Czesław Miłosz’s Voice in the Controversy over “Incomprehensibility” as a Reiterated Choice of Tradition Cover Image

Głos Miłosza w sporze o „niezrozumialstwo” jako ponowiony wybór tradycji
Czesław Miłosz’s Voice in the Controversy over “Incomprehensibility” as a Reiterated Choice of Tradition

Author(s): Agata Stankowska
Subject(s): Literary Texts
Published by: Instytut Badań Literackich Polskiej Akademii Nauk
Keywords: Czesław Miłosz; Miłosz's "Against incomprehensible poetry"; Miłosz's "Postscriptum";

Summary/Abstract: The article offers a detailed analysis of Czesław Miłosz’s two late sketches written at the beginning of 1990s, i.e. “Against incomprehensible poetry (Przeciw poezji niezrozumiałej)” and “Postscriptum.” Resorting to the poetics of manifesto, Miłosz once again presents the main assumptions of his epiphanic poetry project. This time, however, the presentation has a form of a subtle intertextual play with the reader: Miłosz in an allusive way prompts a cue and ostentatiously rejects the thouhgts that refer to the most famous polemics of the Inter-War Years, that is to the controversy over “incomprehensibility.” The present article contains a reconstruction of the play as well as the answers to the question for the stake of the play. In the different context of literature characteristic of a critical phase of modernism Miłosz continues, or rather revives, the question about “incomprehensibility.” Now it is no longer a “within Avant-Garde” argument about the form, but an antonymy between the traditional world view and the modern one in its main aesthetic tendencies: “Against the torrents of elaborate metaphors and against a network of words liberated from colloquial meanings.”

  • Issue Year: 2011
  • Issue No: 2
  • Page Range: 55-74
  • Page Count: 20
  • Language: Polish