Editors Note...
THE EDITOR WRITES
For the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, one of the great witness poets of the 20th century (first to the Nazi devastation of Poland and afterwards to the Soviet takeover of so much of Eastern Europe), literature could be equated with (in his poem A Confession ) “A feast of brief hopes, a rally of the proud, / A tournament of hunchbacks”. Rather than steering his life in some other direction, however, this realisation seems central to his determination to put literature, and specifically poetry, at its very centre. Perhaps it is that an ambiguity, a contradiction, a tension of some sort is what attracts the living soul, the creative heart, the responsive intelligence.
But in poetry, as in life, those who engage in the ideas of politics, or the politics of ideas, must also be measured on their performance on the considerably smaller but no less intensely lit stage of interpersonal relationships. That is to say, for great poets the two are not separate arenas but twin entrances to the same chamber of truth, openness and integrity.
This understanding can give the love poems a powerfully public dimension as well as vice versa. It is as if the act of love and the reporting of it is, in itself, the expression on which everything else depends and by which it is to be measured.
If romantic love tends to eclipse the world, to see only the immediate object of its desire, love poems of the level of achievement which Milosz so often reached explore a kind of
connectedness that does anything but. The whole world watches, and is transformed, by the realisation in After Paradise , for example, that “the tilt of a head, / A hand with a comb / two faces in a mirror / Are only forever once . . .”
Milosz does not need to describe the eyes or ears, the limbs or tresses of his lover. Instead he describes “How softly it rains / On the roofs of the city . . .”, and he prays for “that little park with greenish marble busts / In the pearl-gray light” to “remain as it was when you opened the gate” – as if the love he knew had the power to transform the entire world.