The Polish poet Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) had a complicated Second World War. He was in Warsaw when the Germans invaded, fleeing then to Ukraine. But then, discovering that his wife had been unable to escape Poland, he tried to return to her by way of Romania, then Ukraine again—the Germans were coming from one direction, the Russians from another—then Lithuania. By the summer of 1940, he was back in Warsaw. There, he participated in various underground activities, including the sheltering and transportation of Jews. In 1944, he was captured and briefly held in an internment camp. As the Red Army moved closer to Warsaw and the Nazis burned the city in anticipatory vengeance, Miłosz and his wife, with little more than the clothes on their backs, made their way to a village near Kraków, finding a brief respite from history, though not from poverty. Then:
One afternoon in January 1945 I was standing in the doorway of a peasant’s cottage; a few small-caliber shells had just landed in the village street. Then, in the low ground between the snow-covered hills, I saw a file of men slowly advancing. It was the first detachment of the Red Army. It was led by a young woman, felt-booted and carrying a submachine gun. Like all my compatriots, I was thus liberated from the domination of Berlin—in other words, brought under the domination of Moscow.
History had once again found him. But how strict and severe its newest embodiment would be he did not yet realize.
Already known as a significant young poet, he was seen by the new Polish Communist government as an attractive representative of their cause, even though he was not himself a Communist. He agreed to serve that government as a cultural attaché, first briefly in New York, then in Washington, DC, and eventually in Paris. Throughout this period, there grew in his mind a conviction that his own deeply held literary humanism was incompatible with obedience to the Polish regime. Defection was always a possibility, but the costs of defection were high:
My mother tongue, work in my mother tongue, is for me the most important thing in life. And my country, where what I wrote could be printed and could reach the public, lay within the Eastern Empire. My aim and purpose was to keep alive freedom of thought in my own special field; I sought in full knowledge and conscience to subordinate my conduct to the fulfillment of that aim. I served abroad because I was thus relieved from direct pressure and, in the material which I sent to my publishers, could be bolder than my colleagues at home.
His difficulties were made even worse by the Red Scare in the United States, which left him stuck in Paris while his wife and children remained in Washington. US officials thought him a Communist, but of course a Communist is precisely what he wasn’t: thus his misery in working for the Polish government, whose leaders were dismayed by his lack of commitment to the cause and, at one point, even withheld his passport. In early 1951, the tensions became too great, and he requested, and received, political asylum in France. He would not visit Poland again until, in the aftermath of his winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980, the Polish People’s Republic began to see him as an asset. They even allowed some of his work to be published there.
Immediately after his defection, he began to write the book from which I have been quoting, the book that would make him famous, The Captive Mind (1953). It is perhaps the most bitterly incisive book ever written about the appeal of totalitarianism to intellectuals. Borrowing a term from Islamic theology and reshaping it to his own purposes, he declares that these intellectuals justify their obeisance to totalitarian regimes through the practice of ketman.
To say something is white when one thinks it black, to smile inwardly when one is outwardly solemn, to hate when one manifests love, to know when one pretends not to know, and thus to play one’s adversary for a fool (even as he is playing you for one)—these actions lead one to prize one’s own cunning above all else. Success in the game becomes a source of satisfaction.
This is ketman. It is a strategy for self-preservation: “Over me storms rage and huge ships sail; but my entire effort is concentrated upon clinging to the rock, for otherwise I will be carried off by the waters and perish, leaving no trace behind.” And how can someone trapped by such an illusion ever be liberated from it?
Throughout this tumultuous period, Miłosz continued to write poetry, and Poet in the New World gathers his poems from those years. The poems are selected and translated by Robert Hass and David Frick. Hass, who was Miłosz’s colleague for many years at the University of California, Berkeley, regularly worked with the poet on English versions of his poems. The great majority of the poems in the last English edition published in Miłosz’s lifetime, New and Collected Poems 1931–2001, were translated by the two men in collaboration, although Hass does not know Polish. When Miłosz retired from Berkeley’s Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, David Frick replaced him. An important scholar of Polish and Lithuanian language and culture, Frick produced rough English versions of most of these poems before his death, in 2022, after which Hass completed the work with the assistance of Polish-speaking colleagues. He has dedicated this volume to Frick’s memory.
In his introduction to the book, Hass points out that Miłosz had never been happy with the poems of this period: Even when he first published them in book form, in 1953, he struggled to find a coherent order in which to present the poems and, later on, felt that he had never discovered that order. Perhaps he came to dislike the poems themselves: In the New and Collected Poems, only thirteen poems from this period appear, while Poet in the New World gathers forty-five. Hass and Frick came to believe, though, that if all the 1946–1953 poems were translated and presented in roughly chronological order, one could see them as telling a story of a highly gifted man who had undergone multiple kinds of trauma and was trying to think and write his way back to mental and moral health. About this I believe they were correct.
If you read the poems collected here in chronological order, what you will see, primarily, is a man thinking about hope—what sustains it, and what happens when you lose it. The practitioners of ketman have of course abandoned hope, but there are so many of them that the one who refuses ketman may not be more hopeful than they. In “Two Men in Rome,” one of the earliest poems collected here, written in New York City in 1946, Miłosz makes a kind of pledge:
Yes, I was a witness. But I was never reconciled.
No one living will tear assent from my lips.
Anyone faithful won’t be conciliated.
If your Vatican lies broken,
I will keep going, to bear in the windstorm
The aurea aetas from heart to heart.
But what to say to or about those who have forgotten the aurea aetas, the Golden Age, and instead have been “conciliated,” have devoted themselves to simple self-preservation? One literary form traditionally used to speak to this condition is satire, but, Miłosz laments in another poem from 1946, “Gone is the age of satire.” Yet the next year, writing now from Washington, Miłosz addresses a kind of prayer-poem to Jonathan Swift, because satire is, after all, a mode of hope: “Here is what your lips have said: / The cause of man is not past hope.” And so, in the poem’s final line: “I will persevere, my Dean.”
“I will persevere.” “I will keep going.” But a few pages later he speaks of “the torch of hope, / extinguished daily.” “Hence silence”—why write at all? Two years later, in “My Mother’s Grave,” he now seeks her intercession as he had sought Swift’s:
Help me to create a love eternally alive
From my constant quarrel with the world.
A single link of inspiration and action,
Unknown to the productions of unthinking nature.
…Help me, mother. Strengthen in the man
What you knew as the child’s ardors.
Let me not put down my burden.
(I suspect that Miłosz knew and was alluding to Robert Frost’s famous line from his poem “The Lesson for Today”: “I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.”) And a year later still, in 1950, he wonders why hope is more difficult for him than for others: “Where they see a drop, I see an ocean. / Where they go singing, I barely proceed with hope.”
Yet if he barely proceeds, he does proceed. He bears his burden. And he takes comfort in the fact that he is one of these strange beings who simply cannot forget, cannot deceive themselves forever, cannot give in and give up. These are called poets. To the rulers of this world he declares, “Do not feel safe. The poet remembers. / You can kill one, but another is born.” That is from one of his last poems written in America. A year later, in 1951, he is back in Europe, in Paris, cut off from his wife and children, but still he calls out:
To sing me a new song
In the hour when those who keep silent
In the lands east and west,
And on the shores of a bloody sea,
Try to hide from others with their hands
The source that beats in their chests,
The hot and nameless
Source of a guarded hope.
This poem is virtually contemporaneous with his defection, after which he would write The Captive Mind, with its bitter and, yes, satirical exposure of the ketman of the inwardly despairing intellectuals. He has definitively cast his lot with his fellow poets—and with those who guard their hope in silence.
The most extraordinary poem in this collection, and the longest, is called “Treatise on Morals.” It is one of his masterpieces, and is the definitive poem of this period because it announces a commitment to the poet’s work, the poet’s voice, even without hope. Indeed, in the poem’s final lines Miłosz writes, “I give you no hope”—though perhaps I have quoted selectively: The whole line reads, “For now, I give you no hope.” That is: hope we may achieve, but for now we must learn to get along without it. But how?
Today I invite you onto the ark,
Which will bear us across the rapid stream
Of time and onto new shores.
There are, “Treatise on Morals” suggests, two essential elements to this invitation, this strategy, one negative and one positive. The first is “the discipline / Of paring down”: one must learn to do without, to turn aside; “you must resist / Filling the blanks with theories” … “Please don’t draw any conclusions, / Schoolboy style, from my words” … “Beware madmen,” because madmen always have theories and conclusions. “Competent madmen,” of which we have many, are a particular danger. Also, one must make sure not “to keep company with those / Who are blind as moles,” who “would like to live in their own parish” and ignore the state of the world.
It is easier than you think to lose your soul
Through unsuitable company,
For you are a sponge: you absorb everything.
Thus the necessity of aversion. But what to cultivate, what to pursue? The answer, in short, is: wisdom. The ultimate goal is, “let’s call it, musical knowledge,” a “flexible” wisdom. But for now,
Farewell. Let us pass from hand to hand
The common gift of modest wisdom.
As you see, I do not have a prescription,
I do not belong to any sect,
And the rescue is in you alone.
Perhaps it is simply health
Of mind, a balanced heart.
For at times a simple remedy helps…
That modest wisdom begins with a bold look into “The Heart of Darkness.” If you cannot manage that, then you will join the ranks of the self-deceivers, the self-justifiers—those whose company if you are wise you will avoid. What people fear most is seeing the world as it is; what they call “hope” is really just a form of denial. But if you refuse the lie, if you look into the heart of darkness, and if you are willing to pursue the “common gift of modest wisdom” with “a balanced heart,” then and only then may you be granted genuine hope. Then, poet, you can pursue your true calling: “in a difficult moment, / You must be the ambassador of dreams.”