| The Witness of Poetry Revised Edition Contributor(s): Milosz, Czeslaw (Author) |
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ISBN: 0674953835 ISBN-13: 9780674953833 Publisher: Harvard University Press OUR PRICE: $30.40 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: January 1984 Annotation: 'Milosz is at all times direct, even simple. He has the ability to return the pleasures of poetry to ordinary readers, and in his prose, as here, he makes you suspect that the great intellectual sin of our time may be a fear of the obvious.'Vanity Fair |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Literary Criticism | Poetry - Poetry - Literary Criticism | Eastern European (see Also Russian & Former Soviet Union) |
| Dewey: 809.1 |
| LCCN: 82015471 |
| Series: Charles Eliot Norton Lectures |
| Physical Information: 0.41" H x 6.06" W x 9.01" (0.43 lbs) 128 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: Czeslaw Milosz, winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature, reflects upon poetry's testimony to the events of our tumultuous time. From the special perspectives of "my corner of Europe," a classical and Catholic education, a serious encounter with Marxism, and a life marked by journeys and exiles, Milosz has developed a sensibility at once warm and detached, flooded with specific memory yet never hermetic or provincial. Milosz addresses many of the major problems of contemporary poetry, beginning with the pessimism and negativism prompted by reductionist interpretations of man's animal origins. He examines the tendency of poets since Mallarm to isolate themselves from society, and stresses the need for the poet to make himself part of the great human family. One chapter is devoted to the tension between classicism and realism; Milosz believes poetry should be "a passionate pursuit of the real." In "Ruins and Poetry" he looks at poems constructed from the wreckage of a civilization, specifically that of Poland after the horrors of World War II. Finally, he expresses optimism for the world, based on a hoped-for better understanding of the lessons of modern science, on the emerging recognition of humanity's oneness, and on mankind's growing awareness of its own history. |
Contributor Bio(s): Milosz, Czeslaw: - Czeslaw Milosz was the first Slavic poet to hold the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship at Harvard University. He was Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Emeritus, at the University of California, Berkeley. |