Volume 48, Number 20 · December 20, 2001
A World Gone Up in Smoke
By Charles Simic
New and Collected Poems, 1931–2001
by Czeslaw Milosz
Ecco, 776 pp., $45.00
To Begin Where I Am: Selected Essays
by Czeslaw Milosz, edited and with an introduction by Bogdana Carpenter and Madeline G. Levine
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 462 pp., $30.00
'They wrote as if History had little to do with them'—that's how I imagine some future study of American poetry describing the work of our poets in the waning years of the twentieth century. Like millions of their fellow citizens, they believed they could, most of the time, shut their eyes to the world, busy themselves with their lives, and not give much thought to evil. A hermetic literary culture, Czeslaw Milosz would say, is a cage in which one spends all one's time chasing one's own tail. To realize from one's own experience that there's nothing, no matter how vile, that human beings will not do to one another was until recently a knowledge reserved for the thousands of immigrants whose life stories, had they been able to make sense of them, would have still sounded farfetched and incoherent. Anyone who lived through and survived the many horrors of the last century found himself with an experience nearly incommunicable to someone who still had faith in the basic goodness of man.
Review, 4174 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |