Sherry Chandler

Milosz

from “The Lesson of Biology” in The Witness of Poetry (Harvard, 1983):

An important difference between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries probably derives from the crossing of a certain threshold; things too atrocious to think of did not seem possible. But, beginning in 1914, they proved to be more and more possible. A discovery has been made, that “civilizations are mortal.” Thus there is nothing to protect Western civilization from plunging into chaos and barbarity. The state of savagery, which seemed to belong to the remote past, returned as the tribal rituals of totalitarian states. The extermination camp became a central fact of the century and barbed wire its emblem. Thomas Mann was undoubtedly right in seeing Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as a work inaugurating the twentieth century. Europeans had for a long time been effectively hiding certain horrors in their colonial backyard, until they were visited by them with a vengeance. …Like a child who finds out that fire burns fingers…, mankind encountered naked data that were connected according to the law of cause and effect, and without any divine protection now to guarantee a favorable outcome.

…

A twentieth-century poet is like a child trained to respect naked facts by adults who, in turn, were intiated in an exceptionally cruel manner. (pp. 51-53)

I think, collectively, we went mad in the twentieth century. Whether, as I understand Milosz to argue, this was because science killed God and with God certain aspects of poetry, I don’t know. What concerns me more right now is that the madness seems, like a mutated virus, to be infecting the 21st Century, too, and efforts to re-assert the surety of religious faith seem to be part of the madness.

Here in the United States we have always had a false sense of security, that the madness has not infected us. One might argue that we’ve only been able to maintain this security by steadfastly refusing to look into our own heart of darkness. The events of the last six years have forced us to do that.

I am in awe of Milosz’s poetry because he has lived in proximity to the madness, looks at it without flinching, and somehow finds sane poetry and an expansive spirit.

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