The Most Generous of Great Poets

In 2001 HarperCollins published, under its Ecco imprint, Czeslaw Milosz’s massive and marvelous New and Collected Poems. Late in 2004 it published, also under its Ecco imprint, a slender elegant volume of the additional poems Milosz had written before his death that August entitled Second Space. There is one formal link between the two volumes: “Late Ripeness” is the last poem in the Collected Poems and the second one in Second Space; it begins, “Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year, / I felt a door opening in me and I entered / the clarity of early morning.” One normally approaches with trepidation the work a writer has done in the closing years of a long life, but even in his nineties Milosz remained Milosz, and he knew what he was doing. Apparently a door did open for him; his poems seem to have gained in clarity and simplicity but to have suffered no loss in quality. I might almost say that I prefer Second Space to the Collected Poems on the grounds that at 112 pages it is short enough that I could read and reread all of the poems, getting them all into my head, while I am still working at getting the 769 pages of that big volume tucked safely away.

Second Space is divided into five parts. Part 1 consists of 28 separate but related poems, most of which fit on a single page. Part 2, “Father Severinus,” consists of 11 short first-person poems that add up to a sketch of Milosz’s ideal clergyman, who is notably undogmatic and uncertain of his faith. Part 3, the heart of the book, is a “Treatise on Theology” consisting of 23 short, seemingly autobiographical poems in which he seeks “to redeem himself from the sin of pride.” Part 4, “Apprentice,” is a highly distinctive, heavily footnoted, and deeply characteristic account of his relationship with his “master,” his much older cousin, the French symbolist poet Oscar Milosz. (A footnote reads: “When a certain Polish writer received the Nobel prize in 1980, some French newspapers expressed the opinion that it had been given to the wrong Milosz.”) Part 5 retells the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice in a little over three extraordinary pages. It ends: “How will I live without you, my consoling one!” cries Orpheus. “But there was a fragrant scent of herbs, the low humming of bees, and he fell asleep with his cheek on the sun-warmed earth.”

Milosz has been something of a scandal to fashionably enlightened commentators because he not only proclaimed himself a Catholic (and even wrote a poem in honor of Pope John Paul II) but counted Boehme, Mickiewicz, and Swedenborg among his guides while having little regard for the twentieth-century philosophers that the French existentialists made popular. He is still Milosz, still scandalous; the first poem in the book, the title poem, makes that clear, for it is a lament for our loss of faith in the reality of that “second space” where Heaven and Hell exist. “Without unearthly meadows how to meet salvation? And where will the damned find suitable quarters?” It is no excuse to the fashionably enlightened that his lamentation is tongue-in-cheek; it only makes matters worse that through the rest of the poems in the book the dominant recurring note is “I don’t know, I don’t understand.” Ambiguity is fine, but Milosz carries it so far that he rejects all the beliefs that believers are supposed to have and then insists that he remains a believer, albeit a person of weak faith and a skeptic. His “Treatise on Theology” is an autobiography rather than a demonstration of intellectual brilliance, and it concludes with a poem honoring the loveliness of the Lady who appeared to the children at Lourdes and Fatima.

One of Milosz’s apparently simple but great gifts is for fully registering the defects of, or at least his disagreements with, people he...