Tommy C's Blog

is a book I've failed to review many times. There are over ten attempts sat about on various hard-drives - and a couple of draft postings wait, too, on my old abandonned blogs, for the push of a publish button that will never arrive. No doubt this post will be such a failure too, but at least I have not started it like William Logan did here:

Czeslaw Milosz wrote A Treatise on Poetry nearly half a century ago, in the backwash of the war that almost destroyed his country. In this complex meditation on Poland and Polish poetry, the poet grapples—at the climax, weirdly, wonderfully, in the backwoods of Pennsylvania—with his own compromised relation to his art. You can feel the influence of The Waste Land (there are objective correlatives scattered like candy), though Milosz, attempting to write the history of a sensibility, has his long eye on The Prelude.

A scatter-gun of facts to give some context is alright, but anchoring the review in Eng Lit referents is distinctly odd. True, Miłosz translated The Waste Land into Polish, whilst a member of the Warsaw resistance in fact. But despite some formal similarity between his Treatise and Eliot's Waste Land - they are both long poems, split into parts, and have notes at the back - it is not hard to notice that Miłosz wrote in distinctly ambivalent tones about Eliot. Even polemically and mockingly, in fact, at points in this poem I am once again failing to review.

Still, at least I am doing a better job than William Logan, because hinting that Miłosz aimed to stride with his work into the Western Canon alongside Wordsworth's epic wander in a wood, The Prelude, via this poem, is truly odd. A Nobel poet who here wrote in Polish, about Polish poetry, poems, poets and society - of course! he wants to be Wordsworth. It is as logical as saying that Shakespeare aimed to write like Paul McCartney. And Poles, in my experience, rate English novels but not poets. "Maybe Byron is good enough," a Polish literature PhD student told me once at a seminar in Cambridge, "to be talked about alongside our poetry." And if not Byron, he meant, then none of us at all.

Still, many contemporary English or American poets, recognising the absence of any public recognition - let alone role or adulation - fake for themselves in its place some self-esteem by saying they are like x from Wordsworth, y in whoever, and z as if such-and-such, and so this discourse of legitimation and narcissitic tick of denial is easily projected onto others via the reviews that fund them. Of course the public must be mildly chastized for their ignorance, and also x,y and z must be suitably dead and thus unthreatening, and contemporary poets are not to be discussed in their absence. For, after all, who could dare write directly and honestly nowadays, after all?

Which is why Logan fails to understand the various other parts of this poem that he takes half-hearted and misaimed shots at in his review. For instance, Logan writes that Miłosz "leaps into platitudes as into a warm pool — to write poetry, we’re told, you need a) a classical education, and b) forests and streams." Yet the passage Logan is ineptly summaring is in fact bitterly sarcastic, and does not fit with some implicit cozy dismissal of a European eccentric who dallied to the States.

I don't think Logan's just missed some detail of this poem, either, but pretty much the whole thing. The conclusion of his review: "In A Treatise on Poetry, Miłosz and [co-translator] Hass have made what is so difficult, a beautiful poem in English that wasn’t written in English." Yet the book's Preface makes clear that the ethos of the poem's translation places being literal above being pretty, and poets who retreat from the world into attempts at 'pure beauty' are accused of moral neglect in the poem itself. Also asserted in the poem are the need to be of use, and even that it is better to write with a metaphorical stammer, if it means poetry at least makes more sense - all this, please note, in the context of a country living under various murderous invasions. Anyway. Having casually snubbed or avoided the poem's content, all that is left for Logan is a patronising little pat, I suppose.

I have briefly reviewed a review and could go on, but not reviewed this poem which you by now may have twigged means quite something to me. Means what? And why? Because this poem from Poland is of the world's "salt and void", not Auden's rhetorical world of "eros and of dust", secretly already affirmed from word one? That it proves that whilst "Novels and essays serve but will not last./ One clear stanaza can take more weight/ Than a whole wagon of elaborate prose"? Its elegies for the lost world of European beautiful times, its elegies for the lost poets whose name pass away like a waiter, "without a name"? Its terrible evocation of world war two, unimaginable, its bitter truth within and love of nature? Its history, philosophy, its beautiful poetry? That it is the bridge from Milosz's earlier, angrier writings to his later, more philosophical and at-peace work?

But no-one wants to hear such things from a review, and maybe not even from a work of art any more either. As I flick over the book's rich pages, I think my unending interest has something to do with Miłosz's capacity for honest, deep, intelligence and love, his ability to recognize and directly talk to reality in a way no-one else I've known or read does or has done. Whatever, I read with something shamefully rare, that you would not guess I had from my negating comment's about Logan's void of a review. For I read with the feeling of gratitude, even if I cannot put that into a few more words, or into a review, or ten.