Poetry and History: Poland's Acknowledged Legislators

I have felt that the problem of my time should be defined as Poetry and History.

—Czesław Miłosz, "A Poet between East and West"

Poetry and history, poetry and society, poetry and politics: for some of us, these phrases pair virtual antonyms. In various locations on the map of criticism, but especially in the Anglo-American academy, the lyric poem has been under siege for years. The "aesthetic isolationism" of lyric poetry—its "refusal of life actually conducted in actual society"—has been described as complicitous "with class-interested strategies of smoothing over historical conflict and contradictions with claims of natural and innate organization." On this view, the Romantic poets, in particular, set out to rescue art "from the material practices, social relations and ideological meanings in which it is always caught up, and raised [it] to the status of a solitary fetish."¹ The Romantics' favored form, the lyric, is invariably, in such accounts, the worst offender. These charges have been challenged by New Historicists and die-hard formalists alike; still, a large body of recent criticism claims or presupposes that lyric poetry is socially irresponsible.²

The critics I have in mind often take their lead from Mikhail Bakhtin. The lyric, as Bakhtin understood it, is a deplorably antisocial genre: the poet's "utopian" goal is to "speak timelessly" from an "Edenic world," "far removed from the petty rounds of everyday life." "Authoritarian, dogmatic and conservative," Bakhtin's poet struggles to assume "a complete single-personed hegemony over his own language," destroying in the process "all traces" of "other people," "of social heteroglossia and diversity of language."³ It would not be surprising that lyric poetry—were it indeed opposed to otherness and diversity—should find itself underappreciated or assaulted in the American academy. But it seems untoward that a primary source of this viewpoint should be Russian. For lyric poetry has played a distinctive role in modern East European history—a role it simply has not had to, or been able to, take on in the West. Plato famously expelled poets from his ideal republic: the poet is, as Mark Edmundson remarks, "of no use to heads of state."⁴ Aleksander Wat, the great Polish poet, was quick to see an analogy between Plato's republic and the regimes of postwar Eastern Europe: "Plato ordered us cast out / of the City where Wisdom reigns. / In a new Ivory Tower made of (human) bones."⁵

"In Central and Eastern Europe," Czesław Miłosz once observed, "the word 'poet' has a somewhat different meaning from what it has in the West." In Poland or Russia, for instance, "a poet does not merely arrange words in beautiful order. Tradition demands that he be a 'bard,' that his songs linger on many lips, that he speak in his poems of subjects of interest to all the citizens."⁶ The tradition to which Miłosz referred is nearly two hundred years old: since the early nineteenth century, poets in his part of the world have been called upon to serve (in Alexander Solzhenitsyn's phrase) as their nations' "second government." The heavy load of social and civic responsibility that Poland's writers was expected to shoulder was, if anything, even greater than that shouldered by their Russian counterparts. The partitions that erased Poland from the map of Europe in the late eighteenth century meant that Polish Romantics like Mickiewicz, Norwid, Slowacki, and their literary offspring felt compelled to replace their vanished state with poetry (and prose). Both the poets and their oppressed compatriots took this obligation very seriously.

The political aspirations of English and American Romantics remained unrealized: hence, Shelley's famous "legislators of the world" go "unacknowledged." They stand unfailingly on the side of "great and free developments of the national will" but are, as Shelley saw it, spurned by the nations whose interests they seek to serve.⁷ Perhaps for this reason the Anglo-American critical...