Czeslaw Milosz, Poet in the era of Confused Minds

Czeslaw Milosz, born on 30 June 1911 in Lithuania, considered himself one among the last few 'Polish-speaking Lithuanians'. In his words, "We were something else, Lithuanians, but not in the accepted twentieth-century sense, which says that to be a Lithuanian you have to speak Lithuanian". In 1933 Milosz published his first volume of poetry, Poem in Frozen Time and got an award from the Union of Polish Writers in 1934. He spent most of his youth in western Europe. In 1960 he moved to University of California at Berkeley and in 1961 he became full professor there. He received the Nobel prize of Literature in 1980. In 1981 he moved to Poland after a break of 30 years. He died in August 14, 2004 in Poland.
Milosz's work demonstrates a constant effort to achieve a balance between the sensual life of man and his responsibility to examine philosophical questions of faith and morality. In A Year of the Hunter he writes, "Critics have sought an answer to the question: what is the source of all those contradictions in my poetry? In my prose, too, for that matter. I could enlighten them by referring to the several personalities who reside in me simultaneously, whom I have tried to suppress, generally without success. I didn't want to be so volatile, but what could I do? ..I was conscious of the incompatibility of my various personalities."
His writing reflects the confused nature of one's existence in the modern time where contradiction is the essential part of living, where there is no fixed definition of 'values', where 'right' and 'wrong' are separated by few equations of perspective-transformation, where one constantly struggles to find his identity in the fluidity of economic and cultural transfusions. His poems are tribute to the struggles of numerous confused minds of our time.

From A Poem for the End of the Century:

" When everything was fine
And the notion of sin had vanished
And the earth was ready
In universal peace
To consume and rejoice
Without creeds and utopias,

I, for unknown reasons,
Surrounded by the books
Of prophets and theologians,
Of philosophers, poets,
Searched for an answer,
Scowling, grimacing,
Waking up at night, muttering at dawn.

What oppressed me so much
Was a bit shameful.
Talking of it aloud
Would show neither tact nor prudence.
It might even seem an outrage
Against the health of mankind.

Alas, my memory
Does not want to leave me
And in it, live beings
Each with its own pain,
Each with its own dying,
Its own trepidation.

Why then innocence
On paradisal beaches,
An impeccable sky
Over the church of hygiene?
Is it because that
Was long ago?

.................
o whom should I turn
With that affair so dark
Of pain and also guilt
In the structure of the world,
If either here below
Or over there on high
No power can abolish
The cause and the effect?

Don't think, don't remember
The death on the cross,
Though everyday He dies,
The only one, all-loving,
Who without any need
Consented and allowed
To exist all that is,
Including nails of torture.

Totally enigmatic.
Impossibly intricate.
Better to stop speech here.
This language is not for people.
Blessed be jubilation.
Vintages and harvests.
Even if not everyone
Is granted serenity.


Disclaimer: Information used here are taken mostly from "Internet Poetry Archive"