Czeslaw Milosz and the Insufficiency of Lyric

When a European poet becomes an expatriate living in America, what adjustments and sacrifices should he make? What should he resist? By the same token, how should English-speakers modify their expectations when they read his work? Donald Davie considers such questions and others in this first book on the 1980 Polish Nobel laureate who has been living in the United States for twenty-five years. According to Davie, Milosz holds to a conviction that the responsible poet today, whether under totalitarianism or in the free world, cannot afford to write only poetry that is lyrical, because to do so is to give up using language to change society. In this way he raises questions that have to do not only with himself as a Pole and with Polish literature specifically but with poetry generally, including its present status and its foreseeable future. His work, Davie argues, is more ambitious than American and British readers have yet realized and demands that they radically rethink many of their preconceptions.