released 8/16/2024

In honor of the 20th anniversary this week of the death of poet Czesław Miłosz, we re-present this interview with professor Roger Lundin from Volume 71. Readers often miss the deeper themes in the late poet Miłosz’s work, says Lundin, because they focus instead on his political reputation. As Lundin discusses those themes and reads from Miłosz’s work, he notes that Miłosz’s career spanned seventy years — a fact evidenced in the publication of New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001 in 2003 — only a portion of the writing from which encompasses political themes. Instead of merely praising ideologies above all else in his poetry, he chronicled the particulars of life. He understood the work of the poet (and poetry) as that of bearing witness to the ordinariness and goodness of life, to the beauty of creation and cultural memory. Miłosz (1911-2004) called poets secretaries (readily donning that title himself), states Lundin, and devoted himself to dictating the intimate details of the world around him for posterity’s sake.

16 minutes

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