The Vital Difference Between Czesław Miłosz and Zbigniew Herbert
Milosz, Herbert, and Myself (1956-1967)
I have often been asked to describe what it was like to spend an evening relaxing with Czeslaw Milosz and Zbigniew Herbert. But I have a problem, summed up by the old joke that “Whoever says they remember the Sixties wasn’t really there.” The most I can say is that I got more drunk with each of them in turn than I have ever with any other single person. In my single one-on-one encounter with Herbert in Poland in 1961, I remember only that we drank a fifth of my Black Label whiskey, followed by most of Herbert’s fifth of Polish vodka. In Milosz’s case, over six years, I only remember the time his head dropped to the table, and at that very moment, about 2 a.m., his wife Janka stepped out from behind a curtain, to tell me it was time to go home.
I am not normally a heavy drinker, but in the presence of two Poles at odds with existence, and whose genes had been selectively adapted through millennia of boreal winters, I accepted that alcohol was a fast track to escape from the imperfect reality we live in, to a different, and perhaps saner reality.
What I also shared with both men, I think, was that I too, like them, came from a part of the world (in their case, the Polish Kresy; in my case, the province of Quebec) where the language I spoke was not the dominant language of the region.
This made each of us what I now call a liminal character, conscious of a kind of doubleness stemming from our environment but now also in ourselves, between two cultures at work in our divided bicameral brain. That was perhaps a link shared by all three of us. And in the case of Herbert, I think that explains why I prefer his earliest poems when he wrote, as they say, for the drawer, because he could not then publish in Stalinist Poland. His earliest poems are for me his most memorable, like “Two Drops”: “In the end they were faithful . . . like two drops / stuck at the edge of a face.”
For me, his greatest poems are those in Study of the Object (see: his Collected Poems), published without a problem in 1961 during the closing period of the so-called Polish Thaw. His “Elegy of Fortinbras,” dedicated to Milosz and accurately delineating the differences between them, modestly acknowledges a transcendent dimension to his mentor—“This night is born / A star named Hamlet”—as opposed to his own more secular concerns: “what I shall leave will not be worth a tragedy.”[1] And his short lyric “Pebble” contains a poetic perspective:
Pebbles cannot be tamed
to the end they will look at us
with an eye calm and very clear[2]—
It is a perspective that is potentially, as Milosz acknowledged, subversive:
Pebbles cannot be tamed, but people can, if they are sufficiently crafty and apply the stick-and-carrot method successfully.[3]
But as the Thaw ended, Herbert took refuge in a more limited persona, Pan Cogito, and in this way managed to write and be published during the communist crackdown. Suppressing his dreams, he wrote, speaking metaphorically, from only the skeptical side of his brain.[4]
Milosz, at his best, wrote from both sides of his brain (what he called his Naphta and Settembrini), not just as analytical witness but also as a dreamer. He explicitly recognized that poetry, if it is to “save nations,” must see the temporal (history, becoming, devenir) from the perspective of the eternal (being, esse), and also vice versa. He did so first in a very conflicted short poem:
whoever in what is
Finds peace, order, and an eternal moment
Will vanish without a trace . . .[5]
He then expanded did it (in what he called “a polemic with the T.S. Eliot of The Four Quartets”) in the epic perspective of his Treatise on Poetry:
For contemplation fades without resistance.
For its own sake, it should be forbidden (Treatise, 59).
Addressing a hypothetical Republic in an impending apocalyptic collapse (a screen for post-war Poland), the narrative voice of the poem pronounces prophetically that “Your death approaches,” to be replaced by “man, naked and mortal / Ready for truth, for speech, for wings” (Treatise, 54). In this way, Milosz acknowledged that there is a doubleness in reality—what is now and/or what should be—as well as within ourselves.[6]
The Treatise on Poetry is epic, a survey of history, beginning, as his own life did, back when there was no ephemeral Polish state, only a Polish culture (within a larger empire) that he, like Mickiewicz before him, was deeply loyal to.
Herbert, in contrast, lived only under a Polish state, and became more and more clearly a strident nationalist. Milosz’s perspective was always cultural, transcending the immediate present.
Both poets spoke great truths. Herbert in detail. Milosz in grand perspective. I personally believe that Milosz’s macro truths, transcending any one single culture, may someday establish him as perhaps the most generative poet of our time.
Herbert and Milosz Diverge over Positivity (1968-1998)
In the words of Robert Hass, Herbert’s poetry sought, under oppression, “to say what is irreducibly true in a level voice.”[7] Thinking politically, Herbert wrote, in defiant rebuttal of Milosz, that poetry cannot change the world: “It is not the barometer that changes the weather.”[8] Milosz, thinking culturally, responded in contrast that “the poetic act both anticipates the future and speeds its coming.”[9]
I am grateful for what I learned from both poets. My poetry changed from the experience of translating Herbert’s individual poems, with their incisive, austere diction and imagery. But my entire being has been more enhanced by Milosz’s broader vision, including his faith in the important power of poetry in the ongoing development of human culture.
In 1966, Milosz and I wrote that “Herbert’s poetry is eminently sane.”[10] And Milosz, in contrast, characterized himself in The Land of Ulro as a catastrophist dreamer who “dreams of an idyllic earth where ‘the hay smells of the dream’; where tree, man, animal are joined in praise of the Garden’s beauty.”[11] Milosz described The Land of Ulro in 1977 as not written for “anybody in particular, except perhaps a few fastidious people able to read my Polish and belonging to the same circle of the literati.”[12] I see his book as the most inspiring utopia I know from the twentieth century, on a level with More’s Utopia (written by choice in Latin for the literati of the Renaissance) which in due time was translated into vernaculars and inspired multitudes.
Just as we need sane analysts, we need sane utopians. C.S. Lewis, narrating his loss of faith in the murderous trenches of World War I, wrote that there were two hemispheres of his mind: “On the one side, a many-islanded sea of poetry and myth; on the other a glib and shallow rationalism.”[13] Milosz wrote of a similar doubleness in his own mind, and later suggested that two similar “opposed tendencies usually also coexist within one person.”[14]
Sanity is usually associated by most people, these secular days, with rationalism rather than dreaming. But, as I suggested in Reading the Dream, the healthiest poetry advances culture by balancing “the need to preserve the best of the precious world we now enjoy with the urgent need to make it better.”[15] Herbert not only lacked but repudiated that second need. And, unmistakably, he became more and more unstable mentally as he attacked Milosz in both prose and verse.[16] In this he was like Philip Larkin, who also denied hope, and once wrote that “Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.”[17] Herbert, like Larkin, died prematurely, unhappily, and unfulfilled.
Both in the Middle Ages and again in the Enlightenment, it was once normal to attach importance to this difference between healthy and sick minds. William James, in Varieties of Religious Experience,
Distinguished between two types of religious experience: that of the healthy-minded and that of the sick soul. Those with a healthy-minded temperament are optimistic and have a positive outlook to the extent of willingly excluding evil from their awareness. Such an outlook is beneficial in promoting their well-being. At the other end of the spectrum is the sick soul, or morbid-minded, who cannot help seeing the evil in life. James dramatized this condition by relating the story of his own near nervous breakdown.[18]
This description of the sick soul anticipates Larkin’s description of himself, inspired by a personal crisis like that of C.S. Lewis. However, I am not sure that James, who identified “Divided Selves” with “Sick Souls,” would have agreed that there are two aspects to a balanced sanity, one aspect exhibited by Herbert in his early detailed observations, and the other by the double-minded Milosz in his partly utopian overview.
I strongly believe that Milosz, who in his last major book (A Year of the Hunter, 1990) wrote candidly and courageously about his own mental sicknesses, offered a saner vision of life overall, one which can help ease the world a little from its present distemper.
[1] This is very different from the dismissive tone in “Mr. Cogito and the Imagination” (1974)—“he had no regard for labyrinths / the Sphinx filled him with disgust” (Herbert, The Collected Poems 1956-1998, 352).
[2] Herbert, The Collected Poems 1956-1998, 197. I have slightly modified Milosz’s translation of the last line, for reasons explained in my short note, “Translating ‘Pebble’ with Czeslaw Milosz.”
[3] Czeslaw Milosz, The Witness of Poetry, 91-92. This passage, with its allusion to Sartre, is brilliant, a tour de force. I cannot however agree with Milosz’s wishful conclusion, that “The Pebble . . . ends on an eschatological note.”
[4] All sane thought involves both hemispheres, but not always in equilibrium. Cf. Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, 390-402, etc.
[5] Czeslaw Milosz, “Notebook: Bons by Lake Leman”; cf. discussion in Peter Dale Scott, Ecstatic Pessimist, 121, 131-36, etc.
[6] In the video “Writers Uncensored: Czeslaw Milosz: The Sweep of Time,” Milsosz said, “Striving is the most important. . . . There is a constant striving, and I would like to think that with my death I shall discover ultimate reality. Because I feel that reality, ultimate reality is everywhere—behind this tree, within the tree, and I would like to reach that ultimate reality. Poetry was part of that reaching, going to the other side, so to say, of the curtain.”
[7] Robert Hass, Washington Post, July 20, 1985.
[8] Jacek Trznadel, “An Interview with Zbigniew Herbert,” Partisan Review, 54:4 (1987).
[9] Czeslaw Milosz, The Witness of Poetry (Harvard University Press, 1983), 69.
[10] “Translators’ Note,” in Zbigniew Herbert, Selected Poems, translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott (Ecco Press, 1986), 17. Though the Note was jointly written, the words quoted here are all by Milosz. Ironically, the very year this encomium to Herbert’s poetry appeared, Herbert, having drunk too much at a Berkeley dinner party, “viciously attacked Miłosz [and] reproached him for his lack of participation in the Polish resistance” (Cynthia Haven, “The worst dinner party ever: Czesław Miłosz, Zbigniew Herbert, and the lady who watched the fight,” The Book Haven). In the 1980s, as the Polish People’s Republic was collapsing, Herbert intensified, both in prose and in verse, his reactionary charge that Milosz, born in Lithuania, was a cosmopolitan and not a true Polish patriot.
[11] Czeslaw Milosz, The Land of Ulro (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1981), 275.
[12] Milosz, The Land of Ulro, v.
[13] C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 171-72.
[14] Milosz, Witness, 109.
[15] Peter Dale Scott, Reading the Dream: A Post-Secular History of Enmindment (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2024), 262, cf. 6.
[16] “Like two gods. Herbert and Miłosz,” New Eastern Europe.
[17] Interview with Miriam Gross in The Observer, October 12-19, 1979. Cf. Peter Dale Scott, “Thom Gunn and the Normalcy of Perversity,” forthcoming, 5-6.
[18] “William James (1842-1910),” Boston Collaborative Encyclopedia of Western Theology. Milosz was influenced in his search for equilibrium by the positive thinking of “American pragmatism, especially by William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, which he read in his early youth” (Treatise, p. 123).
