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Summary/Abstract: An image from the book The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, which Miłosz read as a child and to which he returned in his speech given upon the occasion of receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature, constitutes a metaphor of the poet’s calling: to soar above the Earth and embrace it in a single gaze, while at the same time noticing every detail, “to see” from high up and close by, and then to describe as faithfully as possible. An irrefutable faith in the belief in the world and the pursuit of mimesis are the motor force of such poetry, accompanied by the crucial question of adequacy and reference as well as the endless battle waged by literature against that, which is revealed to us as reality. Despite the fact that it remains clumsy in contact with reality, language is the sole tool of cognition and understanding at our disposal. Time and again, we embark upon attempts at reaching reality with the aid of the word, and at efforts, made anew, to reveal the mystery of the world, even if inaccessibleness is part of the essence of all things.

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