Saved or Depraved? Czesław Miłosz: On Salvation Cover Image

Zbawiony czy pozbawiony? Czesław Miłosz „O zbawieniu”
Saved or Depraved? Czesław Miłosz: On Salvation

Author(s): Tomasz Garbol
Subject(s): Literary Texts
Published by: Towarzystwo Naukowe KUL & Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski Jana Pawła II
Keywords: Czesław Miłosz; contemporary poetry; literature and religion

Summary/Abstract: The article is an interpretation of Czesław Miłosz’s poem On Salvation. The basic observation on the level of text analysis is concerned with the phenomenon of its ambiguity. It is discussed both in the semantic and in the strictly artistic order, that is in the order of poetic language. Miłosz’s poems and essays, in which the problem of the existential quality of “depravation” appears, the tradition of Japanese Zen poetry, and Adam Mickiewicz’s Zdania i uwagi (Opinions and Remarks) are a historical-literary context referred to in the article. The center of the meaning of the poem is identified in the article not with the questions of faith or lack thereof, but with the question about man’s cognitive possibilities, about the limitations of imagination confronted with the problem of salvation.

  • Issue Year: 59/2011
  • Issue No: 01
  • Page Range: 219-232
  • Page Count: 14
  • Language: Polish