The Witness of Poetry

Czeslaw Milosz

Narrated by Peter Bishop

Available from Audible

Book published by Harvard University Press

Czeslaw Milosz, winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature, reflects upon poetry’s testimony to the events of our tumultuous time. From the special perspectives of "my corner of Europe," a classical and Catholic education, a serious encounter with Marxism, and a life marked by journeys and exiles, Milosz has developed a sensibility at once warm and detached, flooded with specific memory yet never hermetic or provincial.

Milosz addresses many of the major problems of contemporary poetry, beginning with the pessimism and negativism prompted by reductionist interpretations of man’s animal origins. He examines the tendency of poets since Mallarmé to isolate themselves from society, and stresses the need for the poet to make himself part of the great human family. One chapter is devoted to the tension between classicism and realism; Milosz believes poetry should be "a passionate pursuit of the real." In "Ruins and Poetry" he looks at poems constructed from the wreckage of a civilization, specifically that of Poland after the horrors of World War II. Finally, he expresses optimism for the world, based on a hoped-for better understanding of the lessons of modern science, on the emerging recognition of humanity’s oneness, and on mankind’s growing awareness of its own history.

Czeslaw Milosz is winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature.

REVIEWS:

“Milosz is at all times direct, even simple. He has the ability to return the pleasure of poetry to ordinary readers, and in his prose, as here, he makes you suspect that the great intellectual sin of our time may be a fear of the obvious.”

—Vanity Fair

“Milosz speaks in The Witness of Poetry with the sort of quiet, preeminent brilliance that makes his defense [of poetry]…a classic for our time.”

—Saturday Review

“By the strength of its condensed and lucid exposition, The Witness of Poetry provides us with a key to Milosz’s poetic historiosophy, philosophy, and aesthetics. OF course, Milosz’s entire work offers one of the most profound responses to the dilemmas of our century.”

—New Criterion