the beguiling simplicity of its form and style – all but three of the twenty poems in the entire sequence are written in quatrains, rhyming abab cdcd efef in the original Polish – ‘The World’ delves into core concerns Miłosz will address throughout his literary career, and like William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, with which it is regularly compared, invites, indeed expects its readers to read between the lines.
As part of the campaign accompanying the launch of Andrzej Franaszek’s Miłosz: A Biography translated by Aleksandra and Michael Parker for Harvard University Press, this piece was submitted to a Chicago Bookstore site.
Follow this link to the full article
https://www.semcoop.com/blog/post/czes%C5%82aw-mi%C5%82osz%27s-world