Overcoming the Burden of History. The Poetry of Tadeusz Gajcy, Czeslaw Miłosz, and Zbigniew Herbert
Overcoming the Burden of History. The Poetry of Tadeusz Gajcy, Czeslaw Miłosz, and Zbigniew Herbert

Summary/Abstract: By the end of August 1944, one of the poets about whom I write was dead. A young man of twenty-two, he was killed while fighting in the Rising in German-occupied Warsaw. Two volumes of his poetry had already been published by underground presses. His name was Tadeusz Gajcy. The other two poets had become DPs (displaced persons), and were living near Kraków. They did not know each other, although the twenty-year-old Zbigniew Herbert had read some poems published by the already well-known thirty-three-year-old Czesław Miłosz. At that moment of their personal history they were both homeless and suffering, but they were alive. The choices they would make in the near future would be determined to a significant degree by their relationship to the past and to the dead man whose works, though limited in number, were intense and original. The choices of the surviving poets would affect their later life, career, and mutual relationship. The lives and works of the three poets were influenced by history in different ways and this interaction offers some insight into the makings of literature.

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