After the end of the world

In 1973, when I was twenty-three years old, I decided to stop in Warsaw during a year I was traveling in Europe. From that trip I remember one chilly gray dusk in particular when I walked through the neighborhood that had once been the Warsaw Ghetto. There was a lot of noise on the street-people were bustling home from work-but their activity only seemed to accentuate what was for me the eerie and even ghostly absence of all those missing persons, an annihilated people. One didn't need to travel to Auschwitz to feel guilty absence and palpable vacancy. That night I reread Czeslaw Milosz's poems "A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto," "A Song on the End of the World," and "Dedication." This last poem was addressed to "You whom I could not save," and dated Warsaw, 1945. Its key stanza has thereafter set a standard of moral seriousness in poetry:

What is poetry which does not save Nations or peopie?

Aconnivance with official lies, A song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment, Readings for sophomore girls. That I wanted good portry without knowing it, That I discovered, late, its salutary aim, In this and only this I find salvation.

Milosz's early post-war poems are all haunted by survivor's guilt, the poignancy of living after what was, for so many, the world's end. Poetry here becomes an offering to the dead, a form of expiation, a hope for redemption.

Reading the work of Zbigniew Herbert, Tadeusz Rozewicz, and Wislawa Szymborska-the half-generation after Milosz-I soon discovered that all of post-war Polish poetry was similarly haunted by guilt, initiated in the apocalyptic fires of history. These writers shared an important collective experience, and the formative nature of that experience helped shape the character-the spirit-of their work. Born in the early 1920s, they grew up during one of the few periods of independence in Polish history, but they came of age during the terrible years of World War II. Poland lost six million people during the war, nearly one-fifth of its population, and the young writers felt the full responsibility-the almost crushing burden-of speaking for those who did not survive the German occupation. "I am twenty-four/ led to slaughter/ I survived," Rozewicz wrote. It was no boast. No wonder, then, that at the conclusion of "Dedication" Milosz asks for the dead to free him:

They used to pour millet on graves or poppy seeds To feed the dead who would come disguised as birds. I put this book here for you, who once lived So that you should visit us no more.

The war was such a traumatic event that for a new generation of Polish poets it called all moral and aesthetic values into question. Before the war, Polish poetry was mostly dominated by two groups: Skamander and the Cracow Vanguard (also known as the First Vanguard). The group of poets clustered around the magazine Skamander were vital Bergsonian traditionalists-lyric, tender, cosmopolitan-who believed "unshakably in the sanctity of a good rhyme, in the divine origin of rhythm." They were exuberant formal poets-I especially recommend the poetry of Julian Tuwim-but the war blew apart the optimistic premises of their program. The First Vanguard-Julian Przybos is the best example-rejected the poetic techniques of Skamander, but shared their optimistic faith in the future of technological civilization. The consensus of the young poets was that those who survived the war could never believe in that future again. Nor could they revert to traditional forms. They rejected the aesthetics of elaborate, ornamental, or sonorous language. It was as if poetry had to be reinvented again from the ground up.

The major poets of post-war Poland all share a distrust of rhetoric, of false words and sentiments. "Try to understand this simple speech as I would be ashamed of another," Milosz avows in "Dedication": "I swear, there is in me no wizardry of words." Rozewicz was among the first to catch this mood in a naked, stripped-down poetry of drastic simplicity:

After the end of the world after death I found myself in the midst of life creating myself building life people animals landscapes

This is a table I said this is a table on the table is bread a knife a knife is to cut bread people live on bread

Man must be loved I studied night and day what must be loved I answered man ("In the MiNt of I.el

Rozewicz's brutal simplicity enacted his suspicion of all general ideas and ph es.

After the war, Herbert, too, deliberately cultivated a cool, economical, and anti-rhetorical style, dispensing with punctuation in his poems and suspicous of grand affects-what one poem calls "the piano at the top of the Alps" and "the artificial fires of poetry." His early poems show "a rapacious love of the concrete," a sr; fascination with inanimate objects, which he viewed as st and i uta muni.e human beings.

His concentration on objects was part of his determination to see things as they are, to give them their proper names. "At last the fy of things opens our eyes," he declares in "StooL" To the poet who suffered under, and had seen the collapse of, several shameful ideologies, his commitment to concrete particulars stands as a fundamental contrast and direct alternative to the cant and half-truths of human beings. A radically undeted style stands as a special correlry to the quest for thins-inthemselves. Herbert has sought a langge of what he calls "semantic transparency," the pristine word that holds against moden debasements of language.

Every major Polish poet shows an absolute distrust of any political creed or ideology. They had to come to this position, however, at their own rate, in their own ways. In 1949, Socialist Realism was imposed on Polish artists and, as Milosz has written, "the world of Orwell ceased to be a literary fiction in Poland." The poets responded to authoritarian pressures in different ways. Some, like Milosz, saw what was coming and went into exile. Some, like Herbert and Miron Bialoszewski, chose internal exile or "writing for the drawer." Rozewicz, who was already famous, and Szymborska, who was virtually unknown, had a moment of believing in communism and tried to conform, writing stridently Socialist Realist poems. Those poems make discouraging reading today. Soon they understood that communism was a Utopian fantasy, and distanced themselves from its illusions. It wasn't until after the "thaw" of 1956-the year that censorship famously loosened its grip in Poland-that Szymborska, for example, truly hit her own note and started to become a major poet. Her third book, Calling Out to Yeti, reveals a fresh disillusion with Stalinist politics, a mordent humor and deep skepticism. The figure of Yeti, the Abominable Snowman, is the book's central metaphor for Stalinism. Believing in communism is like believeing in the Abominable Snowman; neither offers any human warmth or artistic comfort. "Notes for a NonExistent Himalayan Expedition" ends:

Yeti, we've got Shakespeare there. Yet, we play solitaire and violin At nightfall, we turn lights on, Yeti.

Up here it's neither moon nor earth. Tears freeze. Oh Yeti, semi-moonman, turn back, think again!

I call this to the Yeti, insside four walls of avalanche, stomping my feet for warmth on the everlasting snow.

The snow here is very cold, very Siberian, but for the Snow Creature there would be no coming down to accommodate the vulnerability of actual human beings.

Ever since the fifties, Polish poets have struggled to keep human beings in fUll view. It's no easy task to preserve individual integrity. Mil:s writes:

The purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person, for our house is open, the are no keys in the doors, and invisible guests come in and out at wilt ("Ars Poetica?")

Szymborska, Herbert, and Roi,ez have, in some sense, refused the mantle of a poetry which could save nations or people. Each writes a poetry of sardonic individualism Yet their poems also tend to shed light on common experiences. They understand something fundamental about our century. "See, how efficient it still is,/ how it keeps itself in shape-/ our century's hatred," Szymborska writes, and "Our twentieth century was going to improve on the others".

A c of problems weren't going to come up anymore hunger, for example, and war, and so forth.

There was going to be respect for helpless people's helplessness, trust, that kind of stuff

Anyone who planned to enjoy the world is now faced

with a hopeless task Stupidity isn't funny. Wisdom isn't gay. Hope isn't that young girl anymore et cetera alas.

God was finally go to believe in a man both good and strong but good and strong are still two different men;

The radical accessibility of contemporary Plish poetry has sometimes bewildered advanced American readers who often miss the point that for these poets stylistic clarity is a form of ethics. One might say that the very clarity of this poetry is a response to ideological obfuscations, political double-talk.

Take, for example, Szymborska's poem "Children of Our Age." She takes a common assertion- "We are children of our age,/ it's a political age"- and examines it until it begins to leak and then fall apart. She tries to find the human being-the human reality-obscured by the political dogma:

Meanwhile, people perished, animals died, houses burned,

and the fields ran wild, just as in time immemorial, and Jess politicaL

One key to Szymborska's style may well be the way she works subversive variations on familiar rhetoric.

The best Polish poets are determined to speak in their own voices. From their own perspective. They have mounted in their work a witty and tireless defense of individual subjectivity against collectivist thinking. At the same time they find it virtually impossible to ignore the catastrophic history of their country. They are involuntary witnesses to such overwhelming events as World War II and the Holocaust, the bitter years of the Stalinist repression in Poland, the imposition of martial law in 1981. No writer can safely ignore the occupation-the trampling-of his or her own country. So, too, these writers share a communal sense of liberation over, say, the October "thaw" of 1956, or the final fall of communism in the late 1980s. These historical events naturally impinge upon and inform their work. As Milosz has written:

One can say that what occured in Poland was an encounter of an European poet with the hell of the twentieth century, not hell's first circle, but a much deeper one. This situation is something of a laboratory, in other words: it allows us to examine what happens to modern poetry in certain historical conditions.

I sense a deep and perhaps unresolvable tension-an ongoing dialoguein the laboratory of Polish poetry. It takes place between the solitary singer and the larger community. On the one hand, there is a strong expectation that the poet speaks on behalf of others. One might call this the prophetic function-the communal covenant-of poetry. On the other hand, there are compelling reasons, in Poland as elsewhere, for the poet to resist any public or ideological pressure to speak for anyone besides oneself. Even so, there is often a public dimension-a dimension of civitas-to this private speech. Herbert writes in "The Trial":

for so many months years I was composing the final speech to God to the court to the world to the conscience to the dead rather than the living

The basic dialectic of Polish poetry is set out in the title of Adam Zagajewski's fine book of essays, Solidarity, Solitude.

Polish poetry has often been called a poetry of witnessing, but that notion needs some refining and expanding. Polish poets themselves have often shown an ambivalence about being so-called "witnesses" to history. Milosz called his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, The Witness of Poetry, but I also recall a letter he wrote to The New York Review of Books objecting to a praiseworthy review by A. Alvarez that called him a "witness." In Milosz's view, the label narrowed the meanings Of his poetry and implied that his poems were a kind of journalistic response to events. Milosz's ambivalence points out that Polish poets are in some sense metaphysical poets forced to become historical ones. While they could not help being aware of the history inflicted upon them, they nevertheless have remained most keenly interested in exploring the nature of reality at even deeper levels. For example, Herbert, who is the most ironic, civilized, and classically conscious of poets (the exemplary personages in his poems tend to be figures such as Marcus Aurelius and Hamlet, Roman proconsuls and Greek gods) has spent virtually his entire adulthood in opposition to totalitarianism. In poetry he has pursued classical valuesraising questions about the nature of nature, of philosophical truth, of suffering, of time, of God.

Like Herbert, Szymborska is a philosophically inflected poet who investigates large unanswerable questions with terrific elan and delicacy. Her notion of "witnessing" seems to involve extracting general truths from individual observations. Take her poem "Reality Demands":

Reality demands that we also mention this: Life goes on.

It continues at Cannae and Borodino, at Kosovo Polje and Guernica There's a gas station on a little square in Jericho, and wet paint on park benches in Bila Hora. Letters fly back and forth between Pearl Harbor and Hastings, a moving van passes beneath the eye of the lion at Cheronea, and the blooming orchards near Verdun cannot escape the approaching atmospheric front

There is so much everything that Nothing is hidden quite nicely.

Eventually, even the worst of destructions recedes: "On tragic mountain passes/ the wind rips hats from unwitting heads/ and we can't help/ laughing at that." Szymborska's subject is how, despite catastrophes that defy the imagination, daily life goes on, forgetfulness seems to conquer memory, the world keeps mysteriously renewing itself. Reality demands, she suggests, that this, too, must be taken into account when we thinkabout history.

Szymborska seems characteristic in the way she learned to use the specifics of the war experience to pose and even generalize about the nature of human experience itself. For example, her poem "Could Have," which has also been translated as "There But for the Grace," appears tose set in wartime Poland during the German occupation:

It could have happened It had to happen. It happened earlier. Later. Nearer. Farther off It happened, but not to you. You were saved because you were the first. You were saved because you were the last Alone. With others. On the right The left. Because it was raining. Because of the shade. Because the day was sunny.

You were in luck-there was a forest You were in luck-there were no trees. You were in luck-a rake,hook, a beam, a brake, .ami, a turn, a quarter inch, an instant So, you're here? Still dizzy from another dodge, close shave, reprieve?

One hole in the net and you slipped through? I couldn't be more shocked or speechless. Listen, how your heart pounds inside me,

While the poem recalls the brutal uncertainty of the Nazi-period, it also addresses the radical contingency of experience-the "sheer dumb luck"that leads to one's survival. So, too, there is a sense of the vast distance between simple things ("a rake, a hook, a beam, a brake . . .") and how much life depends on them. Even the most innocuous objects can become sinister or hazardous, while ridiculous coincidence can account for one's survival. It's as if we're all actors in an unrehearsed slapstick comedy. But the poem ends on bitter irony, for the speaker has had her share of unwitting reprieves, and ruefully pays for them with an incurably guilty conscience.

One final example. In Herbert's poem "Mr. Cogito and the Imagination" there is a compelling list of those things that Mr. Cogito-Herbert's standin-would like to consider to the very end. It's a catalogue of subjectrhymes:

-Pascal's night -the nature of a diamond -the melancholy of the prophets -Achilles ' wrath -the madness of those who kill -the dreams of Mary Stuart -Neanderthal fear -the despair of the last Aztecs -Nietzsche's long death throes -the joy of the painter of Lascaux -the rise and fall of an oak -the rise and fall of Rome

Herbert wants to know about victims of history, both individual and collective, but he also wants to know about the nature of religious faith and the miracle of nature. Compelled by the rage and madness of some that leads to the fear and despair of others, this catalogue certainly points to the horrors of history. But he also wants to meditate on the mysteries of creation and the joys of artistic creativity. He concludes by paralleling the cycle of nature and the cycle of civilization. If this is witnessing, it is of a particularly philosophical kind.

I admire post-war Polish poetry for its unfashionable clarity, its democratic ethos, its commitment to an idiosyncratic individuality, its suspicion of absolutes and rejection of tyranny. I admire its humane values, its eminent sanity, its deep humility before the plentitude of the world. Each of these Polish poets has struggled to find an individual way to replace the nihilism that engulfed civilization after the end of the war, the end of the world. Milosz has sought a ground for transcendence; Rozewicz endorses what has been called a "qualified humanism"; Herbert stubbornly maintains an allegiance to "uncertain clarity," striving to keep a hierarchy of values; Szymborska rejoices in what she calls "commonplace miracles" and the gaiety of art. These poets try to tell the truth about human suffering, but they also seek to make meaning out of that suffering. Hence Milosz's brave claim: "Human reason is beautiful and invincible." Here is a poetry that takes history into account even as it seeks to transcend history, to find the stability of truth.

Edward Hirsch's most recent collection of poems is Earthly Measures, published by Knopl in 1994. He teaches in the University of Houston.

This is the first of a series of columns Edward Hirsch will write for APR.

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