The Milosz File

So, I don’t know, maybe it’s childish, a childish attitude. I’ve done extensive reading in philosophy and so on. But the poetry comes only from pain, only from personal experience. Not because I wanted to create any philosophical theory. The philosophy simply grew out of the pain.
Conversations with Czeslaw Milosz (309)

When Czeslaw Milosz received the Nobel Prize in 1980, there were few works of his available in English. This made it difficult to write an essay on him, which I had been invited to do for one of editor Michael Cuddihy’s special issues of Ironwood. It was easier to make an educated guess about the quality of his prose than his poetry: the poems available in Selected Poems left the latter an open question. I remember the thrill I felt a year later upon opening Ironwood 18 to encounter his early poem “The World,” in the vivid Hass/Pinsky translation, and significant sections of his important later work from The Separate Notebooks and The Land of Ulro. It was also disconcerting to encounter central texts that would have affected what I had written, especially on the issues of Milosz and childhood, his faith, his use of form (particularly rhyme), and his sensuality.