Przystanek Miłosz
MIŁOSZ: ON CIRCUIT

Summary/Abstract: This paper undertakes a critical examination of Czesław Miłosz’s negative responses to contemporary art in general, and American modernist poetry in particular. It focuses on Miłosz’s interpretations of Cézanne’s statements and Wallace Stevens’s poems, and concludes that the Polish poet’s inability and unwillingness to appreciate contemporary art results from his recognition and approval of mimetic representation as the only strategy which guarantees rationality, certainty, a sense of metaphysical hierarchy and which is informed by them. Quoted are Miłosz’s somewhat angry reactions to the concepts of abstract, non-fi gurative art as well as his words of admiration for the representational moment apparently inherent in both poetry and painting. Parenthetically, the paper points to Miłosz’s repressed feelings of existential and epistemological ambivalence, arguably the most valuable aspect of his work.

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