Stanley Bill - Czeslaw Milosz's Faith in The Flesh - Body, Belief, and Human Identity-Oxford University Press (2022)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 12/11/2021, SPi
Czesław Miłosz’s Faith in the Flesh

Czesław Miłosz’s Faith in

the Flesh
Body, Belief, and Human Identity
STANLEY BILL
1
3
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Acknowledgments
This book is the product of many years of professional opportunities and life
experiences in which I owe an incalculable debt of gratitude to numerous collea-
gues and friends for their support and encouragement.
I thank Clare Cavanagh and Aleksander Fiut for teaching me to read poetry, for
introducing me to the world of Czesław Miłosz, and for their indispensable
support and advice. In many respects, I wrote this book for them and in dialogue
with them.
I thank the anonymous reviewers whose generous engagement with the man-
uscript helped me to produce a much better version of it. I also thank Jacqueline
Norton, editor at Oxford University Press, together with Aimee Wright, Bala
Shanmugasundaram, and the editing team, for all their efficient work and
encouragement.
Special thanks to Anthony Milosz for his support and kind permission to
reproduce multiple extracts and two poems in full.
I thank the fellow Miłosz scholars who have been constant interlocutors and
collaborators—among others, Aleksander Fiut, Clare Cavanagh, Łukasz Tischner,
Mateusz Antoniuk, Karina Jarzyńska, Ewa Kołodziejczyk, Marzena Woźniak-
Łabieniec, Joanna Zach, Magdalena Lubelska-Renouf, and Andrzej Franaszek.
I thank my colleagues in the Slavonic Studies Section of the Faculty of Modern
and Medieval Languages and Linguistics at the University of Cambridge, especially
those who read chapter drafts, offering both valuable advice and friendship—Rory
Finnin, Simon Franklin, Susan Larsen, Olenka Pevny, Rachel Polonsky, Rebecca
Reich, and Emma Widdis. Many thanks also to Elena Filimonova, the late
lamented Natasha Franklin, George Gomori, and Edyta Nowosielska. I thank all
my students, and especially doctoral students Kasia Brzezińska and Chelsea
Michta, who have ensured that teaching has always been learning.
I thank all those who contributed to the establishment of the Polish Studies
Programme at Cambridge—in particular, Włodek Bolecki and Maciej Żylicz of the
Foundation for Polish Science; Maciej Duszczyk, Marcin Pałys, and Robert
Sucharski of the University of Warsaw; Leszek Borysiewicz, Emma Widdis, Simon
Franklin, Rory Finnin, Emily Williams, Toby Wilkinson, and Christopher Whitney
at Cambridge; Arkady Rzegocki; Richard Tobiasiewicz and the M. B. Grabowski
Fund; Richard Penty and Sidney Sussex College; and the Zdanowich Fund of Trinity
College. I also thank the many other supporters and friends of the Programme,
including Norman and Maria Davies, Robert Frost, Karin Friedrich, Ewa Ochman,
Michał Rusiecki, Lubomir Jurczak, Joanna Niżyńska, Tamara Trojanowska,
vi 
Edyta Nowosielska, Paweł Stępień, and all the regular attendees of events in
Cambridge.
I thank two key scholarly interlocutors and mentors who still guide my
approach to literature—Lawrence Lipking and Samuel Weber. Thanks also to
Michał Paweł Markowski for his early encouragement. I express deep gratitude to
close intellectual partners and friends in various projects over the years—Jennifer
Croft, Tomek Bilczewski, and Roma Sendyka.
This book is a result of my long engagement with Polish culture and language,
which now extends back twenty years. My interpretive perspectives owe a great
deal to many Polish friends and guides on this journey, including Kinga and
Andrzej Stoszek; Iwona, Olaf, Maja, and Lars Zakrzewski; Asia Osiewicz-
Lorenzutti; Ania Smolarek; Jacek Dukaj; Rafał Siwik; Kasia Postępska and
Michał Zając; Ania Homik; Kasia Zielińska; Tomek Grzegorek; all my past
students in Poland; and the whole Możdżeń family.
Finally, I thank those who remain in many ways the most important audience
for all my work—my parents, Nigel and Janet; Caroline; my brothers, Quentin and
Cameron; my beloved Karolina, who remains the center of my world; and my
beautiful sons, Julian and Sebastian, who make me proud every day. Although its
subject may not necessarily lie at the heart of their most passionate interests, the
book is for them.
Several sections of Chapter Four were first published in my article, “Melting in the
Mirror: Woman, Body and Self in the Poetry of Czesław Miłosz,” Slavic and East
European Journal 58, no. 4 (Winter 2014): 645–62.
Extracts from “With Trumpets and Zithers,” “From the Rising of the Sun,” “La
Belle Epoque,” “Meaning,” and multiple brief quotations from New and Collected
Poems: 1931–2001 by Czesław Miłosz. Copyright © 1988, 1991, 1995, 2001 by
Czesław Miłosz Royalties, Inc. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
Multiple extracts from New and Collected Poems 1931–2001 by Czesław Miłosz
published by Penguin Classics. Copyright © New and Collected Poems 1931–2001
by Czesław Miłosz 1988, 1991, 1995, 2001 published by HarperCollins Inc. 2001,
Allen Lane, The Penguin Press 2001. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Books
Limited.
Extracts from Polish editions of the poems of Czesław Miłosz, Copyright ©
2021, The Estate of Czesław Miłosz, used by permission of The Wylie Agency
(UK) Limited.
Contents
List of Abbreviations ix
Introduction: The Mystery of the Body 1

1. Beyond the Body: Reinventing Transcendence 8
2. The Totalitarian Self: Consciousness in the Trap of the Body 41
3. The Embodied Self: Corporeal Sources of Religious Experience 73
4. The Fluid Self: Woman, Body, and the Flesh of the World 108
5. Poetry and the Body: The Meaning of Rhythm and the
Rhythm of Meaning 144
Conclusion: Belief in the Body 181
Works Cited 185

Index 197
List of Abbreviations
NCP Czesław Miłosz, New and Collected Poems 1931–2001 (New York: HarperCollins,
2003).
W Czesław Miłosz, Wiersze wszystkie (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Znak, 2011).
Introduction
The Mystery of the Body
In 1940, a twenty-nine-year-old Czesław Miłosz wrote a short essay on his fresh

impressions of the German invasion of Poland. In these little-known “Meditations
on a Time of Conflagration” (“Rozmyślania o czasie pożogi”), he describes bombs
falling on Warsaw, buildings in flames, residents fleeing in terror, and the suffer-
ing of the wounded.¹ He expresses astonishment at the stripping away of the
familiar world of civilization: the sudden liquidation of ministries, academies,
clubs, cafés, patisseries, whole neighborhoods. As the capital burns, the young
poet observes an impoverishment of human life. In columns of refugees, the
veneer of culture peels away to reveal the human animals beneath, as if these
mid-twentieth-century people had returned to a “primitive tribe.” He focuses on a
single individual, a “tall, blonde-haired woman” in the crowd, noting red stains of
faded makeup on an unwashed face. No longer sublimated by fashionable cloth-
ing, hairstyles, or cosmetics, the essence of the human being reveals itself in stark
materiality:
The mystery of the human body—that greatest mystery of the world, so difficult
to grasp, which painting and poetry have striven through so many centuries to
decipher—suddenly emerges from the mist. The richness of garments and the
morality of higher spheres vanish. All that remains is the body, bathed in the
flames, as if it had passed through the gates of paradise. There are no longer any
beliefs, religion, wealth, or reason. Do not speak any more of these things. Now
you have only to preserve these weakened legs and the bust showing through a
ragged dress.²
From under the tattered accoutrements of culture, the body appears as the sole
measure of the person, now entirely biologized or sexualized. A few years later, in
¹ Czesław Miłosz, “Rozmyślania o czasie pożogi,” trans. Beata Kalęba, in W cieniu totalitaryzmów:
Publicystyka rozproszona z lat 1945–1951 oraz teksty z okresu II wojny światowej, eds. Aleksander Fiut,
Mateusz Antoniuk, Stanley Bill, Karina Jarzyńska, Ewa Kołodziejczyk, and Marzena Woźniak-
Łabieniec (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2018), 674. This essay was first published in
Lithuanian under the title “Apmąstymai apie gaisrų sezoną” in Naujoji Romuva 8 (1940). It was not
published in Polish until 2018.
² Miłosz, “Rozmyślania o czasie pożogi,” 674. Translation from the Polish my own.
Czesław Miłosz’s Faith in the Flesh: Body, Belief, and Human Identity. Stanley Bill, Oxford University Press.
© Stanley Bill 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192844392.003.0001
2  ’    
another essay, Miłosz would use the same image of makeup as an explicit
metaphor for the fragility of civilization, tenuously separating humans from the
violence of nature. In this postwar account, the symbolic “smearing of lipstick” in
a defeated Warsaw heralds the advent of “Goebbels’ dream” of “blind struggle”
and mass murder.³ The boundary between humanity and “monstrous” nature is
erased in a war whose ideologues proclaim that only the “fittest” deserve to survive.
From this Darwinian perspective, the individual is reduced to a meaningless blip of
flesh in the ongoing transformations of the species. Indeed, Miłosz would argue
more broadly that it was the scientific degradation of human beings from culture to
biological nature that had first opened the ideological path to genocide.
In the same period, his famous poem on the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto
depicts the consequences of this historical process, as nature devours the frag-
mented body parts of anonymous Jewish victims in the ruins: “Bees build around
red liver, / Ants build around black bone” (NCP 63) [“Pszczoły obudowują
czerwoną wątrobę, / Mrówki obudowują czarną kość” (W 211)].⁴ These visions
of bare flesh and civilizational collapse would haunt the poet’s work throughout
the remaining six decades of his creative life. As he came to conceive it, the
historical catastrophe in Europe had been rooted in both the biologization of
humanity and an accompanying decline in religious belief.
The problem of the body lies at the very center of Miłosz’s work. He strongly
opposes reductive forms of modern materialism that he views as the underlying
cause of mass violence. Yet his response to reductionism is not merely to recon-
stitute spiritual or ideal forms of human identity, which no longer seem entirely
plausible. Instead, he often seeks to revalidate the flesh, elaborating his own non-
reductive understandings of human existence on the basis of the body’s deeper
meanings. Miłosz aspires to restore the “mystery of the body,” and thus to reaffirm
the transcendent value of the individual in the face of modern biopolitics.
Within the framework of his own hesitant Christian faith, Miłosz’s ideas of
human identity, belief, and poetic language are fundamentally embodied. His
poetry and prose often suggest a paradoxical striving toward transcendence
precisely through sensual experience. Yet his perspectives on bodily existence
are by no means exclusively affirmative. In this book, I will trace his diverse
representations of the body from dualist visions that demonize the flesh through
to positive images of the body as the source of both religious experience and the
poet’s own creative faculty. At the same time, Miłosz evinces multiple conceptions
of the human self, from rational consciousness trapped in the cage of corporeality
to a fluid subjectivity ecstatically commingling with the flesh of the world.
³ Czesław Miłosz, “Notatnik amerykański,” in W cieniu totalitaryzmów: Publicystyka rozproszona z

lat 1945–1951 oraz teksty z okresu II wojny światowej, 537–9.
⁴ The poem is “A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto” (“Biedny chrześcijanin patrzy na getto”) from
Rescue (Ocalenie, 1945).
:      3
He contends that poetry is the best vehicle for conveying these contradictions
because it also combines “disembodied,” symbolic meanings with the sensual
meanings of sound and rhythm. For Miłosz, the double nature of poetic meaning
reflects the fused duality of human existence.
Against the violence of reductive materialism, Miłosz sets himself the poetic
task of defending or regenerating visions of human “transcendence.” This general
concept has had multiple meanings. In the broadest terms, it denotes an experi-
ence of going above or beyond a certain set of limits. But the specific types of
transcendence depend on what is being surpassed. Contemporary thinkers have
made distinctions between “vertical” and “horizontal” forms.⁵ “Vertical” tran-
scendence, on the one hand, remains the dominant variety, closest to the original
etymology of “climbing over,” suggesting a surmounting of the body, materiality,
or “this world”—and a corresponding access to “another world.”⁶ Vertical under-
standings of transcendence lie at the heart of much religious thinking, both as the
aspiration of believers to “climb above” their worldly or bodily selves, and as a
hierarchical orientation of reality. The divine or “otherworldly” principle above
presides over the human world below.
“Horizontal” transcendence, on the other hand, refers to the experience of
“going beyond” an immanent set of limitations, while still remaining wholly
within this material world. Strictly speaking, the term is an oxymoron, as it does
not imply any “climbing” into a higher dimension.⁷ Moreover, unlike vertical
transcendence, it does not demand the surpassing of the physical boundaries of
human existence. Instead, it describes a positive transformation of embodied, day-
to-day human life.⁸ This process frequently suggests a notion of depth and an
aspiration to descend more profoundly into bodily or worldly experience, and
thus to access hidden dimensions of the self or the physical universe.⁹ Such
⁵ For clear preliminary definitions, see Ursula Goodenough, “Vertical and Horizontal Transcendence,”
Zygon 36, no. 1 (March 2001): 21–31; Michael Kalton, “Green Spirituality: Horizontal Transcendence,” in
Paths of Integrity, Wisdom, and Transcendence: Spiritual Development in the Mature Self, ed. Melvin
Miller (London: Routledge, 2000).
⁶ As Regina Schwartz explains, the term implies “leaving the immanent world, leaving the phenom-
enal, for another world.” See Regina Schwartz, “Introduction: Transcendence, Beyond . . . ,” in
Transcendence: Philosophy, Literature, and Theology Approach the Beyond, ed. Regina Schwartz
(New York: Routledge, 2004), x–xi.
⁷ Goodenough, “Vertical and Horizontal Transcendence,” 25.
⁸ Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2007), 281. In another formulation, William Connolly posits the concept of
“mundane transcendence,” denoting the emergence of fundamental newness within this-worldly
experience: new forms of life, new forms of thought, and new solutions to problems in the immanent
sphere. See William E. Connolly, “Belief, Spirituality, and Time,” in Varieties of Secularism in a Secular
Age, eds. Michael Warner, Jonathan Van Antwerpen, and Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2010), 131.
⁹ Martha Nussbaum talks about an “internal and human” form of transcendence, involving a
“transcending by descent, delving more deeply into oneself and one’s humanity, and becoming deeper
and more spacious as a result.” Martha C. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and
Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 379.
4  ’    
horizontal understandings of transcendence are often—though not exclusively—

secular in their assumptions. Indeed, Miłosz uses the same orientational meta-
phors to characterize the modern processes of secularization: “Religion, which
traditionally was vertically directed, becomes horizontal, probably because the
images founding Christian metaphysics are lacking.”¹⁰ In a “secular age,” the old
religious visions of the heavens have collapsed into the singular reality of a
disenchanted material universe.
Yet ideas of transcendence need not be limited to one symbolic dimension or
the other. Indeed, a “crossing” of vertical and horizontal dimensions is central to
Christianity, which venerates a God who descends from the vertical realm into the
horizontal. This intersection is symbolically represented in the very sign of the
cross, and the historical development of Christian thought has thus seen an
ongoing dialectic of worldly and otherworldly aspirations.¹¹ Christianity demands
horizontal transformation of this world and of human behavior within it, while
always looking to the vertical dimension as the ultimate aim and reference point.
Christian doctrine is somehow both for and against action in the world.¹² By
extension, it may appear to be both for and against the body—the physical aspect
of human beings in the world. Consequently, many of the key controversies in the
theological history of Christianity have centered on whether final transcendence
of the worldly human condition takes place in or beyond the body.¹³
These paradoxes and dilemmas play out in Miłosz’s poetry, which both cele-
brates material existence and laments the crisis of Christian belief in a realm
beyond it. His thought and poetic practice often reflect a mixed or “transcendent”
materialism. In this mode, his writings affirm the embodied nature of human
experience, while still insisting that matter is capable of generating properties that
partially transcend it: poetry, consciousness, and even a version of the “soul.”
Material existence produces non-material phenomena that cannot exist without a
material basis, but which remain irreducible to it. Conversely, the body—as the
ultimate ground of human life—appears to transcend the capacities of rational
¹⁰ Czeslaw Milosz, “The Fate of the Religious Imagination,” New Perspectives Quarterly 21, no. 4
(2004): 145. Charles Taylor also characterizes the process of secularization in the Christian context as a
shift from “vertical” to “horizontal” visions of the order of reality: away from the sacred “above” toward
an exclusive focus on pure immanence “below.” He describes the more limited worldview that results
from this shift as “the immanent frame.” See Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2007), 392, 543.
¹¹ David Martin, On Secularization: Towards a Revised General Theory (Aldershot: Ashgate
Publishing, 2005), 12. In his interpretation of the dialectic, Martin draws on poet Donald Davie’s
conception of the “Christian oxymoron.” Davie also wrote a book on Miłosz’s poetry. See Donald
Davie, Czesław Miłosz and the Insufficiency of Lyric (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
¹² John promises that the kingdom is “not of this world” (John 18:36); Luke announces that “the
kingdom of God is in your midst” (Luke 17:21).
¹³ Caroline Bynum relates the early theological debates over the resurrection of the body—for
instance, over the precise meaning of Paul’s “spiritual body” (soma pneumatikon) and around the
troubling fact of bodily putrefaction after death. See Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the
Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 60, 225.
:      5
consciousness and language. In effect, Miłosz explores both vertical (higher) and
horizontal (deeper) conceptions of transcendence, bringing together these two
symbolic dimensions in a crossing that unites the embodied human self, the
sensuous rhythms of poetry, and “the beyond.” Though this aspiration remains
deeply religious, it also speaks to a secular, or post-secular, project to preserve the
unique value of the individual human being.
Miłosz’s poetic philosophy anticipates some of the most recent thinking on the
interdependence of idealism and materialism, on connections between the body
and religious experience, and on the embodied nature of consciousness and the
mind. In my own interpretations, I will draw on diverse developments in the
theory of embodied cognition, continental philosophy, secularization theory, and
feminist thought. I will put Miłosz into unexpected dialogues with, among others,
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61), Julia
Kristeva (b. 1941), Luce Iragaray (b. 1930), Elizabeth Grosz (b. 1952), and multiple
contemporary thinkers of the body and religion. I will explore Miłosz’s under-
standing of the political consequences of modern visions of the human self against
the background of his own traumatic experience of twentieth-century history. Yet
I will emphasize his insistence on the concrete and sensual capacity of poetic
language to capture the paradoxes of embodied subjectivity and religiosity. For
Miłosz, both poetry and consciousness originate and remain rooted in the fluids
and rhythms of the mortal body, blood, and breath, while also somehow straining
beyond them. Accordingly, poetic language reinvigorates religious belief precisely
when it eschews abstraction for a more human “entanglement” in matter.¹⁴
Various scholars have written on the body, the self, poetic rhythm, biology,
disenchantment, and the post-secular in Miłosz’s work.¹⁵ On these foundations,
I will cast his poetics of the body as the very key to his thinking on religion,
politics, human identity, and poetry itself. I will pay close attention to chronolog-
ical developments, noting the prevalence of certain approaches in particular
periods. Yet I will also insist on the coherence of Miłosz’s oeuvre as a creative
whole characterized by an unusual degree of internal consistency from beginning
to end.¹⁶ Therefore, the arrangement of the book’s chapters is thematic rather than
strictly chronological. The first two chapters focus on disembodied forms of the
human self and negative representations of the flesh. The next two chapters trace
various affirmative representations of embodied existence. The final chapter
¹⁴ Czesław Miłosz, Rozmowy polskie. Vol. 2: 1999–2004 (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2010),
455. Translation my own.
¹⁵ Scholars whose earlier arguments in these areas will form key foundations for my own inter-
pretations include, among others, Aleksander Fiut, Łukasz Tischner, Andrzej Franaszek, Clare
Cavanagh, Joanna Dembińska-Pawelec, Stefan Chwin, Joanna Zach, Jan Błoński, Stanisław Balbus,
and Karina Jarzyńska.
¹⁶ Many critics have noticed this consistency and the constant recurrence of the same central themes
in Miłosz’s work. Marek Zaleski simply describes him as a “poet of repetition.” See Marek Zaleski,
“Miłosz, Poeta powtórzenia,” Teksty Drugie 3–4 (2001): 27–38.
6  ’    
shows how conceptions of poetic language intersect with all these diverse
perspectives on the body.
Chapters 1 and 2 elucidate Miłosz’s visions of the self as consciousness, which
aspires to break free of its bodily ground and thus to achieve a vertical transcend-
ence of the material world. Miłosz describes his own attraction to these notions
both as an escape from the humiliating limitations of biological existence and as
the foundation of poetry’s special meaning. However, he comes to identify a
“totalitarian” danger in this separation from the tangible world and from other
human beings. Chapter 3 concentrates on the opposing embodied conceptions of
the self, exploring Miłosz’s depictions of the body as the origin of religious belief,
and as the link between human beings and God. The chapter looks at instances of
this-worldly transcendence, but focuses on the tentative opening to a “higher”
dimension through sensual experience. Chapter 4 examines a more radical, “fem-
inine” embodiment positing the weakening or dissolution of the self into the
material world. The chapter analyzes the gendered construction of this “fluid”
identity and Miłosz’s broader association of women with corporeality. It puts his
work into dialogue with feminist thinkers who offer tools for a critique of his
essentialism, while also revealing his unexpected engagement with subversive
forms of subjectivity.
Chapter 5 brings together all these reflections on the body, the self, and
transcendence in a sustained discussion of Miłosz’s poetic language. In particular,
the chapter explores the rhythms of his poetry, finding multiple forms of con-
flicting verbal rhythm tied both to bodily rhythms and to various historical types
of versification. The chapter reveals Miłosz’s view of the poetic word as stretched
between two inaccessible dimensions of transcendent meaning: the mute meaning
of the body below and the symbolic meaning above. In the broadest terms, this
book explores the uncertain border between matter and the transcendent, mate-
rialism and idealism, the body and the mind. Yet it shifts these questions from
abstract philosophy to Miłosz’s more visceral project to explain and respond to the
traumas of twentieth-century history in poetic language.
Miłosz’s nightmare was the biologized body of pure reductionism: the human
being stripped of higher value to become a mere animal. He believed he had seen
the violent consequences of this vision in mid-twentieth-century Central and
Eastern Europe. In response, he sought the rehabilitation of a transcendent
human identity that would preserve and intertwine both material and immaterial
aspects. In a purely secular sense, he aimed to restore the value of the human
individual by exposing the deeper significance of the flesh, which transcends
rational consciousness. In religious terms, belief in Miłosz’s writing also takes a
very bodily form—not rationalized or understood, but felt in the blood and breath.
In his poems, he aspires to strip away the stylized garments of conventional forms
to reach down to the underlying sources of faith, but also of poetic language and of
:      7
the self. Even in his wartime “Meditations” on the misery of Warsaw’s refugees, he
sees cause for paradoxical hope in the very reduction he laments:
Is it not possible at last to look beyond the mere wigs, masks, red fingernails,
elaborate hairstyles, dresses, bonnets, bourgeois footwear—and to present to
ourselves man and woman, naked like ancient statues? Then, in those bodies,
we will find something worth living for.¹⁷
Beneath the productions of culture, religion, and poetic language lies the fleshly
form that both generates and shapes them: mute but expressive, profane but
sacred, meaningless but the source of meaning. For Miłosz, the body is not just
the only vehicle for human life, but also the mysterious ground of its higher value.
¹⁷ Miłosz, “Rozmyślania o czasie pożogi,” 673.

1
Beyond the Body
Reinventing Transcendence
1. Miłosz and the Death of God
In 1962, just past midway on the journey of his life, Czesław Miłosz wrote to his
friend Aniela Micińska of the prevailing direction of his intellectual and creative
interests: “For a long time now I’ve been toying with the idea of somehow reaching
to the heart of the European intellectual events of the twentieth century, which
Nietzsche defined by speaking of the ‘death of God’.”¹ This question was not
merely a temporary preoccupation for Miłosz, but rather lay at the very core of his
concerns as a poet and thinker from his first writings in the early 1930s until the
posthumous publication of his last poems in 2006. In different forms and with
different purposes, Miłosz obsessively returned to what he saw as the defining
event of his century: not just the death of “God,” but—more broadly, as Martin
Heidegger interpreted Nietzsche’s claim—the end of metaphysics or the “super-
sensory world.”² Miłosz’s work grapples with what he perceived as a crisis of
transcendence.
To put the problem in other terms, Miłosz was concerned with the social,
political, cultural, and moral consequences of secularization. According to his own
succinct encapsulation of this process, “the scientific revolution has been gradually
eroding the religious imagination.”³ At first glance, this geological metaphor
seems to express a variant of the “classical paradigm” of secularization.⁴ In
short, the discoveries and claims of Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543), Galileo
Galilei (1564–1642), Isaac Newton (1642–1726/27), Charles Darwin (1809–82),
Karl Marx (1818–83), Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), and many others have succes-
sively overthrown various aspects of the worldview enshrined by Christian dogma,
¹ Andrzej Franaszek, Miłosz: Biografia (Kraków: Znak, 2011), 627. All translations from Polish my
own unless otherwise indicated.
² Martin Heidegger, “The Word of Nietzsche: ‘God is Dead’,” in The Question Concerning
Technology, and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 64–5.
³ Czeslaw Milosz, “The Fate of the Religious Imagination,” New Perspectives Quarterly 21, no. 4
(2004): 142.
⁴ José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 7.
  :   9
stripping away the layers of faith through scientific revelation, until finally—as
Nietzsche wrote—“the belief in the Christian god [becomes] unbelievable.”⁵
More specifically, Miłosz proposes that the mental schema imposed by scien-
tific ways of thinking simply makes God—and the whole realm of “vertical”
transcendence—unimaginable. In other words, religious ideas have become
increasingly inexpressible or unrepresentable in the dominant scientific, rational-
ist, and materialist discourse of the West. In Miłosz’s view, this implies a danger-
ous impoverishment of perspective, leading to reductive—and destructive—new
understandings of what it means to be an individual human being. His own stated
aim is to resist this reduction by joining other creative writers and thinkers—
including William Blake (1757–1827), Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–81), and
T. S. Eliot (1888–1965)—who had sought in different ways “to save man from
images of a totally objective, cold, indifferent world.”⁶ This mission would require
a renovation of contemporary poetic language and the development of new ways
to capture or construct ideas of transcendence. For the Polish poet, often inclined
toward apocalyptic or “catastrophist” expectations, nothing less than the fate of
Western civilization was at stake.
Like Nietzsche, Miłosz understood the “death of God” not as a single, precip-
itous event, but rather as an extended process whose consequences would take
time to reveal themselves. The edifice of Christian faith and its associated morality
were too strongly grounded in the most basic Western ways of thinking about the
world and human life to be demolished by new scientific discoveries overnight.
The madman in the marketplace of Nietzsche’s famous parable in The Gay Science
(Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, 1882) had come too early: “The light of the stars
requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard.”⁷
Miłosz’s theory of secularization as “erosion” implies a similar time lag. In The
Land of Ulro (Ziemia Ulro, 1977), he refers specifically to a “law of retardation”
and a temporary afterlife of religious ideas in secular shells: “The influence of
religion has proved far more durable than religion itself; it has sustained customs
and institutions in the face of universal or nearly universal secularization.”⁸ In this
sense, his theory of secularization departs from the “classical paradigm” to
approach an alternative stream of thought describing the process as a transposi-
tion of theological concepts into secular, or “worldly,” terms in ethics, aesthetics,
⁵ Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage Books,
1977), 279.
⁶ Czeslaw Milosz, The Witness of Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 47.
⁷ Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 182.
⁸ Czeslaw Milosz, The Land of Ulro, trans. Louis Iribarne (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2000), 229.
10  ’    
and politics.⁹ According to this perspective, European modernity has not yet seen
the death of religious ideas, but rather their metamorphosis into new forms.
However, both Nietzsche and Miłosz predict a moment of final destruction to
conclude this “delayed” historical process. The inexorable action of pressure and
time will slowly wear away at the foundations until the towers and spires of
Western culture crumble and collapse. As Miłosz’s narrator puts it in his unfin-
ished novel The Mountains of Parnassus (Góry Parnasu, 1967–71), “the house
eaten from within by termites, still covered in external splendor, [will lose] its roof
and walls.”¹⁰ In Nietzsche’s terms, when the accomplished event of God’s demise
is finally “seen and heard,” it will reveal itself as coterminous with the death of “the
whole of our European morality.”¹¹ He greets the impending “breakdown,
destruction, ruin, and cataclysm” with cheerful sanguinity.¹² Miłosz is less opti-
mistic, and he sees the ominous “erosion” of the foundations as already far
advanced by his own time:
In my lifetime Heaven and Hell disappeared, the belief in life after death was
considerably weakened, the borderline between man and animals, once so clear,
ceased to be obvious under the impact of the theory of evolution, the notion of
absolute truth lost its supreme position, history directed by Providence started to
look like a field of battle between blind forces.¹³
Miłosz is convinced that these shifts in worldview have already borne the gravest
consequences. He himself has witnessed “breakdown, destruction, ruin, and cat-
aclysm” with his own eyes in the “bloodlands” between Nazi Germany and the
Soviet Union in twentieth-century Central and Eastern Europe.¹⁴ In part, Miłosz
blames these historical catastrophes precisely on the decline of religious belief and
the rise of what he calls the “scientific worldview,” especially the discoveries of the
biological sciences inaugurated by Charles Darwin. Like Nietzsche, Miłosz does
⁹ Jean-Claude Monod distinguishes two main streams of secularization theory, describing an

ongoing “quarrel of secularization” between theorists who see the straightforward decline of religious
ideas and those who see their transposition. See Jean-Claude Monod, La querelle de la sécularisation de
Hegel à Blumenberg (Paris: J. Vrin, 2002). In recent times, the second stream appears to have become
dominant, with diverse thinkers from Charles Taylor to Gianni Vattimo and Giorgio Agamben arguing
that secular modernity is an elaboration of Christianity’s own internal logic. See Charles Taylor, A
Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Gianni Vattimo, Belief, trans. Luca
D’Isanto and David Webb (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); Giorgio Agamben, The
Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government, trans. Lorenzo
Chiesa with Matteo Mandarini (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011).
¹⁰ Czeslaw Milosz, The Mountains of Parnassus, trans. Stanley Bill (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2016), 70.
¹¹ Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 279. ¹² Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 279.
¹³ Czeslaw Milosz, “Why Religion?,” in To Begin Where I Am: Selected Essays, eds. Bogdana
Carpenter and Madeline G. Levine (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 329.
¹⁴ See Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books,
2010).
  :   11
not believe that traditional morality can survive in the long term without its
original religious foundations. Unlike Nietzsche, his painful experience of
twentieth-century European history makes it impossible for him to greet this
news with any “gaiety.” He continues to hold out hope for the possibility of a
deep and salutary “transformation,” but historical experience inclines him toward
pessimism.¹⁵
This chapter examines Miłosz’s poetic attempts to salvage a non-bodily,
“transcendent” dimension of human identity from reductively materialist
perspectives.¹⁶ It begins with an interpretation of a poem exemplifying his uncer-
tain defense of transcendent human “meaning,” partly represented by poetry
itself. This initial discussion of poetry’s mission is followed by a more detailed
analysis of the stakes as Miłosz conceived them in various prose reflections on the
political and literary consequences of reductive materialism. Finally, the chapter
discusses Miłosz’s positive reconstructions of a “vertical” aspect of the human self
that soars above the physical body. In some cases, this component of human
identity reflects a secular notion of “consciousness.” However, the Polish poet also
develops a “Manichaean” myth of a transcendent spark of the self cast down into
the prison of the flesh. All these attempts to reinvent a “vertical” dimension of
transcendence are intertwined with Miłosz’s understanding—or rather with one
of his multiple understandings—of the basic nature and calling of the poetic word.
2. “Meaning”: The Mission of Poetry
Miłosz presents his most extensive reflections on the “death of God” and its
historical consequences in prose. His mid-career essayistic writings in Native
Realm (Rodzinna Europa, 1959), Visions from San Francisco Bay (Widzenia nad
Zatoką San Francisco, 1969), The Land of Ulro, and The Garden of Knowledge
(Ogród nauk, 1979) combine his interests in religion, history, literature, and
philosophy with social observations and intellectual autobiography. Yet Miłosz
casts the dilemmas of his age with greatest immediacy and power in poetry.¹⁷
¹⁵ Czesław Miłosz, “The Nobel Lecture,” trans. Czesław Miłosz, in Beginning with My Streets: Essays
and Recollections, trans. Madeline G. Levine (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), 282.
¹⁶ Many critics have found the unity of Miłosz’s oeuvre in a simultaneously “metaphysical” and
“anthropological” mission to challenge the disenchanted vision of the world, which he calls—after
Blake—“the Land of Ulro.” For instance, Jan Błoński finds the unity of Miłosz’s work in the “meta-
physical” or “religious” sphere. See Jan Błoński, “Duch religijny i miłość rzeczy,” in Poznawanie
Miłosza 3: 1999–2010, ed. Aleksander Fiut (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2011), 643. Marian
Stala refers directly to the “holistic anthropological-metaphysical project” to liberate the modern
“inhabitant of the Land of Ulro.” See Marian Stala, “Ekstaza o wschodzie słońca: W kręgu głównych
tematów poezji Czesława Miłosza,” in Poznawanie Miłosza 3: 1999–2010, ed. Aleksander Fiut (Kraków:
Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2011), 109.
¹⁷ See Zdzisław Łapiński, Między polityką a metafizyką. O poezji Czesława Miłosza (London:
Odnowa, 1981), 10.
12  ’    
In his lyric works, he addresses the key questions of human identity and the
collapse of transcendence in their most condensed and visceral form. His approach
is often dialectical, conveying the conflicting perspectives of a “polyphonic” mod-
ern reality through opposing voices.¹⁸ In the body of the individual poem, he
transposes the abstract or universal into the concrete and particular, capturing
what he sees as the crucial conflicts of his time in the rhythms of poetic language.
Among Miłosz’s most cogent explorations of the existential challenges con-
fronting the modern human being, and the poet, is the short lyric “Meaning”
(“Sens”) from the late volume Provinces (Dalsze okolice, 1991):
—When I die, I will see the lining of the world.

The other side, beyond bird, mountain, sunset.
The true meaning, ready to be decoded.
What never added up will add up,
What was incomprehensible will be comprehended.
—And if there is no lining to the world?
If a thrush on a branch is not a sign,
But just a thrush on the branch? If night and day
Make no sense following each other?
And on this earth there is nothing except this earth?
—Even if that is so, there will remain

A word wakened by lips that perish,
A tireless messenger who runs and runs
Through interstellar fields, through the revolving galaxies,
And calls out, protests, screams. (NCP 569)
[—Kiedy umrę, zobaczę podszewkę świata. / Drugą stronę, za ptakiem,

górą i zachodem słońca. / Wzywające odczytania prawdziwe znaczenie. /
Co nie zgadzało się, będzie się zgadzało. / Co było niepojęte, będzie pojęte.
//—A jeżeli nie ma podszewki świata? / Jeżeli drozd na gałęzi nie jest
wcale znakiem, / Tylko drozdem na gałęzi, jeżeli dzień i noc / Następują po
sobie nie dbając o sens / I nie ma nic na ziemi, prócz tej ziemi? // Gdyby
tak było, to jednak zostanie / Słowo raz obudzone przez nietrwałe usta, /
Które biegnie i biegnie, poseł niestrudzony, / Na międzygwiezdne pola, w
kołowrót galaktyk / I protestuje, woła, krzyczy. (W 1036)]
¹⁸ On Miłosz’s “polyphony,” see Leonard Nathan and Arthur Quinn, The Poet’s Work: An
Introduction to Czeslaw Milosz (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 100–1; Jerzy
Szymik, Problem teologicznego wymiaru dzieła literackiego Czesława Miłosza (Katowice: Księgarnia
Świętego Jacka, 1996), 42–4. Joanna Zach argues that Miłosz’s polyphony is directly associated with the
problem of “how to express religious experience in contemporary language.” See Joanna Zach, Miłosz i
poetyka wyznania (Kraków: Universitas, 2002), 124.
  :   13
The poem takes the form of a dialogue between three different perspectives on the
world, human life, the body, transcendence, and the poetic word. The first stanza
presents a traditional metaphysical vision of a “true,” underlying reality that
imbues the material world with meaning; the second stanza questions the exist-
ence of this transcendent dimension; the third stanza imagines the protest of
poetic language—as a “word” breaking free of flesh—in the face of this putative
loss. The exchange seems to represent a conversation between at least two
different individuals, as signaled by the quotation marks preceding the first two
stanzas in the Polish version (all three stanzas in the English translation).
Alternatively, it may represent an internal dialogue, reflecting Miłosz’s conviction
that the modern human being is visited or inhabited by multiple voices and
perspectives. The tripartite structure suggests the triad of thesis, antithesis, and
synthesis. However, the final stanza does not reach definitive conclusions or
resolve the tensions between the first two. The questions raised by the second
stanza remain unanswered. The last lines of the poem offer the bitter consolation
of desperate resistance rather than any comforting resolution.
The poem begins with a confident statement of expected revelation after death:
the unveiling of a transcendent beyond that the speaker will “see.” He does not
anticipate grand visions of heaven or another world above this one. Instead, the
transcendent vision of the afterlife denotes the capacity to look more deeply into
this world, so as to perceive the meaning concealed beneath its surface—its
“lining” (“podszewka”). The key metaphor is domestic, intimate, and down to
earth. It suggests the transcendent dimension of creation as something handmade,
warm, and close to the body. The absent creator is present in the revealed
underside of his handiwork. Here, Miłosz perhaps evokes the well-known imagery
of Renaissance poet Jan Kochanowski’s (1530–84) most famous song of praise to
creation—“What Do You Want from Us, Lord, for Your Bounteous Gifts?”
(“Czego chcesz od nas, Panie, za Twe hojne dary?”)—in which God has “splen-
didly embroidered” the sky with golden stars [“i złotymi gwiazdami ślicznieś
uhaftował”].¹⁹ In Miłosz’s poem, the speaker of the first stanza expects to see the
reverse side of this embroidery in the afterlife.
The humble linings of the “bird, mountain, sunset” represent the “true mean-
ing” of the world, while visible reality is a mere code to be deciphered. This sense
of a veiled reality—a “hidden brightness” (“jasność ukryta”), as an early draft of
the poem describes it²⁰—represents an important current in Miłosz’s poetry from
the early cycle The World (Świat, 1943) right through to his late Treatise on
¹⁹ Jan Kochanowski, “Pieśń XXV,” in Dzieła polskie, vol. 1, ed. Julian Krzyżanowski (Warszawa:
Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1969), 299.
²⁰ Draft of the poem “Sens,” National Library of Poland (Biblioteka Narodowa), Warsaw.
14  ’    
Theology (Traktat teologiczny, 2002).²¹ The task of poetry is to “run” after or chase
the unreachable essence of things beneath their surface. In this metaphysical
mood, the poet is convinced not only that “things are,” but that they are “the
sign of something else.”²² This perspective has Christian foundations. Yet the
intuition of the visible world as a sign or surface of a deeper reality also resonates
with a kind of poetic pantheism, and with currents of literary Romanticism.²³
Indeed, in the autobiographical Native Realm, Miłosz describes his absorption of a
syncretic combination of perspectives on transcendence during his childhood in
Lithuania, and especially from his mother:
Her cult of the mystery hidden beneath events indicated the persistence of that
slightly pagan mysticism so frequently met in Lithuania. For her the world was a
sacred place, although the key to its puzzles was to be found only beyond the
grave.²⁴
The first stanza of “Meaning” echoes this “mystical” perspective. However, it also
carries more orthodox Christian connotations focusing not on the sacredness of
the world itself, but on the absent divinity who created it and whose hidden
existence gives it “meaning.” In the later Treatise on Theology, the poet–speaker
more specifically underlines the impossibility of ascribing “meaning” (“sens”) to
physical “reality” (“rzeczywistość”) without an “absolute point of reference”²⁵
[“bez absolutnego punktu odniesienia” (W 1257)]. This unifying force is an
expression of God, the ostensible subject of the treatise, who represents the highest
point in a traditionally hierarchized reality. In the earlier “Meaning,” this identi-
fication and the associated hierarchy are significantly more ambiguous.
Nevertheless, Christian readings of the poem’s first stanza clearly remain plausi-
ble, and perhaps even privileged, with the expectation of revelation after death also
implying a traditional eschatological perspective.
The last two lines of the stanza convey this unveiling grammatically
through repetitions that shift from past negation to future affirmation, from
²¹ See Krzysztof Stala, “ ‘Święte słowo jest’. Miłoszowskie paradoksy bycia,” Znak no. 5 (1993):
94–102; Marian Stala, “Poza ziemią Ulro,” Teksty Drugie 58–9, nos. 4–5 (1981), 134–54; Jan Andrzej
Kłoczowski OP, “Miłosz mistyczny,” in Poznawanie Miłosza 3: 1999–2010, ed. Aleksander Fiut
(Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2011), 719–26.
²² Józef Sadzik, “Inne niebo, inna ziemia,” in Czesław Miłosz, Ziemia Ulro (Paris: Instytut Literacki,
1977), 12
²³ For instance, in the Romantic construction of a transcendent dimension or force flowing through
the material world—the “supernatural” dimension of nature. See M. H. Abrams, Natural
Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971).
²⁴ Czesław Miłosz, Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition, trans. Catherine S. Leach (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 85.
²⁵ Czesław Miłosz, “Treatise on Theology,” in Second Space: New Poems, trans. Czesław Miłosz and
Robert Hass (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 47.
  :   15
disagreement to agreement, from confusion to understanding: “What never added

up will add up, / What was incomprehensible will be comprehended” [“Co nie
zgadzało się, będzie się zgadzało. / Co było niepojęte, będzie pojęte”]. Both these
lines are twelve syllables long, continuing a sense of relative formal order sustained
throughout the first stanza. Its lines vary slightly in length (12, 15, 14, 12, 12), but
each of them constitutes a discrete declarative sentence concluding with a defin-
itive period. In this way, the stanza seems to progress through a series of catego-
rical statements of the speaker’s beliefs and expectations regarding the existence of
a reality beyond the physical surface of the visible world.
By contrast, urgent questions dominate the second stanza, as doubt erodes the
certainty of the opening part of the poem. In the first stanza, the tense shifts from
past to future imbue the repeated phrases with a sense of dynamic progression. In
the second stanza, repetitions in an undifferentiated present tense create an
impression of circularity or monotony. The questions all begin with “if”
(“jeżeli”), suggesting both indeterminacy and consequences that the speaker
never explains. If there is no lining to the world, and if on this earth there is
nothing except this earth, then what? The speaker does not say, but the echoes of
the missing layer of meaning from the opening stanza fill the second with a sense
of loss. This underlying absence or deficiency is reinforced by the prevalence of
negation—every line but one contains the word “nie” (“no” or “not”) or “nic”
(“nothing”)—without the answering affirmations of the first stanza.
At the same time, the previously ordered relation between syntax and the poetic
line breaks down in the second stanza. The definitive periods of the first stanza
disappear, and the third and fourth lines feature the first instance of enjambment.
Like the now meaningless cycle of “night and day,” the two enjambed lines “follow
each other” (“następują po sobie”) without “taking care of” the syntactical order,
or “sense” (“nie dbając o sens”), so carefully established in the opening section.
A calm, measured beat gives way to a rush of unanswered—or unanswerable—
questions. There can be no revelations. The world is nothing more than the
surfaces of its physical appearance, chaotic or disordered, like the less regularly
punctuated lines of the stanza. The deeper, transcendent reality or order has fled.
Here, the poem echoes the mood of Romantic and post-Romantic works lament-
ing the modern disenchantment of a previously divine world—among others,
Friedrich Schiller’s neopagan “The Gods of Greece” (“Die Götter Griechenlandes,”
1788), on the departure of mythological meanings, or Matthew Arnold’s “Dover
Beach” (1867), with its ebbing of the “Sea of Faith” to expose the “naked shingles
of the world.”²⁶
²⁶ Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach,” in New Poems (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867), 96.
16  ’    
The final stanza of Miłosz’s poem delivers a provisional response to the ques-
tions of the second, but without any return to the calm certainties of the first.
The stanza’s speaker seems to be a poet, or at least an advocate of poetry.
He begins in the subjunctive mood—not conceding the truth of the materialist
hypotheses of the second speaker, but acknowledging their plausibility. He then
passionately defends a single point of consolation in a meaningless universe: the
“word” of human language. From the subjunctive mood, he shifts to a defiant
declaration of what “will remain” in the future tense. The disembodied human
word appears as an alien presence, an “envoy” (“poseł”), running tirelessly to an
unknown destination, screaming in protest into the silence of a universe that
stubbornly remains nothing but its material self. The perspective shifts from the
earth to the heavens, into the traditional realm of a transcendent beyond. But there
is nothing up there, and the protest of language goes unheard in the infinite
vacuum of space. In the final line, the unanswered “call” of the protesting voice
breaks into a “scream” of rage or despair.
The dialectic of this short lyric captures one aspect of the central predicament
and mission of poetry as Miłosz conceives them. In the face of the modern collapse
of metaphysical certainties, the poetic word stands alone against an impoverished
reality whose endless processes of destruction will consume the poet. From this
logocentric perspective, human language by its very nature strains toward eternal
meanings beyond matter, and thus beyond the poet’s own body, even if the very
existence of those meanings is now uncertain.²⁷ For the poet, the world is not
enough. Poetic meaning strives to transcend purely immanent descriptions of
reality, even as it originates in the mortal body—“in lips that perish.”
There is something of the existentialist attitude in this predicament—or per-
haps rather of the philosophy of the absurd, as Albert Camus (1913–60) presents it
in The Myth of Sisyphus (Le Mythe de Sisyphe, 1942).²⁸ In a “silent” world devoid
of a priori values, human beings—and poets—must heroically construct their
own. However, in Miłosz’s case, this stance is not necessarily atheist in its
assumptions. Indeed, Aleksander Fiut argues that the Polish poet is attracted
rather to a “doubting” current in Christian thought that leads “from [Blaise]
Pascal, through [Søren] Kierkegaard, to existentialism.”²⁹ In “Meaning,” Miłosz
precisely gives expression to the dialectic of faith and doubt associated with these
religious thinkers. At the same time, and perhaps in contradiction of certain tenets
²⁷ Mateusz Antoniuk, “Przybranie formy z dawnacwyglądanej (dosięganej / obiecanej /

wysnowanej . . . )’: brulion Czesława Miłosza—próba lektury,” Teksty Drugie 147, no. 3 (2014): 32.
²⁸ Miłosz referred to both his close affinity with some of Camus’s ideas and their personal
friendship, which was especially important in the difficult period after his defection from communist
Poland to France in 1951. At this time, Miłosz faced hostility from left-leaning French intellectuals,
including Jean-Paul Sartre. See Czesław Miłosz, Miłosz’s ABC’s, trans. Madeline G. Levine (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 76–8.
²⁹ Aleksander Fiut, “Czy tylko katastrofizm?: o przedwojennej poezji Czesława Miłosza,” Pamiętnik
Literacki 69, no. 3 (1978): 82.
  :   17
of Christian dogma, the poem establishes a fundamental dualism between word

and flesh. The poetic word emerges from the vulnerable flesh, but somehow
breaks free of it to “run” as an alien presence through the universe. Poetry is
estranged from its own bodily sources.
In a later lyric, written on the death of fellow Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert
(1924–98), Miłosz reiterates this image of the disembodied poetic word in even
more radical form:
Liberated from the phantoms of psychosis,

from the screams of perishing tissue,
from the agony of the impaled one,
It [poetry] wanders through the world,
Forever, clear. (NCP 724–5)
[Oswobodzona z majaków psychozy, / z krzyku ginących tkanek, / z

męki wbitego na pal. / Wędruje światem / Wiecznie jasna. (W 1194)]
Here, the pure, incorporeal spirit of the poetic word tears itself away from the
dying body of the poet who created it to travel through the physical universe, and
through later history, without him. Such an explicitly dualistic image of poetry
almost seems to parallel broader characterizations of the essence of the human self
as a disembodied soul: tragically rooted in the body, but then mysteriously
separate from it. This bitter paradox may also suggest the radical dualism of
what Miłosz describes elsewhere as modern “neo-Manichaeism”—a subject to
which I shall return later in this chapter.
But in what way does poetic language transcend material reality or prosaic
descriptions of it? And how does the “protest” of Miłosz’s own poetic word differ
from the related reflections of his prose works? The answers to these questions lie
partly in the non-semantic dimensions of poetry’s “meaning”—in the unconscious
or semi-conscious associations evoked by imagery, sound, syntax, and rhythm.
Perhaps paradoxically, these dimensions are tied to the “body” of the poem, to the
very substance of its language and the affective aspects of its reception and
meaning. Amittai Aviram refers to these non-verbal, “surface” aspects of poetic
signification as the “meaningless meaning of poetry”—its pre-rational, subcon-
scious effects, which resonate in the human body.³⁰ In fact, all linguistic meaning
is partly “embodied,” as images and sounds always evoke sensual or bodily
responses in receivers. But poetry remains a special case.³¹
³⁰ Amittai F. Aviram, Telling Rhythm: Body and Meaning in Poetry (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1994), 50.
³¹ Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2007), 219.
18  ’    
The deeper “meaning” of the lyric “Meaning” lies beneath the initial impres-
sions of its semantic signification. The poem, too, has a “lining.” The certainty and
order of the first stanza are reflected in its measured syntax; the collapse of this
order in the second stanza finds expression in enjambment and a disintegrating
relation between sentence and line. Most importantly, the culminating moments
of the third stanza unite claims about the mission of the poetic word with strong
metrical structures. Just as the poem delivers the core of its message about poetic
“meaning,” the rhythm settles into a clearly defined form for the first time. In the
three most urgent lines, as the speaker declaims on “the word” as a “tireless
messenger,” the poem’s previously irregular versification flows into the classical
form of the thirteen-syllable Polish Alexandrine, with its regular caesura after
seven syllables. As the speaker expresses his hesitant faith in the resistance of the
poetic word, he does so in the classical cadences of Kochanowski and Adam
Mickiewicz (1798–1855) before him, falling back on the most hallowed forms of
poetic signification in the Polish language.
These rhythmic forms “say” something beyond the mere words of the poem,
imparting a powerful sense of constructed human order and purpose in the face of
natural chaos. The rhythm transcends the merely descriptive or referential aspects
of the poem, just as the image of the word as a cosmic probe suggests its
transcendence of earthly meanings. In this way, the poem delivers or embodies
two mutually reinforcing types of meaning: the semantic meaning of its message
and the rhythmic meaning of its form. The two meanings coincide at various key
points in the poem, so that the form echoes the content and vice versa. This
mutual intensification of semantic and rhythmic meanings is a common device in
Miłosz’s poetry, as we shall see.
Miłosz’s short poem “Meaning” delivers in the most condensed form his
reflections on the “death of God,” the collapse of transcendence, the relation of
word and flesh, and the purpose of poetry in the face of the unanswerable
questions of modernity. Through precise use of imagery, syntax, rhythm, and a
dialogue of different perspectives, he turns a set of abstract problems into a living
conversation. At the heart of the poem is a desperate need to respond to a
materialist perspective suggesting that the physical world is all that exists—that
a thrush on a branch is “not a sign, but just a thrush on the branch.” The essential
mission of poetry is to resist this reduction. As Miłosz argues elsewhere, against
the tragic background of twentieth-century history, the stakes of this task for
humanity could not be higher.
3. The Roots of Mass Violence in the Twentieth Century
At the center of Miłosz’s literary project is a response to what I have called

reductive materialism. In his essays and interviews, the poet himself uses a variety
  :   19
of analogous terms: “crass materialism”;³² “the reductionism and crude material-

ity of scientism”;³³ “blind determinism”;³⁴ “the scientific Weltanschaung, accord-
ing to which [there is] only the chain of causes and effects”;³⁵ “the causes and
effects that govern matter with mathematical necessity”;³⁶ “the mechanistic image
of the world”;³⁷ “the scientific world-view.”³⁸ In all these conceptualizations,
Miłosz refers to prevalent modern understandings of the universe as all-
encompassing matter with no place for anything beyond it—where “on this
earth there is nothing except this earth.” He argues that these visions have had
dire psychic, political, and poetical consequences in the twentieth century. In his
view, materialist reductions of human beings to bare flesh have been at the root of
existential despair in individuals, mass violence on an unprecedented scale in
Europe, and a crisis of poetic language.
In a very early poem, Miłosz captures the basic philosophical predicament of
modern reductionism with some initial ambivalence:
That only matter remains to be examined

and only its curious mystery
one might well ask: is this good or bad?
[Że pozostaje tylko materia do badania / i tylko jej ciekawa tajemnica /

któż mógłby powiedzieć: dobrze to czy źle? (W 42)]
The continuing “mystery” of matter and the ambiguity of its status form the
central concerns of this book. However, in its reductive sense, the Polish poet
comes to view the materialist shift described in this poem—and in “Meaning”—as
a degradation of reality. Miłosz is a thinker who always historicizes, and thus,
especially from the 1970s, he sets about constructing a specific genealogy of the
“crass materialist” or “scientific” worldview. The central antagonists in this nar-
rative are Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin, whose discoveries supposedly dis-
rupted and then overthrew the prevailing Christian cosmology and anthropology.
Miłosz’s emphasis is on Darwin—whose work he views as more devastatingly
³² Czesław Miłosz and Renata Gorczyńska, Podróżny świata: Rozmowy (Kraków: Wydawnictwo
Literackie, 2002), 57. In the original Polish-language conversation with Renata Gorczyńska, Miłosz
speaks the words “crass materialism” in English.
³³ Czesław Miłosz, “The Fate of the Religious Imagination,” New Perspectives Quarterly 21 (Fall
2004): 146.
³⁴ Miłosz, The Land of Ulro, 162. ³⁵ Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry, 50.
³⁶ Czesław Miłosz, Visions from San Francisco Bay, trans. Richard Lourie (New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 1982), 174.
³⁷ Czesław Miłosz, Czesław Miłosz: Conversations, ed. Cynthia Haven (Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2006), 28.
³⁸ Miłosz, The Land of Ulro, 171.
20  ’    
influential in his own time—but he also presents evolutionary theory as a step

within a much longer process in the history of ideas.³⁹
In The Land of Ulro, Miłosz defines the late eighteenth century as the key
period for the establishment of reductive materialism. In this early moment, he
associates the “scientific worldview” with a particular vision of space: to wit, the
infinite extension of “absolute Newtonian space” and the earth’s insignificant
place within it.⁴⁰ He does not quote Newton or give any clear explanation of the
specific impact of his works. Instead, he focuses his attention approvingly on
Newton’s early ideological opponents, allying himself with Swedish visionary
Emanuel Swedenborg’s (1688–1772) analogical reconciliation of science and
imagination, with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s (1749–1832) poetic battles
against Newtonian physics, and with Blake’s attacks on deterministic visions of
the natural world. In his discussions of Goethe and Blake, Miłosz describes an
opposition between the scientific lens and the imaginative needs of poets and
poetic language. Accordingly, he defines the late-eighteenth-century turning point
against the background of literary history as the beginning of the “Romantic crisis
of European culture.”⁴¹ Romanticism appears in Miłosz’s analysis as an ultimately
failed attempt to resist the growing dichotomy between “the world of scientific
laws—cold, indifferent to human values—and man’s inner world.”⁴²
While Newton marks the turning point, Miłosz finds the great consolidation of
reductive materialism in the nineteenth century, especially with the advent of
Darwin’s evolutionary theory and the biological sciences. This era gave birth to his
own, since the delayed nature of the erosive process of secularization meant that
the “notions and images born out of nineteenth century science” did not fully
realize themselves until the “purgatory” of the twentieth century.⁴³ Miłosz
describes the most injurious of these notions as the “too-complete insertion of
the human species into the chain of evolution”—that is, the animalization or
biologization of human beings.⁴⁴ On the one hand, Miłosz does not doubt the
scientific truth of Darwinian conclusions about human origins. On the other, he
thinks that these conclusions have had pernicious consequences. Darwin symbo-
lizes the reduction of human beings to the status of mere bodies subject to the
³⁹ As Joanna Zach explains, in the age of the Enlightenment, defenders of the Christian imagination
turned against Newton’s physics, while in Miłosz’s time the turn is against biology and Darwin’s theory.
See Joanna Zach, Biologia i teodycea: Homo poeticus Czesława Miłosza (Kraków: Wydawnictwo
Uniwerstytetu Jagiellońskiego, 2017), 95.
⁴⁰ Miłosz, The Land of Ulro, 183, 230. The key term “Ulro”—taken from the English poet—refers to
visions of “this material world,” and the human beings inhabiting it, as they appear through a purely
naturalist lens. See S. Foster Damon, A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake, ed.
Morris Eaves (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1988), 416.
⁴¹ Miłosz, The Land of Ulro, 94. Miłosz borrows this phrase from the Polish writer and philosopher
Stanisław Brzozowski (1878–1911).
⁴² Miłosz, The Land of Ulro, 94. ⁴³ Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry, 53.
⁴⁴ Czesław Miłosz, “Speaking of a Mammal,” in To Begin Where I Am: Selected Essays, eds. Bogdana
Carpenter and Madeline G. Levine (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 206.
  :   21
processes of matter’s transformations. This biological perspective also offers the

simplest explanation for the violence of human history, which becomes the
extension of a universal “nature devouring, nature devoured, / Butchery day and
night smoking with blood” (NCP 631) [“natura pożerająca, natura pożerana, /
Dzień i noc czynna rzeźnia dymiąca od krwi” (W 1095)].⁴⁵
Miłosz claims to have been fascinated by evolutionary theory from his high-
school days, when he delivered his first class talk on Darwin and natural
selection.⁴⁶ He learns that human beings are but one species among a multitude
of others, all developing aggressive strategies to survive and flourish in an envi-
ronment entirely indifferent to their existence. Darwin’s vision does not awaken
his wonder at the vibrant biological diversity of the planet, but rather horror at
the random proliferation of meaningless life and its endless suffering. In this
mood, nature appears in Miłosz’s poetry as a “Dachau of grasshoppers” and an
“Auschwitz of ants” [“Dachau koników polnych! Mrówek Oświęcimie!” (W 138)];
a “callous mother” presiding over “expanding circles of vibrating agony” (NCP
285–6) [“pośrodku koncentrycznych kół / Wibrującej swojej agonii” (W 639)]; a
“cruel cosmic vaudeville” (NCP 636) [“okrutny kosmiczny wodewil” (W 1107)];
the realm of a “devil’s theology” [“teologii diabelskiej” (W 1261)].⁴⁷
As Miłosz understands it, Darwin’s theory—like Newton’s cosmology—has “a
distorting, maiming effect on the human imagination,” crippling individuals by
denying them the deeper meaning of earlier conceptions of their own origins and
identity.⁴⁸ For how—Miłosz asks—could a post-Darwinian person continue to
believe in traditional notions of the creation or to distinguish the human being, as
a child of God, from other animals? And if morality had developed as a result of
evolutionary advantage, then how could a contemporary person continue to
believe in its transcendent mandate? In Miłosz’s view, these metaphysical tremors
not only threatened the individual imagination, but also lay behind the most
destructive political projects of the twentieth century. Human beings viewed
through a scientific lens lost their value as irreplaceable individuals, becoming
mere ephemeral parts of “a planetary society of two-legged insects.”⁴⁹ This
symbolic dehumanization could be—and had been—used to justify mass murder
in the name of political or social expediency. Miłosz is convinced that ideas have
consequences.
In his notes to A Treatise on Poetry (Traktat poetycki, 1957), Miłosz writes
explicitly of the Darwinian roots of totalitarian violence: “Darwinism influenced
both Nazism and Marxism. The former gave a racial interpretation to the theory
of survival of the fittest; the latter applied the theory to the dying out of the less
⁴⁵ Stefan Chwin even describes a “Darwinian temptation” in Miłosz’s work that might be just as
dangerous as the “Hegelian temptation” of deterministic theories of history. See Stefan Chwin,
“Czesław Miłosz wobec powstania warszawskiego,” Teksty Drugie 131, no. 5 (2011): 78.
⁴⁶ Miłosz, Native Realm, 70. ⁴⁷ Miłosz, Second Space, 51.
⁴⁸ Miłosz, The Land of Ulro, 197. ⁴⁹ Miłosz, The Land of Ulro, 157.
22  ’    
adapted social classes” (W 416). Elsewhere, he clarifies that the violence stemmed
not from Darwin’s theory as such, but rather from “vulgarized” interpretations of
it. Radical political programs supposedly exploited the piecemeal popular dissem-
ination of scientific knowledge to create the impression that political problems
could easily be understood, and even solved, in scientific terms.⁵⁰ Such partial
frameworks, underpinned by the great explanatory force of the new theories, “like
a system of bridges built over chasms,” wielded a dogmatic power comparable to
that of religion. In effect, Miłosz argues, bastardized nineteenth-century science
became a “pseudo-Gospel” that validated the ideologies of both fascism and
communism.⁵¹
In The Captive Mind (Zniewolony umysł, 1953), Miłosz explains the specific
application of reductive materialism to Soviet Marxism-Leninism. With a strong
emphasis on the quasi-religious coloration of this “New Faith,” he argues that
“dialectical materialism, Russian-style, [was] nothing more than nineteenth-
century science vulgarized to the second power.”⁵² According to this philosophy,
the human social world—like the rest of nature—follows the deterministic prin-
ciples of cause and effect. By contrast, Miłosz also describes Marxism itself as
an ideology that is supposed to be fundamentally “anti-nature” (NCP 497) [“anty-
Naturą” (W 968)], since it theoretically opposes the realm of human history and
freedom to materialist biology.⁵³ Yet he argues that its Soviet manifestation
effectively betrayed this opposition, sanctioning terror by recourse to a pseudo-
scientific natural “necessity.”⁵⁴
In Nazism, Miłosz finds a less ambiguous application of the debased Darwinian
vision, tracing the root causes of the German death camps back to the discoveries
of the English naturalist. As he explains in The Witness of Poetry (1983), “ ‘the
survival of the fittest’ in its vulgarized form . . . created a climate for exterminating
millions of human beings in the name of a presumed social hygiene.”⁵⁵ Like
various more recent thinkers, Miłosz viewed the Nazi German genocide as
essentially biopolitical, predicated on an earlier reduction of the victims to ani-
mality or biology. As Giorgio Agamben famously argues: “Jews were exterminated
not in a mad and giant holocaust but exactly as Hitler had announced, ‘as lice,’
⁵⁰ Czesław Miłosz, The Captive Mind, trans. Jane Zielonko (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 191.
⁵¹ Czesław Miłosz, “Przypis po latach,” Ziemia Ulro (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Znak, 2000), 11.
⁵² Miłosz, The Captive Mind, 192.
⁵³ In this line of thought, the Polish Marxist thinker Stanisław Brzozowski was an important
influence, perhaps even setting the secular terms for Miłosz’s insistence on human separation from
Darwinian nature. Miłosz writes in detail on Brzozowski’s intellectual experience of the “crisis of
Darwinism,” his opposition to “naturalism,” and his complex separation of human beings from nature
in a long essay on the writer. See Czesław Miłosz, “A One-Man Army: Stanisław Brzozowski,” in
Emperor of the Earth: Modes of Eccentric Vision (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 192–3,
214–25. The essay was first published in Polish as Człowiek wśród skorpionów: studium o Stanisławie
Brzozowskim (Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1962).
⁵⁴ Miłosz, Visions from San Francisco Bay, 180.
⁵⁵ Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry, 50. Also see Miłosz, Conversations, 28.
  :   23
which is to say, as bare life.”⁵⁶ At the same time, Miłosz’s theory also corresponds
with intentionalist historical understandings of the Holocaust, some of which
maintain that Hitler’s own simplified interpretations of Darwinian science under-
pinned the ideology that led to genocide.⁵⁷ Miłosz poetically reveals a similar link
as early as his wartime lyrics, which abound in images of the brutal animalization
of human beings.⁵⁸
From Miłosz’s perspective, the tragedies of twentieth-century European history
represent moments when circumstances allowed the full consequences of reduc-
tive materialism to make themselves visible. These events were not anomalies, but
rather the logical outcome of a much longer historical development of ideas.
Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton had overturned humankind’s central place in
the cosmos. Subsequently, Darwin had erased the boundary between the human
and animal, the anthropological and the purely biological. Finally, ruthless polit-
ical operators had drawn their own conclusions from these discoveries, and then
put them into practice. In Miłosz’s view, the threat had not dissipated with the end
of the Second World War. On the contrary, his post-war writings regularly return
to the ongoing danger of materialist ideologies, both in the Soviet sphere and in
the United States, his home for three decades from the beginning of the 1960s.⁵⁹
To some extent, Miłosz had already predicted the consequences of reductive
materialism before the war, as a young “Catastrophist.”⁶⁰ After the war, many
other thinkers would come to share his assessment. Frankfurt School philosophers
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer argued in The Dialectic of Enlightenment
(Dialektik der Aufklärung, 1947) that certain forms of instrumental scientific
reason and rationalization had led to genocide. Hannah Arendt proposed in The
Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) that totalitarianism in both its German and
Soviet forms constituted “the last stage in a process during which ‘science has
⁵⁶ Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 114.
⁵⁷ Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (London: The Bodley Head,
2015), 1–11.
⁵⁸ See Aleksander Fiut, The Eternal Moment: The Poetry of Czesław Miłosz, trans. Theodosia
S. Robertson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 41–6. Of course, Miłosz was far from
being alone in these observations. For instance, Tadeusz Borowski’s Auschwitz stories (Pożegnanie z
Marią, 1947) are filled with metaphors that degrade and bestialize human beings. See Tadeusz
Borowski, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, trans. Barbara Vedder (London: Penguin,
1976).
⁵⁹ He lays out his diagnosis and his fears for the future in his major prose works: The Captive Mind
(1953), Native Realm (1959), Visions from San Francisco Bay (1969), The Land of Ulro (1977), and The
Witness of Poetry (1983).
⁶⁰ According to fellow Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert:
In contrast to his predecessors, who were marked by an exaggerated belief in civilization
and in the goodness and wisdom of man, Miłosz took careful note of the cracks and fissures
in the structure of European culture and of the approaching catastrophe of World War II.
Zbigniew Herbert, “On Czesław Miłosz,” Ironwood 18 (1981): 36.
24  ’    
become an idol that [would] magically cure the evils of existence and transform
the nature of man’.”⁶¹ The experience of Nazi German and Soviet power in mid-
twentieth-century Europe formed the central trauma of Miłosz’s life. Like Adorno,
Horkheimer, Arendt, and other post-war European intellectuals, he sought to
comprehend this experience by explaining its origins. However, as a poet, he also
drew conclusions for literature.
4. The Task of Literature: Reaching for Transcendence
In the short poem “Meaning,” Miłosz presents an image of poetry’s stubborn

resistance to the indifferent order of material nature. However, in his critical view,
modern literature has too often capitulated to this order, stifling its protest and
diminishing itself to literary forms of materialism—for instance, in the naturalist
movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Instead of answer-
ing Blake’s early call to resist the tide of scientific reductionism, many modern
writers had thus succumbed to the radical biologization of human life, stripping it
down to the rudiments of bare flesh and animal instincts in their works.⁶² Miłosz
delivers multiple versions of this critique throughout his career.
Before the war, the young poet attacks the “naturalism” of an older generation
of Polish writers who have supposedly reduced the world to “monistic rebuses,”
“narrow equations,” and “the bleakness of a mechanical hell.”⁶³ He singles out
Zofia Nałkowska’s (1884–1954) novel The Impatient Ones (Niecierpliwi, 1938) for
particular criticism, arguing that she puts the narrator in a position of dangerous
power over a human race reduced to the status of insects. Conversely, he praises
writers who reject the influence of the biological sciences, emphasizing the need to
define art as fundamentally opposed to nature.⁶⁴ Just before the war, he optimis-
tically announces that his own era is moving toward liberation from what he
characterizes as the quasi-religious “superstitions of materialism.”⁶⁵ He even
counts himself among a new generation of writers charged with “the task of
reconstructing man” in the face of this scientific dogmatism.
Later, in his wartime essays and letters, Miłosz argues that certain literary
visions have contributed directly to the unfolding catastrophe through the creative
⁶¹ Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian Books, 1958), 346.
⁶² Miłosz, The Land of Ulro, 17.
⁶³ Czesław Miłosz, Przygody młodego umysłu. Publicystyka i proza 1931–1939 (Kraków:
⁶⁴ In 1931, he enthuses that “the art of the present times takes a hostile position towards Nature.” In
1932, in an essay on the work of fellow poet Józef Łobodowski, he writes approvingly: “There is no
blubbering. There is hatred for the earth—a hatred characteristic of the race of the best poets.” Miłosz,
Przygody młodego umysłu, 26, 66.
⁶⁵ Miłosz, Przygody młodego umysłu, 205. Miłosz may have borrowed the idea of “scientific
superstition” from Stanisław Brzozowski. See Miłosz, “A One-Man Army: Stanisław
Brzozowski,” 217.
  :   25
confirmation of dehumanized images of humanity. As he succinctly puts it: “Man

is a being who is susceptible to autosuggestion.”⁶⁶ Accordingly, literature has
political consequences, forming an important part of the broader progression of
ideas that shape the ways in which human beings understand themselves and treat
one another. In particular, Miłosz attacks the increasingly “naturalistic” objectiv-
ity of the French realist novel in the nineteenth century, juxtaposing these devel-
opments with the continued defense of “man as an ethical value” in the Russian
novel of Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910). Under the influence of the
rising power of the scientific worldview, the great French realists—including
Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) and Stendhal (1783–1842)—had allegedly reduced
human society to a teeming “ant heap.”⁶⁷
After the war, Miłosz would continue to condemn various “naturalist” forms of
literature supposedly inclined toward these deforming and deadly visions of
human life. He expresses particular distaste for what he calls the “scientific
radicalism” of Samuel Beckett’s (1906–89) grotesque parodies of fleshly human
existence.⁶⁸ According to Miłosz, literary “materialists” like Beckett—or the
English poet Philip Larkin (1922–85)—gratuitously torment their readers with
the most impoverished views of human life: “[The writer] is like a man who sidles
up to a hunchback and begins to needle him: ‘Hunchback, you’re a hunchback;
you’d rather not be reminded of it, but I shall see to it that you are reminded’.”⁶⁹
Literature is harmful when it supports or creates such visions, imaginatively
absorbing humanity into the brutal natural order. Instead, Miłosz argues, writers
must differentiate “between nature and human nature, between natural laws and
supernatural laws.”⁷⁰ Art must demonstrate the allegiance of human beings to the
“supernatural” side of this equation—in part, because art itself belongs to the very
same dimension. Conversely, the worldview and language of all-encompassing
materialism pose a fundamental threat to poetry, in particular, cutting it off from
its partly religious roots.
In 1939, less than three months before the outbreak of the war, the young poet
writes: “There is no true art without religious sources.”⁷¹ During the war, he
clarifies that “the true life of religion” lies in its metaphysical dimension, opposed
to nature.⁷² Many years later, in The Land of Ulro, he synthesizes these claims as a
lesson learned from Blake: “Poetry and religion . . . are synonymous, provided they
are authentic, i.e., eschatological.”⁷³ In other words, “authentic” poetic language
must side with the otherworldly visions of religion against the purely naturalistic
⁶⁶ Czesław Miłosz, Legends of Modernity: Essays and Letters from Occupied Poland, 1942–1943,
trans. Madeline G. Levine (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2005), 247.
⁶⁷ Miłosz, Legends of Modernity, 232. ⁶⁸ Miłosz, The Land of Ulro, 241.
⁶⁹ Miłosz, The Land of Ulro, 243. In a poem about Philip Larkin, Miłosz writes polemically: “It’s hard
enough to draw a breath / Without his hectoring about nothingness.” (NCP 718) [“Skoro świadomość
różne ma poziomy, / Na niższy spycha mnie, kto śmiercią straszy.” (W 1187)].
⁷⁰ Miłosz, Przygody młodego umysłu, 272. ⁷¹ Miłosz, Przygody młodego umysłu, 283.
⁷² Miłosz, Legends of Modernity, 104. ⁷³ Miłosz, The Land of Ulro, 181.
26  ’    
view of reality. In its very essence, poetry suggests something beyond the material
world, intimating the existence of an extra-material or transcendent dimension of
meaning—a “lining” beyond the surface appearances. Yet this intuition never
comes with any dogmatic assurance. Miłosz himself is rarely an “eschatological”
poet in the mold of Blake, who saw himself as a prophet recording visions of
eternal human life in opposition to nature. Miłosz can only be a prophet in an
ironic mode—for instance, by translating and transposing Blake’s prophecies in
his own poems.⁷⁴ His poetry draws on religious sources, but it is rarely visionary
or devotional in any orthodox sense.
In part, this reticence is an intentional strategy. Since the language of the
twentieth century is a language of “disbelief,” Miłosz claims that he must conceal
his own “believing temperament” in order to protect his poetry from dismissal as
mere “second-rate” religious literature (W 808).⁷⁵ Yet this restraint also derives
from genuine doubt. The underlying worldview of his poetry is far from confident
Christianity. The voice of religion no longer speaks with authority, but rather it
clamors to be heard among a plethora of other ways to understand human beings
and their place in the universe. Even when he includes theological ideas in his
poetry, he tends to admit multiple, contradictory, and often heterodox viewpoints,
as in his late Treatise on Theology.⁷⁶ At best, Miłosz captures a dialogue between
embattled faith and other modern perspectives. In this way, the much-discussed
multi-voicedness or “polyphony” of his poetry reflects a defining feature of the
“secular age.”⁷⁷
In a certain sense, Miłosz is a “post-secular” poet of what John A. McClure has
dubbed a “partial faith.”⁷⁸ He opposes the dogmatism of secular materialism, but
he is also unwilling or unable to subordinate his poetry to dogmatic theology. He
⁷⁴ At the conclusion of his long poem, From the Rising of the Sun (Gdzie wschodzi słońce i kędy
zapada, 1974), Miłosz writes:
For we lived under the Judgment, unaware. / Which Judgment began in the year one
thousand seven hundred fifty-seven. / Though not for certain, perhaps in some other year. /
It shall come to completion in the sixth millennium, or next Tuesday.” (NCP 331)
[“Bo żyliśmy pod Sądem, nic nie wiedząc o tym. / Który to Sąd zaczął się w roku tysiąc
siedemset pięćdziesiątym siódmym, / Choć nie na pewno, może w którymś innym. /
Dopełni się w szóstym millennium albo w następny wtorek.” (W 682)]
1757 was the year of Blake’s birth and of Emanuel Swedenborg’s vision of the “Last Judgment” in the
“spiritual realm.”
⁷⁵ In an interview with Teresa Walas, he says of theology: “This was a subject with which I was
constantly preoccupied, though I could not find a way to introduce it into my poetry.” See Czesław Miłosz,
Rozmowy polskie. Vol. 2: 1999–2004 (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2011), 454. Karina Jarzyńska
describes this strategy as a “masking” of religious meanings. See Karina Jarzyńska, Literatura jako
ćwiczenie duchowe: Dzieło Czesława Miłosza w perspektywie postsekularnej (Kraków: Universitas, 2018).
⁷⁶ Various critics discuss the fruitful contradictions of this late work in Aleksander Fiut ed.,
Poznawanie Miłosza 3, 1999–2010 (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2011), 643–854.
⁷⁷ See Zach, Miłosz i poetyka wyznania, 124. Also see Taylor, A Secular Age, 592.
⁷⁸ See John A. McClure, Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison
(Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2007), 10–16. Karina Jarzyńska has written extensively on
Miłosz’s writings in the context of post-secularism. See Jarzyńska, Literatura jako ćwiczenie duchowe.
  :   27
constantly seeks new, often unorthodox paths to transcendence. As I will show in

the last three chapters of this book, many of these paths lead directly through the
body or sensual experience. Indeed, the corporeal paths often seem to be the most
promising, combining a secular turn to the body with openness to its deeper
meanings and its potential to generate or evoke phenomena that surpass it.
Perhaps most importantly, however, the impulse to seek transcendence is not
only an existential imperative, but also a poetic necessity. In the lyric “Meaning,”
Miłosz captures this tendency in the final image of the “word” tirelessly “running”
through the void of the universe in search of meaning.
From this point of view, the key differentiating feature of poetic language is its
capacity to open up meaning to other dimensions beyond “what ordinary lan-
guage envisages under the name of natural reality.”⁷⁹ Poetry, by definition,
assumes some form of transcendence, since what poets do with words surpasses
any prerogative simply to describe material facts in the most precise or transpar-
ent manner. The descriptive discourses of scientific and everyday language are
better suited to these operations.⁸⁰ Accordingly, any reductive vision of a closed
natural reality that dismisses the existence of other dimensions beyond this reality
abolishes the primary task and opportunity of poetic language. At the very least,
poetry assumes what philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005) calls a “surplus of
meaning”: that poetic words always say more than they appear to say, and refer to
more than they appear to refer to.⁸¹ In Miłosz’s terms, a thrush on a branch is
always more than just a thrush on a branch.
As we have seen, the non-verbal, rhythmic aspect of poetry delivers part of this
surplus meaning, which transcends the semantics of its message. In the poem
“Meaning,” the meaningful use of rhythm and syntax transpose the abstract idea
of poetry’s opposition to physical nature into a more powerful register. However,
an important contradiction emerges here. On the one hand, Miłosz clearly defines
the poetic word against nature and the body. On the other, he frequently identifies
its rhythmic, non-discursive dimensions with the body and the material world—
for instance, with the natural rhythms of the pulse and of the breath. From this
point of view, the transcendent “surplus” of poetry’s meaning would lie in the
flesh, and not beyond it. In fact, these two opposing potentialities seem to co-exist
in Miłosz’s poetry. Poetic language in his understanding opens up multiple
dimensions of transcendence, including variants implying an ascent over
⁷⁹ Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny
with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello (London: Routledge, 2004), 249.
⁸⁰ As Northrop Frye argues, “descriptive language and the development of science” have revealed
“the richness and variety” of the objective world, but remain somehow limiting in their potential,
restricted to what Blake calls “the same dull round, even of a universe.” See Northrop Frye, The Great
Code: The Bible and Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), 21.
⁸¹ Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 171–4.
28  ’    
materiality and a descent deep within it. These contradictory images of poetry
parallel his diverse representations of the human self.
5. Soaring over the Earth: The Self as Consciousness
Miłosz observes the collapse of traditional, religious notions of “vertical” transcend-

ence from the very beginning of his poetic career. In 1930, in one of his first two
published works, the speaker declares that “any lofty flights to the heights are a lie /
the void reigns over us / and the rush toward a distant fate” [“kłamstwem są
wszelkie wzniesienia na wysokość / pustka nad nami króluje / i pęd ku losom
dalekim”] (W 28). The vertically transcendent realm above human beings has been
emptied of its meaning, and as a result the world below has been likewise disen-
chanted. In this poem, entitled “Journey” (“Podróż”), the fall of traditional hier-
archies expresses itself in a lack of conventional versification, capital letters, or
punctuation, as if a cluster of words had been poured randomly onto the page.
Once again, poetic form reflects what it describes—in this case, also echoing the
uncertain “fate” of the human beings who find themselves in this disoriented reality.
Though his early attitude is ambivalent, many of Miłosz’s later works would
openly lament the loss of what he calls “second space,” a dimension that trans-
cends the “first space” of the physical world. In the eponymous poem of the final
collection published in his lifetime—Second Space (Druga przestrzeń, 2002)—he
pleads: “Have we really lost faith in that other space? / Have they vanished forever
both heaven and hell? / . . . Let us implore that it be returned to us, / That second
space”⁸² [“Czy naprawdę zgubiliśmy wiarę w drugą przestrzeń? / I znikło,
przepadło i Niebo i Piekło? / . . . Błagajmy, niech będzie nam wrócona / Druga
przestrzeń” (W 1217)]. The reductively materialist worldview allows only for a
singular space—what philosopher Charles Taylor describes as the closed “imma-
nent frame”—while the poet yearns for the surplus of meaning beyond it.⁸³
Perhaps most importantly, this yearning includes an impulse to defend or even
to reconstruct a “higher” notion of human identity against the reductionist view.
After all, in the absence of “second space,” there can be no place for human beings
after death, no immortality, and no “soul.” Human life is limited to natural
existence, which comes to an end with the deterioration and death of the body.
As Miłosz explains in A Year of the Hunter (Rok myśliwego, 1990), “the construct
no longer holds according to which true life begins after death, and the body as the
temporary dwelling place of the soul has been replaced by a body which is
identical with the individual.”⁸⁴ For the poet, this reality is difficult to accept.
Indeed, many of his most moving poems mourn the disappearance of human
⁸² Czesław Miłosz, “Second Space,” in Second Space, 3. ⁸³ Taylor, A Secular Age, 392, 543.
⁸⁴ Miłosz, A Year of the Hunter, 251.
  :   29
individuals in the unending processes of natural destruction: “How to have peace?

So many faces, / They lived and vanished. ‘Where are you?’ ” (NCP 527).⁸⁵ In
another poem, the speaker turns the same question—a version of the medieval Ubi
sunt (“Where are [they]?”) motif—to himself, objectified and transposed into the
third person: “Where does he come from, where will he disappear to?” (NCP 595)
[“Skąd przychodzi, dokąd zniknie” (W 1062)]. Without belief in the “golden
privilege” of an “immortality” lifting humans over the rest of the material world,
the poet can only try and fail “to reach with words” the notion of an eternal life in
“the beyond” (NCP 537 [W 1007]). If God is dead, then so is the human soul.
Yet Miłosz cannot reconcile himself to reductive conceptions of the human
being as body alone—as “meat / that for a moment prattles, moves, desires” (NCP
720) [“mięso, / które przez chwilę gada, rusza się, pożąda” (W 1189)]. Irrespective
of the existence of the soul, there is still a core aspect of human identity that seems
entirely at odds not only with the physical world of nature, but also with the
subject’s own physical form. In the agnostic or secular language that dominates his
poetry, he calls this incorporeal core of the self “consciousness” (“świadomość”) or
“the mind” (“umysł”). In many of his descriptions, consciousness appears to soar
above the world and its own body, suggesting a quasi-transcendentalization of the
self. Miłosz characterizes this separation as a paradoxically “empirical” experience
derived from the superiority of the immaterial mind’s seemingly limitless capa-
cities over matter’s constraints.⁸⁶ The ordinary phenomenon of consciousness has
the sublime power to embrace material phenomena much greater than its own
physical shell, imaginatively extending itself over vast expanses in space and time:
The mind marvelled at that overflowing multiplicity . . . in every minute and

second of the existence of the world, but also another kind, extending across
years, centuries, a thousand and a million years, and millions of years. And
everywhere the mind was allowed to travel: light and fleshless, it was soaring over
the earth before man, watching eruptions of volcanoes and the pastures of
dinosaurs. (NCP 572–3)
[Umysł podziwiał wylewającą się z brzegów mnogość . . . w każdej minucie i
sekundzie istnienia świata, ale i ta inna, zwielokrotniona przez rok, wiek, tysiąc
i milion lat, i miliony. I wszędzie umysłowi wolno było podróżować, lekki i
bezcielesny szybował nad ziemią jeszcze bez człowieka, patrząc na wybuchy
wulkanów i pastwiska dinozaurów. (W 1039)]
Crucially, this perspective on consciousness parallels Miłosz’s understanding of

the poetic gaze, which also attains a vertical distance from the material world. Like
⁸⁵ This third stanza of the poem is absent from the original Polish version of the poem (“Dalsze
okolice” [W 999]).
⁸⁶ Miłosz and Sadzik, “Obecność Chrześcijaństwa,” in Miłosz, Rozmowy polskie, 628.
30  ’    
the cosmic poetic word of “Meaning,” the alien poetic subject soars over space and
time. In these conceptualizations of poetry and the self, Miłosz was partly influ-
enced by the aesthetic philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), whom he
simply dubbed “my philosopher” (W 1303).⁸⁷ According to the German thinker,
aesthetic contemplation liberates the subject from the material world: “The
individual who soars aloft in this contemplation . . . becomes conscious of himself
as . . . pure subject of knowledge, free from individuality and from servitude to the
will.”⁸⁸ In Miłosz’s writings, the “pure” poetic subject often seems to transcend the
natural world, history, and his own physical existence. In his 1980 Nobel lecture,
he explains that the poet’s work requires a bird’s-eye perspective on human life
that is only attainable through a kind of imaginative flight above the earth.⁸⁹
Yet in many of Miłosz’s poems the soaring “I” as consciousness also descends to
participate in the spectacle as an alien presence “hiking” through nature and
“gathering specimens of the Earth” (NCP 194) [“zbierając . . . okazy Ziemi” (W
522)]. In a poem entitled “Consciousness” (“Świadomość”), the speaker suggests
that a combination of abstract knowledge, imagination, and sensual experience in
the vehicle of the body give consciousness a synthesizing capacity to “contain” the
things of the world, from the micro-scale of “every separate birch” [“każdą
oddzielną brzozę”] and the faces of individual people to the macro-scale of “the
courses of planets” (NCP 431) [“biegi planet” (W 836)]. Poetic consciousness can
reach beyond materiality, but this transcendent form of the self more often finds
itself among the transient things of the world, encountering them via the senses of
its body.
Elsewhere, Miłosz characterizes the interloper of consciousness as a kind of
journalist of being, sent down to the world to prepare “a report on it” for an
unknown audience (NCP 431). He perhaps borrows this metaphor from Walt
Whitman (1819–92), who wrote in a poem that Miłosz translated into Polish: “I
have split the earth . . . And went down to reconnoitre there a long time, / And
bring back a report.”⁹⁰ Crucially, for both Miłosz and Whitman, the reporting “I”
⁸⁷ Czesław Miłosz, Selected and Last Poems, 1931–2004, trans. Czesław Miłosz, Robert Hass, and
Anthony Milosz (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), 304.
⁸⁸ Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, trans. E. F. J. Payne
(New York: Dover Publications, 1966), 180.
⁸⁹ Czesław Miłosz, “The Nobel Lecture,” in Beginning with My Streets: Essays and Recollections, 280.
⁹⁰ Walt Whitman, “Walt Whitman’s Manuscript Drafts of ‘Song of Myself ’,” Bailiwick: The
University of Iowa Libraries, http://bailiwick.lib.uiowa.edu/whitman/specres07.html. Miłosz’s transla-
tion of this untitled poem appeared in Czesław Miłosz, Wypisy z ksiąg użytecznych (Kraków:
Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1994), 75. The quotation from Miłosz above also comes from the poem
“Consciousness,” published in Unattainable Earth (Nieobjęta ziemia, 1984), a collection that included
multiple translations of poems by Whitman. Miłosz published another poem taking the same
Whitmanian metaphor as its title—“Report” (“Sprawozdanie”)—in Facing the River (Na brzegu rzeki,
1994) in the very same year as he published his translation of the Whitman poem quoted above. I have
written elsewhere about Miłosz’s translations of Whitman. See Stanley Bill, “Translation as Talking to
Oneself: Miłosz Makes Whitman Speak,” Wielogłos: Journal of the Faculty of Polish Studies at the
Jagiellonian University 3, no. 17 (2014): 43–56.
  :   31
is closely identified with the poet himself. As Miłosz exclaims in a later poem:
“O Most High, you willed to create me a poet and now it is time for me / to present
a report” (NCP 589) [“O Najwyższy, zechciałeś mnie stworzyć poetą, / i teraz pora,
żebym złożył sprawozdanie” (W 1049)]. Poetry appears as a product of roving
consciousness.
The power of the mind also allows for a quasi-Whitmanian multiplication of
perspectives beyond the individual. In an earlier poem entitled “The Hooks of a
Corset” (“Haftki gorsetu”), Miłosz’s speaker explains: “Passing by the windows of
apartments, I invent stories, similar to my own, a lifted elbow, the combing of hair
before a mirror. I multiplied myself and came to inhabit every one of them
separately, thus my impermanence has no power over me” (NCP 408) [“Mijając
okna mieszkań, wynajduję ich dzieje, do moich podobne, łokieć podniesiony,
czesanie włosów przed lustrem. Pomnożyłem się, zamieszkałem w każdej i w
każdym równocześnie, a moja krótkotrwałość nie ma nade mną mocy” (W
787)]. This multiplication is possible thanks to the bodily senses common to all
human beings. However, it is the work of consciousness or the mind to connect
the specific sense impressions of the “I” with the imagined impressions of others
to construct a multiplied existence that seems to overcome the ephemerality of the
individual.
From these intimations of transcendence, Miłosz draws tentative conclusions
about the existence of “higher powers” or an “absolute mind” beyond both the
material world and individual consciousness. The striving of the human mind, or
the poetic reporter-subject, to embrace and absorb all the distinct phenomena of
the physical universe is an impossible task. Yet the very ambition in itself, and the
success of its partial achievement, suggests the mind’s affinity with a putative God-
like perspective: “An absolute mind, a witness present in every moment of space-
time” (NCP 573) [“Z umysłem absolutnym, świadkiem obecnym w każdym
momencie czasoprzestrzeni” (W 1040)]. In a late poem, the speaker expresses
this intuition in reverse: “Perhaps the world was created by the Good Lord to
reflect itself in the infinite number of eyes of living creatures, or, what is more
probable, in the infinite number of human consciousnesses.”⁹¹ [“Może świat został
przez Pana Boga po to stworzony, żeby odbijał się w nieskończonej liczbie oczu
istot żywych albo, co bardziej prawdopodobne, w nieskończonej liczbie ludzkich
świadomości.” (W 1242)] From this point of view, the transcendent power of
consciousness and its aspiration to embrace all things in space and time—
analogous to Miłosz’s own aspiration as a poet⁹²—may even suggest the existence
⁹¹ Miłosz, Second Space, 27.

⁹² Krzysztof Zajas argues that Miłosz’s poetry aims to gather the manifold fragments of reality
together to produce a human approximation of a divine perspective. See Krzysztof Zajas, Miłosz i
filozofia (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Baran i Suszczyński, 1997), 70.
32  ’    
of a God. At the very least, the immateriality of consciousness allows Miłosz, in an

earlier work, to hypothesize the existence of higher “powers” beyond the material
world:
Though of weak faith, I believe in forces and powers

Who crowd every inch of the air.
They observe us—is it possible that no one sees us?
Just think: a cosmic spectacle and absolutely no one?
There is proof, my consciousness. It separates itself,
Soars above me, above other people, above earth,
Obviously kindred to those powers,
Able, as they are, to see with detachment. (NCP 471)
[Słabej wiary, jednak wierzę w potęgi i moce, / Których pełen każdy

centymetr powietrza. / Oglądają nas—czy możliwe, żeby nikt nas nie
oglądał? / Pomyślcie: kosmiczne widowisko i absolutnie nikogo? / Jest
dowód, moja świadomość. Oddziela się ode mnie, / Szybuje nade mną,
nad innymi ludźmi, nad ziemią, / Najoczywiściej mocom tym
pokrewna, / Zdolna tak jak one oglądać, w oderwaniu. (W 927)]
In this poem, entitled “Powers” (“Moce”), Miłosz suggests—albeit half-ironically⁹³—

that we already know these immaterial powers exist, since human consciousness is
among them. He presents a kind of inductive, secular argument for the possibility
of a genuinely “vertical” transcendence, and even for the existence of other entities
beyond the material world. He argues that any conception of “incorporeal intelli-
gences, or angels” must be founded on the existence and capacities of “human
intelligence.”⁹⁴ The basis for this supposition is not faith in any traditionally
religious sense, but rather logical extrapolation from the “empirical” experience
of the human self, split between a material body and an immaterial aspect that
seems to break away from it. From this starting point, Miłosz elaborates a secular
belief in transcendence—what he calls “a philosophical faith”—which is inde-
pendent of any religious denomination: “A belief in transcendence as a measure of
humanity” (NCP 711) [“Wiarę w transcendencję, jako istotną cechę naszego
człowieczeństwa” (W 1181)]. Through consciousness, the mind, intelligence,
reason, and imagination, human beings vertically “transcend” the material
world and their own bodies.
⁹³ See Joanna Dembińska-Pawelec, “Poezja jest sztuką rytmu”: O świadomości rytmu w poezji
polskiej dwudziestego wieku (Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, 2010), 192.
⁹⁴ Miłosz, Selected and Last Poems, 288.
  :   33
6. Miłosz’s Manichaeism: The Immaterial Spark of the Self
Alongside these partly secular visions, Miłosz’s dualistic images of the poetic
subject as a disembodied interloper on earth reveal his life-long interest in the
Gnostic and Manichaean heresies.⁹⁵ In many works across his career, he draws
explicitly on these historical traditions at the margins of Christian thought,
explaining that the cruelty or “evil” inherent in Darwinian nature and human
history appear to invalidate mainstream Christian ideas of a world forged by a
loving God. In response, he frequently depicts a material world under the sym-
bolic power of the devil.
According to his own account, Miłosz’s earliest encounter with the dualist
heresies was in a “manual of Church history” at high school, where he enjoyed
reading the colorful descriptions of “the Gnostics, Manichaeans, and the
Albigensians.”⁹⁶ In these heretical groupings, typologized and categorized by
Church dogmatists, he identifies common characteristics: “They called necessity,
which rules everything that exists in time, the work of an evil Demiurge opposed
to God. . . . they turned against the flesh; i.e., creation.”⁹⁷ The attraction of these
heresies for Miłosz lay above all in their logical response to the problem of evil in
the world. Since both the natural world and human history were filled with
senseless suffering, they answered the theological riddle by blaming an evil and
inferior god, who had either created or appropriated the material world. The “true
God” was entirely opposed to the world. In Miłosz’s version, this heretical schema
remains identifiably Christian, since the evil “Demiurge” is the devil or Satan,
“The Prince of This World.”⁹⁸ However, he would also come to see the relevance
of radically dualist ideas in non-religious terms.
In various prose works in the 1970s, Miłosz elaborated a theory of
“neo-Manichaeism” as a wide civilizational phenomenon reflecting key modern
philosophical trends: “They will probably make use of the term ‘neo-
Manichaeanism’ to describe our characteristic resentment of evil Matter to
which we desperately oppose value, but value no longer flowing from a divine
source and now exclusively human.”⁹⁹ Miłosz argues that atheist humanism often
takes dualist form, especially in its moralizing Marxist or existentialist varieties.
⁹⁵ In 2011, Zbigniew Kaźmierczyk published the first book-length study on the subject, focusing in
particular on “Gnostic” echoes and correspondences in Miłosz’s early poetry. See Zbigniew
Kaźmierczyk, Dzieło demiurga: Zapis gnostyckiego doświadczenia egzystencji we wczesnej poezji
Czesława Miłosza (Gdańsk: Słowo/Obraz Terytoria, 2011). More recently, Charles S. Kraszewski has
published Irresolute Heresiarch: Catholicism, Gnosticism and Paganism in the Poetry of Czesław Miłosz
(Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012).
⁹⁶ Miłosz, Native Realm, 77–8. The textbook was Roman Archutowski’s Historia Kościoła
Katolickiego w zarysie (1920). See Czesław Miłosz and Aleksander Fiut, Autoportret przekorny:
Rozmowy (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2011), 203.
⁹⁷ Miłosz, Native Realm, 78. ⁹⁸ Miłosz, Visions from San Francisco Bay, 23, 174.
⁹⁹ Miłosz, Visions from San Francisco Bay, 23.
34  ’    
From these philosophical perspectives, human beings must establish their own
values and realm of freedom in opposition to the cold necessity of natural laws.
Transcendent human meaning—like the poetic word of the lyric “Meaning”—
finds itself alone in a physical universe to which it is fundamentally alien.
Miłosz’s thesis borrows certain assumptions from philosopher Hans Jonas’s
famous essay on “Gnosticism, Existentialism, and Nihilism” (1963), according to
which modern estrangement from a deterministic universe was simply a more
desperate version of the ancient Gnostics’ alienation from the cosmos. Jonas traces
secularized versions of Gnostic ideas in twentieth-century existentialism and
nihilism, finding a “basic dualism between man and physis as the metaphysical
background of the nihilistic situation.”¹⁰⁰ Miłosz read Jonas’s influential work in
preparation for a course he taught on “Manichaeism Old and New” at the
University of California, Berkeley in 1975. In his lecture notes, he expresses
astonishment at discovering in Jonas’s work “[his] own thoughts” on the “actu-
ality” of Manichaeism, which reaches to “the very core of man’s situation
today.”¹⁰¹ On the one hand, Miłosz is critical of this “situation” as synonymous
with self-defeating nihilism; on the other, he finds indispensable value in the
dualist perspective when it is recombined with its original religious content.
In Christian form, radical dualism insists on the otherworldly provenance of
the core of the human subject, defining it in opposition to the material world and
to its own body. The human being is a divine “spark trapped in the prison of
matter,” while the eschatological promise of salvation is “the release of the ‘inner
man’ from the bonds of the world and a return to his native realm of light.”¹⁰² In
Miłosz’s terms, the spiritual “spark” of the self exists as a “stranger” in the physical
universe, while its true home lies with the otherworldly “true God” in the vertical
dimension of “the Absolute.”¹⁰³ Consequently, the human interloper must purify
himself or herself by rejecting material nature, worldly society, and carnal exist-
ence. Alienation from the time and space of the material universe gives hope of
human superiority over them through identification with a transcendent or divine
principle beyond them—a “realm of light.”¹⁰⁴
¹⁰⁰ Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of
Christianity (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 338.
¹⁰¹ Czesław Miłosz, “Manichaeism Old and New I–III,” Czesław Miłosz Papers, Series V:
Professional Papers, 1960–1993, Box 175, Folders 2733–5, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript
Library, Yale University (underlining by Miłosz in the original handwritten lecture notes).
¹⁰² Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, 42–7. Miłosz discusses and quotes Jonas in his Berkeley course and
in The Land of Ulro, 152–3.
¹⁰³ Miłosz, Native Realm, 78.
¹⁰⁴ This theme was genuinely present in the thought of certain historical Christian Gnostic sects. For
the Valentinian Gnostics, for instance, the primal Anthropos was the true transcendent principle,
superior to the demiurgical creator who lurked behind the deceitful Old Testament tales of a good god.
Hope for human beings, therefore, lay in a deep transformation in consciousness that would allow
them to make contact with the transcendent principle within themselves. Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic
Gospels (New York: Random House, 1979), 122–9.
  :   35
Miłosz’s early poetry is especially full of these “Gnostic” attitudes.¹⁰⁵ Indeed,

contemporary critics in the 1930s already noticed a strong tendency in his work to
represent the poetic speaker, or perhaps even the poet himself, as a pure being who
has reluctantly descended from a vertical dimension above to wander the impure
earth.¹⁰⁶ This attitude is on display in a 1937 poem entitled “Incarnation”
(“Wcielenie”), in which the speaker yearns for his heavenly “home” after descend-
ing to the “earth” of a dirty modern city filled with fleshly human crowds (W
108–10). As his new earthly habitation entraps him, the speaker fantasizes about
“soaring up over the abyss” back into the heavens [“wzlecę nad przepaście”]. The
poem ends on a note of ambivalence and doubt, as the call of vertical transcend-
ence fails to overcome the reality of a symbolic crucifixion in an earthly body,
followed by death:
And in vain the whisper of the Father calls from the heavens,
as I show the trace with a punctured hand,
before we all perish in the azure.
[I próżno z niebios szept Ojca przyzywa, / gdy pokazuję ślad przebitą

ręką, / zanim my wszyscy zginiemy w lazurze. (W 110)]
In this poem, and in multiple others in the early volume Three Winters (Trzy zimy,
1936), Miłosz’s poetic personas express an unquenchable “hunger” (“głód”) for an
immaterial domain beyond the world they inhabit.¹⁰⁷ They are left with a feeling
of profound alienation in the physical universe—what Miłosz would characterize
many years later as “maladjustment” or “inadaptation” (“nieprzystosowanie”), an
instinctive rejection of the material world and a yearning for the vertical realm: “I
was not made to live anywhere except in Paradise / Such, simply, was my genetic
inadaptation”¹⁰⁸ [“Nie nadawałem się do życia gdzie indziej niż w Raju. / Po
prostu takie było moje genetyczne nieprzystosowanie” (W 1238)]. Such an intu-
ition insists on the transcendent origin or predestination of the self, in opposition
to the body, even in the absence of metaphysical certainty.
¹⁰⁵ See Zbigniew Kaźmierczyk, “ ‘Wcielenie’: wczesny wiersz Miłosza,” Tytuł 2–3 (1999): 152–73;
and Kaźmierczyk, Dzieło demiurga.
¹⁰⁶ In 1938, Ignacy Fik famously accused Miłosz of exhibiting “an angelism complex” in his poetry,
and thus of belonging to a group of Polish poets with a distinct taste for “demonology” and “a whole
wardrobe of demiurgical costumes.” See Ignacy Fik, “Grzech anielstwa,” in Miłosz, Przygody młodego
umysłu, 369. Marek Zaleski lists various other interwar critics unsympathetic to what he characterizes
as Miłosz’s “Manichaean vision of events,” including Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, Stefan Napierski,
and Hieronim Michalski. See Marek Zaleski, Przygoda drugiej awangardy (Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy
im. Ossolińskich, 1984), 280–5.
¹⁰⁷ Kaźmierczyk, Dzieło demiurga, 130–1. ¹⁰⁸ Miłosz, Second Space, 23.
36  ’    
Some critics have relegated Miłosz’s dualist inclinations to a youthful

“Weltschmerz” that he later sought to overcome.¹⁰⁹ Indeed, Miłosz came to
recognize serious intellectual and political dangers in his own “hatred of the
flesh.” Yet his heretical interests would persist throughout his life. He treats dualist
themes in all his later volumes of poetry, continuing to ask rhetorically whether
“the world of matter had received its shape from diabolic power” (NCP 445)
[“świat materii dostał kształt swój pod diabelską władzę” (W 878)]. In 1982, he
published Hymn of the Pearl (Hymn o perle), a collection of poems that opens with
his own adaptation of the Gnostic hymn of the same title from the third-century
New Testament apocrypha, Acts of Thomas. The hymn tells the symbolic tale of a
“son of the King,” who is sent down from his father’s “Kingdom” into Egypt to
retrieve a pearl from a dragon. Among the Egyptians, he takes on their “rags” and
forgets his origins. Eventually, he receives a letter from the King, reminding him of
his provenance, completes his mission, discards the “vile and impure rags,” and
returns to the Kingdom in glory (W 685–8).
The hymn delivers an allegory for the radical dualist vision of the self that
remained relevant to Miłosz even in this late period (he was seventy-one years old
when he published Hymn of the Pearl). The son of the King represents the soul
sent down into the material world, where he takes on the earthly “rags” of the
physical body and forgets his higher origins. But the letter from above reminds
him of where he comes from: “I am the son of the King, and . . . my freeborn soul
yearns for my own kin” (W 687). He then throws off the bodily “rags,” and returns
to his father in the Kingdom of Heaven in the “robes” of his true identity as an
immortal soul. In this symbolic vision, the authentic core of the self is entirely
alien to the body, from which it yearns to be free.
While this translation of an apocryphal myth directly expresses “Gnostic”
dualism, most of Miłosz’s post-war poetry establishes a more skeptical distance
from such claims. However, he continues to find ways to integrate this metaphys-
ical perspective with his “secular” poems. In the Hymn of the Pearl collection, he
subtly weaves the metaphysical framework of the translated hymn into multiple
other lyrics. In a poem on his visit to the famous Catholic pilgrimage site at
Lourdes, France, he refers evocatively to the “taste of wine and roast meat” (NCP
359) [“smak wina i mięsiwa” (W 721)], borrowing an unusual word for “meat”
(“mięsiwo”) from his translation of the hymn: “[The Egyptians] mixed cunning
with drink, and gave me their meat to try” [“Mieszali chytrość z napojem, i dali mi
spróbować ich mięsiwa” (W 686)]. While the anti-material hymn demonizes the
appetites of the flesh, the Lourdes lyric is more ambiguous in its attitude. Indeed,
¹⁰⁹ See Agata Stankowska, “Język ‘młodzieńczego Weltschmerzu’: O skutkach i korektach ‘gnostyck-
iego doświadczenia egzystencji’,” Poznańskie Studia Polonistyczne: Seria Literacka 20, no. 40 (2012):
167–85. Zbigniew Kaźmierczyk makes a similar suggestion, though he also acknowledges the continu-
ing importance of the fundamental dualist dilemma. See Kaźmierczyk, Dzieło demiurga, 215.
  :   37
the speaker calls for the earthly taste to “stay with us,” suggesting that the very
sights of the world itself—and not any imagined higher realm—are all he stands to
lose. Yet the lingering word from the hymn sounds a note of rejection of these
apparent temptations of earthly life.
In another poem from the same collection, entitled “A Portal” (“Portal”), the
speaker describes his deep sense of alienation from the physical world:
. . . Earth, what have I to do with thee?

With your meadows where dumb beasts
Grazed before the deluge without lifting their heads?
What have I to do with your implacable births? (NCP 361)
[ . . . Co mnie tobie, ziemio? / Co mnie do Twoich łąk, na których nieme

bestje / Pasły się przed potopem, nie podnosząc głowy? / Co mnie do
twoich nieprzebłaganych narodzin? (W 723)]
This poem echoes the symbolic awakening of the “son of the King” to his
“inadaptation” to his own bodily existence in the world, though it lacks the
hymn’s faith in the existence of an otherworldly home. Again, Miłosz draws on
the dualist poetic allegory, while mixing it with skepticism and doubt in his own
more personal confession. In this way, the Gnostic and Manichaean myths appear
as a kind of shadow of heretical yearning. The immaterial self rejects fleshly
existence in the biological cycle of births and deaths, feeling a sense of detachment
from these animalizing processes. And yet the absence of metaphysical certainty
to confirm the truth of this intuition means the secular poem can only conclude
with “melancholy” and “anger” (“gniew”). The speaker has precious little faith in
any triumphant return to the “Kingdom” in the glorious raiment of the soul.
In Miłosz’s subsequent volume, Unattainable Earth (Nieobjęta ziemia, 1984),
the poetic speaker once again draws on the imagery of the apocryphal Gnostic
hymn in mixed tones of hope and doubt in an emotive postscript to a poem
written on the death of an anonymous friend:
I would like everyone to know they are the king’s children

And to be sure of their immortal souls
I.e., to believe that what is most their own is imperishable. (NCP 443)
[Chciałbym, żeby każdy i każda wiedzieli, że są dziećmi Króla, / i byli

pewni swojej duszy nieśmiertelnej / to znaczy wierzyli, że co najbardziej
ich własne, jest nie do zniszczenia. (W 860)]
In this epistolary postscript (“P.S.”), Miłosz’s speaker echoes the letter to

the fallen soul of the “Hymn of the Pearl”: “Remember that you are the son of
38  ’    
the King . . . Remember your robes of glory” [“Przypomnij sobie, że jesteś synem
Króla . . . Przypomniej sobie twóją suknię chwały” (W 687)]. The core of the
human self is fundamentally opposed to the perishable flesh. Once again,
the lyric speaker seems uncertain of this reality, conveying fervent desire in the
conditional mood rather than confident knowledge. Only occasionally do Miłosz’s
lyrical avatars muster more conviction. In his very late poem on “Nonadaptation”
(“Nieprzystosowanie”), the speaker insists that he always been “absent, dedicated
to invisible countries” [“nieobecny, powierzony niewidzialnym krajom”], and that
human beings fundamentally live in “banishment” [“wygnanie”] from their true
home in “Paradise” [“w Raju” (W 1238)].¹¹⁰ In such poetic confessions, Miłosz
probes the border between orthodox Christian conceptions of soul and body, with
the concomitant belief in the resurrection of the flesh, and the more radical idea of
a human spark suffering exile in physical existence. But why does he feel the need
to push the boundaries of orthodoxy at all?
In short, Miłosz argues that Gnostic insistence on the absolute otherness of a
vertically transcendent realm is the strongest form of opposition to the steady
secularization of Christianity itself—that is, to its capitulation to the exclusively
horizontal dimension of this-worldly action. He claims that mainstream denomi-
nations have effectively surrendered to the scientific worldview, betraying the
otherworldly dimension, so that modern Christianity is “now both with and in
the world.”¹¹¹ From his earliest writings, Miłosz criticizes this emptying of reli-
gion’s “otherworldly” content into the worldly concerns of hypocritical social
ritual and even national parochialism.¹¹² Later he would add the supposed impov-
erishment of contemporary forms of religion reduced to mere social activism or
good works.¹¹³ In his view, anti-materialism in the form of a radical Christian
dualism offers a corrective to these trends, recovering space for absolute tran-
scendence through negation of the material world. As Miłosz describes it, heretical
“Christian gnosis” represents a “buffer zone” protecting the true, “metaphysical”
religion.¹¹⁴
In other words, Miłosz’s unorthodox leanings are partly a reaction, as he sees it,
to the cage of singular space or the “immanent frame.” By demonizing the
material world and transcendentalizing an incorporeal human subject, he seeks
to bring a strongly metaphysical dimension back into the reductive worldview.¹¹⁵
¹¹⁰ Miłosz, Second Space, 23. ¹¹¹ Miłosz, The Land of Ulro, 248.
¹¹² For instance, he criticizes an interwar Catholicism supposedly sullied by the political nationalism
of “priests calling from the altars for holy war against unbelievers of another race.” See Miłosz, Przygody
młodego umysłu, 205.
¹¹³ Miłosz, The Mountains of Parnassus, 73; Miłosz, The Land of Ulro, 187.
¹¹⁴ Miłosz, The Land of Ulro, 225.
¹¹⁵ See Stanley Bill, “Dualism, Dostoevskii and the Devil in History: Czesław Miłosz’s ‘Neo-
Manichaean’ Theory of Russian Culture,” Slavonic and East European Review 93, no. 3 (July 2015):
403–7. Karina Jarzyńska makes a related point on “heresy as a strategy to overcome secularity” in her
book Literatura jako ćwiczenie duchowe: Dzieło Czesława Miłosza w perspektywie postsekularnej
(2018).
  :   39
As philosopher Leo Strauss puts the predicament in a letter to Hans Jonas,

“Gnosticism is the most radical rebellion against physis.”¹¹⁶ Alternatively, as
Jonas himself explains, Gnostic dualism in modern times is “a reaction formation
over and against natural-scientific thought, which in the world, its world, has left
no more room for godly intervention.”¹¹⁷ In the face of this oppressive material-
ism, Miłosz describes Manichaeism as “both necessary and unavoidable.”¹¹⁸ Its
persistence in his work doubtless reflects his deep intuition of “evil in the world.”
However, he also recognizes its strategic usefulness as a consciously constructed
poetic myth. As he understands it, Christian Gnosis represents a bastion of
eschatological thinking and a powerful affirmation of absolute transcendence.
In Miłosz’s interpretation, heretical dualism also coheres with the mission of
poetry, supporting higher forms of meaning against reductive visions of an earth
that is “nothing except this earth.” Indeed, from very early in his career, Miłosz
distinguishes the “metaphysical” calling of an intertwined religion and poetry
from a “diabolical” immanent sphere. As he reveals in a letter of 1931: “I already
have a sense of hierarchy . . . . There is religion and poetry, and the rest may go to
the devil.”¹¹⁹ By consigning the world to darkness, he preserves an unorthodox
vertical hierarchy. In doing so, he also elevates the human being—or the poetic
subject—above matter. In many cases, this is a doubt-filled, secular elevation. On
other occasions, he reaches for an ironic identification of people with divinity: “On
one side, the world; on the other, men and gods” (NCP 713) [“Po jednej stronie
świat, po drugie ludzie i bogowie” (W 1183)]. In the most radical variants, he
insists on the opposition of human beings to nature and their allegiance to an
otherworldly, alien God, whose existence remains uncertain. At least poetically,
humans belong to the vertical dimension.
7. The Dangers of Dualism
This chapter has examined Miłosz’s poetic and philosophical responses to a

modern materialism that would reduce human beings to mere biology. He sees
this reduction as politically destructive, since it undermines the inalienable value
of each human individual. However, it also constitutes a threat to poetry, since the
reductive perspective erodes the “surplus” dimension of reality that underpins the
very possibility of poetic meaning. In response, Miłosz continues to assert that
both human beings and the poetic word fundamentally transcend the material
world, soaring above it—at least symbolically—in a vertical dimension. In this
¹¹⁶ Benjamin Lazier, “Overcoming Gnosticism: Hans Jonas, Hans Blumenberg, and the Legitimacy
of the Natural World,” Journal of the History of Ideas 64, no. 4 (2003): 632.
¹¹⁷ Lazier, “Overcoming Gnosticism,” 634. ¹¹⁸ Miłosz, The Land of Ulro, 258.
¹¹⁹ Czesław Miłosz and Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, Portret podwójny: wykonany z listów, wierszów,
zapisków intymnych, wywiadów i publikacji (Warszawa: Fundacja Zeszytów Literackich, 2011), 33.
40  ’    
way, he constructs or reconstructs various images of human identity and poetic

meaning in separation from the body.
These visions have both religious and secular dimensions. On the one hand,
Miłosz yearns for the return of “second space,” the confirmation of Christian faith
in the existence of the “soul,” and a world imbued with a hidden meaning
underwritten by an ultimate “point of reference.” On the other hand, he repro-
duces secular, “existentialist” ideas of a transcendent human consciousness and
poetic meaning alone in the cosmos, screaming in protest against the void of the
material universe and constructing their own autonomous sphere of values.
In some of his works, these perspectives are combined in a “neo-Manichaean”
rejection of the physical world and an accompanying exaltation of the “pure
subject.”
Yet these heretical speculations inevitably put the subject into bitter conflict
with the material aspect of itself—the body. The self as consciousness fantasizes
about separation from its own physical frame. This attitude leads to painful self-
alienation, since—whatever its aspirations—the incorporeal spark of the self
remains irrevocably anchored in its bodily form on earth. The dualistic desire
for incorporeal separation also has political implications, as the poet’s elevated
fantasy of purity may produce contemptuous dismissal of the fleshly lives of
“ordinary” people. Miłosz finds in the distanced poetic perspective the tempta-
tions of a violent reduction of other human beings, and even the specter of
“dictators’ dreams” of power over them (NCP 516). The fierce desire to transcend
the body is dangerous.
2
The Totalitarian Self
Consciousness in the Trap of the Body
1. The Divided Self
Miłosz’s dualism is above all a response to the reductive forms of materialism he

saw as dominating contemporary thought with devastating consequences in
history and for poetry. His peculiar “Manichaeism” is not merely a heretical
tendency, but rather a productive way out of a modern perspective whose totaliz-
ing immanence seems to leave no space for the operation of the transcendent in
the world. As Miłosz presents it, the dualist rejection of the immanent, natural
world creates the possibility of renewed transcendence. From this dualist perspec-
tive, the human subject of Miłosz’s poems and essays feels a sense of uncomfort-
able “maladjustment” in the material world. Humans are “strangers” in the world.
This alienation of the subject from physical nature has a corollary that lies at the
heart of the paradoxes of Miłosz’s poetry: alienation from the natural body.
This chapter focuses on Miłosz’s representations of a conflict between an
incorporeal core of the human self and a body that appears to varying degrees
as a limiting frame or trap. While the first chapter described the affirmative
dimensions—or intentions—of Miłosz’s multiple dualist images of an immaterial
self, this chapter looks at the negative consequences of the resulting split in human
identity. On the one hand, the dualist perspective opens space for a vertical form
of human transcendence, as the conscious self appears to soar above the physical
world and its own bodily frame. On the other hand, this split brings both self-
alienation and a hubristic sense of superiority over others. This viewpoint poten-
tially has political ramifications, as the elevated subject comes to perceive the rest
of humanity as an object to be shaped and controlled.
The chapter begins with an interpretation of a key section of the long
poem From the Rising of the Sun (Gdzie wschodzi słońce i kędy zapada, 1974),
which gives expression to Miłosz’s most extensive self-critical reflections on
“Manichaean” hatred of the body. It then broadens the scope to examine the
persistent motif of secular consciousness in front of the mirror, contemplating the
reflection of the “thing” of its own deteriorating, and aging, body. From this
individual perspective, the chapter turns to the collective dimension of the same
self-objectification through analysis of Miłosz’s multiple poetic images of the
human species as “one flesh” from which the “I” strives to separate itself. The
42  ’    
chapter concludes with his gathering sense from the 1950s onward that this split
version of subjectivity—like the reductive materialist view to which it responds—
is both destructive to his poetic vocation and politically dangerous. The alienated
subject’s desire for “purity” and separation from fleshly humanity bears the seeds
of a “totalitarian” worldview.
2. “The Accuser”: Hatred of the Flesh
Miłosz’s long, multipart poem From the Rising of the Sun has been described by
critics and even the poet himself as his magnum opus.¹ In seven diverse sections in
multiple styles, genres, and voices, Miłosz intertwines an autobiographical thread
with reflections on the history of his native region and twentieth-century ideas.
Though he would go on to produce many acclaimed works across three decades
after its publication, the work represents a kind of poetic summing up—a genre
critic Lawrence Lipking calls the “Harmonium.”² In this type of work, an older
poet attempts to reach a unifying understanding of his life, his writings, and the
history of his times. Indeed, From the Rising of the Sun captures Miłosz’s central
concerns in their most developed form, while also representing the culmination of
his formal experiments with multiple voices and the mixing of poetry and prose.
The lyric voice becomes the “editor” of a whole chorus of voices; individual history
bleeds into social history.³
Various readers have interpreted the poem as a “biography of ideas” or as an
account of the poet’s own spiritual or intellectual journey.⁴ In this process, the
sixth section—entitled “The Accuser” (“Oskarżyciel”)—plays an especially impor-
tant role. Here, the voice of the poem’s main semi-autobiographical speaker gives
way to another voice, which forces the speaker into a reckoning with his own
spiritual and poetic failures. Critics have pointed out that “accuser” (“oskarżyciel”)
may be a translation of the Greek diabolos, or Hebrew Satan, a resonance
strengthened by the symbolism of the number six.⁵ Accordingly, the section can
be understood as a moment of diabolical temptation, or mocking accusation,
along the path of the speaker’s spiritual progress.
¹ Czesław Miłosz, Gdzie wschodzi słońce i kędy zapada (Gdańsk: Słowo Obraz Terytoria, 2004), 7.
² Lawrence Lipking, The Life of the Poet: Beginning and Ending Poetic Careers (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1981).
³ Jan Błoński, Miłosz jak świat (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Znak, 1998), 103, 72.
⁴ See, among others, Ryszard Nycz, “Miłosz: biografia idei,” in Sylwy współczesne: Problem kon-
strukcji tekstu (Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1984); Jolanta Dudek, Europejskie korzenie poezji Czesława
Miłosza (Kraków: Księgarnia Akademicka, 1995); Łukasz Tischner, Miłosz and the Problem of Evil,
trans. Stanley Bill (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2015); Karina Jarzyńska, “Postsecular
Instruments of Acculturation: Czesław Miłosz’s Works from the Second American Stay,” Open
Cultural Studies 1 (2017): 140–54.
⁵ Tischner, Miłosz and the Problem of Evil, 181.
  :        43
The diabolical voice may represent an inner demon of the speaker himself: the
specter of his overweening ego or the taunting negations of modern nihilism.
However, it could also suggest a more constructive spirit of self-correction, a
cathartic reckoning with the poet’s own mistakes in a Blakean “throwing off of
error.”⁶ Above all, this error concerns the poet’s attitude to his own mortality and
his existence in a physical body. The main charge of “The Accuser” is that the
poet–speaker—and perhaps Miłosz himself—has rejected frail physical existence
for a deleterious fantasy of fleshless purity.
“The Accuser” begins by confronting the poet with his inevitable death and the
unrealizable desire of his ego for immortality and everlasting glory. The lines vary
in length, from seven to twenty-one syllables; the stanzas are all short, sometimes
only a single line. This style gives a sense of mock gravity, punctuating the
accuser’s often ironic remarks with dramatic pauses. After listing the names of
dead poets largely unknown outside their own countries, he mockingly asks
whether the lyric subject still believes in Horace’s poetic testament: “non omnis
moriar”—“not all of me will die” (NCP 320; W 671). In fact, all that will remain of
Miłosz will be an encyclopedia entry “next to a hundred Millers and Mickey
Mouse” [“w pobliżu setki Millerów i Mickey Mouse”]. The accusing voice
describes the poet as a traveler nearing the setting sun of the poem’s title—that
is, the end of his life—alienated from a “youth all in flowers” [“młodość w
kwiatach”]. In his old age, the speaker faces the most acute form of the basic
tension between the demands of his ego and the fragility of his body:
My most gracious and honorable body,

I, your soul, you declaim, I command you:
It’s time to get up, check the date.
There are many tasks to be done today.
Serve me a little longer, just a bit.
I don’t know what is going on in your dark tunnels,
At what moment you’ll deny and overthrow me,
On what day your cosmos will congeal and collapse. (NCP 321)
[Wielce łaskawe i szanowne ciało, / Ja, dusza twoja, prawisz, rozkazuję. /

Już pora, wstań i sprawdź, jaka data. / Do wykonania dzisiaj dużo prac. /
Usłuż mi jeszcze troche odrobinę. / W twoich ciemnych tunelach co
dzieje się, nie wiem. / Nie wiem, kiedy odmówisz i obalisz mnie, / Kiedy
zastygnie i runie twój kosmos. (W 672)]
In this archaized “medieval dialogue,” sardonically reported by the accuser in

stanzas that oscillate around a traditional eleven-syllable line, the immaterial part
⁶ Dudek, Europejskie korzenie poezji Czesława Miłosza, 144–7.

44  ’    
of the poet reveals a contradictory relationship with his aging body. On the one
hand, he “commands” it as a mere servant of his will; on the other, it must be
addressed in tones of ingratiating respect and cajoled to serve “a little longer.”
The capricious body is what roots the self in time, represented by the calendar,
while also constituting the vehicle for the “tasks” of its various endeavors. Without
the body, the soul or the mind will be “overthrown.” And yet this physical
container is fundamentally unknown and unknowable to the rational subject.
The underlying reality of the flesh lies beyond what is accessible to the conscious
mind. The body’s own response in the dialogue is ominously incomprehensible:
And you hear in reply: a bone cracks,

Murky blood grumbles, accelerates its rhythm,
Pain answers close in sign language,
A megalithic gurgle, whisper, indictments.
[I słyszysz w odpowiedzi: trzaśnie kość, / Mulista krew zamruczy w

prędszym tętnie, / Ból znakami na migi odezwie się blisko, /
Megalityczny gulgot, szept, wyroki.]
The body communicates by means of inarticulate sounds and nerve signals

carrying pain. The lines crackle with onomatopoeia, as the non-verbal sounds of
the body seem to bubble up through the words of the poem. The “quicker pulse”
(“w prędszym tętnie”) of the blood’s rhythm is echoed in the next line by a series
of accelerating amphibrachs in a classical thirteen-syllable Alexandrine line: “Ból /
znakami / na migi / odezwie / się blisko.” Like the body’s mysterious meanings
beyond the reach of the rational mind, the non-semantic meanings of the poem’s
sounds lurk beneath its rational significations. As in the case of the earlier eleven-
syllable lines, these rhythms are impersonal, rooted in cultural history and the
paroxytonic (penultimate-syllable) stress patterns of the Polish language. By
analogy, the “megalithic gurgle” of the body suggests its own impersonal history
in the evolution of the species, abstracted from the consciousness of the individual
person.
From this uncomfortable “dialogue” between the two estranged parts of the
poet’s self, the accuser comes to his primary allegation, and the central dilemma of
the poem:
Confess, you have hated your body,

Loving it with unrequited love. It has not fulfilled
Your high expectations. As if you were chained to
Some little animal in perpetual unrest,
Or worse, to a madman, and a Slavic one at that.
  :        45
[Nienawidziłeś, przyznaj, swego ciała, / Niewzajemnie w nim zako-

chany. Ono nie spełniło / Wysokich oczekiwań. To jakbyś był skuty /
Z niezbyt dużym zwierzęciem w ciągłym niepokoju, / Albo gorzej, z
wariatem, i nawet słowiańskim.]
Alienation and incomprehension escalate into a hatred that springs from the body’s
stubborn imperviousness to consciousness, reason, and language. A hard border
separates the material and non-material aspects of the self; yet the material element
has a tyrannical capacity to subject the non-material element to pain, and to dictate
the very course and conditions of its existence. The seemingly transcendent spark of
the self arises from the ground of an alien thing to which it then remains irrevocably
bound. The resulting hatred of the flesh evokes radical dualism or Manichaeism.
A few stanzas later, the accuser explicitly levels the charge of the “sin” [“grzech”] of
heresy against Miłosz’s lyric subject in one of the poem’s most famous passages:
Indeed, quite early you were a gnostic, a Marcionite,

A secret taster of Manichean poisons.
From our bright homeland cast down to the earth,
Prisoners delivered to the ruin of our flesh,
Unto the Archon of Darkness. (NCP 322)
[Zaiste, wcześnie byłeś gnostyk, marcjonita, / Sekretny zjadacz trucizn

manichejskich. / Z jasnej naszej ojczyzny strąceni na ziemię, / Jeńcy na
zgubę cielesną wydani / Archontowi Ciemności. (W 673)]
This stanza references the familiar account from the autobiographical Native
Realm of Miłosz’s first contact with the dualist heresies in his “textbook of
Church History.” Yet in the poem the emphasis is not on the cruelty of nature,
but rather on the subject’s own alienation in the cage of his body from his “true,”
higher vocation. The “I” appears as a pure spark from a transcendent beyond
trapped in an impure fleshly frame. This passage features the greatest concentra-
tion of classical Alexandrine lines in the poem, as if to reflect or support the
subject’s aspiration to construct himself in separation from the chaos of materi-
ality. As the accuser notes, this ambition appeared “early” in Miłosz’s poetry, most
famously in the lyric “Incarnation” (“Wcielenie”), in which the speaker “descends
to earth” and yearns for his “home in the clouds” [“schodzę na ziemię . . . Mój
obłoczny domie!” (W 108–10)].
The sinfulness of the speaker’s yearning for purity or “vertical” transcendence
extends beyond the heresy of radical dualism. The accuser seems to invoke the
traditional cardinal sins of pride and vanity, castigating the speaker for a life spent
“in the service of self-will” [“na swojewoli”]. Yet the speaker’s transgression also
includes a strongly social dimension. The pure “I” who divides himself from the
46  ’    
bestial cage of his body simultaneously separates himself from the rest of the
human species:
A spirit pure and scornfully indifferent,

You wanted to see, to taste, to feel, and nothing more.
For no human purpose. You were a passerby
Who makes use of hands and legs and eyes
As an astrophysicist uses shiny screens,
Aware that what he perceives has long since perished.
“Tender and faithful animals.” How is one to live with them
If they run and strive, while those things are no more? (NCP 322)
[Duch czysty i wzgardliwie obojętny / Chciałeś widzieć, smakować,

doznać i nic więcej. / Dla żadnych ludzkich celów. Ty byłeś
przechodzień, / Który używa rąk i nóg, i oczu / Jak astrofizyk
świetlnych ekranów, / Świadomy, że co pozna, już dawno minęło /
“Czułe zwierzęta wierne”. Jakże tu być z nimi, / Jeżeli biegną, dążą, a
to już minęło? (W 672–3)]
The spiritual interloper on the unclean earth views other human beings with
detachment or even contempt. The accuser quotes from another of Miłosz’s own
early poems to exemplify his dehumanizing view of others as mere “animals,” part
of a biological world to which the speaker himself does not belong.⁷ The incor-
poreal subject sees the “sights of the earth,” but he does not “take part” in them
[“ciebie tam nigdy nie było”]. The speaker appears here as a type of transcendent
consciousness, a scientific mind whose senses are mere instruments to register the
phenomena of the material world, including other human beings. The cold
indifference of this rationalizing scrutiny suggests a distorted reflection of the
Whitmanian poet-reporter. The required distance of the poetic gaze may function
to alienate the poet from the world.
The next stanzas trace the speaker’s fantasized ascent to a “high castle” of purity
that turns out only to be accessible in art. The section begins with a short stanza of
regular Alexandrines before opening up into a series of longer lines, reflecting a
widening of perspective as the speaker climbs up to the dream castle. When the
illusion suddenly evaporates, the accuser brings the poet back down to earth with
a jolt to face the cruel “bestiality” of human history in a debased style:
Throats.
Choking.
Fingers sinking.
⁷ The reference to “Tender and faithful animals” (“Czułe zwierzęta wierne”) comes from the lyric
“The Gates of the Arsenal” (“Bramy arsenału”) in Three Winters (Trzy zimy, 1936).
  :        47
Into flesh.
Which in an instant will cease to live.
A naked heap.
Quivering.
Without sound.
Behind thick glass. (NCP 324)
[Gardła. / Krztuszące się. / Palce wczepione / W mięso, / Które za chwilę

przestanie być żywe. / Kłąb nagi / W drgawkach. / Bez dźwięku. / Za
grubym szkłem. (W 675)]
In this graphic description of the fleshly reality of human violence, the relatively
ordered form of the poem suddenly disintegrates. From the even lines and gathering
Alexandrines of the earlier sections, the language becomes laconic, disjointed, almost
telegraphic. Human bodies no longer appear as wholes connected to individuals—the
“cosmos” of an earlier stanza—but as disparate parts (throats, fingers) or an undiffer-
entiable mass (flesh, heap). In the same way, the individual words are isolated from
full sentences and piled together into the heap of an irregular stanza. Language is
reduced to a few searing word images; human beings are reduced to “meat” (“mięso”).
And yet the quivering death throes of the victims are observed dispassionately,
without sound, from behind the glass of a screen or scientific lens. Here, the accuser
delivers perhaps the most devastating charge of the poem: “And what if that was you,
that observer behind thick glass?” [“Jeżeli to ty, obserwator za grubym szkłem?”].
Indifference to the suffering of other human beings is a corollary of the poetic
subject’s striving for separation from the material world and his own body. In the
next stanza, the accuser widens this accusation in a general condemnation of the
human capacity to move on from the catastrophes of history. Survivors busy
themselves with the everyday affairs of life and the labor of washing away the
blood of the dead. But the specific charge against Miłosz’s poetic subject remains
more serious. His scientific observation of the sufferings of others seems almost to
imply a degree of culpability. Indeed, the accuser goes on to identify the speaker
with figures of tyrannical political power over fleshly subjects who trim his hair as
he reclines imperiously in a barber’s chair:
O Emperor.
Franz Josef.
Nicholas.
Ego. (NCP 325)
[Cesarzu, / Franciszku Józefie, / Mikołaju, Ego. (W 675)]
The accuser satirizes the poetic speaker’s fantasy of his own power over others: an
aging tyrant presiding over the “tender animals” of humanity. The image is
48  ’    
pathetic, as the imperious “Ego” remains trapped in a body from which he wishes
to separate himself, vainly projecting his fleshliness onto the masses supposedly
under his rule. His power is undermined by the chaotic mortality of his physical
form, symbolized by the unruly growth of “gray hair.” At the same time, the
evocation of Franz Joseph I of Austria and Nicholas II of Russia—whose empires
ultimately collapsed—crystallizes a sense of pride before an inevitable fall.
Humiliated consciousness must accept the limitations of its bodily form.
The poetic subject gently protests against this cutting image of his own egoism
in a regular Alexandrine line: “Yet I have learned how to live with my grief” (NCP
325) [“Nauczyłem się jednak żyć z moją zgryzotą” (W 675)]. The accuser retorts
that “putting words together” [“układanie słów”] in the established forms of
poetry has not redeemed him. On the contrary, the pursuit of purely aesthetic
aims may well have contributed to his isolation from “ordinary” people. Miłosz’s
subject defends himself again by insisting on his bonds with “others”—perhaps
above all with other poets—whom he has “revered.” The accuser responds with a
final mockery of the high aspirations of the speaker, who would exalt himself over
an impure humanity as a kind of aesthetic high priest:
You would like to lead a gathering of people

To a ritual of purification through the columns of a temple.
A ritual of purification? Where? When? For whom?
[Ty chciałbyś na rituał oczyszczenia / Lud zgromadzony prowadzić

między kolumny świątyni. // Rytuał oczyszczenia! Gdzie? Kiedy? Dla
kogo?]
The final line of “The Accuser” takes the form of another classical Alexandrine,
which draws attention to the constructed nature of the whole dialogue. The
derisive exclamation at the speaker’s cathartic ambitions comes before the tradi-
tional caesura, followed by three short questions that break up the rhythm in a
one-two-three-syllable series of cumulative ridicule. Since Miłosz’s poetic subject
wanders freely through space and time in his lyrical works—and especially in this
one—then where and when is he located? Whom will he save? All of humanity? By
what presumptive right and power? In the end, the disembodied poetic conscious-
ness merely observes the world and other human beings from the “nowhere” of his
own imaginative pretensions. The diabolical presence in the poem may turn out
not to be the “accuser,” but rather the poet himself. His pride and desire for
purification from the flesh have led to an almost Satanic fall. After all, as Miłosz
writes elsewhere, “Lucifer, that proud and weightless spirit, is hostile to the body.”⁸
⁸ Czesław Miłosz, Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition, trans. Catherine S. Leach (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1981), 190.
  :        49
The accuser confronts the poet-speaker with the heavy “sin” of his own yearning
for disembodiment and self-exaltation.
In the seventh and final section of From the Rising of the Sun, the speaker goes
on to find a kind of absolution in reflections on the fate of a humble human
individual—an old Lithuanian servant woman—located in a specific time and
space, and through symbolic identification with the human community in the
ritual of the Catholic mass. But the specter of what he calls “the same consciousness
unwilling to forgive” (NCP 330) [“nieskłonna przebaczać, ta sama świadomosć”
(W 681)], with its proud and potentially destructive separation from fleshly
humanity, would never leave Miłosz’s poetry.
3. The Mirror of Consciousness and the Thing of the Body
As we have seen, Miłosz’s “Manichaean” schema does not represent a consistent

ontology in his works. Instead, it constitutes his most radical metaphor for a basic
felt dualism of human existence, which he more often conveys in the secular terms of
mind or consciousness. In A Year of the Hunter (Rok myśliwego, 1990), he writes that
“the division into soul and body was only one of many attempts at naming this
condition that eludes naming.”⁹ Even in agnostic or atheist mode, Miłosz posits an
“empirical” basis for the natural intuition of a fundamental split between the
material foundations of the self and a dimension that extends beyond them. In a
poem entitled “Consciousness” (“Świadomość”), he depicts the simultaneous sense
of identity and difference that marks these relations between the two parts of the self:
I— consciousness—originate in skin,
Smooth or covered with thickets of hair.
The stubby cheek, the pubes, and the groin
Are mine exclusively, though not only mine. (NCP 432–3)
[Ja, świadomość, zaczynam się od skóry, / Gładkiej czy też porosłej

gajami włosów. / Szczeciniasty policzek, pagórek łonowy, pachwina, /
Jedynie moje, choć nie tylko moje. (W 838)]
This characteristic passage gives expression to a non-reductively materialist

understanding of human identity. In short, immaterial consciousness, the incor-
poreal aspect of the “I,” emerges from the material body, but is not reducible to it.
Transcendent consciousness glides above the world, as we saw in the previous
chapter. Yet it still remains tied to the ground of the body. As Miłosz writes in
⁹ Czesław Miłosz, A Year of the Hunter, trans. Madeline Levine (New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1994), 55.
50  ’    
“The Metaphysical Pause” (“Metafizyczna pauza,” 1987), “we must start with the
body,” since the human being is not consciousness alone, but rather “conscious-
ness entangled with animality.”¹⁰ Indeed, consciousness is the product or emana-
tion of the body. It could not exist without the body, and all its reflections and
flights of imaginative fancy are inescapably rooted in sense impressions.
The interrelated assumptions of the material genesis of consciousness and its
continued entanglement with matter raise the question of whether this under-
standing of human subjectivity is dualist at all. In this secular mood, Miłosz does
not present a dualist ontology, but rather he suggests that the apparent split
between immaterial and bodily aspects of the self is a subjective effect of the
process of self-formation. In this way, the border between monistic materialism
and dualism is effaced, as the poet suggests that consciousness is an immaterial
effect of matter, both separate and related: “I am distanced from my own body.
I am dependent on it.”¹¹ This position differs from Platonic, Gnostic, or Cartesian
dualism, as it does not assume that mind and body are distinct substances that—at
least theoretically—could exist separately. Though Miłosz’s “Manichaean” moods
sometimes imply this possibility, more prevalent in his writings is the sense that
the “union” of consciousness and the body presupposes a thoroughgoing “simul-
taneity and identity.”¹² This secular form of dualism is not Cartesian “substance
dualism,” but rather a form of “property dualism,” assuming that conscious
experience is a unique “property” of an individual that is both separate from the
physical properties of that individual and dependent on them.¹³ In other words,
the human individual is a physical entity, but certain non-physical properties may
emerge from this physicality.
Conversely, we might describe Miłosz’s secular dualism as a form of “emergent
materialism.” This type of materialism assumes that “there are only material
things,” but that “some complex material things” give rise to non-material or
“mental” properties that are not reducible to their material origins.¹⁴ Emergent
materialism abandons the dualist ontology, while retaining a sort of dualism of
subjective effect. In other words, the dualist situation of an immaterial conscious-
ness or mind distinct from the flesh emerges from the material body. In his poetry,
Miłosz is frequently a materialist in this particular sense, at least insofar as he
writes with the “atheist part” of himself.¹⁵ In this mode, consciousness, the mind,
and even the soul cannot emerge or exist without the body, and yet they establish a
¹⁰ Czesław Miłosz, “Metafizyczna pauza, czyli pytania i odpowiedzi,” in Metafizyczna pauza

(Kraków: Wydawnictwo Znak, 1989), 75. Translation my own.
¹¹ Miłosz, A Year of the Hunter, 17. ¹² Miłosz, A Year of the Hunter, 17.
¹³ David J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (Oxford: Oxford
¹⁴ Kirk Ludwig, “The Mind-Body Problem: An Overview,” in The Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of
Mind, eds. Stephen Sitch and Ted A. Warfield (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 18.
¹⁵ Czesław Miłosz and Justyna Kobus, “Jestem antymodernistą,” in Czesław Miłosz, Rozmowy
polskie. Vol. II: 1999–2004 (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2010), 446.
  :        51
distance from the body and are not wholly reducible to it. Matter gives birth to
what transcends it, and then remains intertwined with this transcendent or
emergent property. Accordingly, Miłosz’s secular poetic philosophy reflects
what I have described as a kind of “transcendent materialism”—in this case,
suggesting a belief in the capacity of matter effectively to transcend itself.¹⁶
Despite these hopeful visions of higher consciousness, the direct consequences
of Miłosz’s acceptance of materialist assumptions are frequently alienation and
despair. Consciousness appears as a positive promise of the subject’s superiority to
material nature. Yet ultimately this putative superiority is crushingly undermined
by the ties binding the conscious “I” to the vulnerable and mortal material body,
the humble vehicle of its immaterial ambitions. In the absence of firm belief in an
immortal soul, the incorporeal self is doomed to perish with the body, leading to
the hatred of the flesh described in “The Accuser.” Indeed, Miłosz’s poetry
obsessively returns to the theme of the “I” as consciousness helplessly watching
the deterioration of its own fleshly frame: “Without exaggeration we may say that
the ‘I’ also loses its body: in a mirror it sees a being that is born, grows up, is
subject to the destructive action of time, and must die.”¹⁷
This passage features Miłosz’s preeminent poetic image for alienated con-
sciousness: the mirror. Indeed, one of the most frequently recurring scenes in
his poetic oeuvre depicts a lone human being looking at his or her own face or
body in a mirror. Often this figure is the poetic speaker, closely associated with
Miłosz himself, reflecting on the changes wrought by “the invisible beauticians of
Time . . . applying shadowy wrinkles to the angle of the eyes”¹⁸ [“niewidzialne
kosmetyczki Czasu, kładą cienie zmarszczek w kątach oczu” (W 1243)]. The
reflected body becomes an almost inanimate thing, degrading the high aspirations
of the autobiographical poetic subject: “The features of my face melt like a wax
doll in the fire. / And who can consent to see in the mirror the mere face of man”
(NCP 198) [“Rysy twarzy topnieją jak na woskowej kukle zanurzonej w ogniu. /
A kto zgodzi się mieć w lustrze tylko twarz człowieka” (W 528)]. In
“Consciousness,” Miłosz characterizes this alienation from the body as a general
¹⁶ In my theorization of Miłosz’s positition, I have drawn on various contemporary philosophical

conceptions of “transcendental materialism,” “non-reductive materialism,” and “immanent transcend-
ence.” See Adrian Johnston, Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008); Adrian Johnston, Prolegomena to Any Future
Materialism. Vol. 1: The Outcome of Contemporary French Philosophy (Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press, 2013); Adrian Johnston, Adventures in Transcendental Materialism: Dialogues with
Contemporary Thinkers (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014); Elizabeth Grosz, The
Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism (New York: Columbia University Press,
2017); John Milbank, “Materialism and Transcendence,” in Theology and the Soul of the Liberal State,
eds. Leonard V. Kaplan and Charles L. Cohen (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010); Patrice Haynes,
Immanent Transcendence: Reconfiguring Materialism in Continental Philosophy (London: Bloomsbury
Publishing, 2012).
¹⁷ Czesław Miłosz, “Shestov, or the Purity of Despair,” in Emperor of the Earth: Modes of Eccentric
Vision (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 104.
¹⁸ Miłosz, Second Space, 28.
52  ’    
feature of the human predicament: “He or she—consciousness—/ Examines its

body in a mirror, / Recognizing a familiar which is not quite its own” (NCP 433)
[“Inna, jego czy jej, świadomość / Bada uważnie własne ciało w lustrze, /
Rozumiejąc, że swoje, chociaż własne nie jest” (W 838)]. The self as consciousness
scrutinizes its own body with the realization that it is both identical with this
physical frame and fundamentally other.
The mirror also signifies mimesis and the aesthetic gaze in Miłosz’s writings.
The poet creates “halls full of mirrors,” which catch fleeting faces that “loom up
and dissolve” (NCP 362) [“sale pełne luster, / W których ukazują się i nikną
twarze” (W 725)]. In his poetic works, Miłosz puts up a mirror to the world,
aiming to capture faithfully as many moments as possible from its endless flow.¹⁹
With reference to Arthur Schopenhauer’s “aesthetic way of knowing,” Miłosz’s
poetic subject even aspires to become a mirror. In a section of The Separate
Notebooks (Osobny zeszyt, 1977–9), entitled “The Mirrored Gallery,” the speaker
claims that he has already experienced what the German philosopher describes as
a “soaring,” higher existence as “pure subject, the clear mirror of the object” (NCP
372) [“czysty podmiot, jako niezamącone zwierciadło przedmiotu” (W 734)]. In
this aesthetic mode, directly quoting Schopenhauer, Miłosz’s mirror-subject is
fully absorbed by images of the objective world, thus transcending his own
physical existence through “quiet contemplation of the natural object actually
present” (NCP 372).
Yet the manifestation of the subject’s own mirrored body as a “natural object”
within the frame of reflection violently disrupts its pretensions to exist as “pure”
subject. Rational consciousness recognizes with horror that its own corporeal shell
is subject to the same processes as all of external nature. As physical body, the
human being is physis, or nature, a small part of the universal store of matter and a
mere moment in the ongoing transformations of a greater whole. The conscious
self “loses” its body to the very processes from which it desperately wants to
separate itself. At the same time, it knows that it can have no other home, since it
“originates in skin.” The mirror reveals this paradoxical split in the subject,
leading to a kind of self-objectification: “A mirror before him. / In the mirror
the already severed, perishing / Thing” (NCP 358) [“A przed nim lustro. / I w
lustrze oddzielona już, ginąca / Rzecz” (W 720)].
The reified body is violently cut away from abstracted or soaring consciousness,
while also remaining attached to it as a trap that can never be escaped. Here,
Miłosz once again echoes the basic philosophical predicament of existentialism.
His mirror scenes are reminiscent of key moments from Jean-Paul Sartre’s
programmatic novel Nausea (La Nausée, 1938), in which the protagonist
Antoine Roquentin discovers his own estrangement from himself: “There is a
¹⁹ Also see Czeslaw Milosz, The Witness of Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1983), 56.
  :        53
white hole in the wall, a mirror. It is a trap. I know I am going to let myself be
caught in it. I have. The grey thing appears in the mirror. I go over and look at it,
I can no longer get away. It is the reflection of my face . . . Not mine.”²⁰ The mirror
confronts Roquentin with his own entanglement with meaningless matter, elicit-
ing intense feelings of despair and alienation. Like Sartre’s classic existentialist
character, the transcendent “I” of Miłosz’s poetry interprets his entanglement in
the flesh as a trap. He yearns to rise above nature and above humanity as a
collective of natural beings. Yet this desire is doomed to constant frustration by
the mirror image of the subject’s “own other”—the body as object.
4. Old Age and the Dying Body
The sense of the body as a foreign object from which the incorporeal subject is
alienated is strong from the very beginning of Miłosz’s intellectual life, and it
continues to appear throughout his poetic career in dialogue with other perspec-
tives. However, the final phase of his creative work brings a noticeable intensifi-
cation of this vision, as the poet himself enters the “new province” of old age.²¹ In
his late poems, the observation of his own body’s steady deterioration strengthens
the impression of the mind’s imperviousness to these natural processes and the
accompanying feeling of separation from its physical form.
The course of my dying seems to me amusing.

Weakness of legs, the heart pounding, hard to go uphill.
Myself beside my refractory body.
In the clarity of my mind, as in a mountain nest.
And yet humiliated by difficulty in breathing,
Vanquished by the loss of my hair and teeth. (NCP 527)
[Śmieszy mnie to całe moje umieranie. / Słabość nóg, bicie serca, trudno
wejść pod górę. / Ja obok mego niesfornego ciała / Jak w górskim
gnieździe w jasności umysłu. / A jednak moją astmą poniżony, /
Utratą włosów i zębów pobity. (W 999)]
In some of his poems and essays, Miłosz takes a bitterly humorous view of these
changes: “I can’t complain about my body. Nonetheless, with an old car you can
expect that the carburetor will fail or the transmission break down at any
²⁰ Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, trans. Lloyd Alexander (New York: New Directions, 1969), 25.
²¹ See Krystyna Pietrzych, “Miłosz o ciele, starości i umieraniu: Nowy język czy dramat (nie)
wyrażania?,” Poznańskie Studia Polonistyczne: Seria Literacka 20, no. 40 (2012): 89–102.
54  ’    
minute.”²² Elsewhere he describes a process of taking his leave of the world,

accompanied by an even greater sense of ironic distance from his own corporeal
form and from human life more generally: “I am slowly moving away from the
fairgrounds of the world / And I notice in myself a distaste / For the monkeyish
dress, the screams and drumbeats”²³ [“Oddalam się powoli od jarmarku świata /
I zauważam w sobie jakby niechęć / Do małpowatych strojów, wrzasków, bicia w
bębny” (W 1246)]. In this mood, the aging poet seems to withdraw from the strife
of physical and professional life into a quieter place of reflection on the past and
preparation for an unknown future. Yet the world of the senses continues to
entice: “I was old but my nostrils craved new scents / And through my five senses
I received a share in the earth / Of those who led me, our sisters and lovers” (NCP
401) [“Byłem stary, ale nozdrza moje pożądały nowych zapachów. / I przez pięć
moich zamysłów dostawałem udział / W ich ziemi, prowadzących mnie, sióstr
naszych i kochanek” (W 781)]. In this alternative mood, Miłosz writes about old
age as an experience of being dragged away from “the garden of earthly delights,”
while greedily scrambling to take in as many new sensations as possible before
the end.
Yet aging does not primarily appear in Miłosz’s poetry as a last opportunity for
sensual satisfaction or a final phase of detached existence as a venerable sage.
Behind his reflections lies an intense awareness of pain and suffering as both the
inevitable end and the constant background of life in a physical body. Indeed,
much of his poetic career bears witness to the knowledge that all of human life
unfolds “on the fragile border beyond which there is a province of mumblings and
wails” (NCP 589) [“na kruchej granicy, za którą / rozpościera się kraina skarg i
bełkotów” (W 1049)]. This knowledge seems to become more intense and imme-
diate in the latter years of his own life. Miłosz watched his first wife Janina Miłosz,
née Dłuska (1909–86) suffer through a terminal illness, even acting as her “nurse”
for a long period in California.²⁴ He would later write more generally of his
horrified impressions of nursing homes, describing the humiliation of fleshly
existence for the elderly and infirm:
A lot has been written about the hells people have organized in the twentieth
century for the purpose of torturing people. But here, right next door to us, these
“homes” with lovely names operate every day. . . . My visit to that unindicted hell
of broken dolls. . . . No one is responsible other than the pitiless order of the
world. . . . Doesn’t the sight of the humiliated human body or, worse yet, the
²² Miłosz, A Year of the Hunter, 17. Bożena Chrząstowska suggests that he does not lament his fate,
but simply presents the “facts” of aging. See Bożena Chrząstowska, “Stary poeta—mądrość i zachywt,”
Polonistyka 5 (2011): 61.
²³ Miłosz, Second Space, 31.
²⁴ Czesław Miłosz and Konstanty A. Jeleński, Korespondencja (Warszawa: Fundacja Zeszytów
Literackich, 2011), 256.
  :        55
spirit (because it puts in its appearance reduced to the simplest egoistic reflexes)
exert a numbing effect, so that only indifference and cynicism are left?²⁵
Here, even the incorporeal “spirit” may be exposed to the pollution of the body’s
degradation. However, in most cases, Miłosz emphasizes the “misery” of an intact
consciousness helplessly ensnared in the dying body. Later in the same set of diary
entries of 1987–8, he describes the plight of his ninety-two-year-old friend,
Hannah, who seems to be quite literally imprisoned in her body in another
home for the aged.²⁶ She is almost blind, and yet her mind and memory are still
working well. Once again, Miłosz compares her “slow . . . fully conscious dying”
with the mass torture and killing of the twentieth century.²⁷ She wants to die, but
cannot. Oddly, he also links her suffering to his own much earlier “metaphysical
despondency” as a fifteen-year-old, trapped in an adolescent body, not yet ready
to be admitted to the “festivities” of the adult world. He sees continuity in the
sense of incommensurability between the high aspirations of the “inner” self and
the bodily limitations of both awkward adolescence and invalid old age. In these
apparently disparate cases, he finds manifestations of a familiar neo-Manichaean
“horror” at the “monstrous” realities of physical existence.²⁸
The resulting feelings of despair would continue to grow in the final phase of his
life, especially after the unexpected loss of his second wife, Carol Thigpen
(1944–2002), and during his own terminal physical decline. In his biography of
Miłosz, Andrzej Franaszek quotes some extraordinary passages from the poet’s
diary, written in hospital in the last months of his life in 2004. In these notes,
Miłosz describes a simultaneous separation from and deeper immersion in the
body, as painful corporeal experience eclipses all else:
A stay in hospital changes our consciousness to a significant extent. First of all, a

kind of move into the body and attention given to it takes place. The body
presents itself as independent from us and its contortions sometimes become
independent of the rest of us, presenting itself as if on a stage, which is not a
pleasant performance.²⁹
In this conceptualization of bodily suffering and illness, the mind appears once
again as abstracted consciousness, while the body itself is stretched out on a stage
in a grotesque and humiliating spectacle.³⁰ Less than two months before his death,
²⁵ Miłosz, A Year of the Hunter, 62–3. ²⁶ Miłosz, A Year of the Hunter, 249.
²⁷ Miłosz, A Year of the Hunter, 251. ²⁸ Miłosz, A Year of the Hunter, 251–2.
²⁹ Quoted in Andrzej Franaszek, Miłosz: Biografia (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Znak, 2011), 749.
³⁰ Once again, this description recalls Miłosz’s much earlier poetic quotation of Schopenhauer to
characterize the isolated subject: “He is rather like a theatergoer, for separated from everything he
watches the drama” (NCP 370) [“Podobny jest widzowi, ponieważ odłączony jest od wszystkiego, patrzy
na dramat” (W 732)].
56  ’    
Miłosz writes: “The paralysis of the body with clarity of thought—this is precisely
the hellish combination invented to humiliate the proud man, for there are many
humiliations.”³¹
What is perhaps most striking in these passages is Miłosz’s insistence on defining
sharp borders between the “I” as consciousness and an objectified or abject body. As
the body declines, Miłosz’s “empirical” dualism becomes stronger. The distinctive
nature of his attitude emerges very clearly in juxtaposition with the reflections of
French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy in his celebrated essay on the body and illness,
“The Intruder” (L’intrus, 2000). Nancy discusses his similar experiences of medical
treatment in hospital during his own battle with cancer. While Miłosz describes a
crystalline self that remains trapped in the wreck of the body, Nancy relates a
dispersal of the “I” into the body’s experience of pain: “Very soon, you are just a
wavering, a strangeness suspended between poorly identified states, between pains,
between impotences, between failings . . . I end/s up being nothing more than a fine
wire stretched from pain to pain and strangeness to strangeness.”³²
For Nancy, the hospital experiences shake his sense of a continuous and
transparent identity to the core, while underlining that the “I” is the body in all
its upheaval and in the external changes inflicted upon it by medical treatment.
For Miłosz, the experiences of aging, illness, and bodily suffering sharpen the
sense of a non-corporeal “I” as consciousness, separated from, but still tied to, a
vulnerable body.³³ Moreover, in the absence of firm faith in immortality, the
fleshly vehicle turns out to be more durable than both the ideal self and its
language, since only the mute corpse will remain after death, at least before
decomposition begins: “This body so fragile and woundable, / Which will remain
when words abandon us” (NCP 639) [“ To ciało, tak bardzo kruche i ranliwe, /
Które zostaje, kiedy słowa nas opuszczą” (W 1109)]. The ridiculous material shell
will outlast the seemingly transcendent core of the self. This tragic reality unites
Miłosz’s poetic speaker with the rest of suffering corporeal humanity.
5. The Self and the Universal Flesh of the Other
The confrontation of consciousness with a body that is both its own and not its
own is initially an individual experience, as Miłosz describes it. However, the
³¹ Franaszek, Miłosz: Biografia, 750.

³² Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Intruder,” in Corpus, trans. Richard A. Rand (New York: Fordham
³³ This perspective is also present in Nancy’s writings on the body:
But corpus is never properly me. It’s always an “object,” a body ob-jected precisely against
the claim of being a body-subject, or a subject-in-a-body. Here, again, Descartes is correct,
and in the following way: I ob-ject my body against myself, as something foreign, something
strange, the exteriority to my enunciation (“ego”) from this enunciation it-self.
Nancy, Corpus, 29.
  :        57
resulting feelings of alienation are further exacerbated by the introduction of a

new element: other human beings. Miłoszean consciousness recognizes that it is
not alone in its predicament; on the contrary, it finds itself trapped in a body that
is similar to billions of other such bodies, all of which will deteriorate and die in
the same inexorable process. Thus the speaker in “Consciousness” introduces the
figure of the other:
Do I, when I touch one flesh in the mirror,

Touch every flesh, learn consciousness of the other? (NCP 433)³⁴
[Czy, dotykając jednej cielesności w lustrze, / Dotykam każdej, znam

cudzą świadomość? (W 838)]
The relationship of identity between “one flesh” and “every flesh” is a recurring
motif in Miłosz’s writings, forming a key aspect of the alienation experienced
by the conscious “I.” As early as his 1938 essay “Descent to the Earth” (“Zejście na
ziemię”), Miłosz describes his own cultivated sense of aesthetic distance from
physical human life as a defense mechanism against the reductive power of
material resemblance: “My entire dispute was a dispute about similarity. For the
similarity of all human beings with one another is the greatest threat to the divine
element.”³⁵ The persona of the essay wishes to transcend the humiliating sameness
of “every flesh,” separating himself from the rest of the human species, which he
describes in repulsively physical detail. An element of social class also enters
these descriptions, as the impoverished intelligentsia speaker elevates himself
above bestialized working-class people on the social margins. Similarly, in his
early poems, Miłosz’s speakers condescendingly describe the proletarian masses as
“tender and faithful animals” (NCP 10) [“czułe zwierzęta wierne” (W 64)] or as
“dark rabble . . . neighing in the gardens . . . and [taking] bread from the hands of
their pregnant wives” (NCP 19) [“ciemna tłuszcza . . . rżąc na murawach . . . chleb
brali z rąk ciężarnych swoich żon” (W 87)].
The similarity of human bodies turns individuals into mere interchangeable
members of a biological species, making faith in the unique and immortal soul
impossible.³⁶ The “divine element” disappears in the multiplication of bodies and
body parts. In Visions from San Francisco Bay (Widzenia nad Zatoką San
Francisco, 1969), Miłosz suggests that it is precisely this comparison with billions
of other bodies that calls into question whether “my own” body is “really mine.”³⁷
³⁴ Translation altered for clarity.

³⁵ Czesław Miłosz, “Zejście na ziemię,” in Przygody młodego umysłu. Publicystyka i proza 1931–1939
(Krakow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2003), 217.
³⁶ Also see Aleksander Fiut, The Eternal Moment: The Poetry of Czesław Miłosz, trans. Theodosia
S. Robertson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 102.
³⁷ Czesław Miłosz, Visions from San Francisco Bay, trans. Richard Lourie (New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 1982), 70.
58  ’    
Thanks to perspectives imposed by biology, modern medicine, and the media cult
of the body, the human subject perceives himself or herself in a crowd of
“interchangeable buttocks, necks, thighs,” where “every organ is interchangeable
as well.”³⁸ The subject sees his or her own body as “one object among others.”³⁹
The multiplication of interconnected bodies that abounds in Miłosz’s poetry is
not always a cause for horror, but sometimes also for erotic delight. In “The Hooks
of a Corset” (“Haftki gorsetu”), he writes ecstatically of the many bodies that have
walked the boulevard of a large city, probably Paris: “And I, breathing the air,
enchanted because I am one of them, identifying my flesh with their flesh” (NCP
408) [“I ja wzdychający powietrze w upojeniu, dlatego, że jestem jednym z nich, w
utożsamieniu ich cielesności z moją cielesnością” (W 787)]. In an earlier poem of
1964, the speaker expresses his attraction to people in their nakedness, as it reveals
their fundamental interconnectedness in a common nature and existence: “I liked
beaches, swimming pools, and clinics / for there they were the bone of my bone,
the flesh of my flesh” (NCP 199) [“Lubiłem plaże, pływalnie i kliniki, / Bo tam oni
kość mojej kości, mięso mego mięsa” (W 529)]. In “City of My Youth” (“Miasto
młodości”), published in 1994 following Miłosz’s return to Lithuania after a fifty-
two-year absence, the speaker even posits a kind of imaginative corporeal inter-
twinement with the bodies of a dead generation from his youth in Vilnius:
. . . His lungs breathed in air

As is usual with the living. His heart was beating,
Surprising him with its beating, in his body
Their blood flowed, his arteries fed them with oxygen.
He felt, inside, their livers, spleens, intestines.
Masculinity and femininity, elapsed, met in him
And every shame, every grief, every love (NCP 596).
[Płuca wdychały powietrze / Jak zwykle u żywych, serce biło /

Zdumiewając, że bije. W ciele teraz biegła / Ich krew, jego arterie
żywiły ich tlenem. / W sobie czuł ich wątroby, trzustki i jelita. /
Męskość i żeńskość, minion, w nim się spotkały, / I każdy wstyd,
każdy smutek, każda miłość (W 1063).]
The bodily fluids and organs of the dead join with those of the lyric subject,
initially Miłosz himself, who establishes further distance from his own distinct
identity through the use of the third person. The subject’s consent to this de-
personalized co-participation in the “one flesh” represents a moment both of
compassion and “enlightenment” (“rozumienie”). This type of identification
sometimes takes an even broader “erotic” form, expanding to embrace what
³⁸ Miłosz, Visions from San Francisco Bay, 71. ³⁹ Miłosz, Visions from San Francisco Bay, 72.
  :        59
Aleksander Fiut describes as “identification with the universe,” and especially with
the animal world.⁴⁰ Various poems posit a primal fleshly connection between a
human speaker and non-human animals: from “hairy animals” and “quadrupeds”
(NCP 229–30) [“włochate zwierzęta . . . czworonożni” (W 572)] to dogs in their
“doggishness” (NCP 433) [“psiości” (W 838)] to a bird whose “half-opened beak is
with me always / Its inside so fleshy and amorous / that a shiver makes my hair
stand up / In kinship with [its] ecstasy” (NCP 159) [“dziób . . . półotwarty zawsze
ze mną. / Jego wnętrze tak cielesne i miłosne, / Że na karku włos mi jeży drżenie /
Pokrewieństwa i twojej ekstazy” (W 470)].
This ecstatic connection with animal nature inspires some of the more lyrical
flights of Miłosz’s poetry. However, as Fiut observes, any recourse to a universal
identity is always subsequently “contradicted and travestied.”⁴¹ The kinship of
human beings with animals often appears in horrifying forms—for instance, in the
symbolic reduction of human life to an “antheap” seen from above.⁴² As we have
seen, Miłosz excoriates the Polish literature of the interwar period for supposedly
capitulating to such insectivizing visions. In a 1939 essay, entitled “The Hell of
Insects” (“Piekło owadów”), he describes a familiar sense of the literary subject’s
exaltation over the masses—in this case, as an “entomologist” looking down on
the human anthill with feelings of superiority and power.⁴³ In fact, it is tempting to
read the essay as a form of self-critique, much like “Descent to the Earth,” written
only a year earlier.
Ironic representations of an insectivized humanity appear regularly in Miłosz’s
own poetry of the 1930s, often from the exalted viewpoint of a disembodied poetic
subject.⁴⁴ Later, his wartime Voices of Poor People (Głosy biednych ludzi, 1945)
also swarm with insects.⁴⁵ In one of his post-war novels, The Seizure of Power
(Zdobycie władzy, 1953), the Red Army and the inhabitants of the lands they
⁴⁰ Fiut, The Eternal Moment, 114. Joanna Dembińska-Pawelec points out that this connection of
internal rhythms with the rhythms of nature is also deeply rooted in a certain Romantic legacy that
remains present in Miłosz’s work. See Joanna Dembińska-Pawelec, “Poezja jest sztuką rytmu”:
O świadomości rytmu w poezji polskiej dwudziestego wieku (Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu
Śląskiego, 2010), 178.
⁴¹ Fiut, The Eternal Moment, 115.
⁴² Czesław Miłosz, The Land of Ulro, trans. Louis Iribarne (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2000), 157. Joanna Zach writes more broadly about “the insect world of Czesław Miłosz.” See Joanna
Zach, Biologia i teodycea: Homo poeticus Czesława Miłosza (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Uniwerystetu
Jagiellońskiego, 2017), 174–93.
⁴³ Czesław Miłosz, “Piekło owadów,” in Przygody młodego umysłu. Publicystyka i proza 1931–1939
(Krakow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2003), 268–74.
⁴⁴ “Slow River” (“Powolna rzeka”) from Three Winters (Trzy zimy, 1936) may stand as one eloquent
example among many others, with its apocalyptic descriptions of “dark rabble at their vernal feasts /
and crematoria like white cliffs / and smoke seeping from the dead wasps’ nests” (NCP 19) [“Ach,
ciemna tłuszcza na zielonej runi, / a krematoria niby białe skały / i dym wychodzi z gniazd nieżywych
os” (W 87)].
⁴⁵ See Zach, Biologia i teodycea, 180; Stefan Chwin, “Czesław Miłosz wobec powstania warszaws-
kiego,” Teksty Drugie 131, no. 5 (2011): 62–81.
60  ’    
invade appear in multiple passages as ants, bugs, and moths.⁴⁶ Decades later, in
From the Rising of the Sun, the speaker describes the “men and women of the end
of the twentieth century” as “a swarm opening and closing its wings” (NCP 311)
[“cały okręt pokryty rojem, który otwiera i zamyka skrzydła, / Mężczyznami i
kobietami dwudziestego wieku” (W 663)]. At the very end of his career, Miłosz
paints visions of the individual person as a “miserable human fly” (NCP 614)
[“nieszczęsny człowiek-mucha” (W 1077)], and of the species as “a gigantic
cocoon hanging from a cosmic tree.”⁴⁷
The insect swarm is but one of a series of metaphors Miłosz uses to convey the
biologization of human beings as ephemeral instantiations of an animal species.
The prevalence of these metaphors establishes what his friend Konstanty Jeleński
characterizes as the fundamental “ahumanism” of some of his poetic writings.⁴⁸ In
Visions from San Francisco Bay, Miłosz likens the human collective—as a mass of
naked bodies—to another colony of lowly invertebrates, this time marine animals:
“Physiological humanity clinging to itself resembles a sort of coral reef.”⁴⁹ Here,
the insect swarm of individuals in close and interchangeable proximity gives way
to the image of a collective that is physically interconnected in a network of
individual parts that live, die, and make way for identical replacements. The
image of coral also suggests a form of animal life with strongly vegetative char-
acteristics, rooted to one place and without volition. Individual human beings
would thus represent the identical polyps that form this reef of flesh.
In other works, Miłosz takes this interconnectedness a step further in a series of
poetic images envisioning all of human life as a single organism or body, con-
stantly renewing itself through the life and death of new generations of constituent
individuals. Each discrete individual is nothing but a temporary part of this
organism, a short-lived cell or unit of a greater whole, doomed to expiration
and replacement by new units of living flesh. In “Descent to the Earth,” Miłosz
introduces this image in diabolical form: “My death and the deaths of others are
nothing but the loss of a few scales on the skin of the dragon of humanity, on an
immense shimmering surface, endlessly regenerating itself.”⁵⁰ Almost three dec-
ades later, in “With Trumpets and Zithers” (“Na trąbach i na cytrze”), he finds a
startling new metaphor for the same basic notion:
⁴⁶ Włodzimierz Bolecki draws attention to various insect and other natural metaphors in the novel.
See Włodzimierz Bolecki, “Proza Miłosza,” in Poznawanie Miłosza 2, ed. Aleksander Fiut (Krakow:
Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2001), 59–61.
⁴⁷ Czesław Miłosz, Road-side Dog, trans. Czesław Miłosz and Robert Hass (New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 1998), 200.
⁴⁸ Jeleński drew a distinction between the “humanism” of Miłosz’s prose writings and the “ahuman-
ism” of his poetry. See Konstanty Jeleński, “Poeta i przyroda,” in Szkice, ed. Wojciech Karpiński
(Kraków: Wydawnictwo Znak, 1990), 92. Miłosz partially agreed with this interpretation, but insisted
that his poetic writings also included a humanist reaction. See Miłosz and Jeleński, Korespondencja,
94–5.
⁴⁹ Miłosz, Visions from San Francisco Bay, 101. ⁵⁰ Miłosz, “Zejście na ziemię,” 224.
  :        61
A coelentera, all pulsating flesh, animal-flower,

All fire, made up of falling bodies joined by the black pin of sex.
It breathes in the center of a galaxy, drawing to itself star after star.
And I, an instant of its duration, on multilaned roads which penetrate
half-opened mountains (NCP 230).
[Jamochłonne, z różowego pulsującego mięsa, kwiatozwierzę, / Z ogni i

spadania ciał spiętych po parze czarną szpilką seksu, / Oddycha, w
centrum galaktyki przyciągając gwiazdę za gwiazdą. / I ja, chwila jego
trwania, na wielotaśmowych drogach wnikających między rozchylone
góry. (W 573)]
This image is closely related to that of the human reef: coelenterates form a group
of marine invertebrates that includes coral. The use of the neologism
“kwiatozwierzę” (“animal-flower”) once again emphasizes a form of life on the
border between animal and vegetable. Yet here the speaker of the poem seems not
to refer to a coral colony, but rather to a single mythical organism, an enormous
pulsating growth of living flesh, composed of innumerable bodies, human and
perhaps non-human. In this intergalactic organism, the speaker of the poem is but
one of the identical bodies falling through time and space, chained together by the
regenerative act of reproduction. His “I” constitutes a single moment of con-
sciousness emerging from a single body-cell on the surface of this monster, “an
instant of its duration.” The universal flesh of the species throws up countless
other instantiations of equivalent human consciousness: one for each body within
the larger mass. Humanity appears as a tangled mass of emerging and declining
material bodies surrounded by a halo of minute individual consciousnesses flick-
ering into being for a short time and then dying out. The speaker of the poem
yearns to exalt himself as a higher being above this mass, but ultimately he must
accept his undeniable identity with others: “I wanted to be a judge but those whom
I called ‘they’ have changed into myself” (NCP 230) [“Chciałem być sędzią, ale ci,
których nazywałem oni, zmienili się we mnie” (W 573)].
In an untranslated poem of a few years earlier, “Anybody” (“Ktokolwiek,”
1961), another poetic “I” discovers its inescapable belonging to the collective
human organism, so that to touch its own body, “naked in front of the mirror,”
is synonymous with “touching every part of a universal body” [“nago przed
lustrem, dotykając każdej części powszechnego ciała (W 581)]. On the one
hand, this notion of a “universal body” refers to a sort of abstract “Form” of the
human body in all its constituent parts, whereby my own liver becomes the “one,
universal liver as represented in my body.”⁵¹ Bodies remain specific to individual
human beings, but they are mere variations on a general pattern, subject to the
⁵¹ Miłosz, Visions from San Francisco Bay, 99.

62  ’    
same general processes of aging and death. On the other hand, the later coral and
“animal-flower” images suggest that the “universal body”—or “one flesh”—is a
singular organism, a mass of identical human polyps, living and dying together in
endless cycles. In Road-side Dog (Piesek przydrożny, 1997), Miłosz develops still
another variation on the same image of humanity, this time as a “pulsating
organism composed of autonomous tiny parts, a gigantic sea anemone, or a
nebula of stars.”⁵²
In the light of these visions, the human “I” as consciousness is not just an
immaterial aspect of the self that emerges and then separates itself from the vehicle
of the individual body, while remaining tethered to it. Instead, the conscious “I” is
tied to the immense species organism of corporeal humanity, as a single instant of
transcendent duration attached to one polyp in an ever-changing and regenerat-
ing historical body. As Miłosz writes in another early poem, “we are bound by the
knot of the body” [“jesteśmy złączeni węzłem ciała” (W 119)]. Through its identity
with other human bodies, the individual’s physical frame is swallowed up by this
fleshy mass, indistinguishable from the rest of the roiling swarm, coral reef, or
“animal-flower” of humanity. The transcendent “I” will last only as long as the
duration of its body, a delimited point in the more expansive time and space
occupied by the interconnected human organism. Consequently, the hubristic “I”
as consciousness is not just alienated from its own body, which it both transcends
and does not transcend, but also from the corporeal human mass—the one flesh to
which it is condemned by the law of similarity.
6. The Totalitarian Self
The “empirical experience” of consciousness and its ability to contain things much
larger than itself allow Miłosz to posit in his poetry a kind of secular and limited
transcendence of the “I” over material nature and the body. In much of his
writing, this form of transcendence is plagued by its limitations—in particular,
by the modern improbability of traditional concepts of immortality. The tran-
scendent “I” is humiliated by its attachment to a single mortal body within the
mass of similar bodies—past and present—that constitute the human species. It
wants to break away from this material ballast, which dooms it to destruction. Yet,
in the absence of certain belief in the existence of an immortal soul, this aspiration
remains impossible, and the subject is left trying to drag itself out of the mire of
materiality by its own hair. This is the hopeless predicament of the “neo-
Manichaean” subject. According to Miłosz’s psychologizing account, the subject’s
compensatory response to this situation may include not just demonization of
⁵² Miłosz, Road-side Dog, 143.

  :        63
material nature, but also condemnation of its own physical body and the mass of
other human bodies as impure or evil.
Critic Michał Paweł Markowski characterizes this deprecation of material
existence as the core of Miłosz’s poetry. He argues that Miłosz’s central concept
is “purgation,” whereby the poet treats his art as a purifying “catapult” capable of
flinging himself—and perhaps the reader—beyond the filth of everyday existence,
life, time, and reality.⁵³ Faced with the transience of the material world and the
physical body, Miłosz yearns for a poetry that would transfigure earthly human
bodies into something more pure and lasting, perhaps into Pauline “spiritual
bodies.” In various works, he writes of a materiality transformed into pure
“light” [“zmieniają się w światło” (W 874)], or a “new corporeality” that would
be “cleansed of evil and afflictions” (NCP 638) [“nowa cielesność . . . obmyta ze zła
i choroby” (W 1108)]. From this perspective, at least in its most radical versions,
Miłosz’s poetic subject is incapable of participation in the world. Instead, he
aspires to view it from a distance, under the control of his own strongly
objectifying gaze.
Markowski’s argument is not dissimilar to earlier critiques of self-exaltation in
Miłosz’s work—for instance, interwar critic Ignacy Fik’s charge of “the sin of
angelism” or Kazimierz Wyka’s post-war analysis of Miłosz’s poetic “maladjust-
ment” as an expression of “contemptuous distinction” from other human
beings.⁵⁴ Other scholars have identified the partially Romantic sources of this
“Promethean” elevation of the individual over the masses.⁵⁵ Yet Miłosz himself
was also strongly aware of these tendencies in his own thought, wrestling with
them in dialectical detail in multiple essays and poems, including “The Accuser.”
As early as “Descent to the Earth,” he writes self-critically of the “transparent
screen behind which I was separated from others by the coolness of contempt.”⁵⁶
Later, in Native Realm, he begins to lay out what he perceives as the explicitly
political dangers of this dualist desire for self-separation.
As Miłosz explains, the “neo-Manichaean” stance predicates a lofty, or “angel-
ized,” view of the natural world, but it also offers the same elevated perspective on
other human beings, who represent nothing more than a part of this objectivized
nature. The “I” as consciousness tears itself away from the “animal-flower” of
humanity, and then surveys it from a critical distance with a mixture of pity and
contempt: “What meaning had they? What did they exist for? I was soaring at
⁵³ Michał Paweł Markowski, “Tęsknota do monumentu,” Tygodnik Powszechny 27 (28 June 2011),
https://www.tygodnikpowszechny.pl/tesknota-do-monumentu-139,695.
⁵⁴ Ignacy Fik, “Grzech anielstwa,” in Czesław Miłosz, Przygody młodego umysłu, 369; Kazimierz
Wyka, “Ogrody lunatyczne i ogrody pasterskie,” Twórczość 5 (1946): 135–47. Markowski directly refers
to Wyka’s arguments in his article.
⁵⁵ See Lidia Banowska, Miłosz i Mickiewicz: Poezja wobec tradycji (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Naukowe
UAM, 2005), 272–3; Elżbieta Kiślak, Walka Jakuba z aniołem: Czesław Miłosz wobec romantyczności
(Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Proszyński i S-ka, 2001), 296.
⁵⁶ Miłosz, “Zejście na ziemię,” 216.
64  ’    
some sort of divine height, poised over them as if they were specimens under a
microscope, which are born, last a second, and die without leaving a trace.”⁵⁷ The
“angelized” consciousness looks down at what Schopenhauer called “the common,
ordinary man, that manufactured article of nature which she daily produces in
thousands,” often feeling compassion but also a sense of god-like superiority.⁵⁸ In
“Descent to the Earth,” Miłosz characterizes the psychology of this move as a
defensive response to the despair awakened by his own “similarity” to these
pathetic beings. However, he also confesses to associated feelings of hatred and
a lust for power.
In his 1938 essay, Miłosz describes his earlier perceptions of the repulsiveness of
human physical existence in the poorer regions of a Polish city, which he associ-
ates with foul smells, sperm, and other bodily fluids.⁵⁹ Elsewhere, in a 1934 letter
to his poetic mentor Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz (1894–1980), he writes of the same
social setting: “I hate these animals, just as I hate the plebeian qualities in
myself.”⁶⁰ On the one hand, he recognizes that he is one of these “animals,” and
that the “purity of separation” is impossible. On the other, he has supposedly been
offered the “gift of power” and the “lifting of boundaries” through his superior
faculty of creative consciousness.⁶¹ He both belongs and does not belong to the
fleshly human mass. This conflicted identity is also connected to his understand-
ing of his poetic vocation, rooted in Romantic conceptions of the poet as a
powerful being with his origins in a higher sphere, entirely unlike the “ordinary
breadwinners” of the lower world.⁶²
Yet the poet’s desire to separate himself is pernicious, since it leads to a radical
reification of others: “I treated these people, in other words, as things.”⁶³ Miłosz’s
neo-Manichaean “I” as poetic consciousness transcendentalizes his own subjec-
tivity, separating himself from the foul cage of the material world. In doing so, he
turns the rest of humanity into precisely what he wishes to escape: a lowing herd of
human cattle, a species of repulsive animals, a seething ant heap, or an assemblage
of mere things. Even in a late fragment from Unattainable Earth (Nieobjęta
ziemia, 1984), the autobiographical speaker catches himself in a visceral feeling
of sheer “revulsion” at the bestial materiality of “the majority of the human race”
[“tak przyłapywałem siebie raz jeszcze na wstręcie do większości ludzkich ple-
mion” (W 850)].
⁵⁷ Miłosz, Native Realm, 80.

⁵⁸ Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, trans. E. F. J. Payne
(New York: Dover Publications, 1966), 187.
⁵⁹ Miłosz, “Zejście na ziemię,” 218.
⁶⁰ Czesław Miłosz and Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, Portret podwójny: wykonany z listów, wierszów,
zapisków intymnych, wywiadów i publikacji (Warszawa: Fundacja Zeszytów Literackich, 2011), 61–2.
⁶¹ Miłosz, “Zejście na ziemię,” 217–18.
⁶² Miłosz, Native Realm, 273–4. Also see Czesław Miłosz, “Życie na wyspach,” in Życie na wyspach
(Kraków: Wydawnictwo Znak, 2014), 93.
⁶³ Miłosz, Native Realm, 80.
  :        65
Finally, Miłosz comes to believe that this attitude has had consequences in
history. Individual yearning for transcendence can lead to the exaltation of one
human being over all others: “He is a free man; they are slaves.”⁶⁴ In “Descent to
the Earth,” he claims that the cold scrutinization of human life from an objective
distance is “the favorite entertainment of great leaders and tyrants.”⁶⁵ In
Unattainable Earth, the poetic speaker confesses to the explicit “cruelty” of his
own reifying gaze [“okrucieństwo spojrzenia” (W 864)]. In Visions from San
Francisco Bay, perhaps drawing on Fik’s earlier critique of his writings, Miłosz
argues that the separated neo-Manichaean “I” becomes a “politicized angel,”
bearing “all the markings of an inquisitor or servant of the Inquisition.”⁶⁶ By
turning other human beings into things or insects, even the most brutal action is
potentially legitimate in the service of a higher cause or “greater good”—for
instance, to “liberate” them. As Miłosz conceives it, this originally “metaphysical”
logic lies at the root of totalitarian ideologies—above all, of Soviet Marxism-
Leninism.⁶⁷ In The Captive Mind (Zniewolony umysł, 1953), his famous study of
Stalinist thought, he describes Marxism as a quasi-religion built on these very
foundations: “[The Marxist intellectual] is not unlike the inquisitor of the middle
ages; but whereas the latter tortured the flesh in the belief that he was saving the
individual soul, the intellectual of the New Faith is working for the salvation of the
human species.”
From the 1970s onward, Miłosz would connect these ideas with interpretations
of the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–81), linking “neo-Manichaeism” to Ivan
Karamozov’s “Grand Inquisitor” from The Brothers Karamazov (Bratia
Karamazovy, 1880) and to the ruthless revolutionaries of Demons (Besy, 1872),
who treat individual human beings as expendable insects in their grand utopian
schemes.⁶⁸ He contends that Dostoevsky’s fictionalized representations of the
radical Russian intelligentsia in the nineteenth century had anticipated the later
totalitarian temptations of European intellectuals in the twentieth.⁶⁹ He finds the
⁶⁴ Miłosz, Native Realm, 81. ⁶⁵ Miłosz, “Zejście na ziemię,” 219.

⁶⁶ Miłosz, Visions from San Francisco Bay, 196.
⁶⁷ In Visions from San Francisco Bay, he writes: “Only when a metaphysical core is recognized in
what seems to be merely social and political can the dimensions of the catastrophe that has befallen us
be assessed.” Miłosz, Visions from San Francisco Bay, 180.
⁶⁸ For instance, see Czesław Miłosz, “Dostoevsky and Western Intellectuals,” Cross Currents 5
(1986): 493–505; Czesław Miłosz, “Dostoevsky and Swedenborg,” Slavic Review 34, no. 2 (1975):
302–18; Czesław Miłosz, “Biesy,” in Ogród nauk (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Znak, 2013). Shigalyov, the
doctrinaire theorist from Demons, famously says: “Starting with unlimited freedom, I concluded with
unlimited despotism.” See Fyodor Dostoevsky, Demons, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa
Volokhonsky (New York: Random House, 2000), 223.
⁶⁹ Miłosz’s interpretation is not highly unusual. Dostoevsky scholars from Nikolai Berdyaev to Gary
Saul Morson have argued that the Russian novelist foretold the future of the Bolshevik Revolution in his
novels. Miłosz also reveals his own interpretive debt to Berdyaev. See Nikolai Berdyaev, “Spirits of the
Russian Revolution,” trans. S. Janos, Berdyaev.com, http://www.berdyaev.com/berdiaev/berd_lib/1918_
299; Gary Saul Morson, “Tradition and Counter-Tradition: The Radical Intelligentsia and Classical
Russian Literature,” in A History of Russian Thought, eds. William Leatherbarrow and Derek Offord
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 146.
66  ’    
roots of both in a bitter response to modern disenchantment. In short, he argues,

pessimism about the possibilities of human life in a universe ruled by mechanical
“necessity” led intellectuals in Eastern Europe to collaborate with tyranny. The
“chosen few” who grasped the scientific laws of history could justifiably commit
crimes in its service, giving the ignorant masses bread and a new political
“religion,” but not freedom. Once again, Miłosz characterizes this revolutionary
stance as a “peculiar gnosis,” professed by intellectuals who perceived their own
“separation” from the people, assigning themselves a “Promethean” political role
in history.⁷⁰
In The Captive Mind, Miłosz interprets these developments in psychological
detail to explain the specific motivations of intellectuals collaborating with com-
munist regimes in post-war Central and Eastern Europe. He begins with the
“alienated intellectual” and his supposed sense of “the absurdity of physiological
existence.”⁷¹ Above the “stupid animal diversions” of the masses, this intellectual
exalts his fantasized power to rearrange human life in order to give it higher
meaning: “Let a new man arise, one who, instead of submitting to the world, will
transform it.”⁷² Revulsion for ordinary people as fleshly beings underlies or elicits
this dialectical yearning for quasi-transcendence in the familiar neo-Manichaean
style. The aim is to break free of the limits of materiality, and somehow to elevate
the subject—and, theoretically, humanity—above nature and all previous human
history. Finally, Miłosz argues, in the name of such “higher ends,” Stalinist
ideologues gave themselves the right to enslave or destroy other human indivi-
duals, as legitimate sacrifices on the path to establishing a final realm of justice and
freedom from necessity.⁷³ In this interpretation, Soviet terror is partly the end
result of a long process in the history of religious ideas.
This heretically religious account of the appeal of Bolshevism and Stalinism to
intellectuals is doubtless obscure and idiosyncratic; some readers have found it
deeply unconvincing.⁷⁴ Yet the parallels with Miłosz’s own dualist proclivities and
self-confessed contempt for physiological human life are revealing. Indeed, much
of The Captive Mind appears to be a thinly-veiled critique of his own choices and
tendencies. As he makes clear in the preface, the book is a self-examination and
confession of his service to the Soviet-controlled Polish People’s Republic as a
diplomat between 1946 and 1951. Though his work as a cultural attaché in the
⁷⁰ Miłosz, “Dostoevsky and Western Intellectuals,” 501. I have written elsewhere in detail about
Miłosz’s connection of Dostoevsky, Manichaeism, and Bolshevism. See Stanley Bill, “Dualism,
Dostoevskii and the Devil in History: Czesław Miłosz’s ‘Neo-Manichaean’ Theory of Russian
Culture,” Slavonic and East European Review 93, no. 3 (July 2015): 401–28.
⁷¹ Czesław Miłosz, The Captive Mind, trans. Jane Zielonko (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 7, 10.
⁷² Miłosz, The Captive Mind, 9–10. ⁷³ Miłosz, The Captive Mind, 121, 223.
⁷⁴ Various contemporary Polish readers were skeptical of Miłosz’s complex philosophical explana-
tions of collaboration in The Captive Mind. Gustaw Herling-Grudziński famously dismissed these
arguments, insisting that intellectual collaborators with the Soviet regime were motivated above all by
the much simpler factors of fear, stupidity, depravity, and vanity. See Gustaw Herling-Grudziński,
Dziennik pisany nocą, vol. 1. 1971–1981 (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2011), 430–1.
  :        67
United States and France may have done little direct harm, he seeks to expose the
destructive consequences of the deeper worldview to which he had partly suc-
cumbed. In this context, he unmasks the specific content of totalitarian
ideologies—and their quasi-metaphysical underpinnings—as a mere pretext for
a much deeper desire of their advocates “to push others into the position of objects
in order to look upon themselves as subjects.”⁷⁵ In short, the “neo-Manichaean”
perspective of the incorporeal “I” attempting to break its ties with corporeal
humanity serves as a rationalization of tyranny.
In the autobiographical Native Realm, Miłosz does not spare his younger self
the most powerful version of this critique:
I was, it could be feared, a potential executioner. Every man is whose “I” is

grounded in a scientific way of thinking. The temptation to apply the laws of
evolution to society soon becomes almost irresistible. All other men flow together
into a “mass” subordinated to the “great lines of evolution,” while he, with his
reason, dominates those “great lines.”⁷⁶
Here, the emphasis returns from specifically “neo-Manichaean” ideas to the

dangers of Darwinian biologism. Indeed, Miłosz’s peculiar history of ideas exhi-
bits a certain circularity. For if radical dualism is a response to reductive materi-
alism, a “buffer zone” for continued belief—religious or otherwise—in the human
subject’s transcendence of nature, then how does it end up confirming the worst
materialist visions? Miłosz suggests that the problem is a dualism without meta-
physics. In the absence of faith in God or the immortal soul, the unrealizable
desire for separation engenders a rage that translates into violence in its political
applications. According to Miłosz’s psychologized account, the adherents of
modern totalitarian ideologies may begin with the religiously-inflected aspiration
to expand the sphere of human freedom, but they end up legitimating oppression
in the name of this future earthly paradise.⁷⁷ In short, some of the most injurious
forms of reductive materialism seem to emerge from its combination with quasi-
religious yearnings.
At the same time, bare hatred and the will to power always lurk beneath these
sublime desires. In an untranslated 1949 poem, entitled “Siegfried and Erika”
(“Siegfried i Erika”), the “angelized” speaker is a German pilot, Siegfried, who
contrasts the filth and “chaos” of refugees fleeing from his fighter plane with the
“purity” of his bullets and his distanced position “above the world,” wielding the
power of life and death over their repulsive bodies (W 245). Addressing his sister,
⁷⁵ Miłosz, Native Realm, 80. ⁷⁶ Miłosz, Native Realm, 81.

⁷⁷ Miłosz argues that Dostoevsky foresaw this choice as a kind of devil’s deal in The Brothers
Karamazov: “Since Nature . . . is under the control of the devil, whosoever would rule effectively over
men must make the same decision as the Grand Inquisitor: ‘to collaborate with the terrible and wise
spirit of Non-being’.” See Miłosz, “Dostoevsky and Western Intellectuals,” 505.
68  ’    
Erika, in lofty tones, he justifies his actions by evoking idealized visions of a pure
“future of the human race” [“przyszłość rodu ludzkiego”], when chaos will be
replaced by “one clean line” [“jedna linia niezmącona” (W 246)]. The purifying
violence of the poem also introduces a sublimated erotic charge in the speaker’s
apparent ecstasy as he strafes the crowd and in his satisfaction at the sexual
humiliation of women, symbolically uniting Eros and Thanatos in a caricature
of German Romantic idealism.
Elsewhere, Miłosz argues that even vitalistically erotic images of humanity as a
mass of naked bodies bear the shadow of the totalitarian reduction. When he
writes of the sexualized social environments of Californian “beaches” and “swim-
ming pools” in Visions from San Francisco Bay, he strikingly conflates them with
concentration camps: “Human corpses, legs spread, their private parts exposed to
public view, this is what prisoners were to the camp administrators who assigned
them numbers.”⁷⁸ The camp officers rise above the biological mass as distanced,
scientific scrutinizers of human material, perhaps like the “observer behind thick
glass” of “The Accuser.”
Even more disturbing in its combination of sexuality with murder is a digres-
sion in The Captive Mind in which Miłosz intertwines the ecstatic experience of
being alive in a large city amid crowds of human bodies with the tragic knowledge
of their vulnerability to violence. The beauty of passing strangers evokes his own
traumatic memory of witnessing the shooting of a young Jewish woman by
German soldiers in the Warsaw Ghetto:
The moment when bullets pierce the flesh is a moment of amazement for the
body. Life and death mingle for a second, before a bloody rag falls to the
pavement and is kicked aside by an SS boot. This girl was not the first nor
the last of the millions who were killed in the period when the life-force within
them was at its height. But the obstinacy with which this image returns—and
always when I am drunk with the beauty of being alive amidst living human
beings—merits some reflection. This is perhaps a matter that belongs to the same
sphere as do the collective sex orgies of some primitive tribes. At such times, this
or another object of desire are the same, all women and men are fused by a great
feeling of communion through which everyone belongs to all . . . In other words,
this is a profound basis for love of mankind, a love one cannot really conceive of
if, looking at a group of laughing women, one does not recall this young Jewish
girl as one of them, as identical and ever present.⁷⁹
Here, Miłosz directly contrasts an ecstatically “orgiastic identity”—as he would

later describe it—with the murderous objectification of others that flows from the
⁷⁸ Miłosz, Visions from San Francisco Bay, 101. ⁷⁹ Miłosz, The Captive Mind, 177.
  :        69
same vision of an undifferentiated corporeal humanity.⁸⁰ The scene reveals the

narrow margin dividing vitalistic affirmations of a common human existence from
the destructive dimensions of the same collective identity.⁸¹ Depersonalization and
a sense of communion with a greater whole are both a source of pleasure and an
anticipation of the scientific standardization of bodies as “objects whose stock is
apparently inexhaustible, no matter what plagues might afflict the species.”⁸² The
value of the individual disintegrates into the “universal flesh” of the human
“animal-flower,” renewing itself in the endless cycles of sex, birth, and death.
In his Treatise on Poetry (Traktat poetycki, 1957), Miłosz formulates another
variation on his vision of the “one flesh” with a further image of the Holocaust in
the deaths of young women:
Above our bodies

Our bodies are one body now.
Bone, muscle, nerves not mine but ours.
The names of Miriam, Sonia, Rachel
Darken and cool in the slow air.
Grass will thrive. (NCP 135)
[Będzie na nas / Na nas, bo teraz jesteśmy jedno. / Kość, mięso, nerwy są

nasze, nie moje. / Imiona Miriam, Soni i Racheli / Gasną i stygną powoli
w powietrzu. / Trawa rosła. (W 426)]
In this passage, the murdered women have a voice, singing the words of an
anonymous lyric of Jewish origin, interspersed with the words of the speaker,
even as their names fade into oblivion. Yet they belong to a singular flesh—“one
body”—that ultimately denies them any separate existence. Their common life in
common bodies anticipates a common death and a return to the indifferent
storehouse of the earth’s material. The image of these “marching girls” again
ambivalently combines a partly erotic vitalism with violent death and the disin-
tegration of the individual. On one level, the speaker seems to capitulate to a vision
of human life degraded to “universal, impersonal and even antipersonal cate-
gories.”⁸³ The girls are reduced to anonymous bone, muscle, and nerves. On
another level , his insistence on names suggests a resistance to this “totalitarian”
reduction. His aim is to pluck out the brief moments of these lost individuals from
the flow of corporeal life, and to preserve them in poetic language—in this case, in
⁸⁰ Miłosz, Visions from San Francisco Bay, 98.

⁸¹ Georges Bataille writes of the “underlying violence” of the “ritual orgy,” connecting erotic frenzy,
the “frantic proliferation of life,” the shedding of individuality, and “the violence of Death.” See Georges
Bataille, Eroticism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City Lights Books,
1986), 112–14.
⁸² Miłosz, Visions from San Francisco Bay, 101. ⁸³ Miłosz, Visions from San Francisco Bay.
70  ’    
an ironically classical eleven-syllable line. The women’s names seem to stand out
in a disjointed rhythm within this regular line, which serves to highlight them,
before the poem flows on again with three consecutive amphibrachs in the next
line on their fading away.⁸⁴
Both rhythmically and rhetorically, Miłosz aims to differentiate between appar-
ently indistinguishable bodies crushed by the forces of nature and history, giving
them names and a sort of irreducible meaning. In this mode, his poetry aspires to
defend the little human individuals on the margins of history from total annihi-
lation. As Clare Cavanagh puts it, the poet’s mission is to rescue “humdrum
humanity” in all its idiosyncratic particularity from the dehumanizing metanar-
ratives and processes of the modern age.⁸⁵ In a celebrated example, from “Six
Lectures in Verse” (“Sześć wykładów wierszem,” 1985), the poetic speaker
attempts to “save” with his words a “hunchback” librarian who perished in the
wartime bombing of Warsaw, placing particular emphasis on her individual, flesh-
and-blood existence against the language of abstraction:
The little skeleton of Miss Jadwiga, the spot

Where her heart was pulsating. This only
I set against necessity, law, theory. (NCP 497)
[Szkielecik panny Jadwigi, miejsce / Gdzie pulsowało serce. To jedno

kładę / Przeciw konieczności, prawu, teorii. (W 968)]
Miłosz’s poetic purpose is to preserve individual human beings in verbal forms that
will last longer than their frail bodies, presiding over an imagined gathering of real
people taken from his memory in what the “accuser” mockingly calls “a ritual of
purification” (NCP 325) [“rytuał oczyszczenia” (W 676)]. However, in order to
generate this cathartic perspective, the poetic subject must paradoxically separate
himself from the objective spectacle, placing himself outside it as bodiless conscious-
ness or pure gaze. Indeed, in the “Six Lectures,” the speaker also confesses to a self-
exaltation that becomes the condition for his poetic vision of Miss Jadwiga: “He is
different, alien . . . . He scorns them, a judge, observer” (NCP 491) [“On inny, obcy,
obcy . . . . On nimi gardzi, sędzia, obserwator” (W 964)]. Once again, the superiority
complex returns, as the poetic subject soars above the world with the alienated power
of consciousness, excluding himself from the human herd even as he takes pity on it.
Ultimately, Miłosz comes to view this stance as unsustainable—since he too
belongs to the fleshly spectacle—but also as dangerous in its dislocation from
down-to-earth human concerns. In his synthesizing interpretation, the bitter
⁸⁴ I will return to a detailed discussion of the central significance of amphibrachs in Miłosz’s poetry
in Chapter 5.
⁸⁵ See Clare Cavanagh, Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2009), 18.
  :        71
“neo-Manichaean” desire for separation, coupled with both compassion and

contempt for suffering humanity, inspires totalitarian political solutions. Miłosz
specifically ascribes these contradictory motivations to the Marxist intellectuals of
Central and Eastern Europe—including himself—and then to post-war Western
“fellow travelers” like Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) and Simone de Beauvoir
(1908–86).⁸⁶
Behind political and poetic projects to save humanity lie self-exaltation, scorn,
and the temptation to violence—either in pure rage or in the name of supposedly
higher ideological aims. This is what Miłosz means when he describes his own
youthful self as “a potential executioner.” In his posthumously published science-
fiction novel The Mountains of Parnassus (Góry Parnasu, 1967–71), a character
bearing more than a passing resemblance to the author collaborates with a future
totalitarian world-state for the same reasons. As he deplores the “senseless mate-
rial, senseless brutality” of the world, the young man yearns to feel power and
superiority over others as “an unearthly spirit observing from beyond.”⁸⁷ He joins
the chosen few of the state elite to rule over ignorant masses absorbed by frivolous
corporeal pursuits. Miłosz himself would come to reject this self-isolation as fatal
hubris, but the shadow of “neo-Manichaean” hatred of the flesh would continue to
haunt his writings.
7. Overcoming Excarnation
In his poetic works and essays, Miłosz posits an immaterial aspect of the self that
arises from the flesh, and then soars beyond it to generate the subjective effect of a
limited form of “vertical” transcendence. Yet frustrated consciousness remains
tethered to the “perishing thing” of the body. The fantasy of this alienated subject’s
separation from its individual body and from the “one flesh” of the human
community can be both psychologically and politically destructive.⁸⁸ Behind the
totalitarian temptations of twentieth-century intellectuals, as Miłosz describes
⁸⁶ Once again, Miłosz finds the foundations of this attitude in revulsion at corporeal existence—for
instance, as manifested in Sartre’s novel Nausea. See Miłosz, The Captive Mind, 121. He also argues that
de Beauvoir’s presentation of her own intellectual milieu in The Mandarins (Les Mandarins, 1954)
echoes the dilemmas of the Russian intelligentsia over their political role as “chosen ones.” See Miłosz,
“Dostoevsky and Western Intellectuals,” 501.
⁸⁷ Czesław Miłosz, The Mountains of Parnassus, trans. Stanley Bill (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2017), 43–4. The character, Karel, attempts to commit suicide in the same way as a young Miłosz,
as revealed by Andrzej Franaszek: in a solitary game of Russian roulette. See Miłosz, The Mountains of
Parnassus, 33.
⁸⁸ The self-destructive aspect is particularly evident in the motif of suicide, which appears promi-
nently in Miłosz’s novels. For instance, in The Issa Valley (Dolina Issy, 1955), the character of Balthazar
turns his hatred of material existence against himself, committing suicide in a protest against the
deterministic laws of nature. Czesław Miłosz, The Issa Valley, trans. Louis Iribarne (London: Penguin,
2001), 233. Franaszek’s biography reveals that Miłosz himself seriously contemplated suicide on more
than one occasion. See Franaszek, Biografia: Miłosz, 84–92.
72  ’    
them in multiple works, lies a disappointed desire for disembodiment. This self-
exalting ambition retains the remnants of an originally religious dimension—a
longing for purity and immortality.
Philosopher Charles Taylor has used the concept of “excarnation” to capture a
historical transition within Christianity from originally embodied forms of religi-
osity to a later emphasis on disembodied reason as the basis of both faith and the
self. According to Taylor, this current of thought gave rise to the beginnings of the
secularization process by separating the physical world from the transcendent
realm that had once seemed to interpenetrate it. He argues that this attitude is at
odds with Christianity’s core doctrines of the incarnation and the resurrection of
the body.⁸⁹ In response, he traces “a felt need to rehabilitate the body” in the
modern era among both Christian and non-Christian thinkers.⁹⁰ Taylor himself
advocates a rejection of “excarnation,” while also seeking a way out of the
“disenchanting reduction” of the transcendent to purely immanent visions of
matter. In other words, he argues for a return to a more balanced understanding
of Christianity and of the human self as an intertwining of bodily and non-bodily
aspects.
Miłosz reaches similar conclusions in his poems and essays. First of all, dualistic
negation of the flesh appears to be at odds with his poetic practice. As he explains
in Native Realm, “poetic discipline is impossible without piety and admiration,
without faith in the infinite layers of being that are hidden within an apple, a man,
or a tree.”⁹¹ Hatred of the material world and the physical body damages the
creative foundation of his work because he conceives of poetry as an art of
ascribing meaning to the sensual particulars of the world. At the same time, he
comes to agree with Taylor that “excarnation” is harmful to Christian faith. Miłosz
even associates the yearning for disembodied existence with the devil, who takes
the form of an incorporeal spirit of abstract rationality, contemplating the world
from an isolated vacuum.⁹² By contrast, the humane God has a physical body.
In response to—and in dialogue with—the “soaring” perspectives of incorpo-
real consciousness, Miłosz proposes a strong return to the body, with renewed
emphasis on the fundamental incarnation of the self and on the transcendent
aspects of sensual experience. In the next chapter, I will examine Miłosz’s poetic
attempts to express a revitalized religious faith not over the body, but rather in and
through the body. Instead of being the mere ground for the emergence of vertically
transcendent consciousness, the physical body generates new forms of a very
material transcendence.
⁸⁹ Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 554, 746, 741.
⁹⁰ Taylor, A Secular Age, 641, 766. ⁹¹ Miłosz, Native Realm, 281.
⁹² Miłosz, Native Realm, 190.
3
The Embodied Self
Corporeal Sources of Religious Experience
1. Return to the Body
In response to the dangers of “neo-Manichaean” excarnation and the alienated,

“totalitarian” self, Miłosz makes a positive turn back to embodied existence. To
some extent, this dialectic is constant throughout his poetic career. From the
beginning to the end, his works include a combination of body-negating and
body-affirming perspectives. However, the late 1960s were a particularly impor-
tant period in the development of this dialectic. In Visions from San Francisco Bay
(Widzenia nad Zatoką San Francisco, 1969), Miłosz explicitly draws out the
diabolical political implications of “neo-Manichaeism.” In his unfinished experi-
ment in science-fiction writing of the same period, The Mountains of Parnassus
(Góry Parnasu, 1967–71), he uses a fictional narrative in an unfamiliar genre to
imagine these consequences with vivid immediacy. In the scenario of a future
global totalitarian state, Miłosz creates a character, Lino Martinez, who first
isolates himself from other human beings, and then later changes his mind to
enact a very concrete and intentional return to bodily existence. Through this
semi-autobiographical character, Miłosz appears to dramatize an aspect of his
own philosophical journey.¹
In the novel, Martinez, belongs to the “Astronauts’ Union,” a state elite
resembling the party elite of the Soviet Union. The members of this crack unit
receive special privileges over the subjugated masses, including access to bio-
technologies that make their bodies virtually immortal. This superiority is aug-
mented when Martinez returns to Earth from a mission to another planet. The
relativistic effects of time dilation mean that many more years have passed for his
earthbound acquaintances than for himself. When he meets Felisa, a “gray,
shriveled old woman,” who had once entranced him as a young lover, the eternally
youthful Martinez feels a mixture of sorrow, contempt, and consternation.² His
¹ Biographer Andrzej Franaszek notes this autobiographical aspect with reference to an unpublished
version of the manuscript of The Mountains of Parnassus. See Andrzej Franaszek, Miłosz: Biografia
(Kraków: Wydawnictwo Znak, 2011), 91.
² Czesław Miłosz, The Mountains of Parnassus, trans. Stanley Bill (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2017), 113.
74  ’    
own “triumph” over human mortality seems hollow and morally suspect, leading
him to experience a profound crisis.³ In response, he makes the fateful decision to
abandon his position in “the Union,” thus losing access to the regular medical
procedures that have kept him young.
Martinez’s reaffirmation of his belonging to the human species is tantamount to
suicide.⁴ He chooses “chaotic” mortality over purified separation from other
people. He reverses his previous dedication to “the rule of reason over the passions
and animal instinct.”⁵ Pity and, above all, “solidarity” with suffering humanity
against the indifferent universe become the only possible sources of meaning. He
explains: “If the whole human species had the choice either of losing or winning as
we [the elite] have won, then winning wouldn’t be worth it.”⁶ He discovers that the
incarnate, impermanent, and delimited nature of human life is precisely what
gives it value, while aspirations for a purer and more enduring existence in
separation from these material realities can only lead to alienation and contempt
for the wretched human herd. As Sławomir Sierakowski puts it in his appendix to
the Polish edition: “Longevity is inhuman; it is reserved for God.”⁷ In a sort of
epilogue to the unfinished novel, a group of rebels, possibly including Martinez,
seeks to escape from this dystopian world by rebuilding religious belief through
new forms of shared, bodily ritual.⁸
This obscure work of science fiction, unpublished in Miłosz’s lifetime, reveals
with particular clarity his gathering creative resolution to descend from the
heights of the transcendent poetic subject soaring above the world to a more
human dimension of delimited, embodied existence. The same move had already
appeared in nascent form in his 1938 essay “Descent to the Earth,” in which he
critiques his own poetic desire to identify with a “divine element” in opposition to
other human beings. He describes this tendency as tyrannical.⁹ In the decades
after the war, he connected this desire for purity even more explicitly with the
destruction wrought by totalitarian regimes. However, Miłosz’s response is by no
means to eschew all forms of aspiration to transcendence. On the contrary, I will
show in this chapter that he frequently turns toward embodied, worldly, or
³ Miłosz, The Mountains of Parnassus, 111.

⁴ Suicide is a recurring motif throughout the novel. Also see Miłosz, The Mountains of Parnassus, 33.
⁵ Miłosz, The Mountains of Parnassus, 92. ⁶ Miłosz, The Mountains of Parnassus, 117.
⁷ Sławomir Sierakowski, “Przegrać dla ludzi,” in Czesław Miłosz, Góry Parnasu: Science fiction
(Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, 2012), 140.
⁸ The ritual includes a liturgical, rhythmic language: “Lay your hope in God, for time shall be
fulfilled and you shall praise him in the glory of your body” [“Nadzieję połóż w Bogu albowiem spełni
się czas i wysławiać go będziesz w chwale twojego ciala”]. See Miłosz, The Mountains of Parnassus, 138;
Czesław Miłosz, Góry Parnasu: Science fiction (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, 2012), 93.
⁹ Czesław Miłosz, “Zejście na ziemię,” in Przygody młodego umysłu. Publicystyka i proza 1931–1939
(Krakow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2003), 217, 219.
  :      75
“horizontal” forms of transcendence—a transcendence through “descent” into the

finitude of bodily experience.¹⁰
More specifically, Miłosz aims to intertwine or reintegrate the “horizontal” and
“vertical” dimensions. He finds in the body the most authentic sources of the self,
but also of a human connection with the otherworldly divine. In this way, he
returns to the central significance of incarnation in Christian thought, with its
“crossing” of the two symbolic dimensions. In doing so, he presents religious
belief—at least for himself—as instinctive and natural, almost written into the
code of the body. He rejects any reductively biological explanations of faith, and
yet—as I will show—his writings prefigure some of the most recent philosophical
and scientific work on the bodily origins of religiosity. In this chapter, I will
examine Miłosz’s positive representations of the body, beginning with an inter-
pretation of one of his earliest lyrics, in which the finite human subject ecstatically
identifies with the material world. In subsequent sections, I will discuss his poetic
exploration of the bodily dimensions of faith, the emotion of wonder, morality,
and the human relation with God.
In A Year of the Hunter (Rok myśliwego, 1990), Miłosz acknowledges the
difficulty of capturing in words the experience of being a body: “I have constantly
circled around such themes in my poems, but only occasionally did something
come of it. I have been preparing myself throughout my life for a direct attack on
this knotty question in a treatise, a poem, or a work of prose.”¹¹ Miłosz would
never write this single definitive work on human corporeality. However, the rich
fruits of his lifelong preparations for an “attack” on this theme are evident in a
substantial body of poems and essays throughout his literary career. I will argue
that many of the most powerful expressions of “transcendence” in Miłosz’s
work—including his most evocative intimations of an encounter with God—are
deeply incarnate. The human body is the site of a crossing or intertwining of
horizontal and vertical dimensions: a locus of transcendent material.
2. “I love the movement of my blood”: The Body

as Essence of the Self
In the previous two chapters, I elucidated Miłosz’s various poetic conceptions of

an incorporeal self as consciousness, which transcends nature and the body, even
as it originally emerges from the body and remains inextricably bound to it. From
this perspective, the body itself appears as a mere vehicle for consciousness or even
¹⁰ See Martha Nussbaum’s concept of “internal transcendence” and “transcending by descent.”

Martha C. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford
¹¹ Czesław Miłosz, A Year of the Hunter, trans. Madeline Levine (New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1994), 53.
76  ’    
as an alien thing, inscrutable to the rational subject. This unknowability suggests

threat. The body lies beyond what is accessible to the conscious mind, while still
remaining ever present and inescapable in its tangible form. In this sense, it is not
consciousness that transcends the body, but rather the body that transcends
consciousness. Beyond or beneath the workings of the conscious mind is a realm
of incomprehensible materiality that precisely gives rise to the seemingly trans-
parent, immaterial aspect of the self.
However, in many of Miłosz’s poetic works, this material dimension is not a
threat, but rather a source of faith and creative inspiration. The inexpressible body
may represent the site both of a deeper self and of deeper forms of—often
religious—experience, transcending the limitations of the mind and language.
Miłosz’s primary symbols for this material ground of human individual existence
are the rhythmic beating of the heart and the pulsation of blood.¹² In “With
Trumpets and Zithers” (“Na trąbach i na cytrze,” 1965), he writes: “The ‘I’ is felt
with amazement in the heartbeat, but so large it cannot be filled by the whole
Earth with her seasons” (NCP 230) [“Odczute ze zdumieniem jest ‘ja’ w biciu
serca, ale tak szerokie, że nie wypełni go cała ziemia z jej wiosną i latem.” (W 572)].
In this passage, which conveys a “dream” of primordial human existence, the
rhythm of the individual self links the speaker with the natural world—and with
the animal nature of other humans—in an empowering way. The body and the
pulse of circulating blood mark the identity of a unique human animal who
communes through the senses with an external world of which he or she is an
integral, though temporary, part. In this poem, and in many others, the speaker
appears to embrace or accept this dynamic natural reality instead of yearning for
incorporeal separation from it.
The emphasis on blood reveals a key formative influence on Miłosz’s poetic
work in the writings of his distant cousin, the French-Lithuanian symbolist
poet Oscar Vladislas de Lubicz Milosz (1877–1939).¹³ The elder Milosz had
developed an alchemical theory of the blood and its cosmic significance in a series
of visionary poetic works purporting to link Einsteinian physics with an unortho-
dox Christian eschatology. In these “metaphysical poems,” time and space are
¹² Joanna Dembińska-Pawelec observes that “the pulse of blood is the element conditioning the
subjectivity of experience.” See Joanna Dembińska-Pawelec, “Poezja jest sztuką rytmu”: O świadomości
rytmu w poezji polskiej dwudziestego wieku (Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego,
2010), 201.
¹³ Dembińska-Pawelec finds the origins of a “transcendentally and sacrally inflected symbolism of
the blood” in Czesław Miłosz’s poetry in the influence of Oscar Milosz. See Dembińska-Pawelec,
“Poezja jest sztuką rytmu,” 231. Ewa Kołodziejczyk examines the specific influence on the young
Miłosz’s early volume Three Winters (Trzy zimy, 1933). See Ewa Kołodziejczyk, “ ‘Złączeni jednym
węzłem dziedziczenia’: Powinowactwa Trzech zim z poezją Oskara Miłosza,” Ruch Literacki 3 (2001):
291–312. Aleksander Fiut and Marek Bernacki write more generally about the importance of the Polish
poet’s early encounters with his distant relative. See Aleksander Fiut, W stronę Miłosza (Kraków:
Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2003); Marek Bernacki, “Czeladnik i mistrz: Czesława Miłosza spotkania z
Oskarem Władysławem Miłoszem,” Postscriptum Polonistyczne 2, no. 8 (2011): 191–206.
  :      77
inseparable from human subjective perception, as human beings are a part of the
physical world they perceive: “Everything here, all this matter, why, this is your
own blood, and this blood is motion, therefore time and space.”¹⁴ The human
body is a microcosm for the universe, while its “movement” allows the individual
to organize space and to situate himself within it. In the writings of the French-
Lithuanian poet, as Czesław Miłosz understands them, movement thus reveals
itself as “a spiritual principle linked in an indissoluble manner to the very flow of
the blood,” binding human beings to the physical universe and to God.¹⁵
Under the probable influence of his cousin and mentor, Miłosz’s earliest poems
include prominent images of the blood’s creative motion.¹⁶ However, in contrast
to the sacralizing symbolism of Oscar Milosz, the younger Miłosz seems at first
glance to present a strongly materialist perspective.¹⁷ The previously untranslated
short lyric “Morning” (“Rano”), from A Poem on Frozen Time (Poemat o czasie
zastygłym, 1933), constitutes perhaps the most striking example:
Beautiful is the earth

beautiful are the clouds
beautiful is the day
and the dawn immense.
so sang the man as he looked down at the city

where a battery of a hundred chimneys smoked.
And the bread on the table became a mystery

at the sight of it his brow pulsated
the man raised his arms aloft
and laughed, dancing around in his shirt.
The taste of bread recalls the light of the sun

when you eat it, the bread shoots out beams
on his way to work the man felt love
and told it to the stones of the street.
I love matter, which is but a whirling mirror.

I love the movement of my blood, the single cause of the world.
¹⁴ Oscar Milosz, “Lumen,” trans. Czesław Miłosz, Ironwood 18 (1981): 125.

¹⁵ Czesław Miłosz, The Land of Ulro, trans. Louis Iribarne (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2000), 199.
¹⁶ Dembińska-Pawelec refers in particular to “Wiosna 1932” and “Dialog.” See Dembińska-Pawelec,
“Poezja jest sztuką rytmu,” 232.
¹⁷ In his later reflections on his early encounter, Miłosz juxtaposed the Catholicism and “mystical
experiences” of his cousin with his own “untamed biological individualism” and resistance to any self-
definition as a Catholic. See Czesław Miłosz, Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition, trans.
Catherine S. Leach (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 175.
78  ’    
I believe in the destructibility of everything that exists.

So as not lose my way, I have on my hand a blue map of veins.¹⁸
[Piękna jest ziemia / piękne są chmury / piękny jest dzień / a świt olbrzymi
// tak śpiewał człowiek patrząc w dół na miasto / w którym bateria stu
kominów dymi. // A chleb na stole stał się tajemnicą / od jego widoku
pulsowało czoło / człowiek podniósłszy ramiona wysoko / śmiał się, w
koszuli tańczył naokoło. // Smak chleba światła słońca przypomina / gdy
jesz—chleb może wystrzelić promieniem / idąc do pracy człowiek poczuł
miłość / i mówił o niej ulicznym kamieniom. // Kocham materię, która jest
tylko lustrem wirującym. / Kocham ruch mojej krwi jedyną świata
przyczynę. / Wierzę w zniszczalność wszystkiego co istnieje. / Aby nie
zgubić drogi, mam na ręku siną mapę żył. (W 9)]
This early poem conveys vitalistic attachment to a physical existence that inte-
grates the subject with the wider world. In order to experience this form of
“horizontal” transcendence of the self, “the man” must first descend to earth.
Indeed, the poem perhaps represents an alternate version of the “Gnostic” descent
to earth of the later lyric “Incarnation” (“Wcielenie”). Instead of alienation from
the material world, “Morning” traces a transition from aestheticizing distance to
ecstatic identification, from a “beauty” constituting the central idea of the first half
of the poem to a “love” that dominates the second half.
In the opening stanza, “the man” is situated above a human city, looking down
at the smoking chimneys that symbolize the world of proletarian work. This image
reflects the social and political commitments present in A Poem on Frozen Time
more than in any other volume of Miłosz’s career. Identifying with the physical
world also means joining the working people.¹⁹ Yet “the man” is initially separate
from this world, viewing it from a distance and capturing it in a “song” in praise of
its beauty. The song itself takes the shape of a children’s rhyme or folk lyric, with
short lines of mostly five syllables—a trochee and an amphibrach in the case of the
first two lines. With this simple form, “the man” perhaps already moves closer to
the down-to-earth world of the people below.
The middle (third) stanza of the poem represents a turning point, as the
“mystery” of bread prompts a transition from mere “looking” to bodily partici-
pation. The eating of bread becomes a symbolic act of joining the human crowd of
the factory world below, literally transforming the speaker into an “ordinary
¹⁸ Literal translation my own.

¹⁹ Critics have argued that these social questions are not generally treated in a realistic manner in the
volume as a whole, and that “Morning” may even suggest a flight from social problems into a sort of
idyll of integration with nature. See Aleksander Fiut, “Czy tylko katastrofizm?: o przedwojennej poezji
Czesława Miłosza,” Pamiętnik Literacki 69, no. 3 (1978): 90–1; Stanisław Bereś, “Wokół ‘Poematu o
czasie zastygłym’ Czesława Miłosza,” Pamiętnik Literacki 72, no. 4 (1981), 77.
  :      79
bread-eater” (“zwykły zjadacz chleba”), as the saying goes in Polish—an every-

man. This resonates with Miłosz’s own later characterization of A Poem on Frozen
Time as a sustained attempt to turn himself into a “man of the crowd,” and thus to
suppress the proud separation of his “Gnostic” poetic persona as disembodied
consciousness.²⁰ In “Morning,” the central figure joins a universal dance of joy
around the bread with his arms raised in what almost seems like a religious ritual.
As he does so, the poem adopts a harmonious abab rhyme scheme in a quatrain of
almost regular eleven-syllable lines. At the same time, the key symbol of pulsating
blood enters the poem—and Miłosz’s oeuvre—for the first time, perhaps suggest-
ing a Eucharistic resonance in its identification with bread.
The last two stanzas are concerned with a co-participatory feeling of “love” for
the physical world. The “man” has descended to the earth as a material body;
now the earthly and heavenly spheres are joined in a comparison of the taste of
bread to the light of the sun. In an enigmatic image, the bread is able to “shoot out”
(“wystrzelić”) a beam or ray (“promieniem”). The latter phrase chimes through
alliteration and assonance with the verb in the previous line that unites the two
symbols—“recall” (“przypomina”). The man is no longer just a spectator, but
rather an active, bodily participant in the working world. His new sense of
identification with materiality is so powerful that he talks to the stones, telling
them of his ecstatic love for all things. This image of the man walking into the city
may even evoke Jesus’s coming to Jerusalem and his pronouncement that “the
stones [would] cry out” to praise him (Luke 19:40)—a material Christ in com-
munion with the earth.
In the final stanza, as in the first, the man speaks directly, once again in praise of
the physical world, giving the poem a circular structure. The first line begins—
before its caesura—in the same five-syllable rhythm of trochee and amphibrach as
the first stanza: “I love matter” [“Kocham materię”]. The image that follows of
matter as a “whirling mirror” is especially striking. As we have seen, the mirror is
generally a symbol of consciousness or aesthetic reflection in Miłosz’s later work.
Here, the material world itself is a mirror. But what does it reflect? And why is it
whirling? Perhaps the image suggests interdependence—that the material world
reflects back the materiality of the gazer. There can be no separation of conscious-
ness from the world, since the subject exists in a relation of mutual co-creation
with external reality, which whirls in endless circles of birth and destruction. The
next line confirms this relation, as the man expresses his love for the motion of his
blood as the “cause of the world” (“jedyną świata przyczynę”). The lack of articles
in Polish creates ambiguity as to whether this “world” is internal and subjective or
²⁰ Czesław Miłosz, “Zejście na ziemię,” in Miłosz, Przygody młodego umysłu, 223. In a much later
essay, he describes this desire to join the masses as a common gesture of poets of his era, rejecting the
separation of the earlier Romantic figure of the poet. See Czesław Miłosz, “Życie na wyspach,” in Życie
na wyspach (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Znak, 2014), 93.
80  ’    
external and objective. It may refer to both—two worlds intertwined in the man.
The poem thus suggests an embodied notion of the self as a living world in
communion with the objective world of nature.²¹
The final lines address questions of faith. The man “believes” only in the
ultimate destruction of everything that exists, including himself. His sense of
orientation and purpose comes not from any higher faith or guidance, but rather
from the foundation of his own body and the blood flowing through the “blue
map of veins.”²² In place of an empty vertical realm, the poem points to a form of
“horizontal” transcendence through ecstatic embrace of the material world and
the subject’s ultimate disintegration within it. Decades later, Miłosz would explain
that in this early period he had even perceived a sort of transcendence in death as a
return to the greater whole of nature. He recalls “ecstatic feelings” experienced
when “reading or thinking about death,” and a yearning to “unite” with the world
“in passing away.”²³ Participation in this greater, eternal reality seemed to offer the
chance of transcendence of the burden of the individual self.
Yet fatalistic irony shadows such affirmations.²⁴ Even in this early phase, Miłosz
detects a note of insincerity in his poetic “descent to the earth,” with its embrace of
death and purging of “what differentiates him” from the human crowd.²⁵ In his
1938 essay, he questions the value of this self-degradation, criticizing the gesture
as a capitulation to the reductive biologization of humanity—this time, including
himself.²⁶ On the one hand, his self-exaltation over “everyday,” bodily human
beings is hubristic; on the other hand, resignation from the very existence of a
higher human nature is an impoverishment. Here, we see the dilemma that would
come to shape Miłosz’s poetic career: how to plot a middle path between the two
extremes of total separation from bodily, biological humanity, and total identifi-
cation with it. In the essay, he associates a balance between them with Christianity,
with its crossing of horizontal and vertical axes in a God who descended to earth
and imbued bodily existence with higher meaning. Miłosz defines his own poetic
task as the reintegration of the two dimensions: a “digging down” to a deeper
²¹ Jerzy Kwiatkowski argues that in this poem Miłosz affirms “Nature” as a kind of “Greek fatum,”
seeking strength in it. See Jerzy Kwiatkowski, “Poemat o czasie zastygłym,” in Poznawanie Miłosza:
Studia i szkice o twórczości poety, ed. Jerzy Kwiatkowski (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1985), 58.
²² Biographer Andrzej Franaszek observes that in the poem the speaker “seeks support in what is
closest to him, and thus in his own body.” See Franaszek, Miłosz: Biografia, 159.
²³ See Czesław Miłosz and Renata Gorczyńska, Podróżny świata: rozmowy (Kraków: Wydawnictwo
Literackie, 2002), 27–8.
²⁴ Miłosz himself refers ironically to critical judgments that would over-emphasize the world-
affirming character of these early works: “Critics have tended to see a myth of the Earth, a protective
deity ever renewing herself, as the core of Miłosz’s poetry, or have been calling him the only true
pantheist in Polish poetry.” See Czesław Miłosz, The History of Polish Literature (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1983), 413.
²⁵ Miłosz, “Zejście na ziemię,” 223. ²⁶ Miłosz, “Zejście na ziemię,” 225.
  :      81
reality, where “a strange light” from above “gives meaning to the impoverished
events and everyday toil” of human life.²⁷
Accordingly, even the most materialist of Miłosz’s poems open themselves to
meanings beyond the purely horizontal dimension. “Morning” begins with
imagery uniting the vertical and horizontal realms, the higher and lower, the
clouds and the earth, “the man” above and the city below. As I have argued, the
poem carries shades of a Christ-like symbolism of an earthly and incarnate kind,
inverting the “Gnostic” perspective of the later lyric “Incarnation.” The
Eucharistic imagery of bread, body, and blood also connect the poem back to
Oscar Milosz. The younger Miłosz’s description of the movement of blood as the
“cause of the world” echoes his distant relative’s language from the metaphysical
poem Storge (1917), which the Polish poet would later translate from the French:
“This blood, this cosmos, the maker of your body, its sole and perfect cause, is the
sum of the energies that manifest themselves” [“Ta krew, ten kosmos, sprawca
twego ciała, jedyna i doskonała jego przyczyna, jest sumą objawiających się
energii”].²⁸
The image of the sun in “Morning” may reveal the same influence. Oscar
Milosz claimed to have experienced a vision of God as a “spiritual sun,” and
subsequently wove this image—borrowed from Emmanuel Swedenborg and
shared with William Blake—into his mystical works.²⁹ In “Morning,” the “mys-
tery” of the earthly bread is likened to the light of the sun, with its beams shooting
outward or upward, connecting Eucharistic imagery with a symbol of God. A few
years later, the younger Miłosz would use the sun as a symbol for God in the final
poem of his wartime cycle The World (Świat, 1943).³⁰ In “Morning,” this sym-
bolism remains ambiguous, but its faint resonance opens the apparent material-
ism of the poem to alternative dimensions of meaning.
In summary, “Morning” establishes several key tropes of Miłosz’s writings at
the very beginning of his career. First, it presents a positive valuation of the
physical body as the core of the human self. Second, it posits a joyful immersion
of the bodily self in the rhythmical transformations of the material world.³¹
Finally, and most importantly, the early poem introduces the theme of the
movement of blood as the foundation of the human self, the “cause” of a subjective
“world” in communion with both the objective world and a higher reality. As
²⁷ Miłosz, “Zejście na ziemię,” 225.

²⁸ Oskar Miłosz, Storge, trans. Czesław Miłosz (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Znak, 1993), 59.
²⁹ Czesław Miłosz, “The Metaphysical Poems of Oscar Milosz: An Introduction,” Ironwood 18
(1981): 124.
³⁰ Marian Stala, “Poza ziemią Ulro,” Teksty Drugie 58–9, nos. 4–5 (1981), 134; Krzysztof Stala,
“ ‘Święte słowo jest’. Miłoszowskie paradoksy bycia,” Znak, no. 5 (1993): 94.
³¹ Later, Miłosz would discover a parallel strand in the thought of Simone Weil, quoting her
reflections in a similar direction: “To unite the rhythm in which the body lives with the rhythm of
the world, to continually feel that bond and to feel also the continual transformation of matter thanks to
which the human being is immersed in the world.” See Miłosz, A Year of the Hunter, 80.
82  ’    
Miłosz would explain four decades later in The Land of Ulro (Ziemia Ulro, 1977),
inspired by both Oscar Milosz and William Blake: “We are that pulsation of blood,
that rhythm, that organism which transposes external spatial structures into
internal spaces.”³²
In Miłosz’s interpretation, the human being is pulsating rhythm in a physical
body that occupies a specific location in space, establishing its identity relative to
other entities through movement. Even the seemingly incorporeal aspect of the
self—the mind—is “contingent” on physical processes that take place uncon-
sciously in the depths of the body.³³ The pulsation of blood is the “cause” of a
world that is both internal and external, subjective and objective, intertwining
symbolically higher and lower dimensions. At the same time, as the early poem
suggests and later works would confirm, the movement of blood through the body
connects the human being with God. The very foundations of faith lie in the body.
3. Rehabilitating the Body: Historical Perspectives
Before moving into detailed analysis of bodily belief in Miłosz’s work, I propose to
take a brief detour to put his ideas into a broader historical context. Indeed,
Miłosz’s project belongs to a much wider modern trend—as Charles Taylor
describes it—to “rehabilitate” the body in response to the rationalistic processes
of “excarnation.”³⁴ Taylor finds this rehabilitation in the Romantic critique of
disengaged reason, among certain Christian thinkers who would return to “enflesh-
ment” in response to secular threats to religious meanings, and in a materialist
philosophical tradition he dubs the “immanent counter-Enlightenment.”³⁵ Miłosz’s
perspectives on the embodied self and the corporeal sources of religious experience
develop in dialogue—or at least in parallel—with all three of these projects.
As his frequent references to Blake suggest, Miłosz’s poetic interest in the
body takes inspiration from a certain strain of Romanticism. The Polish poet
draws on Romanticism’s corporeal responses to disembodied reason, disenchant-
ment, and the resulting alienation of the self. His critique of the alienated,
“Manichaean” subject echoes Blake’s polemic against an excarnated, reasoning
“Selfhood” or “Spectre” that becomes the “murderer of its own Body.”³⁶ He also
connects Blake’s suspicion of disembodied subjectivity with Polish Romantic
Adam Mickiewicz’s advice in Forefathers’ Eve, Part II (Dziady, część II, 1823)
that corporeal “immersion” in the material world is a prerequisite for any
³² Miłosz, The Land of Ulro, 245. ³³ Miłosz, The Land of Ulro, 245.
³⁴ Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 766.
³⁵ Taylor, A Secular Age, 9, 372, 741.
³⁶ William Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (New York:
Random House, 1988), 153.
  :      83
experience of transcendence.³⁷ More generally, a central stream of Romantic

poetics seems to enact a “failure of distance” between the mind and the body,
simultaneously straining beyond the body and finding that transcendence is
founded on the flesh.³⁸ In this way, the secular, often “horizontal” forms of
transcendence that many critics have noted in Romantic poetry—for instance,
in M. H. Abrams’s concept of “natural supernaturalism”—are highly congenial to
Miłosz’s concerns.³⁹
However, Miłosz’s positive interest in embodied life is also strongly Christian,
resonating with various theological projects in the twentieth century to restore the
body and the central meaning of incarnation to the Christian message. Diverse
Christian thinkers—especially in the Roman Catholic tradition—have drawn
attention to what they perceive as an insidious and heretical forgetting of the
embodied self in favor of the bodiless soul or reasoning ego. To take but one
prominent example, Miłosz’s compatriot Pope John Paul II devoted his first series
of public audiences at the Vatican to a Theology of the Body (1979–84), affirming
the body’s positive value against an errant “Manichaean perspective” that would
lead to the “annihilation of the body.”⁴⁰ For John Paul II, excessive emphasis on an
“excarnate self” constitutes a misinterpretation or distortion of the Gospel’s
original message. Accordingly, he advocates a return to a corporeal—or at least
partially corporeal—conception of the self, and to Christianity’s core innovation:
the simultaneous incarnation of the sacred and sacralization of the carnal. This
dimension is particularly prominent in Catholic dogma and theology, with their
continued insistence on embodied ritual and the transubstantiation of the
Eucharist.
These ideas have important implications for the nature of the human self. Like
Miłosz in many of his works, John Paul II argues for a fundamentally embodied
understanding of human identity: “Man . . . belongs to the visible world; he is a
body among bodies.”⁴¹ Moreover, the body is the basic source and condition of
³⁷ Miłosz, The Land of Ulro, 162–3. Maria Delaperrière suggests the importance of the
Mickiewiczean “immersion in the world” for Miłosz, while also connecting this idea with Miłosz’s
neologism “wciałowzięty” (“flesh-enraptured”). See Maria Delaperrière, “Dialog Miłosza z
Mickiewiczem,” Postscriptum Polonistyczne 1, no. 7 (2011): 244–5.
³⁸ Alan Bennett, “Language and the Body,” The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature,
eds. David Hillman and Ulrika Maude (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 79.
³⁹ See M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature
(New York: Norton, 1971).
⁴⁰ Pope John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body, trans. Michael
Waldstein (Boston: Pauline Books & Media, 2006), 306–9. Pope Benedict XVI followed his predeces-
sor’s stance against anti-body dualism, particularly with respect to sexuality. In an interview with Peter
Seewald, he echoed John Paul’s earlier warning about the dualist threat to the positive Christian value of
what he calls “bodiliness”: “Admittedly, forms of rigorism have also repeatedly gained ground in
Christianity, and tendency toward negative appraisals of sexuality, a tendency that had developed in
Gnosticism, also found its way into the Church.” See Benedict XVI, Light of the World: The Pope, the
Church, and Signs of the Times. A Conversation with Peter Seewald (San Francisco: Ignatius Press,
2010), 47.
⁴¹ Pope John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them, 152.
84  ’    
the individuated, differentiated human self: “Right from the beginning, man was
able to distinguish himself, almost to be individualized—that is, confirm himself
as a person—through his own body.”⁴² Bodily existence denotes the very founding
of subjectivity. These ideas correspond with Miłosz’s own positive depictions of
the embodied nature of the individual self. In different ways, both Miłosz and the
Polish pope respond critically to what Taylor describes as the dominant subjec-
tivity of the secular age: the disembodied, “buffered,” Cartesian, “bounded self”
that has replaced the embodied, “porous self” of an earlier “enchanted world.”⁴³
Taylor’s own project in A Secular Age (2007) is also clearly polemical, aiming to
highlight the problem of “excarnation,” and to propose his own Catholic Christian
philosophical response.⁴⁴
Inherent in these responses is a return to older, pre-modern understandings of
embodied subjectivity. Indeed, early Christian theologians established the doc-
trine that the human individual could only remain self-identical in the process of
salvation in corporeal form. As Pope Gregory I observed in the sixth century: “I
am not ‘I’ if I rise in an aerial body.”⁴⁵ Without the material body, the resurrection
of the individual “I” was impossible. According to Caroline Bynum, a scholar of
medieval Christianity, this early emphasis has experienced a revival in modern
times within both Christian and post-Christian culture in response to disembod-
ied rationalism: “Like the medieval theologians, poets, and mystics, [we] find it
difficult to think that any survival that really counts could entail loss of those
markers the body bears: sex, race, personal appearance, and so forth.”⁴⁶ The body
appears as the basic expression of individual identity. Without it, the very notion
of an “I” evaporates, and the whole Christian narrative of personal sin, moral
responsibility, penance, forgiveness, and salvation loses its coherence—as do the
secularized versions of these concepts.⁴⁷ In certain texts, Miłosz appears as a
⁴² Pope John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them, 241.
⁴³ Taylor, A Secular Age, 38. Łukasz Tischner has used Taylor’s ideas to show how Miłosz defends a
specifically anti-Cartesian vision of a “porous self” open to interpenetration with other agents and the
outside world. See Łukasz Tischner, “Miłosz and a Secular Age,” Cross Currents 61, no. 1 (2011): 63–71.
⁴⁴ As another example of a similar argument, though from a different Christian denomination, the
Lutheran theologian Oscar Cullmann argues in Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead
(1956) that a “Greek,” or Platonic, belief in the “immortality of the soul” has superseded the “original”
Christian faith in the resurrection of the physical body. He considers this change to be illegitimate,
making strong arguments for the body’s originary importance according to the New Testament. See
Oscar Cullmann, Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead: The Witness of the New Testament
(Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2000).
⁴⁵ Quoted in Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–
1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 60.
⁴⁶ Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 341.
⁴⁷ Bynum argues that the “unorthodox,” anti-corporeal position began its rise to preeminence in the
late medieval period. Specifically, she claims that the dominance of Thomist theology within Western
Christianity marked an important victory for “the position that emphasizes the soul” against the body,
so that it became possible for theologians “to think of survival and identity of self without continuity of
material particles.” Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 10.
  :      85
thinker within this corporeal tradition of Christianity, emphasizing what he

describes as “the warm, human presence of a God who took on flesh.”⁴⁸
Perhaps more surprisingly, Miłosz’s interest in the body also has certain points
of contact with what Taylor calls the “immanent counter-Enlightenment”: a set of
ideas and thinkers rooted in post-Romantic aesthetics and Friedrich Nietzsche’s
“Dionysian” philosophy. The avowedly materialist tendencies of the associated
thinkers—among whom Taylor includes Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and
Michel Foucault—are largely alien to Miłosz’s central concerns. However, certain
aspects of what I would describe as a loose “anti-Cartesian” tradition, including
the work of phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61), parallel
Miłosz’s own interrogation of secular modernity and disembodied reason. Like
Blake’s poetry, this post-Nietzschean philosophical tradition delivers a powerful
critique of the isolated, reasoning Cartesian “self,” yielding diverse projects to
rehabilitate and reaffirm the body and bodily experience. Nietzsche himself
attacked Western metaphysics and its representatives, both Christian and non-
Christian, as “despisers of the body.”⁴⁹ In the next chapter, I will focus more
specifically on Merleau-Ponty and several feminist philosophers as key “anti-
Cartesian” thinkers whose work sheds a surprising light on Miłosz’s valorization
of a “feminine” bodily identity in opposition to “masculine” rational subjectivity.
Of course, there are insurmountable differences between the Christian critique
of “excarnation” and the post-Nietzschean tradition. John Paul II argues for an
integral unity of body and soul,⁵⁰ while Nietzsche’s Zarathustra claims that “body
am I through and through, and nothing besides; and soul is just a word for
something on the body.”⁵¹ Moreover, the Christian tradition emphasizes embod-
iment as the foundation of subjectivity, while thinkers in the anti-Cartesian
tradition often undermine the very existence of a strong self.⁵² Nevertheless,
both Christian and post-Nietzschean thinkers argue that the crucial corporeal
dimension of human identity must be recovered from its marginalization by
modern rationalism. Miłosz shares aspects of both critiques, combined in varying
proportions. He searches above all for a Christian answer to the challenges of
embodied existence, but many of his poems remain agnostic and open in their
basic ontological assumptions. When he does enter a more explicitly religious
⁴⁸ Czesław Miłosz, Visions from San Francisco Bay, trans. Richard Lourie (New York: Farrar, Straus
⁴⁹ Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, trans. Adrian Del Caro
⁵⁰ Pope John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them, 390.
⁵¹ Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 23.
⁵² Nietzsche’s defense of corporeality runs parallel with an all-out assault on the “principium
individuationis.” Heidegger’s Dasein is a rebuttal of the Cartesian conception of a discrete subject
existing as consciousness somehow prior to body or world. Julia Kristeva’s emphasis on the body’s
constitutive power puts the strong, transcendental subject “on trial” or “in process” (en procès),
breaking down its unity, self-transparency, and autonomy.
86  ’    
mode, he seeks a new grounding for faith in the flesh, and in an intertwining of
vertical and horizontal dimensions of transcendence.
4. The Believing Body
If Miłosz’s poetry is religious, then any faith it expresses is shadowed by doubt.

This has become a truism in scholarship on his work. The all-consuming reality
of death—“the destroyer of faith” (NCP 708) [“wiarę niweczącej śmierci”
(W 1177)]—undermines belief in resurrection and the immortal soul. More
broadly, secularization and reductive forms of materialism seem to have disrupted
traditional accounts of any immaterial reality beyond the physical world. In the
absence of this “second space,” the moments of greatest religious conviction in the
poet’s work describe an uncertain faith flowing directly from the body and its
biological rhythms.
In a 1966 essay, Miłosz marvels at the deep power of the “believing body”
(“wierzące ciało”), declaring his “full solidarity” with an avowal of corporeal faith
from another contemporary poet in his own translation:
I feel the rationality of being, I touch, I know, I understand, screaming with my

vibrating body against nothingness . . . . My whole organism roars like an organ in
praise of life . . . . I hear with all my blood. I boundlessly believe. And if so, then so
it must be. It cannot be otherwise: my body believes.
[Czuję rozumność bytu, dotykam, wiem, pojmuję, krzycząc wibrującym ciałem
przeciw nicości . . . . Cały organizm jak organ huczy na chwałę życia . . . . Słyszę
całą krwią. Bezgranicznie wierzę. A jeżeli tak, to właśnie tak jest. Nie może być
inaczej: wierzy ciało.]⁵³
Miłosz makes his own declarations of bodily faith against “nothingness” in most
phases of his work, from “Morning” through to his final poems. He repeatedly
suggests that the physical body and the pulse of his life blood constitute the
strongest sources of meaning, moral strength, and religious belief. He finds
intimations of transcendence in bodily experience, pointing to the physical
origins and embodied nature of religious feelings and concepts. In a very late
poem, the lyric speaker can only imagine heaven itself in the terms of his own
body and blood: “Under the warmth of the Sun at its zenith, in gardens, / whose
rhythm’s like the former pulsing of my blood” [“Pod ciepłem Słońca w zenicie,
⁵³ The poem is by Soviet poet Evgeny Vinokurov (1925–93), whom Miłosz translated from the
Russian. See Czesław Miłosz, “Na marginesie Ankiety,” Kultura 3 (1966): 106. Translation from the
Polish my own.
  :      87
w ogrodach, / których rytm jest jak moje dawne pulsowanie krwi” (W 1327)].⁵⁴ As
in “Morning,” these lines bring together the image of the “Sun”—in this case, an
unambiguous symbol of God—with the unity of the blood’s pulsation and the
rhythms of the material world. The heavenly realm appears as a sublimation of the
subject’s own vitalistic feelings of oneness with nature.
In one of his most important poems—“Father Ch., Many Years Later” (“Ksiądz
Ch., po latach”) from Unattainable Earth (Nieobjęta ziemia, 1984)—Miłosz’s
speaker expresses a similar intersection in an ecstatic encounter with the divine:
And yet I could not distinguish Him [God] from the rhythm of my
blood
And felt false reaching beyond it in my prayer.
I was not a spiritual man, but flesh-enraptured,
Called to celebrate Dionysian dances. (NCP 436–7)
[Nie mogłem Go jednak odróżnić od rytmu mojej krwi / I fałsz jakiś

czułem, dążąc modlitwą w zaświaty. / Nie byłem człowiek duchowy, ale
wciałowzięty, / Wezwany, żeby odprawiać dionizyjskie tańce. (W
852–3)]
The neologism “wciałowzięty” is the crucial concept here, literally meaning

“taken” (wzięty) “into the body” (w ciało). Miłosz’s adjective evokes the common-
place expression wniebowzięty—usually translated into English as “ecstatic” or
“enraptured”—which literally means “taken up into heaven.”⁵⁵ In different ways,
these expressions give a sense of going beyond daily experience into a mode of
more intense feeling, including possible contact with divinity. Wniebowzięty
suggests a vertical form of transcendence, a spiritual ecstasy perhaps involving a
temporary departure from the body and the material world. Wciałowzięty implies
a horizontal experience of transcendence, or rather a descent, a feeling of rapture
originating in the physical senses. In the first case, the ecstatic moment meta-
phorically takes the subject “up” toward heaven and away from the physical body;
in the other instance, the experience of rapture takes the subject further “down”
into the body. The subject revels in his corporeal identity, in the ecstatic “rhythm
of the blood,” finding in it a form of temporary self-transcendence and a connec-
tion with divinity.
Despite its corporeal emphasis, the image still posits a fundamental dualism.
For what is being “carried into” the body? The implication seems to be that an
incorporeal self—consciousness, the mind, or the soul—is transported into its
⁵⁴ Czesław Miłosz, “Heavenly,” Selected and Last Poems, 1931–2004, trans. Czesław Miłosz, Robert
Hass, and Anthony Milosz (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), 317.
⁵⁵ Dembińska-Pawelec notes this dichotomy. See Dembińska-Pawelec, “Poezja jest sztuką rytmu,”
184–5.
88  ’    
own body or reconnected with its corporeal origins. In fact, this experience is the
opposite of “ecstatic” in the usual sense of “standing outside oneself.” Instead, the
incorporeal aspect of the self comes to stand more profoundly inside its own body,
to settle into the actual ground of its apparently independent existence, and thus
to encounter an “other” that is already intertwined with it. At the same time, this
enstatic process also opens the subject to a direct encounter with the absolute
“Other” of God, who is present not in a vague spiritual dimension, but in the
subject’s own material flesh and blood.
Yet this God is far from pure materiality—an immanent or pantheistic deity.
Just as the separateness of the immaterial self is preserved even in its ties with the
body, the “God” of the poem remains opposed to or outside “the world.” In the
final lines, the rhythm of blood and the experience of being carried into the body
lead the speaker to a statement of faith in a divine plan symbolically uniting the
worldly and otherworldly, the horizontal and the vertical: “I could not understand
from whence came my stubbornness / And my belief that the pulse of impatient
blood / Fulfills the designs of a silent God” (NCP 440) [“Nigdy nie mogłem
zrozumieć, skąd brał się mój upór. / I skąd wiara, że tętno niecierpliwej krwi /
Spełnia zamysły milczącego Boga” (W 856)]. Bodily faith paradoxically connects
the speaker with an almost “Gnostic” deity, who seems removed from the physical
universe—or at least “silent” within it. Reductive forms of secular materialism may
threaten the coherence and plausibility of belief in an otherworldly God, but
bodily experience provides better proofs for His existence than any intellectual
arguments.
In a similar vein, Miłosz’s personas sometimes describe the feeling of a divine
plan or order of the world in the rhythms of their bodies. This bodily faith appears
in Native Realm (Rodzinna Europa, 1959) in the poet’s autobiographical account
of a perilous crossing of four totalitarian borders between Lithuania and Warsaw
during the war. In the moment of greatest danger, Miłosz describes the “discon-
nection” of his mind, and a descent into a calming state of trust in the world that
emerges from the depths of his body: “I listened to the voice of my organism: my
body believed deeply in Providence and submitted in advance to its decrees;
whatever happens to me has been destined to happen.”⁵⁶ The wisdom of the
body transcends the conscious mind to bring the subject into contact with both
deeper and higher dimensions of existence. The body enters into an instinctive
harmony with the material world, filling the poet-fugitive with “inner calm.” As he
passes a Soviet NKVD encampment, hidden in the back of a hay cart, he gazes at
“clouds, rosy from the setting sun,” and chews a blade of grass. Yet this bodily
integration with the world also suggests the operation of a vertical hierarchy—a
⁵⁶ Miłosz, Native Realm, 217.

  :      89
higher “Providence” penetrating material things and guiding events. The young
writer escapes the danger, and later attributes his good fortune to his bodily faith.
In this instinctive understanding of belief, Miłosz represents religiosity as an
innate characteristic of human beings, or at least of himself, encoded in the body.
In this way, perhaps surprisingly, his ideas overlap with new scientific research on
the physiological conditions in the human body that make religious belief both
possible and prevalent. Various theories in evolutionary psychology and anthro-
pology, cognitive science, neurobiology, and genetics have proposed that religious
beliefs and practices are natural consequences of the structure of the human brain
as it developed for evolutionary advantage.⁵⁷ Such physical explanations suggest
that specific genetic factors may help to explain why some individuals have a
greater predisposition to religious belief, even giving rise to controversial theories
of a “god gene.”⁵⁸ These theories also account for the near universality of religion
without discounting the importance of specific cultural factors in any given
manifestation of it.
Crucially, such biological accounts of religion need not be reductive. Indeed,
several researchers explicitly emphasize that the new discoveries are coherent with
the continued plausibility of religious faith.⁵⁹ The theories do not purport to
address the truth claims of specific religions. Instead, they seek to explain the
biological substratum of a highly complex set of behaviors and beliefs that also
have social, cultural, and perhaps metaphysical causes. Like the mind or con-
sciousness, religiosity can be explained with reference to its physical basis, but
such explanations do not necessarily invalidate the existence of another dimension
of reality forming the background condition for these mechanisms.⁶⁰ In other
words, such a perspective admits the possibility that humans are biologically
predisposed toward religious feelings because this is how God designed them.
For Miłosz, too, religious feelings are often instinctive, involuntary, and rooted
in the body. However, he rejects scientific rationalizations of religious feelings
that would reduce them to mere genetic mechanisms. He argues passionately
⁵⁷ For instance, see Paul Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought
(New York: Basic Books, 2001); Stewart Guthrie, Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Justin L. Barrett, Why Would Anyone Believe in God?
(Lanham, MD: Alta Mira Press, 2004); Robert C. Fuller, Spirituality in the Flesh: Bodily Sources of
Religious Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Dean Hamer, The God Gene: How Faith
is Hardwired into Our Genes (New York: Doubleday, 2004).
⁵⁸ Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 171;
Hamer, The God Gene.
⁵⁹ For instance, Justin L. Barrett in Why Would Anyone Believe in God?
⁶⁰ Such theories reflect an open type of naturalism or materialism related to the “emergent” or “non-
reductive” varieties discussed in the previous chapter. See Aku Visala, “Explaining Religion at Different
Levels: From Fundamentalism to Pluralism,” in The Roots of Religion: Exploring the Cognitive Science of
Religion, eds. Roger Trigg and Justin L. Barrett (London: Routledge, 2016), 65–7; Aku Visala and Justin
L. Barrett, “In What Senses Might Religion Be Natural,” in The Naturalness of Belief: New Essays on
Theism’s Rationality, eds. Paul Copan and Charles Taliaferro (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books,
2019), 78.
90  ’    
against scientific approaches to religiosity that would dismiss it as a mere “function

of our nervous system” or an “anthropocentric illusion.”⁶¹ He also criticizes
the attempts of theologians like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) to
integrate Christian doctrine with a “providential” understanding of evolution.⁶²
Miłosz condemns this “bogus Christianity,” as he describes it, for prostrating itself
before “the world” and acceding to the “demands of the age.”⁶³ He regards such
“worldly religion” as dangerous, associating it with the revolutionary atheist
religion of the “Man-God” supposedly heralded by Dostoevsky and realized by
Bolshevism.
In the same way, Miłosz evinces his suspicion of pragmatist approaches to faith
in an essay written during the war on William James’s Varieties of Religious
Experience (1902). He admits the initial attractiveness of James’s ideas, according
to which an instinctive religiosity runs in the blood together with a natural sense
of the harmony of the world.⁶⁴ Yet he comes to view this intuitive form of
religiosity as pernicious in its supposed irrationality, anti-intellectualism, and
emphasis on “life” over “cognition.”⁶⁵ These vitalistic tendencies may even have
political consequences in the construction of various myths of blood and belong-
ing to an essentialized collective body. In response, he once again advocates the
stream of religiosity that would declare itself in opposition to “the world,” and to
the biological realities of human existence.
However, in spite of these reservations, Miłosz would also continue to seek
confirmation in James and in his own experience of a dimension of faith that
might exist “parallel to biology or physics,” accepting or at least not contradicting
scientific discoveries.⁶⁶ Conversely, he calls for a non-reductive science—or non-
reductive materialism—that would remain open to the claims of believers. At his
most optimistic, he looks hopefully to Oscar Milosz’s adventurous theories of a
restored unity of science and faith in the era of Einsteinian physics, which
supposedly put the human being back at the center of a relativized space and
time.⁶⁷ Most importantly, the basic intuition of the bodily origins of religious faith
never disappears from Czesław Miłosz’s poetry, although it remains in constant
dialectic with its dualist negation. For the Polish poet, it is very often the body that
believes in the face of the doubts of the mind.
⁶¹ Miłosz, The Land of Ulro, 56.

⁶² Miłosz, The Land of Ulro, 56; Czeslaw Milosz, “On Pasternak Soberly,” in To Begin Where I Am:
Selected Essays, eds. Bogdana Carpenter and Madeline G. Levine (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2001), 418–19.
⁶³ Miłosz, The Land of Ulro, 71, 256.
⁶⁴ Czesław Miłosz, “Beyond Truth and Falsehood,” in Legends of Modernity: Essays and Letters from
Occupied Poland, 1942–1943, trans. Madeline G. Levine (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2005), 64–5.
⁶⁵ Miłosz, “Beyond Truth and Falsehood,” 69. ⁶⁶ Miłosz, Native Realm, 86.
⁶⁷ Miłosz, The Land of Ulro, 225–31.
  :      91
5. The Emotion of Wonder and the Religious Instinct
The experience of rapturous connection with the material world of the early
lyric “Morning” would find expression in poetic works right across Miłosz’s
career. Two interrelated words would come to symbolize this feeling of integration
with the physical universe: “podziw” and “zachwyt.”⁶⁸ The two words recur
throughout his oeuvre, generally translated into English as either “wonder” or
“amazement.” Miłosz uses these words to express the most intense emotion
provoked by the beauty of the world’s material forms, often with strongly religious
overtones. This religious dimension comes into clear focus when he translates
“podziw”—exceptionally—as “reverence” in the culminating moments of From
the Rising of the Sun (Gdzie wschodzi słońce i kędy zapada, 1974), where the poetic
speaker contrasts this bodily feeling of affirmation with the despair of his disem-
bodied persona:
And always the same consciousness unwilling to forgive.

Perhaps only my reverence will save me.
If not for it, I wouldn’t dare pronounce the words of prophets. (NCP
330)
[Ze mną nieskłonna przebaczać, ta sama świadomość. / Może tylko

podziw uratuje mnie. / Gdyby nie on, nie odważyłbym się wymawiać
zaklęcia proroków. (W 681)]
The specific connotations of the two terms in Polish are closely related, but still
distinct. “Podziw” covers a semantic range including “admiration,” “amazement,”
and “awe” in English. Etymologically, the term derives from words meaning
“miracle,” suggesting a supernatural dimension (Proto-Slavic: *divъ).⁶⁹ Sometimes
Miłosz uses the related term “zdziwienie,” emphasizing “surprise” or “astonish-
ment,” or the synonym “zdumienie,” denoting “amazement” or “astonishment.”
“Zachwyt”—on the other hand—may also be translated as “admiration,” but it more
often renders “delight” or “rapture.” “Zachwyt” perhaps evokes a more explicitly
corporeal context, etymologically suggesting “seizing” or “carrying away,” like
“rapture” in English. In this sense, “zachwyt” is related to Miłosz’s neologism
“wciałowzięty” (“flesh-enraptured”), implying a type of spiritual experience acces-
sible through the body:
⁶⁸ Various critics have discussed the importance of these terms, among others: Jan Błoński,
“Epifanie Miłosza,” Teksty 4–5, nos. 58–9 (1981): 27–51; Marian Stala, “Ekstaza o wschodzie słońca:
W kręgu głównych tematów poezji Czesława Miłosza,” Poznawanie Miłosza 3: 1999–2010, ed.
Aleksander Fiut (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2011), 132–4; Irena Sławińska, “Odniesienia
religijne w twórczości Miłosza,” Spotkanie 15 (1981): 10–15.
⁶⁹ Oleg Trubachev, Anatoly Zhuravlev et al., Etimologicheskiy slovar0 slavyanskikh yazykov, vol. 5
(Moscow: Nauka, 1978), 35.
92  ’    
Wonder kept seizing me, and I recall only wonder,

Risings of the sun over endless green, a universe
Of grasses, and flowers opening to the first light
Blue outline of the mountains and a hosanna shout. (NCP 376–7)
[Zachwyt porażał mnie i tylko zachwyt pamiętam. / Wschody słońca w

nieobjętym listowiu, / Kiedy otwarte po nocy, trawy bezbrzeżne, /
Niebieski zarys gór dla krzyku hosanna. (W 738)]
In this passage from the long poem The Separate Notebooks (Osobny zeszyt,
1977–9), the speaker suggests that his recurring sense of delight at the beauty of
the world is an instinctive physical experience. Bodily sensations of joyful inte-
gration with the universe carry the speaker beyond suffering and the flat line of
everyday existence, transforming his perception of natural reality and shaping its
creative re-expression in language.⁷⁰ In such moments, the speaker goes beyond
the usual limits of perception. The healthy body moves, the blood moves within it,
and the joy of this movement gives rise to poetry as a song of rhythmic praise to
material things without any need for the participation of reflective consciousness.
As the speaker goes on to explain, the words of poetic language are as involuntary
and natural as the beating of the heart:
But the lips praised on their own, on their own the feet ran;
The heart beat strongly; and the tongue proclaimed its adoration. (NCP
377)
[Ale usta same wychwalały, nogi same biegły, / Serce mocno biło i język
rozgłaszał wielbienie. (W 738)]
This feeling of “wonder” (“zachwyt”), as a very bodily rapture inspiring poetry,

overlaps with another key Miłoszean concept: “Eros.” In the poet’s vocabulary,
this term does not exclusively, or even principally, refer to sexual feelings or a
biological drive.⁷¹ Instead, it describes a much wider sense of intense emotional
attachment to the whole material world—as in the ecstatic “love” described by the
⁷⁰ As Mark Johnson defines it, horizontal transcendence supposes “[an] ability both to transform
experience and to be transformed ourselves by something that transcends us: the whole ongoing, ever-
developing natural process of which we are a part.” Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics
of Human Understanding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 14.
⁷¹ Aleksander Fiut asserts that the importance of nature in Miłosz’s “poetic pansexualism” moves his
thought away from Freud’s conception of the sexual drive. See Aleksander Fiut, The Eternal Moment:
The Poetry of Czesław Miłosz, trans. Theodosia S. Robertson (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1990), 111. Magdalene Renouf accuses Miłosz of contradicting himself in the disjuncture between
purely “psychophysical” and much broader understandings of “Eros.” See Magdalene Renouf, “Eros,
kobieta i Bóg,” in Miłosz i Miłosz, eds. Aleksander Fiut, Artur Grabowski, and Łukasz Tischner
(Kraków: Księgarnia Akademicka, 2014), 471–2.
  :      93
speaker of “Morning.” As Miłosz would later explain, the “power of Eros” in this
broad sense led him in childhood to “fall in love” with the figure of a carved
wooden squirrel, and later with “a book illustration, a bird, a poet; a line of words,
rhythmically linked.”⁷² This expansive type of love for “all things existing, discretely
and collectively” awakens a physical response in the poet—in his “insides.” At least
as it manifests itself in his poetry, this universal “erotic” feeling is stronger than
any sexual or romantic feelings toward individual human beings, though the two
types of experience are often intertwined. In a late poem, the speaker directly links
desire for a particular woman with desire for “everything” (NCP 679; W 1150).
Miłosz’s bodily feelings of “love” for the world also lie at the foundation of the
poetic impulse as he understands it. In an unpublished English-language fragment
preserved at the Beinecke Library at Yale University, Miłosz describes his under-
lying motivation as a poet: “Why do I write? I write because I am in love with the
things of this world and am trying to find words which would capture be it the
smallest part of its richness and immensity.”⁷³ Elsewhere, he refers to a “pansex-
ual” desire to consume or swallow the world, joining it with his own body.⁷⁴ As
this ambition can never be realized, the poetic speaker as desiring subject char-
acterizes himself in another poem as “a sponge, suffering because it cannot
saturate itself” (NCP 249) [“gąbka, która cierpi, bo nie może napełnić się wodą”
(W 378)]. In this context, the writing of poetry becomes an outlet for frustration.
Since the amorous poet-observer cannot literally devour the world or absorb it
into his body, all that remains is the hopeless task of attempting to capture in
words the infinite objects of his desire.
This task is a deeply ambivalent one. Miłosz’s speakers often come to suspect
that feelings of “love” for the world may represent the mere sublimation of
biological instinct, and thus capitulation to the degradation of human beings to
their animal nature. In this light, Eros appears as a snare of bodily instincts, a trap
for the higher self, while poetry becomes a mere unconscious product of this
entrapment. Eros is opposed to both reason and morality, and the poet must ask, as
the speaker does in The Separate Notebooks: “Is it worthy of man to be seduced and
caught” (NCP 371) [“Czyż godne jest człowieka, żeby dał się uwieść i został schwy-
tany?” (W 733)]. This question—couched as a paraphrase of Arthur Schopenhauer’s
pessimistic philosophy—has no definitive answer in Miłosz’s poetry.
While the raptures of “zachwyt” are tied to the surface of the world and to
“Eros,” the related term “podziw” tends to imply the perception of something
beneath or beyond the purely physical reality. As in his translation of “podziw” as
“reverence,” Miłosz often links this variety of “wonder” with an instinctive form of
⁷² Miłosz, The Land of Ulro, 30.

⁷³ “Why do I write? . . . ,” Czesław Miłosz Papers; Series II: Writings, 1934–2000, Box 126, Folder
2010, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. The original text is in English.
⁷⁴ Miłosz, Native Realm, 150.
94  ’    
religiosity. In Native Realm, he uses the term to describe his own innate tendency
toward belief from earliest youth: “I did not have the makings of an atheist,
because I lived in a state of constant wonder [podziw], as if before a curtain
which I knew had to rise someday.”⁷⁵ As we have seen, he would later refer to the
hidden dimension of reality behind the curtain as “the lining of the world” (NCP
569) [“podszewkę świata” (W 1036)] or as “the world turned inside out” (NCP
275) [“na lewą stronę odwrócony świat” (W 628)]. The visible world itself appears
as the mere “reverse side of a Gobelin” (NCP 431) [“zła strona jakiegoś gobelinu”
(W 836)], while “wonder” at the chaotic spectacle springs from anticipation of a
final unveiling of its true image.
Various scholars of religion have written more recently on this type of “won-
der” as a source of spirituality. For instance, Robert Fuller draws on the work of
cognitive anthropologists to link wonder and religious faith as phenomena origi-
nating in an enhanced human faculty for “agency detection.”⁷⁶ According to these
theories, wonder arose—like beliefs in supernatural beings—as a byproduct of an
evolutionarily conditioned human tendency to ascribe animate agency to unex-
pected events in the external environment.⁷⁷ In short, evolution primed human
beings to sense something lying “behind” the visible world. From these roots in a
survival instinct, wonder developed into a complex emotional response to inex-
plicable or inexpressible phenomena, including natural beauty.⁷⁸ Wonder “arrests
our active will,” encouraging a contemplative stance open to the existence of
meanings behind the physical world and beyond the grasp of reason.⁷⁹ In a similar
argument, psychologist Nico Frijda describes wonder as a “passive, receptive
mode of attention,” involving a “forgetful relaxation” of the body into a state
akin to that of religious devotion.⁸⁰
These accounts of a passive, though attentive receptivity to external phenomena
echo some of Miłosz’s descriptions of his poetic faculty. In the late 1950s, he looks
back at the inspirations of his earliest writing in the mid-1930s as follows:
I had such an extreme receptivity to external stimuli that every detail engraved
itself in my memory with all its color and solidity; at the same time, like a lunatic,
I was a passive instrument of another power that operated from somewhere
inside, that was at once me and not me. There was nothing to do but submit.⁸¹
⁷⁵ Czesław Miłosz, Native Realm, 85. ⁷⁶ Fuller, Spirituality in the Flesh, 54.
⁷⁷ Various scholars have posited a notion of “hyperactive agency detection” as the basis for belief in
the supernatural, arguing that evolutionary advantage ensured human brains developed a particular
sensitivity to the possible existence of unseen animate threats. See Boyer, Religion Explained, 145;
Barrett, Why Would Anyone Believe in God?, 31–2; Fuller, Spirituality in the Flesh, 16–18, 158.
⁷⁸ Fuller, Spirituality in the Flesh, 54. ⁷⁹ Fuller, Spirituality in the Flesh, 68–9.
⁸⁰ Nico H. Frijda, The Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 19.
⁸¹ Miłosz, Native Realm, 179.
  :      95
These recollections of possession by an external force unite poetic practice with

religious intuitions. As Miłosz specifically explains later in the same account, the
writing of poetry springs from the feeling of “wonder” (“podziw”) and an accom-
panying faith in the “layers of being” concealed behind the visible or tangible
universe.⁸² These feelings do not imply any specific form of religiosity, but rather a
generalized sense that another dimension exists, that there is something behind,
within, beneath, or beyond the physical things of the world, that the world has a
“lining.” This attitude is potentially congenial to a Christian poetry of praise
before the Creation of God, but Miłosz’s poetic wonder more often remains
agnostic. When it is Christian at all, it tends to be unorthodox.⁸³ On certain
occasions, its expression even bears pantheistic or pagan overtones, as the poetic
speaker pays homage to the beauty of an ever-regenerating earth—for instance, in
the early Three Winters (Trzy zimy, 1936).⁸⁴
According to Robert Fuller, wonder is awakened by natural phenomena, and
connected in this way to religious experience. More broadly, he posits a basic
connection between wonder at natural beauty and “the capacity for metaphysical
thought.”⁸⁵ In its mysterious elaboration of the underlying faculty to detect causal
agency in the material world, wonder stimulates thinking that strains beyond the
limitations of the purely physical universe, while also suggesting the idea of a
greater unity to which the subject belongs. In Miłosz’s account, his own youthful
religiosity was precisely of this innate or instinctive type: “With my feeling of
being immersed in a great whole, I was, as they say, religious to the core.”⁸⁶ Later,
he describes the same faculty as an “inbuilt” and archaic source of all human belief
in the supernatural, so that “to believe in tales about ghosts is as easy for us as it
was for our ancestors thousands of years ago.”⁸⁷
In one of his final poems, entitled “Presence” (“Obecność”), Miłosz once again
characterizes his early religiosity as an inborn tendency to detect the existence of
an unseen agent behind the material things of the world. The “presence” cannot
initially be named, and the speaker adopts a position of neutrality toward the truth
claims of conflicting religions. His cultural milieu as a child in Lithuania privileges
a Christian meaning, but he imagines how easily other systems of belief might find
validation in the same basic feeling. From these reflections, he concludes with the
statement of a pantheist, a syncretist, or a religious comparatist: “Yet in truth I felt
their Presence, all of them, gods and demons, / As if rising within one enormous
⁸² Miłosz, Native Realm, 280.

⁸³ For instance, in his famous Blakean prophecy of apocatastasis—or the restoration of all material
things—in the final sections of From the Rising of the Sun (NCP 330–1 [W 681–2]).
⁸⁴ Nathan and Quinn draw on Miłosz’s own interpretation from his History of Polish Literature to
assert that “many of Miłosz’s poems of the Zagary period are tributes to pantheism, celebrations of the
renewal of earth.” See Leonard Nathan and Arthur Quinn, The Poet’s Work: An Introduction to Czesław
Miłosz (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 10.
⁸⁵ Fuller, Spirituality in the Flesh, 56. ⁸⁶ Miłosz, Native Realm, 88.
⁸⁷ Czesław Miłosz, Piesek przydrożny (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Znak, 1997), 126.
96  ’    
unknowable Being”⁸⁸ [“Co prawda czułem Obecność ich wszystkich, bogów i

demonów, / Jakby unoszących się wewnątrz jednej ogromnej niepoznawalnej
Istoty” (W 1302)]. This abiding “presence” makes itself known to the senses of a
young boy in ecstatic motion, running barefoot through gardens on the banks of
the River Niewiaża, where Miłosz himself was born. The contact with this
“presence” among the trees is physical and tangible. The boy feels it with and in
his moving body: “The air was full of it, it touched me, it held me close. / It spoke to
me through the scents of grass, the flute voice of the oriole, the twitter of swallows”
[“Pełno jej było w powietrzu, dotykała, obejmowała mnie. / Przemawiała do mnie
zapachami trawy, fletowym głosem wilki, ćwirem jaskółek”].
The apparent pantheism of this late poem has literary antecedents in
Romanticism.⁸⁹ Yet Miłosz also seems to reach a poetic expression of something
approaching a non-reductive version of the “naturalist” thesis of religion. In short,
human beings—and children in particular—have a natural propensity to suppose
or accept the existence of unseen, “supernatural” powers.⁹⁰ This tendency arises
together with the emotion of wonder that provokes metaphysical thinking. Of
course, Miłosz does not talk about the evolutionary development of a faculty of
agency detection. Indeed, he would doubtless have rejected any reductive versions
of such theories. Yet he clearly assumes that religious feelings are natural—at least
for himself—and that they arise from bodily responses to the natural world, and
from a deep sense of belonging to it.⁹¹ Intimations of transcendence are accessible
through the physical experience of rapture at the beauty of the earth.
6. Morality and Meaning in the Body
Miłosz’s instinctive notion of bodily faith is closely linked with health, physical
vigor, and, to some extent, youth, as he suggests in Unattainable Earth: “My piety
is perhaps just the gratitude of a benign body, for breath, for the rhythm of the
blood, for everything” [“Moja pobożność jest być może wdzięcznością pogodnego
ciała, za oddech, za rytm krwi, za wszystko” (W 851)]. From this point of view,
Miłosz proposes that faith in God and in the ultimate goodness of the world are
directly related to the vital strength of the body. As he writes earlier, in The Land
⁸⁸ Miłosz, Selected and Last Poems, 273.

⁸⁹ For instance, Samuel Taylor Coleridge writes of a “world soul” that permeates all of nature as a
universal “presence.” See Thomas McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1969). Also see M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution
in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971).
⁹⁰ See Justin L. Barrett, Born Believers: The Science of Children’s Religious Belief (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 2012).
⁹¹ Ewa Bieńkowska describes Miłosz as “anima naturaliter religiosa,” though she tends to emphasize
the importance of the “immortal soul” rather than the body in his work. See Ewa Bieńkowska, W
ogrodzie ziemskim: Książka o Miłoszu (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Sic!, 2004), 44–50.
  :      97
of Ulro, “When my guardian angel (who resides in an internalized external space)

is triumphant, I am perfectly at ease because I am surrounded by a divine
protection, my health is good, I feel within me the rush of a mighty rhythm.”⁹²
This internal rhythm of blood rushing through the healthy body in harmony with
the external rhythms of nature evokes the presence of a guiding providence.
Miłosz lived to the age of ninety-three, for the most part enjoying very good
health. At times, this bodily endurance seems to astonish or embarrass him,
especially in the valedictory reflections of his last poems. He describes a sense of
guilt or “shame” at his longevity (W 1315), comparing his own good fortune with
the fates of those who died from “slightly weaker hearts” or who perished in the
camps of Auschwitz or Vorkuta: “I don’t see in this any merit of mine. /
Providence shelters dimwits and artists” [“Nie widzę żadnej w tym mojej
zasługi. / Opatrzność chroni głupków i artystów” (W 1311)].⁹³ In “Orpheus and
Eurydice” (“Orfeusz i Eurydyka”)—a poem written in 2002 on the death of his
second wife, Carol Thigpen (1944–2002)—the sense of separation from other
human beings through his own vitality finds an even more personal expression,
as the poet-speaker visits the underworld in search of his lost partner:
Thronging shadows surrounded him.

He recognized some of the faces.
He felt the rhythm of his blood.
He felt strongly his life with its guilt.
And he was afraid to meet those to whom he had done harm.⁹⁴
[Otaczały go twarze tłoczących się cieni. / Niektóre rozpoznawał. Czuł

rytm swojej krwi. / Czuł mocno swoje życie razem z jego winą / I bał się
spotkać tych, którym wyrządził zło. (W 1296)]
As friends and loved ones die around him, and his own body slowly begins to take
its leave of his mind, Miłosz becomes more pessimistic about the body’s potential.
In this mood, the “rhythm of the blood” may appear as an amoral force of nature,
strong in the poet himself for inexplicable reasons unrelated to any hierarchy of
human or higher values. However, in other poems, the circulation of the blood,
bodily health, and the structure of the body are all closely connected with certain
understandings of morality. The body appears as the reflection or source of moral
ideas, generating the affective framework and vocabulary of their expression. Even
at the age of eighty, Miłosz’s continued vigor allows him to link a concept of “the
good” with both bodily health and erotic delectation:
⁹² Miłosz, The Land of Ulro, 246. ⁹³ Miłosz, Selected and Last Poems, 291, 275.
⁹⁴ Czesław Miłosz, “Orpheus and Eurydice,” in Miłosz, Selected and Last Poems, 260–1.
98  ’    
What is good? After a long drive water in a pool and a sauna.

Lovemaking and falling asleep, embraced, your legs touching hers.
Mist in the morning, translucent, announcing a sunny day. (NCP 534)
[Co dobre? Woda basenu i sauna po wielu milach podróży. / Kochanie

się i sen w objęciu z dotykaniem się nóg. / Mgła o poranku jasna, bo
zaczyna się dzień słoneczny. (W 1005)]
This poem is not just a celebration of carnal pleasures. It also gives intimations of a
vision locating a sense of “the good,” and—by extension—of morality, in the
body’s needs and sensations. Here, Miłosz shares certain assumptions with the
recent perspectives of embodied mind theory—in particular, with the influential
work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. The two American researchers argue
that human beings express morality in a limited set of metaphors, all of which are
strongly rooted in bodily feelings and experience. They place a particular emphasis
on sensations of “physical wellbeing” as the wellspring of these metaphors,
including conceptions of health, purity, strength, light, balance, wealth, nurtur-
ance, protection, and beauty.⁹⁵ Health is the basic notion underlying all these
conceptions, so that—according to Lakoff and Johnson—“we understand moral
well-being in general by means of one particular aspect of it, health.”⁹⁶ In a poem
published in 1984, Miłosz concisely expresses very similar arguments on the
bodily origins of morality, emphasizing his own key metaphor of pulsing blood:
Comprehension of good and evil is given in the running of the blood.

In a child’s nestling close to its mother, she is security and warmth,
In night fears when we are small, in dread of the beast’s fangs and in
the terror of dark rooms,
In youthful infatuations where childhood delight finds completion.
And should we discredit the idea for its modest origins?
Or should we say plainly that good is on the side of the living
And evil on the side of a doom that lurks to devour us?
Yes, good is an ally of being and the mirror of evil is nothing,
Good is brightness, evil darkness, good high, evil low,
According to the nature of our bodies, of our language. (NCP 418)
[Poznanie dobra i zła jest nam dane w samym biegu krwi. / W tuleniu
się dziecka do matki, bo w niej bezpieczeństwo i ciepło. / W strachach
nocnych, kiedy byliśmy mali, w lęku przed kłami zwierząt i ciemnym
pokojem, / W młodzieńczych zakochaniach, kiedy spełnia się dziecinna
⁹⁵ George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge
to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 291–2, 311.
⁹⁶ Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 308.
  :      99
lubość. / I czyż tak skromne początki obrócimy przeciwko idei? / Czy

raczej powiemy, że dobro jest po stronie żywych, / A zło po stronie
zagłady, która czyha, żeby nas pożreć? / Tak, dobro jest jasność, zło
ciemność, dobro jest wysokość, zło niskość / Wedle przyrody ciał
naszych, naszego języka. (W 803)]
Miłosz ascribes feelings of faith and “piety” to a sense of gratitude for a healthy
and vigorous body. However, he also shows a strong awareness of the way in
which the language to convey moral ideas is shaped by the very structure of the
body and the demands of physical wellbeing. The nature of our language reflects
the nature of our bodies, and both together shape our notions of “good and evil.”
In 1969, in Visions from San Francisco Bay, Miłosz asserts that “all our metaphors
revolve around sensations of above and below, darkness and light, greenery, fire,
water.”⁹⁷ These linguistic metaphors are “symbols” collectively imposed on
human beings by their shared physiological construction, forming a bodily species
memory that “circulates through us with our blood.” Miłosz regularly returns to
the pulsing of the blood as a sign of life, health, and wellbeing, but the metaphors
of “above” and “below” are also crucial to his reflections. These concepts are
foundational for morality, and for traditional ideas of “vertical transcendence” as
an experience of climbing “over” or “above.”
The basic concepts of “above” and “below” expand into a series of metaphorical
oppositions, including “high” and “low,” “up” and “down,” “superior” and “inferior,”
“elevated” and “base,” “exalted” and “debased.” According to the adherents of embod-
iment theory, these metaphors originate in bodily experiences and in the structure of
the body. Indeed, Lakoff and Johnson suggest that spatial or “orientational” metaphors
represent our most fundamental concepts, and that all such metaphors are based on
physical experience. For instance, the metaphorical connection between “more” and
“up” originates in the experience that an increase in quantity often correlates with an
increase in height or verticality.⁹⁸ In their earlier book on metaphor, Lakoff and
Johnson characterize the basis for the primary moral identification that “good is up”
as rooted in the bodily nature of health, happiness, control, and life itself. We lie down
when we are sick or dead; we stand up when we are alive, healthy, and in control.⁹⁹
Moreover, the “higher” parts of the body are responsible for thought and emotion,
while the “lower” parts are associated with unclean biological processes.
Physical notions of health and wellbeing thus generate the moral resonance of
spatial metaphors like “up” and “down.” From the same dichotomy arises the idea
of heaven, or a “Kingdom of God,” which is both physically and morally “higher”
⁹⁷ Miłosz, Visions from San Francisco Bay, 13.

⁹⁸ Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 54. Also see George Lakoff and Mark Johnson,
Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 14–21.
⁹⁹ Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 16–17.
100  ’    
than the earthly realm.¹⁰⁰ Vertical “transcendence” is an experience or process

taking place within a spatially organized moral universe. From this perspective,
the final aim of the human being is to move upward, “climbing above” himself or
herself and the world in both physical and moral terms. This notion of transcend-
ence gives rise to systems of thought positing an incorporeal essence of the human
being—for instance, a soul—which aspires to depart the body in an upward
movement toward heaven and salvation. The work of Lakoff, Johnson, and others
suggests that the origin of this set of metaphors for rejecting the body as lowly,
immoral, and unclean are themselves fundamentally bodily in origin. The desire
for vertical transcendence is ultimately a desire for infinite health and physical
wellbeing—in Miłosz’s poetic terms, for an eternal pulsing of the blood.
The thesis of the bodily origins of spatial metaphors at the root of morality has
important implications for Miłosz’s broader contentions about the negative influ-
ence of the scientific revolution. In his “Six Lectures in Verse” (“Sześć wykładów
wierszem,” 1985), he laments that modern human beings “have lost the up, the
down, the right, the left, heavens, abysses” (NCP 498) [“straciliśmy górę i dół,
prawo i lewo, niebiosa, otchłanie” (W 969)]. Disorientation is a defining charac-
teristic of modernity. In Visions from San Francisco Bay, he describes a funda-
mental disruption of morality in the incongruity between its linguistic expression
through old spatial metaphors and newly discovered realities about the universe,
which contradict the assumptions of such metaphorical dichotomies as “high” and
“low.” In a chapter entitled “Religion and Space,” he lays out the central problem:
My imagination is not like that of someone who lived when Thomas Aquinas’s
world view was reflected in Dante’s symbols, though its fundamental need—to
reduce everything to spatial relations—is the same. Space, however, has under-
gone certain disturbances. To begin where I am: the earth instead of being a
stable, solid foundation, slips out from under my feet. . . . I lose the possibility of
dividing things into “above” and “below.” Drawing a vertical line above me, I will
not reach the boundary where the world ends and heaven’s spheres begin to
circle the throne of God. Neither will any plumb line allow me to bore deeply
enough through the geological strata to come upon the caverns of hell. A seething
infinity surrounds me on every side and eludes the powers of my mind.¹⁰¹
In Dante’s time, the corporeal basis of moral metaphors was ostensibly coherent
with the preeminent vision of a universe hierarchically arranged according to a
“vertical” understanding of space. As Ezra Pound puts it, Dante had a theological
¹⁰⁰ Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 24.

¹⁰¹ Miłosz, Visions from San Francisco Bay, 30–1.
  :      101
“Aquinas map” with which to order his poetic world.¹⁰² The metaphorical
identification “good is up” resonated with understandings of both the body and
the universe. In Miłosz’s time, this harmonious relationship has broken down, so
that the bodily moral categories of “up” and “down” are now entirely relative
terms bearing no direct connection to the broader reality of the cosmos. Modern
human beings have experienced “the collapse of hierarchical space, and when they
fold their hands and lift their eyes, ‘up’ no longer exists.”¹⁰³ The earth is not
“below” a heaven inhabited by God, but rather surrounded on all sides by the
infinite, expanding, undifferentiated space of the universe.
In Miłosz’s view, this collapse of a hierarchically organized vertical dimension
has had dramatic consequences for religion, spirituality, and morality: “Let no one
say that religion can manage without such primitive directions to orient people.
Not the theologians’ dogma, but human images of the universe, have determined
the vigor of religions.”¹⁰⁴ As it turns out, the physical universe does not conform to
the shape of the human body or to the moral and religious demands that spring
from it. For Miłosz, this new reality reinforces a subjective sense of alienation from
the world. In the previous chapter, I discussed his conception of disembodied
human consciousness as a foreign presence in the universe. Yet this alienation
may originate in the incoherence between the demands of the body and modern
scientific visions of the external world. In a poem entitled “To Mrs. Professor in
Defense of My Cat’s Honor and Not Only” (“Do Pani Profesor w obronie honoru
kota i nie tylko”), Miłosz intertwines these apparently different forms of aliena-
tion, connecting consciousness, morality, and the body with an otherworldly,
though still human God:
Our consciousness and our conscience

Alone in the pale anthill of galaxies
Put their hope in a humane God.
Who cannot but feel and think,
Who is kindred to us by his warmth and movement,
For we are, as he told us, similar to Him. (NCP 631–2)
[Nasza świadomość i nasze sumienie / Samotne w bladym mrowisku

galaktyk / Nadzieję pokładają w ludzkim Bogu. / Który nie może nie
czuć i nie myśleć, / Który jest nam pokrewny i ciepłem, i ruchem, / Bo
Jemu, jak oznajmił, jesteśmy podobni. (W 1095–6)]
¹⁰² Ezra Pound, The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941, ed. D. D. Paige (New York: New
Directions Books, 1971), 323.
¹⁰³ Miłosz, Visions from San Francisco Bay, 32.
¹⁰⁴ Miłosz, Visions from San Francisco Bay, 32.
102  ’    
In the face of a materialist vision that would reduce human beings to insects in
a galactic anthill, it is precisely by means of living matter—in “warmth and
movement”—that humans can “transcend” their insignificance and mortality
through identification with the divine. The hope that human “consciousness
and conscience” place in the “humane god” is not conditioned here by “neo-
Manichaean” ideas of pure mind or spirit straining beyond the material world.
Nor does it rely on disembodied consciousness or philosophical abstractions like
Schopenhauer’s “pure subject” of knowledge. Instead, the God of this poem is
“kindred to us” through bodily experience. In the original Polish, the word
“pokrewny” is even more evocative, since it literally means “blood-related,”
from “krew,” meaning blood. Humans are joined to divinity through the body
and blood, so that incarnation here takes on an opposite meaning from the
negative expulsion into matter depicted in the “neo-Manichaean” vision. In effect,
Miłosz implies a positively corporeal model of human identity, whereby morality,
religious faith and a speculative connection with God all originate in the body.
7. Alienation and the Incarnate God
Miłosz’s instinctive religiosity fundamentally denotes a humanization of the

natural world. In Unattainable Earth, he describes his own innate need to ascribe
meaning to nature by filling it with invisible agency: “If I were to find myself alone
on a desert island, I would probably multiply gods, forces and powers, benign or
hostile, and I would commune only with them” [“Gdybym znalazł się na bezludnej
wyspie, prawdopodobnie namnożyłbym bogów przychylnych albo niechętnych,
mocy, potęg i tylko z nimi bym obcował” (W 901)].¹⁰⁵ This imaginative enchant-
ment of the world somehow makes it more of a home, permeating it with human
meanings. Yet this poetic move does not necessarily imply pantheism or demon-
ism. In an earlier poem, the semi-autobiographical speaker ties the familiarly
instinctive sense of a “presence” in nature with a traditionally Christian symbol-
ism of an incarnate God:
If I accomplished anything, it was only when I, a pious boy, chased after

the disguises of the lost Reality.
After the real presence of divinity in our flesh and blood which are at the
same time bread and wine. (NCP 588)
¹⁰⁵ Translation my own. The passage is not translated in the English edition of Miłosz’s New and
Collected Poems.
  :      103
[Jeśli coś zrobiłem, to tylko, pobożny chłopczyk, ścigając pod

przebraniem utraconą Rzeczywistość. / Prawdziwą obecność Bóstwa w
naszym ciele i krwi, które są jednocześnie chlebem i winem. (W 1058)]
Here, the speaker feels the presence of a deity imbued with Christian Eucharistic
metaphors in the external world and in his own body. The reference to the
theological concept of the “real presence” perhaps suggests the Catholic dimen-
sion of the image, in contrast with some Protestant perspectives. Miłosz’s poetic
rehabilitation of the body takes the form of an explicit return to a core Christian
emphasis on incarnation, both of the essential human self and of God. He thus
echoes and anticipates other modern Christian projects to recover more embodied
forms of religiosity from the alienation of the disembodied self. He argues that the
Christian God is literally “blood-related” (“pokrewny”) to human beings, so that
the poetic subject in rare moments of rapture “cannot distinguish” the deity from
the rhythmic motion of his own blood. Miłosz is no mystic; he does not literally
describe encounters with divinity in his writings. Nevertheless, he insists that the
hypothetical relation of the human being with God inheres not so much in the
incorporeal “soul” as in the individual body.¹⁰⁶
Miłosz presents this view in dialectical form in “The Metaphysical Pause”
(“Metafizyczna pauza”), a short text written in 1980:
Q. Is God thus understood not imperceptibly identical with the very rhythm of
the blood and is He not present in the entrails, in the muscles, in the savoring of
oneself which is like the stretching of a cat?
A. One must begin with the body, for the body is a wonder of nature in its
transience and incomprehensible particularity. By immediately reaching too
high, how can we properly judge our consent to disease or misfortune? For
then the body is against us.¹⁰⁷
Miłosz castigates himself for “reaching too high” toward imaginary models of a
pure, spiritual essence. Such dualistic fantasies make earthbound, fleshly reality
unbearable, evoking the bitter longing for an immaterial “heavenly home”
expressed by his Manichaean personas. In “The Metaphysical Pause,” however,
Miłosz proposes that humans must accept the heterogeneous condition of their
existence as “consciousness entangled in animality.” Yet he still insists that even
the physical human being is somehow “alien in the universe,” and opposed to
“Mother Nature,” thus suggesting a hostility to the world that stretches the limits
¹⁰⁶ As Dembińska-Pawelec puts it, “the presence of God in man manifests itself immanently and
physically.” See Dembińska-Pawelec, “Poezja jest sztuką rytmu,” 246.
¹⁰⁷ Czesław Miłosz, Metafizyczna pauza (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Znak, 1989), 75.
104  ’    
of Christian orthodoxy.¹⁰⁸ Indeed, Miłosz implies here and in various other works
that the human subject feels alien to the world precisely as a corporeal entity, and
not merely as incorporeal consciousness, spirit, or soul.
From this perspective, the circulation of the blood becomes a symbol of the
distinction between human beings and the inanimate world. In “City Without a
Name” (“Miasto bez imienia,” 1968), Miłosz couches this opposition as a stark
contrast between living blood and dead rock, between human vitality and lifeless
mineral nature: “In Death Valley salt gleams from a dried-up lake bed. / Defend,
defend yourself, says the tick-tock of the blood. / From the futility of solid rock, no
wisdom” (NCP 215) [“W Dolinie Śmierci błyszczy sól na dnie suchego jeziora. /
Broń się, broń się, mówi tykot krwi. / Z litery skały nadaremnej żadna mądrość”
(W 555)]. The “tick-tock” of the blood announces the temporal finitude of the
individual body’s existence against stony nature. Elsewhere, in “An Appeal”
(“Wezwanie”), the poetic speaker says that the circulation of “red-hot” blood
through the “internal planet” (“wewnętrzna planeta”) of the individual human
body constitutes the sign that he or she is not “in harmony” (“w harmonii”) with
external nature (NCP 268) [W 619]. In “To Mrs. Professor In Defense of My Cat’s
Honor and Not Only,” the speaker explains that “warmth and movement” not
only relate human beings “by blood” to God, but also alienate them from the
indifferent physical universe.
In these works, Miłosz appears to develop the very opposite idea from that
summarized earlier in my discussion of “wonder” (“zachwyt”). In the poems
expressing wonder, the heartbeat suggests a deep harmony with the world, a
sense of the subject’s oneness with the material universe. In the opposing set of
poems, the circulation of the blood is a sign of alienation or “maladjustment.” The
second attitude unexpectedly combines a strong emphasis on corporeality with
the basic shape of the world-negating “Manichaean” myth as Miłosz conveys it. In
this variant, the human being identifies with the transcendent God in separation
from the world not as pure mind or spirit, but rather as an embodied self,
differentiated by the rhythmic pulsation of blood. In short, Miłosz presents at
least two contradictory visions of bodily transcendence. In some poems, the
vigorous flow of blood in a healthy body gives access to horizontal transcendence
through a self-surpassing harmony with the broader rhythms of nature. In other
works, a very bodily feeling of “maladjustment” generates intimations of vertical
transcendence in a future existence beyond the physical universe, and in a relation
with an otherworldly God.
The symbolism of blood also carries a dual significance—both horizontal and
vertical. In a certain sense, Miłosz returns here to the early influence of his cousin
Oscar Milosz’s “alchemical” or “cosmic” theories of the blood, suggesting an
¹⁰⁸ Miłosz, Metafizyczna pauza, 75–6.

  :      105
analogical relation between the “down here” and “up there,” between the human
body and the heavenly realm. Czesław Miłosz specifically imagines “heaven” as a
place of the continued “movement of blood” (“ruch krwi”), but of a “higher
degree” (NCP 465) [“wyższego stopnia” (W 922)]. From this point of view, the
experience of horizontal transcendence generated by the sense of “wonder” and
harmony with the natural world gives signs of correspondence with the vertical
“other side.” Once again, Miłosz supposes a kind of intersection of the horizontal
and vertical axes of transcendence. The body transcends mere consciousness,
opening visions of a realm above and beyond individual, delimited existence.
The instinctive connection of the embodied subject with the physical world
anticipates the unveiling of its hidden “lining” and a future encounter with God.
Since Miłosz is not a visionary or a mystic, these notions remain largely specula-
tive, and sometimes even half-ironic. Nevertheless, they underpin the most vivid
expressions of religious faith—or at least hope—in his oeuvre.
Miłosz’s writings also include certain variants of an entirely “horizontal”
transcendence—for instance, in moments of rapture before natural beauty and
in the individual’s sense of unity with the rhythms of the world. However, these
purely immanent or material forms of transcendence are of relatively limited
significance. In contrast with exclusively secular definitions, Miłosz’s engagement
with this way of seeing does not usually lead, for instance, to a purely environ-
mental or ecological spirituality.¹⁰⁹ Instead, he remains hopeful that traditional
ideas of immortality and the infinite may still be plausible in the face of mortality
and finite existence. His manifestations of “wonder” partially fit secular under-
standings of this-worldly transcendence as personal transformation. Yet the main
tendency of these experiences in his poetry is to point to something “beyond.”
Accordingly, Miłosz opposes any radical theological notions of God’s total
emptying of himself into immanence, which turn the “death” of the transcendent
divinity into a triumphant sacralization of natural reality.¹¹⁰ Superficially, one
might wonder whether this is what he is getting at when he describes an enchanted
world filled with a mysterious “presence” linked to the human subject through the
heart’s pulsation. However, his explicit critique of the “death of God” theology
makes it clear that his intentions are very far from any post-Christian identifica-
tion of God with the world.¹¹¹ His understanding of God generally remains
within the mainstream of Christian traditions, positing the incarnation of an
¹⁰⁹ For examples of these secular forms of “horizontal transcendence,” see Johnson, The Meaning of
the Body, 14.
¹¹⁰ These ideas are sometimes characterized as reflecting a kind of “post-transcendence.” See John
D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon, eds., Transcendence and Beyond: A Postmodern Inquiry
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 2–3.
¹¹¹ Miłosz specifically links the “death of God” theology—with particular mention of Thomas
Altizer—with deadly “European nihilism.” See Czesław Miłosz, “Dostoevsky and Swedenborg,” Slavic
Review 34, no. 2 (June 1975): 316–17.
106  ’    
otherworldly deity rather than the deification of the natural body or world.¹¹²
Once again, Charles Taylor, a fellow Roman Catholic, supplies the closest philo-
sophical analogy for Miłosz’s poetic ambition to restore the spiritual significance
of the flesh without discounting the existence of a higher reality beyond it.
Like Miłosz, the Canadian philosopher acknowledges the possibility of purely
this-worldly forms of transcendence within the “immanent frame” of modernity.
However, he makes a strong distinction between “closed” and “open” under-
standings of this frame. The closed variant assumes that nothing beyond the
material can exist, while the open approach—which Taylor strongly favors—
admits at least the possibility of a dimension beyond immanence. Miłosz’s experi-
ences of horizontal transcendence most often cohere with the open interpretation.
His diverse poetic accounts of this experience remain amenable to intersections
with verticality and to the existence of an otherworldly God. Yet the path to this
traditional dimension of transcendence often leads through the body and blood.
8. The Limits of Embodied Spirituality
In this chapter, I have shown that Miłosz frequently locates the core of the human
self in the body, and that he links this corporeal essence with the possibility of
religious belief. In multiple poems and essays, Miłosz describes faith as funda-
mentally natural and instinctive. He demonstrates that morality and other systems
of human meaning find their sources in the body and in bodily metaphors. Finally,
he partially founds his conceptions of God and of the human relation with God on
the embodied dimensions of the self.
In Miłosz’s poetry, isolated moments of ecstatic bodily experience suggest a
“standing outside” of thought and consciousness through physical connection
with the material world. The resulting intuition of another dimension of reality
constitutes a source of both joy and religious faith. Yet this positive condition is
always temporary, and perhaps even illusory. Feelings of wonder and love for the
world are accompanied by the tragic knowledge that all things flow and eventually
pass away. The specters of bodily pain and spiritual depression constantly threaten
to return, especially as the individual body degenerates in old age. In this sense, the
vistas opened by a deeper commitment to incarnate existence offer only a partial
solution to the problem of suffering in the world and to the reality of mortality.
Miłosz seeks intimations of the infinite in embodied existence, but this maximalist
hope can never be fully answered as long as there is no solution to the ultimate
problem of death.
¹¹² In spite of doubts about his putative “Manichaeism,” Father Jerzy Szymik writes approvingly of
the Catholic orthodoxy of Miłosz’s “Christology.” See Jerzy Szymik, Problem teologicznego wymiaru
dzieła literackiego Czesława Miłosza (Katowice: Księgarnia Świętego Jacka, 1996), 295–8.
  :      107
For Miłosz, the insoluble dilemma lies in the demands of the strong self, which
cannot accept its finite identity in the material world: “What does a creature that
calls itself ‘I’ want for itself? It wants to be. Quite a demand!”¹¹³ In most of his
poetry, this “creature” is explicitly masculine, loosely identified with the poet
himself. However, in some of his works, he expands his horizons to embrace a
very different kind of bodily self: open, fluid, and symbolically “feminine.”
Through this gendered type of subjectivity, Miłosz explores a more radical form
of horizontal transcendence, implying the destabilization and even disintegration
of the self. Miłosz’s constructions of “feminine” perspectives are strongly essen-
tializing, but they also include a subversive potential that may offer unexpected
answers to his deepest questions.
¹¹³ Czesław Miłosz, “Shestov, or the Purity of Despair,” in To Begin Where I Am: Selected Essays, eds.
Bogdana Carpenter and Madeline G. Levine (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 264.
4
The Fluid Self
Woman, Body, and the Flesh of the World
1. Miłosz’s “Feminism”
From the earliest phase until the late religious turn, the poetry of Czesław Miłosz is
consistently and profoundly self-reflexive. One of the most frequently recurring
images in his work features a poetic subject observing his own face in the mirror,
establishing the alienation of the self as consciousness from its own body. Yet
Miłosz’s mirror scenes also have a strongly intersubjective dimension. The poetic
subject’s bodily presence in front of the mirror is interchangeable with an infinite
number of other bodies, both men and women, with their self-reflexive egos: “So
strange, the self-loving ‘I’ of men and women that adores itself in mirrors”¹
[“Przedziwne, siebie kochające Ja, mężczyzn i kobiet, adorujące siebie w lustrze”
(W 1243)]. This multiplication serves to intensify the effect of alienation, as
subjugation to universal biological processes exposes to ridicule the ego’s desire
to exalt itself over the human herd.
For the most part, the self-reflexive poetic subject in Miłosz’s work is male.
However, in a significant number of poems, the mirror scene plays out in a female
version.² This variant usually involves the male poetic consciousness observing a
naked woman as she inspects her own body in the mirror. These scenes appear
from Miłosz’s earliest work, where they often introduce the pathos of human
vanity in the face of time’s destructive power: “Standing naked in front of her
mirror, the woman / Lightly wipes away two tears with her kerchief / And darkens
her eyebrows with henna” (NCP 17) [“Przed lustrem nago stojąc, dwie łzy / lekko
wyciera kobieta chusteczką / i farbą przyciemnia brew” (W 76)]. In most cases, the
women are young and attractive, but they also appear in old age: “Beautifully fetid
lilies, / Rattles of throaty laughter if you shake them, / . . . Afterward they comb
their hair a long time before the mirror” (NCP 251) [“Lilie piękne, ale smrodliwe, /
grzechotki gardłowego śmiechu, jeśli potrząsnąć” (W 453)]. Most strikingly,
¹ Czesław Miłosz, Second Space: New Poems, trans. Czesław Miłosz and Robert Hass (New York:
HarperCollins, 2004), 28.
² Some of this chapter’s interpretations are reworked and expanded versions of arguments first
presented in an article published in Slavic and East European Journal. See Stanley Bill, “Melting in the
Mirror: Woman, Body and Self in the Poetry of Czesław Miłosz,” Slavic and East European Journal 58,
no. 4 (Winter 2014): 645–62.
  : , ,       109
unlike the male mirror gazers, the women are usually touching their own bodies as
they behold them: “Chanteuses. I see now their satin underskirts / And black
panties with lace. Breasts, too big, too small, / Worries, touching themselves in
mirrors, tardy menses” (NCP 512) [“Szansonistki. Jakbym widział ich satynowe
halki / I czarne majtki koronką. Piersi, za małe, za duże, / Zmartwienia dotykań się
w lustrze, spóźnionego periodu” (W 954)]. Miłosz’s men just look, while his
women look and touch.
In this chapter, I will argue that some of Miłosz’s depictions of reflected female
bodies touching themselves evoke a distinctive understanding of the self. In place
of the fantasy of subjectivity as “pure seeing,” Miłosz sometimes embraces what he
characterizes as a “feminine” model of a self that occupies the uncertain territory
between subject and object, between touching and being touched. The gender
essentialism of these claims will demand close examination. However, I will also
show that Miłosz’s presentation of embodied “feminine” subjectivity suggests
access to a type of horizontal transcendence more radical than the vitalistic
integration with the material world discussed in the previous chapter. In certain
poems, when Miłosz’s male poetic speaker “enters” a female body in front of the
mirror, the strong version of the divided self begins to dissolve into a liberating,
though still ambivalent, communion with the material world.³ The resulting
transcendence of the self offers a solution to the alienation of consciousness
from a body that is both familiar and foreign, itself and not itself, self-same and
other.
Miłosz links this “porous” type of subjectivity both with certain highly tradi-
tional stereotypes of “femininity” and with the basic nature of his own poetic art.
He claims that poetry is “feminine” (“żeńska”), since—like the supposedly
“weaker” female subject—it “opens up and waits for a doer, a spirit, a daimon”
[“otwiera się i czeka na sprawcę, ducha, dajmoniona”].⁴ He asserts that poetry is
“unmanly,” for it demands a surrendering of the self as an “instrument” for
various voices.⁵ Accordingly, as poet, the male subject is “feminine,” passive,
receptive, guided by the emotion of “wonder” (“podziw”), and open to penetration
by external forces that shape the work he produces. In The Land of Ulro (Ziemia
Ulro, 1977), Miłosz uses Carl Jung’s conception of the “anima”⁶—the putatively
³ In a different context, Krzysztof Kłosiński has described “the experience of disindividuation” as an

important aspect of Miłosz’s understanding of poetry. See Krzysztof Kłosiński, Poezja żalu (Katowice:
Wydawnictwo Naukowe “Śląsk,” 2001), 132.
⁴ Czesław Miłosz, Road-side Dog (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 33; Czesław Miłosz,
Piesek przydrożny (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Znak, 1997), 60. For an application of Taylor’s idea of
“porous” subjectivity to Miłosz’s work, see Łukasz Tischner, “Miłosz and a Secular Age,” Cross Currents
61, no. 1 (2011): 63–71.
⁵ Miłosz, Road-side Dog, 34–5; Miłosz, Piesek przydrożny, 59–60.
⁶ Jung writes:
Although it seems as if the whole of our unconscious psychic life could be ascribed to the
anima, she is yet only one archetype among many. Therefore, she is not characteristic of the
110  ’    
feminine dimension of male consciousness—to characterize the basic nature of

the poetic imagination, thus establishing a conflict between “masculine” and
“feminine” aspects of himself.⁷ The masculine “ego” suppresses the feminine
aspect, while the “underground” presence of the “anima” in turn undermines
the ego’s unified integrity.
Miłosz suggests a biographical dynamic to this confrontation. According to his
own account, the “feminine side” was especially prevalent in the early part of his
career, tunneling an “escape route” out from under masculine oppression in the
lyrical, “unconscious” verse of his first collection, Three Winters (Trzy zimy, 1936).
Later, the masculine ego would assert its control through an increasingly discur-
sive poetic style. In this mode, Miłosz even expresses a specific desire to become a
strong, male “poet” (“poeta”) instead of a weak, “female poet” (“poetka”).⁸
However, in the last phase of his career, he claims that his feminine “anima” has
reasserted itself, breaking free of masculine control and expressing itself through a
growing emphasis on women and women’s perspectives.⁹ He makes this turn
toward the symbolically “feminine” explicit in a 1981 letter to Konstanty Jeleński:
“Like old Faust, I have become disgusted with book wisdom . . . . If there were once
misogynistic tendencies within me, I have now almost turned to feminism.”¹⁰
Miłosz’s declaration is ironic; he is clearly not a “feminist” in any orthodox
sense. As Anna Nasiłowska points out, feminism involves thinking from a per-
spective where “the woman is a subject,” while Miłosz’s women are largely silent
or present only as objectified bodies.¹¹ The poet himself confesses to “swinish
male reactions to feminism,” and attacks feminists for their supposed linguistic
unconscious in its entirety. She is only one of its aspects. This is shown by the very fact of
her feminity. What is not-I, not masculine, is most probably feminine, and because the not-I
is felt as not belonging to me and therefore as outside me, the anima-image is usually
projected upon women. Either sex is inhabited by the opposite sex up to a point.
See Carl Jung, “Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious,” in The Archetypes and the Collective
Unconscious, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 27.
⁷ Czesław Miłosz, The Land of Ulro, trans. Louis Iribarne (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2000), 183. He also feminizes William Blake’s male symbol of poetic imagination, Urthona, polonizing
the “a” ending in order to interpret the name as indicative of feminine gender. Miłosz, The Land of
Ulro, 183.
⁸ He attaches this apparently insulting identification to the older poet Julian Tuwim (1894–1953).
See Czesław Miłosz and Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, Portret podwójny: wykonany z listów, wierszów,
⁹ Miłosz, Road-side Dog, 14.
¹⁰ Czesław Miłosz and Konstanty A. Jeleński, Korespondencja (Warszawa: Fundacja Zeszytów
Literackich, 2011), 258.
¹¹ Anna Nasiłowska, “Women in the Poetry of Czesław Miłosz,” trans. Anna Warso, Teksty Drugie
1, Special English Edition (2013): 49. Nasiłowska also concedes that Miłosz shows “remarkable
openness to feminism.” Nasiłowska, “Women in the Poetry of Czesław Miłosz,” 33. Magdalene
Renouf points out that even the woman’s face very rarely appears in Miłosz’s poetry. See Magdalene
Renouf, “Eros, kobieta i Bóg,” in Miłosz i Miłosz, eds. Aleksander Fiut, Artur Grabowski and Łukasz
Tischner (Kraków: Księgarnia Akademicka, 2014), 474.
  : , ,       111
“censorship” in the name of equality.¹² His own self-avowed youthful misogyny

reveals itself in early letters to fellow poet Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, where he writes
of women with contempt.¹³ In the late “Treatise on Theology” (“Traktat teolo-
giczny,” 2001), woman is even responsible for man’s subjugation to nature,
physical existence, and death (W 1266).¹⁴ Indeed, throughout his career, Miłosz
constructs a set of dichotomies under broad, essentialized gender categories.
“Masculine” culture, art, mind, philosophy, action, idea, and logos take precedence
over “feminine” nature, passivity, corporeality, and materiality in a typical matrix
of “dual, hierarchized oppositions.”¹⁵ All these dichotomies have their origins in
diverse Western religious and philosophical traditions.¹⁶
In this chapter, however, I will argue that the order of these hierarchical
relations is not immutable in Miłosz’s poetry. I will elucidate several key moments
in which the valence of the hierarchy reverses, as a symbolically “feminine” form
of corporeal and non-rational subjectivity asserts itself over a metaphysical and
rational “masculine” self.¹⁷ Specifically, I will trace this shift through Miłosz’s
female mirror scenes, his development of a “feminine” philosophy of the body, his
ambivalent treatment of bodily fluids, and his representation of the erotic encoun-
ter with the female “other” as an experience of transcendence. Drawing on a host
of modern anti-Cartesian or feminist thinkers—in particular, Maurice Merleau-
¹² Czesław Miłosz, “W stronę kobiet,” Teksty Drugie 4–6, nos. 22–4 (1993): 9. In the same essay, he
“defends” Telimena, a female character from Adam Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz (1834), and writes
against domestic violence.
¹³ In short, his physical or amorous feelings for women supposedly interfere with his intellectual,
spiritual and artistic vocation. See Miłosz and Iwaszkiewicz, Portret podwójny, 13, 19, 21, 27. This
conflict takes religious form in the early poem “Wiersze dla opętanych” (“Verses for the Damned”),
which presents a bitter dialogue between lovers with a diabolical presence behind them (W 31–2).
¹⁴ Miłosz, Second Space, 56. In the broadest mythical terms, Miłosz consistently associates women
with “the earth.” See Czesław Miłosz and Renata Gorczyńska, Podróżny świata: rozmowy (Kraków:
¹⁵ See Hélène Cixous, “Sorties,” in New French Feminisms, eds. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de
Courtivron (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 91. Miłosz often conflates the gender
categories of “masculine” and “feminine” with biological distinctions between “male” and “female.”
According to Toril Moi, “when one pictures sex as pervasive, there can be no difference between male
and masculine, female and feminine, sex and gender.” See Toril Moi, What is a Woman? And Other
Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 14. It is also worth pointing out that the Polish
language does not distinguish between “sex” and “gender,” employing the word “płeć” for both. In
recent times, the English word “gender” has become more prevalent in Polish discourse, while “płeć
kulturowa” (“cultural sex”) and “płeć społeczna” (“social sex”) are also sometimes used.
¹⁶ Apart from biblical references, Miłosz also cites Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy, with its “fear
of Nature, fear of woman, who is revealed as a representative and an ally of the implacable order of the
world.” See Czesław Miłosz, Visions from San Francisco Bay, trans. Richard Lourie (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1982), 27.
¹⁷ This reversal might not imply a radical transformation, since the binary opposition itself remains
intact. Gayle Rubin argues strongly against this mere reversal of the hierarchy, which fails to address the
basic dichotomy: “But we are not only oppressed as women; we are oppressed by having to be women—
or men as the case may be. I personally feel that the feminist movement must dream of even more than
the elimination of the oppression of women. It must dream of the elimination of obligatory sexualities
and sex roles.” See Gayle Rubin, Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader (Durham: Duke University Press,
2011), 61.
112  ’    
Ponty, Julia Kristeva, Elizabeth Grosz, and Luce Irigaray—I will show Miłosz’s
proximity in certain moments to non-reductively materialist varieties of a purely
“horizontal” transcendence.
2. “The Same Other”: Woman in the Mirror
The most extensive of Miłosz’s female mirror scenes appears in the multi-part
poem La Belle Époque (Dla Heraklita, 1984–5), where the figure before the looking
glass is Gabriela Kunat, or “Ela,” the poet’s own first cousin once removed on his
mother’s side.¹⁸ Miłosz refers to Ela on multiple occasions throughout his poetic
career, generally in the context of a youthful fascination with her physical beauty.
Biographer Andrzej Franaszek even suggests that Ela and the young Czesław may
have been lovers as early as 1926 or 1927.¹⁹ Subsequently, her name would appear
in the dedication of an important early poem entitled “The Song” (“Pieśń”), in
which an anonymous female voice laments that she has nothing “except her body”
(NCP 7; W 61). Later, Ela returns in The Separate Notebooks (Osobny zeszyt,
1977–9), where her portrait “consorts” with a portrait of Arthur Schopenhauer
(NCP 370; W 732), seemingly as patrons of two opposing ways of perceiving the
world. Upon her death at Sopot in 1962, Miłosz addressed a poem to her with the
obfuscatory title of “Elegy to N. N.” (“Elegia dla N. N.”).²⁰ In La Belle Époque,
Miłosz’s explicitly male poetic consciousness enters his kinswoman’s body in an
imagined mirror scene dating back to 1903, eight years before the poet’s own birth:
And perhaps the community of our experiences, considerable, as we are

parts of the same species, is enough to make me for a short while a
fifteen-year-old Ela when she runs to meet a swelling, rustling wave of
the Atlantic? Or when she stands naked before a mirror, unplaits her
black tress, pretty and aware she is pretty, touches the brown disks on
her breasts and in a flash experiences a revelation which excludes her
from everything she had been taught: curtseying, bows, sailor’s collars,
petticoats, behavior at the table, governesses, sleeping cars, gentlemen
with their moustaches combed into spikes, women in corsets and
tournures, of whom one says either “ladies” or “cocottes,” the catechism,
the list of sins before confession, music lessons, French verbs, pretended
naiveté, politeness toward servants, knowledge of the amount of your
dowry. Revelation: it is not like that at all, in reality it is completely
different. One should not tell this to anybody, only to oneself. How good
it is to touch oneself and not to believe them even a bit, and everywhere,
¹⁸ The title of the full multi-part poem in Polish translates as “For Heraclitus.”
¹⁹ Andrzej Franaszek, Miłosz: Biografia (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Znak, 2011), 87–92.
²⁰ The poem was written in 1962, and published in 1974 in From the Rising of the Sun (Gdzie
wschodzi słońce i kędy zapada [NCP 266–7; W 616–17]).
  : , ,       113
in the sun, in the white clouds above the sea, in the rustling of the waves,
in one’s own body to feel this: completely different.
(NCP 474)
[I może uniwersalność naszych doznań, tak duża dlatego, że jesteśmy
cząstką tego samego ludzkiego rodu, wystarcza żebym przez chwilę był
piętnastoletnią Elą, wtedy kiedy biegnie na spotkanie wzbierającej,
szumiącej fali Atlantyku? Albo kiedy stoi nago przed lustrem, rozplata
czarny warkocz, śliczna, świadoma tego, że jest śliczna, dotyka brunat-
nych tarcz na piersiach i przez krótko doznaje olśnienia, które wyłącza
ją ze wszystkiego, czego ją nauczono: dygnięć, ukłonów, marynarskich
kołnierzy, halek, zachowań się przy stole, guwernantek, wagonów
sypialnych, panów z zaczesanymi w szpic wąsami, kobiet w gorsetach
i tiurniurach, o których mowiło się: damy albo: kokoty, katechizmu,
listy grzechów przed spowiedzią, lekcji muzyki, francuskich słówek,
udawanej naiwności, grzeczności wobec służby, wiedzy o swoim posagu.
Olśnienie: to wcale nie tak, bo naprawdę zupełnie inaczej. Nie trzeba
nikomu o tym mowić, tylko sobie. Jak dobrze jest siebie dotykać i nie
wierzyć im nic a nic, i wszędzie, w słońcu, w obłokach nad morzem, w
szumie przypływu, we własnym ciele, czuć to samo i n n e.
(W 946–7)]
An unusual translation choice in the concluding phrase of this passage opens an

interesting perspective on its meaning. The published English version—which Miłosz
produced with Robert Hass—renders the final “to samo i n n e“ as “completely
different.” This is arguably a legitimate choice, since the word “samo” may function
here as an intensifier. However, it also eliminates the potential clash between “the
same” (“to samo”) and “other” or “different” (“inne”), which forms the most striking
feature of the phrase in Polish. Indeed, one might translate the final line more literally
as follows: “Everywhere, in the sun, in the clouds over the sea, in the rush of the waves,
in one’s own body, to feel the same other [to samo i n n e].”²¹ In Polish, there is great
ambiguity here. Is the perceived, or rather “felt,” body of the perceiving subject “the
same other” or “completely different”? Is the perceiving subject “completely differ-
ent” from the fire (sun), air (clouds), water (sea), and flesh (body) of the material
world? Or are all these natural elements partly identified with the subject? The
English translation defuses the ambiguity, while the original version potentially
unveils a new variety of Miłosz’s mirror scene and a radically different form of
subjectivity. Instead of a besieged male “I” despairingly confronting his own self-
alienation, the poem presents a female “I” embracing her identity with otherness.
Ela beholds herself in the mirror and experiences a “revelation” (“olśnienie”) of
identification with the “other” that is at once her own body, a foreign body, and
the very elements of the material world. She senses with joyful liberation that all
²¹ Italicized emphasis my own. Emphasis by letter spacing from the original.

114  ’    
the social and linguistic determinants of her buffered “I” as consciousness are
fictions: (1) the social mores regulating her relations with other subjects—
curtseying, bows, behavior at table, pretended naiveté, politeness towards servants,
knowledge of the amount of your dowry; (2) the garments, accessories, and styles
used to control and regulate the body—sailor’s collars, petticoats, gentlemen with
their moustaches combed into spikes, women in corsets and tournures; (3) the
linguistic and artistic forms used to regulate existence as a social self—the cate-
chism, sins before confession, music lessons, French verbs. The young Ela experi-
ences an empowering revelation of the truth: “It is not like that at all, in reality it is
completely different.”²²
This “revelation” presents itself in the poem as a shift from seeing to feeling,
and from knowledge to sensual experience.²³ At first, Ela looks at herself in the
mirror and is “conscious” (“świadoma”) that she is “pretty.” Then she “(physi-
cally) experiences” (“doznaje”) an awakening that immediately disconnects her
from this consciousness of social significations, and from everything else she has
been “taught” (“nauczono”). She moves from “nauka” (“learning,” “science,” or
“knowledge”) to “doznanie” (“experience” as “sensory impression”).²⁴ Miłosz
himself as poetic speaker makes this shift together with her, since he has identified
with his kinswoman precisely through the universality of human experiences or
sense impressions (“uniwersalność naszych doznań”), though also through an act
of poetic voyeurism. In the Polish version, he is her, at least momentarily: “That
I might be for a moment the fifteen-year-old Ela” (“żebym, był przez chwilę
piętnastoletnią Elą”).²⁵
The English translation is once again slightly misleading here in its choice of
“revelation” to convey the Polish “olśnienie.” “Revelation” suggests an unveiling
before sight, the removal of a barrier to authentic vision; the Polish word, on the
other hand, may even suggest a temporary loss of vision, since it derives from the
verb “olśnić,” meaning “to dazzle” or even “to blind.” In other words, “sight” and
“vision” are further marginalized here, rather than authenticated. In the final lines,
Ela’s shift into a sensual experience based on “touch” excludes the need for both
“speech” and “belief.” She feels no compulsion or perhaps has no capacity to “tell”
anybody else about her “bedazzlement.” As she “touches” herself, she ceases to
²² Here the translation of the less ambiguous Polish phrase “zupełnie inaczej” as “completely
different” is more precise.
²³ This shift is particularly significant when we consider the general prevalence of the sense of
sight—noticed by various critics—in Miłosz’s poetry. For instance, see Marian Stala, “Ekstaza o
wschodzie słońca: W kręgu głównych tematów poezji Czesława Miłosza,” Poznawanie Miłosza 3:
1999–2010, ed. Aleksander Fiut (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2011), 119; Kris van Heuckelom,
“Patrzeć w promień od ziemi odbity”: wizualność w poezji Czesława Miłosza (Warszawa: Instytut Badań
Literackich PAN, 2004).
²⁴ It is worth pointing out here that the English word “experience” cannot render the specifically
physical or sensory meaning attached to the word “doznanie,” which is distinguishable in Polish from
both “conscious or epistemological experience” (“doświadczenie”) and “lived experience” (“przeżycie”).
²⁵ Italics my own.
  : , ,       115
“believe” what people say. Touch gives the lie to speech. Ela’s fundamental identity
with the “other” of the sun, clouds, sea, and the image of her own body is not
understood, realized, learned, or known, but rather “felt.”
Miłosz’s male poetic speakers “see” their own bodies in the mirror and “realize”
or “understand” with horror that these fleshly frames do not fully belong to them
as perceiving subjects or as consciousness. Their bodies are not “their own.” Yet
Ela joyfully “feels” the “identical other,” which is simultaneously “her own” and
“not her own,” both in her body and in the apparently external world. The verb
“feel” (“czuć”) is crucial here in its opposition to “seeing.” Although seeing may
not always be voluntary, visual verbs tend to assume a strongly active relation of a
discrete subject toward an object.²⁶ Moreover, if I “see” something, the relation is
not necessarily mutual. The thing may not be able to see me, even if it has eyes to
do so. Either way, the thing “seen” is strongly objectified. “Feeling,” on the other
hand, suggests a more mutual or co-participatory relation.²⁷ If I “feel” something,
it must be able to “feel” me, assuming it is sentient at all. Accordingly, the verb “to
feel” may imply either an active or passive role for the grammatical subject, or
both at the same time. For instance, I may actively “feel a rock” (with my hand) or
passively “feel a rock” (jutting into my back).²⁸ In Polish, the verb “czuć” tends
even more strongly toward passivity. The grammatical subject becomes an object
of sensation, since “feeling” is imposed upon it.
In La Belle Époque, the shift to the verb “feel” (“czuć”) denotes a palpable
weakening of agency. Instead of a strong, “metaphysical” subject actively “seeing”
an objective world separated from itself by the walls of its differentiating fortress,
the poem presents a weaker, corporeal subject passively “feeling” an objective
world of which it forms a part. This apparent transition from strong to weaker
subjectivity is accompanied by an ecstatic (or enstatic) sense of identification with
this world. The strong, metaphysical subject feels despair when it looks into the
mirror, because what it sees is the container or cage in which its true, transcendent
identity is somehow trapped. The bodily self becomes other. By contrast, Ela
joyfully surrenders herself to feeling her body both as part of the physical world
and as her most authentic being or self. As she dashes into the Atlantic Ocean, she
“meets” the waves in euphoric mutual embrace. Ela’s “oceanic feeling”—to borrow
a term made famous by Freud—implies the dissolution of strong, rational
²⁶ The most recent scholarship acknowledges the prevalence of this traditional view, while tending
to dismiss it as “naïve realism.” See Berit Brogaard, Seeing and Saying: The Language of Perception and
the Representational View of Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 3–4.
²⁷ As Susan Stewart exlains, “tactual perception” can involve a blurring of “intransitive and
transitive states,” so that “we can move between feelings of subjectivity and objectivity.” See Susan
Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002), 163.
²⁸ J. J. Gibson classically distinguished between active and passive forms of tactile perception:
“Active touch refers to what is ordinarily called touching. This ought to be distinguished from passive
touch, or being touched.” See J. J. Gibson, “Observations on Active Touch,” Psychological Review 69, no.
6 (1962): 477.
116  ’    
subjectivity into the body and the external material world.²⁹ This entire world is in
constant flux or motion, as the poem’s titular reference to Heraclitean flow
suggests in the original Polish.
Ela’s “bedazzlement” springs from a fusion of “seeing” with “touching” or
“feeling,” but also from an intertwining of subjectivity and objectivity. The
apparent weakening of subjectivity turns out to be paradoxically empowering,
since the self is no longer a precarious dyke holding back an ocean of unconscious
impulses and external stimuli. As the role of consciousness in subjectivity declines,
the body becomes more important in itself, no longer the mere “object” of a
specular image. Indeed, Ela feels the full falseness of the socially imposed “mas-
querade of femininity,” whereby she is an object for the male subjective gaze
within a male-dominated symbolic economy.³⁰ Instead, she enters into a new
order of mixed subjectivity–objectivity based on “touching” and “feeling” instead
of “seeing.” In her reflections on specifically “female” forms of subjectivity,
philosopher Luce Irigaray suggests that some women may identify more with
“touching” than “looking” precisely because the “dominant scopic economy”
consigns them to “passivity” and an existence as objects of male contemplation.³¹
Ela leaves behind the “consciousness” of her “prettiness,” or rather the prettiness of
her objectified image within this economy, and actively feels her way into her own
body, where she exists on the productive border between subject and object.
Ela’s mirror scene represents a distinctly “feminine” variant of Miłosz’s broader
project to rehabilitate the body. Here, the Polish poet shares some key assump-
tions with what I have loosely characterized as an anti-Cartesian intellectual
tradition—in this case, with the foundational work of French phenomenologist
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61). In his philosophical writings, Merleau-Ponty
strove to break down the distinction between consciousness and the body, arguing
that the human subject is part of what it perceives. Consciousness, body, and the
“external” world are entangled, since the thoroughly “incarnate subject” is formed
from the same material substance as the world it encounters through its bodily
senses.³² This position involves a polemic with Cartesian and any other radical
²⁹ Freud appropriated the term “oceanic feeling” from his friend Romain Rolland, describing it in
Civilization and its Discontents (Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, 1930) as “a feeling of an indissoluble
bond, of being one with the external world as a whole.” He associates it critically with “the restoration
of limitless narcissism” in the bond with the mother. See Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its
Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1962), 12–19. Feminist philosopher Elizabeth
Grosz characterizes the strongly negative dimension of a similar feeling as male “horror of submersion,
the fear of being absorbed into something that has no boundaries of its own,” implicitly associated with
“femininity” and “maternity.” See Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 194–5.
³⁰ Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1985), 134.
³¹ Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 26.
³² For instance, see Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith
(London: Routledge Classics, 2002), 61, 96, 215, 225. Also see the collected notes to Merleau-Ponty’s
  : , ,       117
dualism: “We have to reject the age-old assumptions that put the body in the
world and the seer in the body, or conversely, the world and the body in the seer as
in a box.”³³
Ela’s experience confirms Merleau-Ponty’s strong critique of Cartesian philos-
ophy as a falsely purifying separation of mind from body, subject from object.³⁴ In
a posthumous work published two decades before Miłosz’s poem, the French
phenomenologist developed a series of metaphors to describe the crisscrossing
interrelation between subject and object, mind and body, inner and outer, self and
world: the “chiasm,” “the intertwining,” and the “fold.”³⁵ The Cartesian gaze
suggests a subject totally separate from what it beholds, even when it beholds its
own reflected body. By contrast, Merleau-Ponty describes a gaze that “folds” back
upon or crosses itself, and a touching hand that both feels and is felt. He presents
both the body and the subject as fundamentally self-reflexive, and also as insep-
arable from the ostensibly “external” world. The subject appears partly to tran-
scend itself as it dissolves into a singular, self-perceiving “flesh of the world”:
[The flesh] is the coiling over of the visible upon the seeing body, of the tangible
upon the touching body, which is attested in particular when the body sees itself,
touches itself seeing and touching things, such that, simultaneously, as tangible it
descends among them.³⁶
Miłosz’s female mirror scene from La Belle Époque poetically captures Merleau-
Ponty’s sense of “the reflexivity” of a subject that “touches itself touching, sees
itself seeing,” and whose body is “made of the same flesh as the world.”³⁷ In
Miłosz’s poem, Ela is both perceiver and perceived, sensible and sentient: “the
same other” [“to samo inne”]. As she touches and observes her own body, she
symbolically descends into the ocean of the material world, immersing herself in
what initially appears to be an external object or “other,” but which turns out to be
a deeper and more extensive dimension of her own identity. Ela’s experience of
her body in front of the mirror problematizes the division between “same” and
“other.” Subject and object are “intertwined” in her. She is not a Cartesian subject
or “soul” peering out at the image of her alien “box” of a body. Instead, she
experiences the direct sensory revelation that she is the box.
1947–8 lecture series, published in English as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Incarnate Subject:
Malebranche, Biran,and Bergson on the Union of Body and Soul, trans. Paul Milan (Amherst, NY:
Prometheus Books, 2001).
³³ Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 1968), 138.
³⁴ Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London:
Routledge Classics, 2002), 230.
³⁵ See Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible.
³⁶ Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 146.
³⁷ Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 248–9.
118  ’    
Ela cannot say “Not mine,” as Miłosz’s alienated male consciousness inevitably
must do when it sees the “box” of its physical self in the mirror. For everything she
sees and feels is “Mine” coiled back upon “Not Mine,” like a Möbius strip.³⁸ In
Ela’s terms, the subject is both “same” and “other,” an “intertwining” of identity
and difference. Moreover, since Miłosz’s poetic speaker partially identifies with
her body, the controlling gaze of the masculine subject seems on the brink of
dissolving into the participatory feeling of an ostensibly weaker, but ultimately
empowering “feminine” subjectivity. This feeling is even more radical than the
ecstatic integration with the world described through Miłosz’s “masculine” forms
of subjectivity, as in the early lyric “Morning” (“Rano”) from A Poem on Frozen
Time (Poemat o czasie zastygłym, 1933). In La Belle Époque, the male speaker
speculatively enters a female body, so as to experience a “completely different”
kind of subjectivity: a weakened, tangible, corporeal self, commingling with the
external world.
3. “There is No Me”: The Poetry of Anna Świrszczyńska
Miłosz’s female mirror scenes and his ironically self-avowed “feminism” do not
overthrow the well-worn associations of woman with passivity, body, and nature.
On the contrary, he consistently confirms these identifications. “Feminism” in its
conservative Miłoszean incarnation denotes the temporary unsettling or inversion
of traditional symbolic hierarchies placing “transcendent” man, as active repre-
sentative of reason, intellect, and art, above bodily or natural woman. Ela senses
that the inexpressible, unnamable truths of the physical body are superior to the
constructions of civilization, art, reason, intellect, and language. “Feminine” soma
is superior to “masculine” logos. Moreover, the passage from La Belle Époque may
even depict the absorption of male consciousness as metaphysical subjectivity into
the female body as a more dispersed subjectivity that “descends among” the things
of the material world. Male subjects look at themselves in the mirror, beholding
the image of the “I.” Female subjects look and touch themselves in the mirror,
entering into a corporeality that embraces the whole physical universe.
Miłosz finds both a confirmation and radicalization of his intuitions of “fem-
inine” subjectivity in the works of fellow Polish poet Anna Świrszczyńska
(1909–84), a selection of which he translated into English in a volume entitled
Talking to My Body (1996).³⁹ In the early 1990s, Miłosz promoted Świrszczyńska’s
³⁸ Elizabeth Grosz borrows the metaphor of this one-sided loop from Lacan to describe a “double
sensation” in which the subject touches itself, thus exhibiting the “interchangeability of active and passive
sensations, of those positions of subject and object, mind and body.” See Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 35–6.
³⁹ Anna Swir, Talking to My Body, trans. Czesław Miłosz and Leonard Nathan (Port Townsend,
WA: Copper Canyon Press, 1996). The name Świrszczyńska was shortened to Swir in order not to
intimidate English-language readers with its length and clustered consonants.
  : , ,       119
work in Poland through a series of interpretive sketches that formed an important

part of his “feminist” turn.⁴⁰ Once again, the limitations of this conception are
apparent in the sometimes condescending nature of his patronage, and in his
persistent focus on Świrszczyńska’s gender.⁴¹ Irena Grudzinska Gross notices a
certain ambivalence in his attitude, and even a perception of threat to his “manly
self.”⁴² Nevertheless, Miłosz describes his compatriot’s central preoccupation with
“personae who are trapped by their flesh and yet also distinct from it” as a
confirmation of his own poetic interest in the paradoxes of the human body.⁴³
He finds in Świrszczyńska’s writings new ways for the logos to make contact with
the soma as well as a certain liberation from the “masculine” ego in what he
characterizes as a “feminine,” egoless corporeality. Again, the essentializing sym-
bolic binary opposition remains intact, but the traditional hierarchical relation
reverses. An empowering transcendence of the limited self becomes possible
precisely through its weakening or even dissolution.
In one of his own poems, entitled “Translating Anna Swir on an Island of the
Caribbean” (“Tłumacząc Annę Świrszczyńską na wyspie Morza Karaibskiego”),
Miłosz writes: “And the body is most mysterious, / For, so mortal, it wants to be
pure, / Liberated from the soul which screams: ‘I!’ ” (NCP 599) [“I ciało jest
najbardziej tajemnicze, / Ponieważ tak śmiertelne, chce być czyste, / Uwolnione
od duszy, która krzyczy ‘Ja!’ ” (W 1071)]. The speaker of the poem suggests that
Świrszczyńska has taught him the art of “disappearing, in order to be, unperson-
ally” [“znikałaś, żeby trwać bezosobowo”]. He quotes Świrszczyńska’s claim that
the impermanent and impersonal reality of human bodily existence may even
imply that “There is no me” [“Nie ma mnie” (W 1070)]. Świrszczyńska makes
this declaration in three of her poems, associating it with joyful liberation, and
with “rapture” or “wonder” (“zachwyt”), the key Miłoszean term for embodied
religiosity.⁴⁴ In the poem most probably cited by Miłosz, entitled “I Am Powerful”
(“Jestem potężna”), Świrszczyńska writes:
There is no me in me,
I never was,
I never will be,
what happiness.
⁴⁰ Miłosz published these critical sketches together in a volume in 1996. See Czesław Miłosz,
Jakiegoż to gościa mieliśmy: O Annie Świrszczyńskiej (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Znak, 1996).
⁴¹ Renata Ingbrant characterizes Miłosz’s approach as an example of “phallic criticism” constantly
returning to the problem of “femininity.” See Renata Ingbrant, From Her Point of View: Woman’s Anti-
World in the Poetry of Anna Świrszczyńska (Stockholm: Stockholm University Press, 2007), 84.
⁴² Irena Grudzinska Gross, Czesław Miłosz and Joseph Brodsky: Fellowship of Poets (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2009), 109.
⁴³ Czesław Miłosz, “A Body of Work,” The Three-Penny Review 23 (Autumn 1985): 4.
⁴⁴ The three poems are entitled “Samotność” (from Wiatr, 1970), “Jestem potężna” and “Podwójny
zachwyt” (from Cierpienie i radość, 1985).
120  ’    
I have no body, I am song.

I have no soul, I am body.
There is no me,
and so I am powerful
like eternity.
[Nie ma mnie we mnie, / nigdy mnie nie było, / nigdy mnie nie będzie, /
szczęście. / Nie mam ciała, jestem śpiew. / Nie mam duszy, jestem ciało. /
Nie ma mnie, / dlatego jestem potężna / jak wieczność.⁴⁵]
The power of eternal existence springs from the end of selfhood, which comes in
the recognition that the subject is constantly alienated from its own physical
existence (“I have no body”), but that it also has no other, non-bodily existence
(“I have no soul”). Miłosz characterizes this knowledge of alienation as a funda-
mental dualism in Świrszczyńska’s poetry: “A woman talks to her thigh, and
where there is conversation, there must be two. In fact, all of Świrszczyńska’s
poetry may be called a conversation with her body.”⁴⁶ However, this dualism can
only be a dualism of subjective effect, which is really just a form of materialism,
since Świrszczyńska does not recognize any existence beyond material existence.
As she explains, the separation of the “I” from the body is impossible because it
would require the self to “race away from [itself]”—that is, to separate from the
only real form of its existence.⁴⁷ In another poem, she describes the inverse
impossibility of shutting down the senses to “walk into myself” in search of an
essential, incorporeal core of her identity—“what matters most.”⁴⁸ Yet, in spite of
its apparent fictionality, the impression of dualist separation remains fundamental
to the experience of human subjectivity in the works of both Świrszczyńska and
Miłosz. When Świrszczyńska’s poetic speaker asks precisely where the “I” is
located in the body, the question turns out to have no sensible answer:
Belly, am I in the belly? In the intestines?

In the hollow of the sex? In a toe?
Apparently in the brain. I do not see it.
Take my brain out of my skull. I have the right
to see myself. Don’t laugh.⁴⁹
⁴⁵ Anna Świrszczyńska, Cierpienie i radość (Warszawa: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1985), 58.
⁴⁶ Czesław Miłosz, Jakiegoż to gościa mieliśmy: O Annie Świrszczyńskiej (Kraków: Wydawnictwo
Znak, 1996), 103.
⁴⁷ Swir, Talking to My Body, 75. ⁴⁸ Swir, Talking to My Body, 103.
⁴⁹ Swir, Talking to My Body, 74.
  : , ,       121
[Brzuch, czy jestem w brzuchu? W jelitach? / W wydrążeniu płci?

W palcu u nogi? / Podobno w mózgu. Nie widzę go. / Wyjmij mi
mózg z czaszki. Mam prawo / zobaczyć siebie. Nie śmiej się.⁵⁰]
In Miłosz’s poetic translation of his compatriot’s work into English, it is only in

liberation from this search for the “I”—and from the “I” itself—that a kind of
“double rapture” (“podwójny zachwyt”) can be experienced: “Because there is no
me / and because I feel / how much there is no me”⁵¹ [“Że mnie nie ma. / I że czuje,
jak bardzo / Mnie nie ma.”].⁵² In this poem, as in Ela’s scene in La Belle Époque,
“feeling” replaces the “seeing” that otherwise so typically characterizes the rela-
tionship of the “I” as consciousness with its body.⁵³ Both “rapture” or “wonder”
(“zachwyt”) and “power” flow from a weakening of the self that Świrszczyńska
directly associates with touch and with bodily identity. The buffered, rational self
is always subject to and alienated from its own body; only full identification with
ego-less corporeality can overcome this alienation.⁵⁴
Critic Anna Węgrzyniakowa argues that Miłosz misunderstands Świrszczyńska’s
corporeal conception of reality, ignoring her “woman’s rationale of existence”
(“babska racja istnienia”) in favor of a supposedly “masculine” focus on metaphys-
ical dualism.⁵⁵ This charge is partly justified, especially when Miłosz directly
describes Świrszczyńska as a “metaphysical poet.”⁵⁶ On the other hand, he fre-
quently recognizes the difference inherent in what he also characterizes as a
distinctively “feminine” perspective. If anything, Miłosz’s interpretation places
excessive attention on the “femininity” of Świrszczyńska’s worldview. More broadly,
it is precisely in this difference that he seeks relief from “masculine” dualist
alienation. An essentialized “woman’s” model of subjectivity offers a solution to
the sufferings of the explicitly masculine ego, which Miłosz evokes at the very
beginning of his career in an unpublished stanza: “Only painful masculinity, like a
wound smeared with iodine, / Trembles within us and fill us with terror” [“To tylko
męskość bolesna jak rana zalana jodyną / Dygoce wewnątrz nas i przerażeniem
napawa”].⁵⁷ In response, the youthful speaker seeks succour in what he already
views as the symbolically feminine dimensions of “the earth and the body” [“ziemi i
⁵⁰ Anna Świrszczyńska, Poezja (Warszawa: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1997), 223.

⁵¹ Swir, Talking to My Body, 126. ⁵² Świrszczyńska, Cierpienie i radość, 94.
⁵³ Miłosz, Jakiegoż to gościa mieliśmy: O Annie Świrszczyńskiej (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Znak,
1996), 103.
⁵⁴ Świrszczyńska’s poetic philosophy also remains strongly rooted in the everyday, as the simulta-
neously ordinary and ontological ring of the very phrase “Nie ma mnie” suggests. Miłosz likens the
phrase to the declarations of “oriental” philosophy, but it can also be used simply to mean “I’m not
here.”
⁵⁵ Anna Węgrzyniakowa, “ ‘Metafizyka ciała’ w ostatnich wierszach Anny Świrszczyńskiej,” in
Egzystencjalne i metafizyczne: Od Leśmiana do Maya (Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu
Śląskiego, 1999), 82.
⁵⁶ Miłosz, “A Body of Work,” 4. ⁵⁷ Miłosz and Iwaszkiewicz, Portret podwójny, 21.
122  ’    
ciała”]. Świrszczyńska gives Miłosz a strong confirmation of his own earlier intui-
tions of a salutary “feminine” experience of the self.
4. Feminine Subjectivity and the Wisdom of the Body
La Belle Époque and the poem for Anna Świrszczyńska are by no means the only
works in which Miłosz’s male speakers encounter a liberating, female subjectivity
or a “feminine” philosophy of existence. In the late poem “Beautiful Stranger”
(“Piękna nieznajoma”), Miłosz describes a young girl experiencing sensual
“bedazzlement” by touching her body in front of a mirror.⁵⁸ Once again, female
corporeal experience seems to reject the “masculine” wisdom of the logos—of
“speech” and “words.” Like Ela, the young girl rebels against the identity imposed
upon her by collective mores and social forms of knowledge with her own
“wisdom of the mocking body” [“mądrość prześmiewczego ciała” (W 1233)]. To
adapt Blaise Pascal’s phrase, the girl’s body has reasons of which reason knows
nothing. Indeed, Miłosz’s essentializing definition of feminine characteristics
seems almost to yield the vague notion of a secret women’s knowledge that
would offer liberation from the absurdities of “masculine” rationality and alie-
nated selfhood. In an untranslated poem dedicated “to the feminists,” Miłosz
somewhat boorishly frames the prosaic wisdom of the “darners of torn sweaters”
and “ironers of shirts” as a distinct philosophy:
Patiently able to put up with grand ideas,

Plans to change the world, faith in his genius,
Carriers of a secret that he doesn’t know,
They smile, make the tea,
Go to the window and water the flowers.
[Umiejące cierpliwie znosić wielkie idee, / Plany zmieniania świata, wiarę

w genialność, / Nosicielki sekretu, o którym on nie wie, / Uśmiechają się,
zaparzają herbatę, / Idą do okna, podlewają kwiaty. (W 988)]
Here, Miłosz employs the most stereotypical conceptions of women’s social roles
to suggest their ironic superiority over men, even as he intentionally provokes the
poem’s “feminist” dedicatees with these associations. He strongly confirms tradi-
tional gender roles, while ostensibly reversing the associated hierarchy of values.
Whereas men occupy themselves proudly with the abstract world of “ideas,”
⁵⁸ Though the girl is described as a “stranger,” it is possible that she is another incarnation of
Miłosz’s cousin Ela. The girl is the same age as Ela in La Belle Époque, and there are similarities in the
physical description—for instance, the “brown disks” (“brunatne tarcze”) of her breasts.
  : , ,       123
women apparently focus on the mundane details that make life possible. They are
connected with nature, but also with human corporeality, tending to the health of
the male body through “cookery.” Women tolerate the grand aspirations of their
male life partners, while knowing that their own preoccupations are closer to the
underlying realities of human existence—hence their ironic “smiles” at the secret
of which men remain ignorant. Of course, this male acknowledgment of female
“superiority” in domestic affairs serves as a justification for the perpetuation of
stereotypical gender roles.⁵⁹ In this sense, Miłosz’s poem “to the feminists” is
distinctly anti-feminist, or rather sexist.
Yet the female “wisdom of the body” also finds stronger and more positive
expression elsewhere in Miłosz’s work. In The Separate Notebooks, one of the
many competing voices in the polyphonic chorus belongs to an anonymous
woman, who mocks the vain constructions of the masculine mind and of
language itself:
You talked, but after your talking all the rest remains.
After your talking—poets, philosophers, contrivers of romances—
Everything else, all the rest deduced inside the flesh
Which lives and knows, not just what is permitted.
I am a woman held fast now in a great silence.
Not all creatures have your need of words.
. . . In reality there is only a sensation of warmth and gluiness inside,

also a sober watchfulness when one advances to meet that delicious and
dangerous thing that has no name, though people call it life. (NCP
374–5)
[Mówiłeś, ale po waszych mówieniach zostaje cała reszta. / Po waszych

mówieniach, poeci, filozofowie, układacze romansów. / Cała reszta
wywiedziona z głębi ciała, Które żyje i wie, nie to co wiedzieć wolno. /
Zatrzymana teraz jestem w wielkiej ciszy. / Ale słowa nie każdemu są
potrzebne. / . . . Naprawdę jest tylko czucie w swoim wnętrzu ciepła i
lepkości, i trzeźwa czujność, na spotkanie tej rozkosznej i niebezpiecznej
rzeczy, która nie ma nazwy, a na którą mówi się: Życie.” (W 736–7)]
According to the logic of Miłosz’s multi-voiced lyric technique, the woman’s voice
seems partly to enter his own. “I am a woman,” says the poem in the English
version.⁶⁰ Perhaps this anonymous voice expresses Miłosz’s own “feminine”
⁵⁹ Recognition of this anachronism may have been the reason Miłosz chose not to translate the
poem into English for his mostly American audience.
⁶⁰ In the original Polish, this “femininity” is more subtly conveyed via the feminine form of an
adjectival participle.
124  ’    
side—his “female anima,” as he characterizes it in The Land of Ulro.⁶¹ In any case,

the woman presents a very different viewpoint from the largely male voices
dominating the rest of the poem, and particularly from the semi-autobiographical
male voice meditating on the poet’s own past life. The nameless woman places
herself in direct opposition to this dominant voice, questioning his need for words
and once again undermining the traditional hierarchy of value. On one side of the
symbolic divide, there is “masculine” consciousness, associated with empty “talk”
(“gadanie”), poetry, philosophy, and “words.” On the other, there is “feminine”
corporeality, linked with flesh, life, body, silence, namelessness, and feeling.⁶²
Feminine knowledge realizes itself through the body, while the unconscious
body itself knows more than the mind or the conscious self.
In a discussion with journalist and critic Renata Gorczyńska, Miłosz says of this
nameless woman: “Words, all these constructions are the world of men, while
women look on all of it with a slight sneer. Their attitude is: ‘Go ahead, talk all you
want!’ ”⁶³ He goes on to suggest that the woman in his poem represents a position
of radical materialism almost nihilistically opposed to a symbolically masculine
“civilization.” Here, Miłosz’s discursive commentary reasserts the traditional
hierarchy of “masculine culture” over a dangerously subversive “feminine nature.”
Yet the poem itself is much more ambiguous. The nameless woman’s independent
voice has equal rights, opening new perspectives on a whole set of traditionally
linked oppositions: male–female, masculine–feminine, human–animal, culture–
nature, consciousness–body, reason–instinct, language–silence. The essentialized
associations remain intact, but the hierarchies potentially reverse.
The corporeal, or “feminine,” perspective also seems to exclude the reality,
necessity, and even possibility of poetry. The female voice in Miłosz’s poem
questions the very existence of the entire verbal structure in which her utterances
appear, contrasting the falsity of “masculine” words with the reality of “feminine”
silence. In analogy with this opposition, she juxtaposes the imposition of elaborate
corsets, petticoats, lacy “unmentionables,” and silk dresses with the “warm,”
“gluey” reality of the female body. Cousin Ela and the “beautiful stranger” make
similar comparisons. In fact, this analogy forms one of Miłosz’s favorite meta-
phors for the relation between artificial form and natural reality, between art and
nature, between poetry and nameless feeling.
The specific form of the opposition seems to have come partly from his reading
of Charles Baudelaire’s The Painter of Modern Life (Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne,
⁶¹ Miłosz, The Land of Ulro, 183.

⁶² Once again the key verb in the Polish original—this time in participle form—is “czuć.” The
published English version is inconvenient here, as “trzeźwa czujność” is translated as “sober watchful-
ness”—suggesting sight—whereas “czujność” is also etymologically related to words for “sense,”
“sensitivity” and “feeling.”
⁶³ Miłosz and Gorczyńska, Podróżny świata, 270.
  : , ,       125
1863), particularly the section “In Praise of Cosmetics.”⁶⁴ Here, Baudelaire

valorizes the embellishments of “maquillage” and “external finery,” suggesting
that woman is fulfilling her “duty” when she lifts herself “above Nature” by
ornamenting and “sublimating” her natural body.⁶⁵ More generally, the French
poet argues that elaborate decorations reveal a fitting “disgust for the real” and a
desire to bear witness to the “immateriality of the soul.”⁶⁶ In Miłosz’s poetry, as in
Baudelaire’s essay, the artificial forms of clothing seem to represent a defense
against the ephemerality and meaninglessness of purely fleshly existence:
Lungs, liver, sex, not me, not mine.

Masks, wigs, buskins, be with me!
Transform me, take me to a gaudy stage
So that for a moment I can believe I am! (NCP 505)
[Płuca, wątroba, seks, nie ja, nie moje. / Maski, peruke, koturny, przy-
bywajcie! / Odmieńcie mnie, zabierzcie mnie na jaskrawą scene, /
Żebym na chwilę mógł wierzyć, że jestem! (W 979)]
Miłosz extends ironic this comparison by making explicit connections between

the elaborate dress of the late-nineteenth century and poetic language or style. In a
late poem, he compares “our liking for tortuous [poetic] line, / our high spirals of
contraries” [“predylekcja do linii krętej, / wysokie spirale przeciwieństw”] with
“women in abundantly draped silks / to brighten the dance of skeletons” (NCP
462) [“strojenie kobiet w suto drapowane suknie, / Żeby dodawać blasku tańcowi
szkieletów” (W 958)]. Poetic, linguistic, and intellectual forms are analogous with
forms of dress.
The same analogy is evident in the middle section of the nameless woman’s
speech in The Separate Notebooks, where she describes a “dark academy” (“ciemna
akademia”) filled with “translators of corsets, grammarians of petticoats, poets of
unmentionables with lace” (NCP 375) [“tłumaczki gorsetów, gramatyczki halek,
poetki ineksprymabli z koronką” (W 737)]. She mocks the euphemistic manner in
which “a brassiere lifting the breasts bears the name soutiengorge” [“stanik
podtrzymujący piersi soutien-gorge”]. She recalls how, “in the spirit of French
great-grandmothers who remembered the red coats of English soldiers, a men-
struation is announced as ‘the English have arrived’ ” [“wzorem francuskich
prababek pamiętających czerwone kabaty angielskich żołnierzy powiadamiać o
nadejściu miesiączki: Anglicy przyjechali”]. The styles of women’s dress shift over
⁶⁴ See Czesław Miłosz, “Traktat przeciwko naturze,” Gazeta Wyborcza, September 26, 1998, https://
wyborcza.pl/1,75410,327995.html.
⁶⁵ Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne
(London: Phaidon Press, 1995), 32–3.
⁶⁶ Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, 32.
126  ’    
time in the masquerade of femininity, but all these styles separate her from the
truth of nature and “life.” Baudelaire may approve of women’s “self-sublimation,”
but the “nameless woman”—like Ela and the “beautiful stranger”—prefers what
the French poet calls “the real.” As she explains: “In reality there is only a
sensation of warmth and gluiness inside.”⁶⁷
In this “feminine” mode, Miłosz makes precisely the same point about language
and poetry. The styles of verbal expression may change over time, but the
disconnection of language from the underlying physical reality of human life
remains unaltered. Elevated language merely sublimates or veils natural reality,
just as maquillage and fine clothing do. Poetry itself is simply the most ostenta-
tious variety of linguistic sublimation, especially when it takes the sentimental
form of the “romances” mocked by the anonymous woman. In another poem, the
male speaker confesses that all such forms are powerless before the secret feminine
wisdom, and especially before the hidden parts of the female body itself:
I’ve always meditated on what women keep hidden:

In a foam of flounces, frills, and skirts,
The dark entrance to the garden of knowledge
...
Where philosophy and grammar,
Poetics and mathematics,
Logic and rhetoric,
Theology and hermeneutics,
As well as all the teachings of wise men and prophets,
Gathered to compose a canticle of canticles
To a small, furry, untameable animal (NCP 688).
[Zawsze myślałem o tym, co kobiety noszą zakryte: / Ciemne wejście do

ogrodu wiedzy / W pianie halek, falbanek i spódnic. / . . . W którym
filozofia i gramatyka, / Poetyka i matematyka, / Logika i retoryka, /
Teologia i hermeneutyka, / Oraz wszelkie nauki mędrców i proroków /
Zgromadziły się, żeby układać pieśń nad pieśniami / O puszystym
zwierzątku nie do oswojenia. (W 1159)]
Both clothing and language conceal or sublimate a hairy, gluey underlying reality
that itself represents a kind of instinctive “knowledge.” In many of these reflec-
tions on women’s underwear and clothing, Miłosz returns to la belle époque, a
period that was ending around the time of his own birth in 1911. The significance
of this choice is not exclusively autobiographical. First, the period represents the
final heyday of the most excessive forms of “sublimating” finery: flouncy dresses,
⁶⁷ Emphasis my own.
  : , ,       127
corsets, petticoats, decorous headgear. Second, the period coincides precisely with
the Young Poland (Młoda Polska) movement in Polish culture—an aestheticist
“neo-Romanticism” whose poetic representatives are often associated with the
most elaborate forms of modern poetic language.⁶⁸ The movement was heavily
influenced both by Schopenhauer’s philosophy and Baudelaire’s poetics, while a
yearning for incorporeal forms of existence was central to its concerns.⁶⁹ Indeed,
Miłosz himself underlines its anti-materialist emphasis, even linking Young
Poland with Manichaeism.⁷⁰
Here, we reach the intersection of Miłosz’s philosophical and religious concerns
with his dilemmas over poetic form. On the one hand, he explicitly agrees with
Baudelaire that human beings must impose their own sublimating forms on
nature. Poetic language must impose the shapely corset of “form” onto the
“real,” thus projecting a human sense of order and beauty onto unruly nature.
The poet finds “shelter” from chaos in “rhythm and the order of syntax.”⁷¹ Yet the
forms of this imposed order are false, like the impossible wasp waists and
preposterous bustles of late-nineteenth-century fashion. Just as Ela rejects the
falseness of her petticoated social self, so Miłosz condemns the legacy of Young
Poland both for its anti-corporeal “Manichaeism” and for an artificial style whose
powerful influence on Polish poetry, including his own work, he recognizes with
distaste: “Our style, unpleasant to say it, was born there” (NCP 112) [“Styl nasz,
choć to jest przykre, tam się rodzi” (W 387)].
The high-sounding poetry of Young Poland rings false to Miłosz, as the last
despairing sighs of a worldview that can no longer be supported, or as a mere
“stand-in for religion” (NCP 113) [“Ersatz modlitwy” (W 389)]. The claims of the
“real” have become too strong, so that any faith in poetry’s sublimating power now
appears unfounded. Miłosz acknowledges this falseness in his own writing, as he
reveals in the late poem “This” (“To”): “And I confess my ecstatic praise of being /
Might just have been exercises in the high style. / Underneath was this, which I do
not attempt to name” (NCP 663) [“I wyznaję, że moje ekstatyczne pochwały
istnienia / Mogły być tylko ćwiczeniami wysokiego stylu, / A pod spodem było
TO, czego nie podejmuję się nazwać” (W 1139)]. “This”—or the Freudian “It,” as
one might alternatively translate from the Polish—underlies all sublimating lan-
guage, exposing it as the dainty speech of “French great-grandmothers” vainly
attempting to deny the flow of menstrual blood beneath their finery. Modern
poetry must either slip into something more comfortable or take it all off.
⁶⁸ See Julian Krzyżanowski, Neoromantyzm polski, 1890–1918 (Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im.
Ossolińskich, 1980).
⁶⁹ See Marian Stala, Pejzaż człowieka: Młodopolskie myśli wyobrażenia o duszy, duchu i ciele
(Kraków: Baran i Suszyński, 1994), 267.
⁷⁰ Czesław Miłosz, The History of Polish Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1983), 327.
⁷¹ Miłosz, Road-side Dog, 84.
128  ’    
5. Miłosz and the Semiotic
In Unattainable Earth (Nieobjęta ziemia, 1984)—in the middle of his “feminist”

turn—Miłosz announces an aspiration to discover a “poetry of the future,” which
would capture “the rhythms of the body—the beating of the heart, the pulse,
sweating, the bleeding of the period, the gluiness of sperm, the position for passing
urine, the movement of the intestines” [“Rytmy ciała—bicie serca, puls, pocenie
się, krwawienia periodu, lepkość spermy, pozycja przy oddawaniu moczu, ruch
kiszek” (W 802)]. However, this poetry of the unnamable “It” seems impossible,
because of the “non-adherence of language to what we really are” [“nieprzyleganie
języka do tego, czym naprawdę jesteśmy”]. Language and the body are radically
incommensurable, as the “anonymous woman” of The Separate Notebooks insists.
Yet poetry encompasses more than just “language.” Indeed, the “anonymous
woman” does not explicitly claim that poetry in the broadest sense is unnecessary,
but rather declares that “not all creatures have your need of words.” Poetry is not
just an arrangement of “words”—that is, of discrete linguistic signs with estab-
lished fields of meaning—but also a configuration of sound, melody, rhythm, and
intonation. For his own part, Miłosz describes the non-verbal dimension of
rhythm as the core of his poetry: “Why did I say that I don’t consider myself a
philosopher or a thinker? Because a philosopher or thinker thinks first and then
phrases his thoughts. In my work, meaning formulates itself in the phrase,
immediately in rhythm.”⁷² Elsewhere, he writes that elevated metaphorical lan-
guage reduces poetry to empty ornamentation or garrulousness from which only
“rhythmical cohesion” can save it.⁷³ Rhythm is the life blood of poetic language.
Miłosz repeatedly explains that this poetic rhythm originates in the body. He
borrows William Blake’s intuition of poetry’s sources as the “pulsation of the
artery” and the “globule of blood.”⁷⁴ He suggests that rhythm manifests itself in
other biological cycles—for instance, in respiration.⁷⁵ Poetry wells up in the body’s
rhythms, seizing control of the rational subject through his or her own pre-
rational, physical aspect. It is precisely in this sense that Miłosz describes poetry
as “feminine,” opening the subject to penetration by a “doer, a spirit, a daimon”
that resides in or at least expresses itself through the body.⁷⁶ The male poetic
subject is “feminized,” made passive and receptive, turned into an “instrument of
that music” [“muzyczny instrument”] of “the rhythm of days and nights” (NCP
708) [“rytmów dnia i rytmów nocy” (W 1177)] or even into a “lunatic” subjugated
to “another power.”⁷⁷ While Miłosz describes this “feminine” passivity as the
positive source of his poetry, he also expresses great ambivalence about the
⁷² Czesław Miłosz and Aleksander Fiut, Autoportret przekorny: Rozmowy (Kraków: Wydawnictwo
Literackie, 2011), 45.
⁷³ Czesław Miłosz, Ogród nauk (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Znak, 2013), 209.
⁷⁴ Miłosz, The Land of Ulro, 172, 245. ⁷⁵ Miłosz and Fiut, Autoportret przekorny, 43.
⁷⁶ Miłosz, Road-side Dog, 33; Miłosz, Piesek przydrożny, 60. ⁷⁷ Miłosz, Native Realm, 179.
  : , ,       129
associated weakening of the self. Rhythm undermines the poet’s own sense of
control or sovereignty as a singular, self-transparent, rational subject.⁷⁸ In the
opening section of From the Rising of the Sun (Gdzie wschodzi słońce i kędy
zapada, 1974), Miłosz’s semi-autobiographical speaker adopts the persona of an
archetypal poet battling with his inner “daemon”:
This time I am frightened. Odious rhythmic speech,

Which grooms itself of its own accord, moves on.
Even if I wanted to stop it, weak as I am from fever,
. . . Again the other, unnamed one, speaks for me. (NCP 278–80)
[A mnie straszno tym razem. Obrzydliwość rytmicznej mowy, / Która

sama siebie obrządza, sama postępuje, / Choćbym chciał ją zatrzymać,
słaby z przyczyny gorączki, / . . . Znowu tamten nienazwany mówi za
mnie. (W 631–3)]
Poetry is a “fever” attacking the strong version of the rational self. The poet becomes a
helpless, “feminized” medium for rhythm, for the unnamed “It,” whether he likes it or
not. In a late poem addressed “To My Daimonion,” the speaker-poet ironically begs
for this power to “ease off just a bit” with the “intimidating” force of its “rhythmical
whispers” (NCP 600) [“zluzuj troche. / . . . Twoje rytmiczne szepty onieśmielają mnie”
(W 1064)]. Of course, such claims of fevered weakness before the external force of
poetic inspiration are typical of Romantic poets and various prophets or mystics.⁷⁹ In
Miłosz’s modern version of this trope, poetry comes into existence on the border
between conscious thought and the “odiousness” of an irrepressible rhythm originat-
ing in his own body. Accordingly, various critics and the poet himself observe that his
poetic writing comes to enact a fundamental struggle between two opposing princi-
ples: rhythmic language and discursive language.⁸⁰
⁷⁸ Joanna Dembińska-Pawelec underlines that Miłosz’s “daimonion” uses “rhythmic speech.” In her
interpretation, she draws on Roman Jakobson and Linda Waugh’s connection of metrical rhythm and
“inspired speech.” See Joanna Dembińska-Pawelec, “Poezja jest sztuką rytmu”: O świadomości rytmu w
poezji polskiej dwudziestego wieku (Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, 2010), 194. Also
see Roman Jakobson and Linda R. Waugh, The Sound Shape of Language (New York: Mouton de
Gruyter, 2002), 215–18.
⁷⁹ Karina Jarzyńska refers to “the experience of a superindividual dimension.” See Karina Jarzyńska,
“Postsecular Instruments of Acculturation: Czesław Miłosz’s Works from the Second American Stay,”
Open Cultural Studies 1 (2017): 144. As Elżbieta Kiślak points out, Miłosz both rejected and accepted
various aspects of Romanticism in his long “wrestle” with the “angel” of its influence. See Elżbieta
Kiślak, Walka Jakuba z aniołem: Czesław Miłosz wobec romantyczności (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo
Proszyński i S-ka, 2001), 19.
⁸⁰ See Stanisław Balbus, “ ‘Pierwszy ruch jest śpiewanie’ (O wierszu Miłosza—rozpoznanie wstępne),”
in Poznawanie Miłosza: Studia i szkice o twórczości poety, ed. Jerzy Kwiatkowski (Kraków: Wydawnictwo
Literackie, 1985), 461–521; Stanisław Barańczak, “A Black Mirror at the End of a Tunnel: An
Interpretation of Czesław Miłosz’s ‘Świty’,” Polish Review 31, no. 4 (1986): 273–84. Włodzimierz
130  ’    
On the one hand, Miłosz suggests that his poetry originates in the body, in
“feminine” rhythm, in the pre-linguistic and pre-subjective. Yet, on another level,
he seems to distrust this current within himself, seeking to regulate, channel, and
control it.⁸¹ Therefore, his poetry takes the hybridized forms best exemplified by
his long “polyphonic” works. Lyrical passages imbued with pulsating rhythm,
often celebrating nature’s morally suspicious beauty, are reined in or trammeled
by prose fragments, self-commentaries, quotations from other texts, philosophical
and theological reflections. Language as discourse constantly interrupts language
as rhythm and sound.
In the next chapter, I will discuss the connection of diverse forms of poetic
rhythm with the body in much greater detail. In the present context, I wish merely
to highlight the strongly gendered nature of this conflict in Miłosz’s poetics. On
one side lies body, breath, blood, rhythm, incantation, instinct, nature, the “fem-
inine,” along with a weakened or dispersed subjectivity.⁸² On the other side is
consciousness, thought, discourse, theology, philosophy, artifice, culture, the
“masculine,’ and the strong, Cartesian subject. These symbolic dichotomies
remain intact as “dual, hierarchized oppositions,” while the precise valence of
the hierarchical relation is subject to change.
A useful comparative framework through which to elucidate the gendered
aspect of this conflict is Julia Kristeva’s theory of the “semiotic” and the “sym-
bolic.” Her conception of dual signification very closely reflects the dichotomies of
Miłosz’s poetics. Kristeva’s semiotic refers to processes of signification via the
sound elements of rhythm and intonation, which give expression or outlet
through the body to what both she and Miłosz characterize as unconscious, pre-
subjective “drives.”⁸³ By contrast, the symbolic denotes semantic or discursive
meaning, whereby words are not mere sounds, but signs representing objects of
consciousness. Kristeva suggests that in poetic language the semiotic tends to
prevail over the symbolic constraints of the ego or consciousness.⁸⁴ In Miłosz’s
case, this power of the semiotic—which he reluctantly recognizes—is constantly
interrupted or restricted. The language of his poetry is the stage for a clash
between the symbolic of ego consciousness and the pre-subjective semiotic of
the body, between the controlling conscious mind and the “It,” between verbal
Bolecki suggests that “discursive language” gains the upper hand in this conflict. See Włodzimierz
Bolecki, “Proza Miłosza,” in Aleksander Fiut, ed., Poznawanie Miłosza 2. Część druga (Krakow:
Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2001), 36. I will return to these interpretations in detail in the next chapter.
⁸¹ See Marek Zaleski, “Od ‘grzechu anielstwa’ do ‘uważności,’ czyli poezja jako instalowanie się w
świecie,” Teksty Drugie 5 (2011), 30.
⁸² Arent van Nieukerken also suggests that “the sensitivity to rhythm” is most perceptible when “the
will of the subject submits to the undifferentiated fullness of life.” See Arent van Nieukerken, Ironiczny
konceptyzm: Nowoczesna polska poezja metafizyczna w kontekście anglosaskiego modernizmu (Kraków:
Universitas, 1998), 132.
⁸³ Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, trans. Thomas
Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 134.
⁸⁴ Kristeva, Desire in Language, 134.
  : , ,       131
petticoats and naked rhythm. Miłosz’s poetic ego struggles to come to terms with
what expresses itself through him, as if his poetry were unwanted proof of
inhabitation by wild forces:
In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent:

a thing is brought forth which we didn’t know we had within us,
so we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out
and stood in the light lashing his tail. (NCP 240)
[W samej istocie poezji jest coś nieprzystojnego: / powstaje w nas rzecz

o której nie wiedzieliśmy że w nas jest, / więc mrugamy oczami,
jakby wyskoczył z nas tygrys / i stał w świetle, ogonem bijąc się po
bokach. (W 588)]
In Kristeva’s theory, as in Miłosz’s work, the bodily, instinctive, pre-rational

aspects of poetry are closely associated with essentializing notions of “the femi-
nine.” Kristeva describes semiotic rhythm as “indifferent to language, enigmatic
and feminine . . . irreducible to intelligible verbal translation.”⁸⁵ Conversely, she
identifies the symbolic order of the transcendental ego, rationality, language, law,
politics, culture, and religion with the masculine.⁸⁶ In gendered terms, Miłosz’s
poetry is the scene of a similar clash between a feminine semiotic and a masculine
symbolic. In many of his works, he exhibits deep suspicion of poetry’s potential to
unleash the semiotic to the point where the symbolic function of language might
begin to break down. In such cases, he exhibits no desire for the strong subject of the
transcendental ego to reveal itself as a weak subject, or what Kristeva describes as
a mutable “subject-in-process.”⁸⁷ Instead, he resists this breakdown of subjectivity,
defending the strong, metaphysical version of the subject as disembodied “pure seeing.”
In this vein, his poetry remains a masculine “poetry of the eye”—as Jan Błoński
describes it— in opposition to what Miłosz himself characterizes as an ambivalent
“feminine” poetry marked by the tactility of a mixed looking and touching.⁸⁸
Nevertheless, in spite of the desire for control, the subversive potentiality still
threatens to break out of his poetic writing. At certain moments, he even appears
to embrace it. When Miłosz as male poetic speaker identifies with female figures
⁸⁵ Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1984), 29. Kristeva also relates the bodily aspect of the semiotic to the subject’s
repressed dependence on the mother. Kristeva, Desire in Language, 136.
⁸⁶ Anna Rosalind Jones, “Julia Kristeva on Femininity: The Limits of a Semiotic Politics,” Feminist
Review 18 (Winter 1984): 58. Toril Moi acknowledges the presence of these gendered associations, but
insists that Kristeva also strongly challenges their essentializing or reductive potential. See Toril Moi,
introduction to The Kristeva Reader by Julia Kristeva, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1986), 11.
⁸⁷ Kristeva, Desire in Language, 135.
⁸⁸ Jan Błoński, Miłosz jak świat (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Znak, 1998), 25–7.
132  ’    
touching their bodies in front of mirrors and feeling their social selves as fictions,
he makes contact with a phase before the ego’s despairing mirror stage
alienation.⁸⁹ He “regresses” into a “feminine” corporeality that disperses the
strong subject as self-transparent consciousness into unconscious rhythm, mel-
ody, intonation, and “process.” With this poetic move, once again, Miłosz con-
firms the archetypal associations of “femininity” with the subversion of
“masculine” culture and rationality, while inverting the traditional hierarchy of
value. The female body comes to represent both the positive breakdown of the
strong metaphysical subject and the site of poetry’s origins. Beneath the “sym-
bolic” corsets and petticoats of grammar, syntax, metaphor, and social significa-
tion lies the “semiotic” of naked sound, breath, fluids, and the pulsation of blood.
In this language of the mortal body, as Miłosz learns from Anna Świrszczyńska,
“There is no me.”
6. Fluids and the Form of the Self
The attitudes of Miłosz’s poetic speakers to the feminine “gluiness” or fluidity of

“the real” beneath the flounces of culture, reason, and the logos are far from
uniformly positive. The symbolic woman as body and representative of nature
frequently constitutes a threat, exuding a “sticky erotic aura” that drags the male
as consciousness down into the fluid order of nature.⁹⁰ As Anna Nasiłowska
points out, Miłosz’s speakers are often disgusted by “bodily secretions,” “procre-
ation,” and the “darker side of femininity”—in other words, by “everything that is
‘natural’ or bodily about woman.”⁹¹ These characteristics are negatively associated
with unclean and animal aspects of human existence, as Miłosz reveals in the
important mid-career poem “City Without a Name” (“Miasto bez imienia,” 1969):
Female humanity,
Children’s snot, legs spread apart,
snarled hair, the milk boiling over,
stench, shit frozen into clods. (NCP 218)
[Ludzkość kobiecości, / włosów skudłanych, rozstawiania nóg, /

smarków dziecinnych, mleko wykipi, / smrodu, kup zamarzłych w
grudzie. (W 558)]
⁸⁹ Kristeva identifies the semiotic with the phase before Jacques Lacan’s mirror stage and the
symbolic with the new structures imposed by the mirror stage. See Kristeva, Desire in Language,
19, 136.
⁹⁰ Miłosz, Visions from San Francisco Bay, 28.
⁹¹ Nasiłowska, “Women in the Poetry of Czesław Miłosz,” 40.
  : , ,       133
Women epitomize the repulsive corporeality of human life, and of its reproduc-
tion. More broadly, the “gluiness” of what lies beneath is often a highly negative
symbol for the nothingness of pure matter in its lowest form in Miłosz’s poetry.
Gluey pulp is the result of the disintegration or decomposition of specific forms
into the general, undifferentiated mass of the world’s substance—not the positive
“flesh of the world,” but a negative “pulp” of the universe. In From the Rising of the
Sun, the descriptions that best exemplify Miłosz’s negative vision of biological
nature focus on the disintegration of individual creatures into parts within a fluid
mass: “In sap, mush, glue, millions and millions / Of entangled legs, wings, and
abdomens” (NCP 288) [“Na sokach, maziach, lepach, milion za milionem / Nóg
poplątanych, skrzydeł i odwłoków” (W 641)]. In “You Whose Name” (“Wołacz”),
the speaker describes the effect of the same general principle on the male repre-
sentatives of human reason and religion: “You whose name is aggressor and
devourer. / Putrid and sultry, in fermentation. / You mash into pulp sages and
prophets” (NCP 633) [“Ty, której imię agresja i pożeranie, / Gnilna i duszna,
fermentująca, / Przerabiająca na miazgę mędrców i proroków” (W 1104)]. In
“Three Talks on Civilization” (“Trzy rozmowy o cywilizacji,” 1963), the foul fluids
of bodily secretions—”excrement, urine, and dead sperm” (NCP 203) [“ekskre-
mentach, moczu i martwej spermie” (W 533–4)]—remove human beings from
any socially constructed forms, including from their individual selves.
Miłosz repeatedly stresses that the sameness of human biological existence
alienates the individual from himself or herself. The repulsive soup of fluids is
the lowest form of this sameness, where fragmented subjects decompose into the
undifferentiated object, suggesting a diabolical analogy of Ela’s positive “oceanic”
dissolution. The accompanying self-alienation echoes Kristeva’s conception of
“the abject,” a term she uses to describe the “uncanniness” or “meaninglessness”
that emerges from the breakdown of a clear distinction between subject and
object.⁹² The “abject” manifests itself in the rotten fluidity of decomposing
corpses, open wounds, and human waste, representing the invasion of the subject
by its potential reduction to object. According to Kristeva, the “I” must expel the
“abject” in order to set itself up as a discrete “self” separated from the “other” by
clear borders. Moreover, the process of “abjection” can never reach a definitive
conclusion. The “abject” may always return unbidden to challenge the integrity of
the differentiated self. Like Miłosz in the passages above, Kristeva describes this
return of the abject in images of burnt milk, excrement, decay, and bodily fluids,
all of which inspire intense loathing.
Kristeva’s notion of the abject is also strongly gendered—for instance, in its
association with the maternal body, from which the symbolically male subject
originally separates himself in order to come into being as an autonomous
⁹² Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1982), 1–2.
134  ’    
entity.⁹³ Feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz picks up this gendered element of

the abject to explain the cultural construction of a negative female corporeality
associated with “the fluid as a borderline state, disruptive of the solidity of things,
entities, and objects.”⁹⁴ Miłosz, too, very often associates the “abjection” of bodily
fluids with women. Above all, female fluids disrupt the integrity of the rational or
socially constructed self, as the case of another woman in a mirror reveals in an
untranslated poem:
In rolls of colorful materials wrapping the thighs and neck

Of she who looks in the mirror, half knowing and half not knowing,
Who she should be, who she is, and to what she should confess,
When the streak of blood trickles down her leg.
[Zwojami kolorowych materii owijający biodra i szyję / Tej, która patrzy

w lustro i na wpół wie, na wpół nie wie, / Kim być powinna, kim
jest, do czego się przyznać, / Kiedy smużka krwi sączy się wzdłuż
nogi. (W 941)]
The female subject looks at the colorful materials representing the symbolic
construction of her autonomous “self,” before feeling the subversive trickle of
blood that undermines it. Once again, menstrual blood exposes the “frailty of
symbolic order,” as Kristeva puts it.⁹⁵ Beneath the flounces of social convention,
the female body is unknowable, even by the female subject herself. The trickle of
blood seems to drain any certainty of her identity, as if this knowledge and the
accompanying solidity of her delimited self were leaking out of her. As in the
earlier cited examples, menstruation represents the unspeakable “real” of the body
beneath the symbolic dimensions of language and social ritual. In the same way,
another female speaker refers to “the flow of blood, spots on the linen” as facts that
must be passed over “in silence” (NCP 620) [“krwi płynienie, / Plamy na
prześcieradle, przemilczane” (W 1080)]. This feminine, bodily “silence” poten-
tially gives access to a deeper layer of reality, as the “nameless woman” of The
Separate Notebooks suggests. However, in much of Miłosz’s work, and in the
Western tradition more generally, feminine fluidity carries a subversively negative
dimension, which Grosz polemically captures:
Can it be that in the West, in our time, the female body has been constructed not
only as a lack or absence but with more complexity, as a leaking, uncontrollable,
seeping liquid; as formless flow; as viscosity, entrapping, secreting; as lacking not
⁹³ Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 14–5.

⁹⁴ Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 195. Grosz also uses related ideas in the thought of Mary Douglas and Luce
Irigaray.
⁹⁵ Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 70.
  : , ,       135
so much or simply the phallus but self-containment—not a cracked or porous

vessel, like a leaking ship, but a formlessness that engulfs all form, a disorder that
threatens all order?⁹⁶
This suspicion of supposedly “feminine” formlessness and disorder is clearly

present in Miłosz’s work. His female mirror scenes and identification with “fem-
inine” dissolution into weakened subjectivity remain highly ambivalent, especially
before the late “feminist” turn. He frequently links women with the endless flow of
the material world. The early poem “The Song” features a despairing “woman”
associated with “the Earth,” which “flows away” and will “keep flowing” (NCP 7)
[“Ziemie odpływa . . . odpływaj” (W 61)]. An untranslated poem written during
the war, entitled “On the Beach” (“Na plaży”), presents yet another variant of the
female mirror scene. The poem is filled with menstrual symbolism: flowing rivers
and the surging tides of the ocean over shores at night in the light of the moon.⁹⁷
The final sections introduce two young women, one of whom, Zosia, “combs her
hair in front of the mirror” [“przed lustrem rozczesuje włosy” (W 130)]. Like Ela,
Zosia holds her breasts in her hands, “swaying dreamily like a sea plant” [“chwieje
się sennie jak morska roślina”]. The watery imagery continues in the “plunging” of
the comb into her hair, before the two women converse frankly about erotic love
based on explicitly bodily—not spiritual—qualities. The poem concludes with the
sloshing of the waves on a sandy shore in moonlight.
“On the Beach” is far from the ecstasy of Ela’s meeting with the ocean. Instead,
it exudes the cold menace of a flowing universe in which generations of the human
species live and die, reproducing themselves in accordance with the instincts of
their bodies. This is the world of “radical materialism” that Miłosz associates with
the “nameless woman” from The Separate Notebooks in his conversation with
Gorczyńska. Male speakers also appear on beaches in Miłosz’s poetry, usually to
face the passing of time and the inevitability of death: “The sea breaks on the
sands, I listen to its surge and close my eyes” (NCP 559) [“Na piaskach roztrąca się
morze i słucham jego szumu, i zamykam oczy” (W 1027)].⁹⁸ However, these
scenes generally present the male speaker as looking and reflecting consciousness,
and not as a physical body entering the water. The strong male subject attempts to
⁹⁶ Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 203.

⁹⁷ Renouf observes that this scene brings together a host of symbols and attributes associated with
women: “night, moon, mirror, water.” See Renouf, “Eros, kobieta i Bóg,” 476. More broadly, the
connection of women with flux is reinforced by metaphorical links between women and rivers. For
instance, in the short lyric “Rivers,” the flowing water is likened to a “goddess” (NCP 396) [“bogini” (W
768)].
⁹⁸ This poem from Provinces (Dalsze okolice, 1991), also entitled “On a Beach” (“Na plaży”) contains
strong echoes of Walt Whitman’s “When the Ocean of Life Took Me Away with the Tide,” which
Miłosz had earlier translated into Polish and published in Unattainable Earth (Nieobjęta ziemia, 1984).
See Stanley Bill, “Translation as Talking to Oneself: Miłosz Makes Whitman Speak,” Wielogłos: Journal
of the Faculty of Polish Studies at the Jagiellonian University 3, no. 17 (2013): 43–56.
136  ’    
differentiate himself from a fluidity, formlessness, and mortality that the poet
projects onto the female.⁹⁹
Grosz argues that male distancing from corporeality expresses itself in the male
subject’s refusal to acknowledge his own symbolic and literal connection with
fluids and flows.¹⁰⁰ The porous, leaking, and irrational body is associated with
women, while men’s own bodily fluids are restricted to “by-products of pleasure
and the raw materials of reproduction.” This observation holds true in Miłosz’s
poetic world—with the notable exception of blood, which circulates powerfully
through the male body rather than leaking out of it. Otherwise, male fluids are
limited to rare references to semen, as the successfully expelled “abject,” a by-
product separate from a male consciousness purged of repulsive materiality. In
“Descent to the Earth” (“Zejście na ziemię,” 1938), the early essay critiquing this
excarnated type of subjectivity, the alienated speaker describes with disgust “the
odors of private dens, and sperm and juices not yet dry” in a poor district.¹⁰¹ These
fluids form part of a degraded human corporeality from which the male “I” wishes
to purify himself. The gendering of fluids as the “gluiness” and “snarled hair” of
“female humanity” allows the masculine ego more easily to distance himself
from them.
From another feminist perspective, Luce Irigaray argues that the substance of
the fluid female body has traditionally served as the horizontal ground for the
“erection” of a vertical masculine transcendence: “The masculine subject erects
itself out of mucous.”¹⁰² Insofar as Miłosz constructs a notion of a vertical
consciousness alienated from its horizontal bodily origins, often identified with
woman, he echoes this symbolic procedure. This move is perhaps also related to
what Grosz describes as men’s “disavowal” of the femininity within themselves,
capturing Miłosz’s self-confessed repression of what he calls his “female
anima.”¹⁰³ Iragaray’s radical response is to invert the symbolic hierarchy by
valorizing or even transcendentalizing what lies beneath. In opposition to a
male “vertical” transcendence based on rejection of corporeality, she posits the
fluids of the body as a female “horizontal” version of the transcendent core of
human identity. Specifically, she casts “mucous” as “that which underlies being,” a
“prime matter” forming the basis for a new metaphysics, and even for a female
equivalent of the soul.¹⁰⁴ Instead of taking flight in an incorporeal aspect, the
human essence inheres in the seeping mucous that underlies the body and mind,
thus “transcending” their physical structures and the faculty of reason.
⁹⁹ As Irena Grudzinska Gross explains: “The fear of the fragility and decay of the body, the horror of
death is transferred onto the woman.” See Grudzinska Gross, Czesław Miłosz and Joseph Brodsky, 107.
¹⁰⁰ Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 200.
¹⁰¹ Czesław Miłosz, “Zejście na ziemię,” in Przygody młodego umysłu. Publicystyka i proza 1931–
1939 (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2003), 218.
¹⁰² Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1993), 109.
¹⁰³ Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 200. ¹⁰⁴ Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 109.
  : , ,       137
As I have argued, Miłosz’s poetry includes various moments in which he also

inverts the gendered hierarchy—or, at least, where he opens himself to a more
positive engagement with the underlying reality of the body. Fluidity and looser
types of form have aesthetically productive dimensions in his poetic and philosoph-
ical universe. He finds an ambivalent freedom from the oppressive boundaries of
buffered subjectivity in a symbolically feminine “oceanic feeling,” in the ironic
wisdom of the body’s gluey warmth, and in the dissolution of an embodied subject
into the flesh of the world. In certain works, Miłosz explores the creative potential of
this “feminine” subjectivity and its closer connection with the fluid “real”—or the
border zone of Irigaray’s “mucous membranes.”¹⁰⁵ Yet gluey pulp and mucuous more
commonly appear in negative contexts in his works. They represent the symbolic
reduction of human beings to undifferentiable matter: to “nothing, lumps of mucous
on a beach” (NCP 708) [“nicoście jak bryłki śluzu na plaży” (W 1177)]. In this light,
mucous constitutes the basic substance of the physical shell inhabited by alienated
consciousness, as another male poetic speaker confesses in front of another mirror:
From nails, mucous membrane,

Lungs, liver, bowels, and spleen
Whose house is made? Mine. (NCP 217)
[Z paznokci, śluzowej błony, / Kiszek i płuc, i śledziony / Czyj dom

będzie uczyniony? / Swój własny, a jeden z wiela. (W 557)]
The male self is trapped in a fleshly “house,” even as he feels his distinctness
from this bodily frame. For Miłosz, the paradox of consciousness echoes the
paradox of poetry: it simultaneously arises from the fluidity of the body and
transcends it. As a form of human ritual, poetry “soars . . . above the warmth of
mucous membrane / On the incomprehensible borderline between mind and
flesh” (NCP 434) [“nad ich ciepłem śluzowej błony, / Na niepojętej granicy
umysłu i ciała” (W 839)].¹⁰⁶ Yet both poetry and the metaphysical subject remain
in touch with their “gluey” origins, which hold the vague promise of a primal
renewal beyond the limitations of rationality. Therefore, when Miłosz speculates
about a liberating “poetry of the future,” as we have seen, he associates it with
circulation, with the “rhythms of the body,” and with shameful fluids: “Sweating,
the bleeding of the period, the gluiness of sperm, the position for passing urine, the
movement of the intestines” [“Pocenie się, krwawienia periodu, lepkość spermy,
pozycja przy oddawaniu moczu, ruch kiszek” (W 802)]. Only by making contact
¹⁰⁵ Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 109.

¹⁰⁶ Again, the context here is strongly female, as established by an earlier line about “dark triangles
of hair” (“ciemne trójkąty uwłosień”).
138  ’    
with these abject substances can poetry or language touch “who we really are” as
human animals.
In this key passage, the “gluiness” previously linked with feminine internality is
also explicitly associated with masculine fluids. The porous reality of mucous
membrane and fluid exchange with other people and with the external environ-
ment reveals itself as common to men and women. All human subjectivity is
rooted in, but also weakened by, the fluidity of corporeal identity. Here Miłosz
goes beyond what Irigaray describes as the masculine subject’s mere elaboration of
“something solid” or “essential” upon the feminine ground of “mucous.” Instead,
he implicitly acknowledges the presence of a fluid “prime matter” that destabilizes
all solid notions of identity, allowing for a constructive blurring of the borders
between masculine and feminine, vertical and horizontal, immaterial and
material.
Several critics have noted the presence of an ambivalent androgynous identity
in some of Miłosz’s works.¹⁰⁷ Indeed, he characterizes his poetic vocation as
imbued with “womanliness,” confessing to a feeling of being a “transvestite in a
woman’s dress” among males.¹⁰⁸ As a poet, he presents a mixed identity—an
essentialized combination of strong “masculine” will and “feminine” receptivity to
external influences. This internal conflict is sometimes threatening, but it also
establishes the necessary creative tension for the production of poetry. More
broadly, Miłosz’s androgynous identity may suggest another path to transcend-
ence and even to the divine, as Joanna Dembińska-Pawelec argues: “[Masculine]
unification with the deepest immanence of a feminine, sacred principle . . . opens
[the subject] to an encounter with God and His eternal duration.”¹⁰⁹ But what
kind of God could it be?
7. Erotic Intersubjectivity and the Divine
Miłosz finds the sources of religious experience and belief deep in the body. Even
the other-worldly God is “blood-related” to human beings, revealing Himself
above all “in the very rhythm of the blood . . . in the entrails, in the muscles.” In
many of his works, Miłosz rejects the purifying excesses of excarnation, and seeks
transcendence in material existence, or rather at a crossing of the vertical and the
horizontal symbolic axes. However, since he assumes that the very existence of the
¹⁰⁷ Aleksander Fiut argues that “divine androgyny seems to be a poetic hypothesis of complete
humanity.” See Aleksander Fiut, The Eternal Moment: The Poetry of Czesław Miłosz, trans. Theodosia
S. Robertson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 130; Kris van Heuckelom observes the
“liquidation of the opposition between the male and female elements.” See Kris van Heuckelom,
“Patrzeć w promień od ziemi odbity”: wizualność w poezji Czesława Miłosza (Warszawa: Instytut
Badań Literackich PAN, 2004), 161.
¹⁰⁸ Miłosz, Road-side Dog, 35. ¹⁰⁹ Dembińska-Pawelec, “Poezja jest sztuką rytmu,” 270.
  : , ,       139
vertical dimension is now in doubt, and human immortality along with it, the
power of this crossing is limited by the final reality of death. As long as the strong
self yearns for something beyond total identity with its finite material form—for a
radical transcendence of death—then the horizontal dimension alone can only
inspire faith in moments of bodily health and vigour.
The fluid “feminine” subject’s ecstatic dissolution into the objective world
represents a very different kind of fully horizontal transcendence in Miłosz’s
poetry. This vision is largely secular or agnostic, devoid of explicitly “spiritual”
characteristics, sharing common assumptions with the anti-Cartesian philosophy
of Merleau-Ponty and certain feminist critiques of masculine metaphysics.
However, these theories also open alternative perspectives on religion and God.
For example, Irigaray intimates a radical new principle of divinity associated with
fluidity, “mucous,” and what she famously calls the “sensible transcendental”—a
strongly horizontal understanding of transcendence as an experience rooted in the
pre-rational, living body.¹¹⁰ By contrast, she associates the traditional masculine
“vertical” God—the “dead” God of Nietzsche’s polemic—with alienation from the
flesh, frozen immutability, singular truth, otherworldly transcendence, and
rational discourse. She imagines the “new incarnation” of a God who would be
opposed to any notion of immutable transcendence in separation from the mortal
flesh.¹¹¹
In his own way, Miłosz also links humans with God through a corporeal
subjectivity that is porous, fluid, and open to penetration or inhabitation by a
non-human “Other.” Moreover, this version of subjectivity is closely related to his
own androgynous self-definition as a poet. However, his understandings of God
more often remain traditionally Christian, and thus very far from Irigaray’s radical
vision of a feminine or neuter “divinity” incarnate in mucous membrane. Instead,
Miłosz suggests yet another kind of horizontal transcendence, replete with inti-
mations of divinity, but founded on this-worldly intersubjectivity between men
and women. Especially in the erotic relation, the simultaneous sameness and
difference of the female “other” expose the male subject to a dimension beyond
himself—a sphere of shared sensations. In some instances, this self-transcendence
may even evoke the presence of an otherworldly God. In a prose fragment from
¹¹⁰ Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 110–15. According to Patrice Haynes, “Irigaray calls for a
reinterpretation of transcendence in this-worldly, immanent, or materialist terms.” See Patrice Haynes,
“Transcendence, Materialism, and the Reenchantment of Nature: Toward a Theological Materialism,”
in Women and the Divine: Touching Transcendence, eds. Gillian Howie and J’annine Jobling (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 72.
¹¹¹ Another feminist thinker, Catherine Clément, makes a comparable set of distinctions in her
exchange with Julia Kristeva. She distinguishes between “masculine transcendence” and a “feminine
supernatural” intertwined with “sensation” and physicality. See Catherine Clément and Julia Kristeva,
The Feminine and the Sacred, trans. Jane Marie Todd (New York: Columbia University Press,
2001), 113.
140  ’    
Unattainable Earth, the male speaker confesses to an erotic conflation of hori-

zontal and vertical dimensions:
Do I love God? Or her? Or myself? I’m not able to differentiate, and for this
reason I am ashamed, because not only is it difficult to admit to this openly but
even to think it. My piety is perhaps just the gratitude of a benign body, for
breath, for the rhythm of the blood, for everything.
[Czy kocham Boga? Czy ją? Czy siebie? Nie umiem rozróżnić i jestem z tego
powodu zawstydzony, bo nie tylko trudno się do tego głośno przyznać, ale nawet
pomyśleć. Moja pobożność jest być może wdzięcznością pogodnego ciała, za
oddech, za rytm krwi, za wszystko. (W 851)]
In this passage, the bodily sources of religious feeling, or piety, are directly linked
with erotic love for a female other. However, the direction of this love and the
precise nature of the feelings aroused by the encounter remain uncertain. The
speaker cannot tell if this is a genuinely religious experience, an intense emotion of
attachment to another human being, or rather a narcissistic feeling of vitality and
pleasure. Nevertheless, the confrontation with the otherness of sexual difference
appears in these lines both as an anticipation of the otherness of the divine in its
vertical dimension, and as a form of horizontal transcendence in itself. In this
limited sense, Miłosz eschews those dominant streams of the Western philosoph-
ical tradition that have treated “female” corporeal life as radically opposed to a
transcendence associated with the “male” sphere of reason and the spirit.¹¹²
Indeed, this example—and various others presented in this chapter—suggest
types of self-transcendence rooted precisely in encounters with female bodies
and in attempts to express feminine perspectives.
This symbolic identification may also be inspired by certain mystical traditions
of Christian thought, especially in connection with erotic love. In this respect,
Miłosz refers on several occasions to the influences of his cousin Oscar Milosz and
Emmanuel Swedenborg. In Unattainable Earth, he even quotes his relative’s notes
on the eighteenth-century Swedish mystic: “And thus the whole of Creation is
FEMININE and the love of the Lord for his own self in Creation is the love of Man
for Woman, and the return to God is Conjunction, or Marriage” [“A zatem całe
Stworzenie jest ŻEŃSKIE i miłość Pana do Siebie samego w Stworzeniu jest miłością
Mężczyzny do Kobiety, a powrót do Boga jest Koniunkcją, czyli Małżeństwem”
(W 857)]. From this point of view, Man’s love of Woman reflects God’s love of
Creation, which also represents a kind of divine self-love. On this symbolic
level, Miłosz’s poetic speaker’s love of God, woman, and self are all mutually
confirming. In a late poem, he bemoans the modern reduction of this complex
¹¹² Pamela Sue Anderson, “Transcendence and Feminist Philosophy: On Avoiding Apotheosis,” in
Women and the Divine: Touching Transcendence, eds. Howie and Jobling, 29.
  : , ,       141
spiritual interplay—also captured in the biblical Song of Songs—to a mere “sexual

game” [“seksualną zabawę” (W 1287)]. Against this perceived trend, he wishes to
preserve the religious symbolism of the erotic sphere, at least in poetic form.
Both conventional and unconventional forms of Christian erotic mysticism are
evident in Miłosz’s version of the sensible trancendental.¹¹³ However, his descrip-
tions of male encounters with female bodies also suggest Iragaray’s secular
characterizations of a horizontal transcendence evoked by contact with “the
other of sexual difference . . . towards whom it is possible to go . . . while remaining
in the self.”¹¹⁴ Once again, Miłosz’s poetry opens itself to both religious and non-
religious interpretations here. For Irigaray, a kind of self-transcendence is acces-
sible in the experience of a heterosexual, male–female erotic intersubjectivity. She
strategically essentializes differences between men and women, thus mirroring
Miłosz’s simultaneous preservation of the male–female dichotomy and reversal of
its valency.¹¹⁵ Though their aims are radically disparate, both Irigaray and Miłosz
emphasize an irreducible sexual difference that accommodates uniquely “female”
forms of existence. In many of Miłosz’s poems, binary understandings of gender
and biological sex outweigh any sense of a common identity: “You will never know
what I feel, she said, / Because you are filling me and are not filled” (NCP 433)
[“Nigdy nie będziesz wiedział, co czuję, powiedziała. / Ponieważ ty mnie
wypełniasz, a nie jesteś wypełniany” (W 838)]. The male subject recognizes that
female subjectivity is “completely different”—or perhaps, in Ela’s terms, “the same
other” (“to samo inne”), both different and the same.
Iragaray describes the humble recognition of sexual difference as “respect for the
other whom I will never be, who is transcendent to me and to whom I am
transcendent.”¹¹⁶ Instead of locating transcendence in a vertical realm, she argues,
we should “learn to lay it beween us.”¹¹⁷ In certain moments, one might describe
Miłosz’s exploration of female subjectivity as an encounter with this very form of
horizontal transcendence: a respectful poetic approach to the inaccessible realm of
woman’s fleshly experience. However, the male speaker more often frames and
controls this intersubjective difference in order to privilege his own “strong” sub-
jectivity in the form of reflecting consciousness. The female subject is ostensibly
equal to the male in her unique sensual experience of the world. However, in reality,
she becomes a secondary subject, mostly reduced to an inferior bodily identity in
¹¹³ See Magdalena Lubelska-Renouf, “La poésie érotique et métaphysique: Lieu de rencontre entre
Oscar Milosz et Czeslaw Milosz,” Prace Polonistyczne 70 (2015): 177–97.
¹¹⁴ Luce Irigaray, I Love To You: Sketch for a Felicity Within History, trans. Alison Martin (London:
Routledge, 1996), 105.
¹¹⁵ Debates over Irigaray’s use of “strategic essentialism” have formed an important part of her
work’s reception. For instance, see Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference
(New York: Routledge, 1989), 55–72. Also see Elizabeth Grosz, “The Nature of Sexual Difference:
Irigaray and Darwin,” Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities 17, no. 2 (2012): 69–93.
¹¹⁶ Irigaray, I Love To You, 104.
¹¹⁷ Luce Irigaray, “A Bridge between Two Irreducible to Each Other,” in Why Different? trans.
Camille Collins (New York: Semiotext(e), 2000), 58.
142  ’    
opposition to dominant male rationality. In another poem from Unattainable Earth,

Miłosz’s autobiographical speaker addresses his lover in a similar register:
I loved your breasts and your belly and your lips.

How to comprehend your otherness and sameness?
Convex and concave, how do they complement each other?
How is it that we feel and think alike?
Our eyes seeing the same, our ears hearing the same,
Our touch making and unmaking the same world.
Not one, divided in two, not two, united in one:
The second I, so that I may be conscious of myself. (NCP 438–9)
[Kochałem twoje piersi i brzuch, i usta / Tylka jak pojąć, że jesteś inna,
choć tożsama? / Że wypukłość i wklęsłość uzupełniają się, /Ale czuć i
myśleć możemy podobnie? / Że oczy tak samo widzą, uszy tak samo
słyszą / I dotyk rzeczy ziemskie tak samo poznaje? / Nie jedno, ale
dwoje, nie dwoje, bo jedno, / Ja drugi, żebym siebie był przez to
świadomy. (W 853)]
Here, the woman exists in order to provide a mirror for the man: to make him
conscious of his own distinct identity. Beyond this role, she has no agency of her
own. Although Miłosz recognizes the “difference” of female subjectivity, and gives
intimations of an autonomous “feminine” perspective, women are largely silent in
his poetry.¹¹⁸ They are objects rather than subjects. Once again, in Irigaray’s terms,
the female body remains the symbolic ground upon which male subjectivity can
“erect” itself. In this mode, the woman’s power lies only in the capacity to entrap
the man in sexuality or in purely material existence: “A glance through eyelashes,
lasting no more than an instant . . . . The sundew flower closes over the insect it has
seized.”¹¹⁹ From this biological perspective, the sexual relation with the female
drags the hapless male subject—with his pretensions to purified separation—back
down into the order of nature. In response, the male fantasy of woman’s “differ-
ence” may function to reduce her, as Grosz argues, to a harmless mystery “to
master and decipher within safe or unthreatening borders.”¹²⁰ In consequence, the
man remains in a privileged “objective” position beyond sexual difference as the
apparently ungendered subject “par excellence.”
Grosz’s critical perspective captures the limitations of Miłosz’s exploration of a
weak, corporeal, “feminine” identity. In some of his poems, an imaginative
engagement with female bodily experience potentially leads to a liberating desta-
bilization or transcendence of the male incorporeal self. Elswhere, his version of
¹¹⁸ Nasiłowska, “Women in the Poetry of Czesław Miłosz,” 49.

¹¹⁹ See Miłosz, Visions from San Francisco Bay, 27–8. ¹²⁰ Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 191.
  : , ,       143
the “sensible transcendental” may even reach beyond purely immanent or inter-
subjective transcendence toward a speculative crossing of horizontal and vertical
dimensions, where bodily encounters with a female “other” anticipate an encoun-
ter with God. Yet Miłosz more often retreats into a stereotypical position of
strong, masculine subjectivity defined against a weaker feminine subject-object
closely identified with nature.
8. A Mixed Identity
In this chapter, I have contrasted Miłosz’s conception of the vertically transcend-

ent male poetic subject with a more fluid female subject experiencing a radical
form of horizontal self-transcendence. In general, he remains deeply traditional in
his essentialistic approach to sex and gender, maintaining binary oppositions
between masculine and feminine, mind and body, art and nature, transcendent
and immanent, heaven and earth, knowledge and experience, seeing and touching.
However, in certain moments, he seems to reverse the valence of these dominant
hierarchies, while still preserving their basic dichotomies. In a weaker, “feminine”
subjectivity that embraces dissolution into the “flesh of the world,” he finds a
potential solution to the problem of alienated consciousness. His female subjects
are open to a co-participatory relation with the external world, exposing the
porousness and even fictionality of their distinct identities. Finally, Miłosz
characterizes this “feminine” openness to external influences as an important
condition for the emergence of a poetry also tied to the fluids and rhythms of
the body—that is, to the self ’s own “other.”
Miłosz’s gender distinctions are largely symbolic—representing ideal types—
while the reality of any individual identity appears to be mixed. He frequently
refers to a “feminine” aspect of his own identity, linking it with the instinctive or
instrumental dimensions of his poetic faculty. More generally, human life—as he
describes it—manifests a constant tension between consciousness, with its capac-
ity to abstract itself from matter, and the concrete, incarnate situation of individ-
ual existence. In its combination of “symbolic” and “semiotic” modes of
signification, Miłosz finds in poetry the type of language most commensurate
with this composite human identity. The final chapter of this book will bring
together its diverse arguments in a sustained analysis of poetic language. Miłosz’s
reflections on the body, the self, and transcendence parallel his innovative exper-
imentation with new kinds of poetic form.
5
Poetry and the Body
The Meaning of Rhythm and the Rhythm
of Meaning
1. The Lever of Contradiction
The central argument of this book is that Czesław Miłosz’s search for a new
transcendence in a secular age unfolds in large measure through deep engagement
with material or embodied existence. In opposition to his own radically anti-
materialist tendencies, he proposes that both the self and religious experience are
inextricably linked with the material body. The self as consciousness springs
mysteriously from the body, neither reducible to it nor separable from it.
Conversely, the body is the site of a deeper self that transcends consciousness. In
a similar way, religious and moral beliefs originate in bodily experiences, which, in
turn, transcend rational forms of religiosity. After initial discussions of the devel-
opment of disembodied perspectives in Miłosz’s work, I have focused on his
representations of various forms of transcendence accessible through sensual expe-
rience. As he explores different versions of strong and weak subjectivity in the flesh,
Miłosz finds intimations of a very immanent or material form of the transcendent.
In these interpretations, I have concentrated on the religious and philosophical
content of Miłosz’s writings, starting with close readings of individual poems. This
final chapter will focus more directly on his general principles of poetic form,
exploring the interaction of different types of rhythm with the body, and with both
“horizontal” and “vertical” dimensions of transcendence. For Miłosz, poetry is the
type of language closest to materiality—to the signifier, sound, bodily effects—and yet
it also aspires to make contact with what he characterizes as a “deeper” or “higher”
reality. Like the conscious self, poetry originates in the membranes and rhythms of the
body, partially transcends them, but can never be entirely detached from them:
Poetry is an embarrassing affair; it is born too near to the functions we call intimate.
Poetry cannot be separated from awareness of our body. It soars above it,
immaterial and at the same time captive, and is a reason for our uneasiness,
for it pretends to belong to a separate zone, of spirit.¹
¹ Czesław Miłosz, Road-side Dog, trans. Czesław Miłosz and Robert Hass (New York: Farrar, Straus
, ,    145
In the last chapter, I explained Miłosz’s sense of the “embarrassing” closeness of a

certain kind of rhythmic language to the fluid realities of a symbolically “female”
corporeal existence. He describes the writing of poetry as an “unmanly occupa-
tion” and the “sex” of poetry as “feminine.”² However, in these essentializing
associations, he also perceives a transgressive potential to generate new perspec-
tives on transcendence. He argues that poetry’s greater connection with what is
“most deeply felt in life”—a connection he also associates with women—makes it
more effective than contemporary “theology” and “traditional religion” at addres-
sing “the ultimate in the human condition.”³ Poetry’s proximity to the body and to
a putatively “feminine” type of corporeal receptivity gives it the power to encap-
sulate the most fundamental realities of human existence in the world.
At the same time, Miłosz continues to insist on poetry’s immaterial separation
from its own material origins. Poetry is born in the rhythms of the body—the
beating of the heart, the pulse, respiration, the cycles of menstruation—and yet it
also strains for meanings beyond the purely physical or material world. As Miłosz
presents it in the lyric “Meaning” (“Sens”), the poetic word is a “tireless messen-
ger” that breaks free of mortal lips to issue a “protest” against the impersonal order
of the physical universe (NCP 569; W 1036). In a poem on the death of fellow
Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert, this word appears almost as a “Gnostic” stranger in
the material cosmos, analogous to the ambivalently incorporeal poetic “I”: a
“clear” consciousness liberated from the “screams of perishing tissue” (NCP
724–5) [“z krzyku ginących tkanek” (W 1194)].
As Miłosz understands it, poetry is an art of articulating contradictions. Like
various philosophers of language, he recognizes that poetic language is deeply
embodied—as all language is. Yet he still continues to cherish notions of poetry as
a “pristine language” beyond the body.⁴ On the one hand, it springs from “rhythm,
born of the heart’s pulsation”⁵; on the other, “it cannot inhabit / the chambers
of the heart, / the meannness of the liver, / the sententiousness of the kidneys, / or
the brain, with its dependence on the grace of oxygen” (NCP 724) [“nie może
mieszkać / w alkowach serca, / w zgryźliwościach wątroby, / w sentencjach nerek, /
ani w mózgu zdanym na łaskę tlenu” (W 1194)]. In this opposition between deep
rootedness in the body and alienation from it, Miłosz finds poetry to be the most
congenial vehicle for the exploration of religious problems and the dual nature of
the human self:
Because poetry captures all the contradictions of human life. Our sensuality,
entanglement in matter, but also our lofty flights. In abstract language, the body
² Miłosz, Road-side Dog, 34–5. ³ Miłosz, Road-side Dog, 20–1.

⁴ Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2007), 219–21.
⁵ Czesław Miłosz, The Land of Ulro, trans. Louis Iribarne (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2000), 199.
146  ’    
and the mind do not exist simultaneously. But poetry refers at the same time to
our corporeality and our spirituality. And by conveying this amazing combina-
tion within us, poetry somehow advances the whole question of religion.⁶
In this central dialectic, Miłosz borrows from French philosopher Simone Weil
(1909–43) the maxim that “contradiction is the lever of transcendence.”⁷ Through
the oppositions of poetic language, Miłosz hopes to shift this lever, opening
new perspectives on religious experience and belief. In this book, I have argued
that the Christian form of transcendence most central to his aspirations emerges
at the crossing of “vertical” and “horizontal” dimensions, between an inaccessible
“otherworldly” sphere and the deepest potential of this-worldly life. In this
chapter, I will connect the intertwining of these dimensions to a more detailed
analysis of the forms and structures of Miłosz’s poetry. I will introduce a theory of
his poetic work as a site of conflict between multiple rhythmic principles, which
also interact with diverse bodily rhythms and with different understandings of
subjectivity. Finally, I will show how he links the rhythms of poetic language with
embodied forms of religious practice. For Miłosz, poetry and ritual represent
parallel structures of human form extended between the opposing transcendent
horizons of the inexpressible body and a silent God.
2. Miłosz’s Struggle against Rhythm
So far, I have often referred to rhythm in Miłosz’s most general terms as a diverse
set of “pulsations” or cycles originating in the body. However, rhythm expresses
itself in poetry most ostentatiously in the regular forms that have developed and
mutated within specific cultural or intercultural histories, manifesting themselves
in discrete patterns of stress, intonation, meter, and line length. Critics have drawn
attention to the unusual diversity, richness, and historical eclecticism of Miłosz’s
engagement with these rhythms of poetic tradition.⁸ Indeed, the famous “polyph-
ony” of Miłosz’s work also pertains to the multiple poetic styles and systems
⁶ Czesław Miłosz, Rozmowy polskie. Vol. 2: 1999–2004 (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2010),
455. Translation my own.
⁷ This idea comes from Weil’s “New York Notebook”—published in English in The First and Last
Notebooks (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 134. Miłosz refers to the maxim in an essay
entitled “The Importance of Simone Weil”—first written in English in 1960—and in The Land of Ulro.
See Czesław Miłosz, To Begin Where I Am: Selected Essays, eds. Bogdana Carpenter and Madeline
Levine (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 254; Miłosz, The Land of Ulro, 257. William
Blake’s interest in contradiction also influenced Miłosz. As Blake writes in The Marriage of Heaven and
Hell (1790–3), “Without contraries is no progression.” See William Blake, The Complete Poetry and
Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (New York: Random House, 1988), 34.
⁸ Polish scholarship distinguishes four systems of versification. The three traditional systems are
usually described as syllabic, syllabotonic and tonic. Syllabic verse is based on number of syllables per
line, where stress is less significant. This system has dominated Polish verse, as Miłosz observes in his
, ,    147
in which he writes. This versatility sometimes takes the form of conscious

stylization, involving the anachronistic deployment of historical metrical systems
and rhyme for ironic or satirical effect.⁹ These borrowings are present throughout
his career, though they are particularly evident around the period of the Second
World War.
In the wartime cycle The World (Świat, 1943), Miłosz uses a simple eleven-
syllable line and regular rhyme reminiscent of verse for children to emphasize the
bitter contrast of these “naïve poems” with the context of occupied Warsaw.¹⁰
After the war, the untranslated Treatise on Morals (Traktat moralny, 1953) is a
sardonic commentary on “historical necessity” written in rhymed nine-syllable
lines drawn from Jonathan Swift’s (1667–1745) polemical and satirical poetry in
English.¹¹ A Toast (Toast, 1953) and several other poems are written in rhyming
Alexandrines, the classical Polish thirteen-syllable line, also with partly ironic
effect. A Treatise on Poetry (Traktat poetycki, 1957) predominantly takes a regular
eleven-syllable line, and also includes an ode, an archaic form that Miłosz would
borrow on several occasions.¹² As he explains, the use of eighteenth-century
models associated with the Enlightenment is a deeply critical gesture. He satiri-
cally reproduces the most controlled and ordered forms of the Western poetic
tradition in order to critique Western civilization and its values after their
apparent downfall in the mass violence of mid-twentieth-century Europe. In
short, his odes and treatises are almost always “mock odes and treatises.”¹³
The use of ironic stylization in regular metrical forms would continue through
to the very end of Miłosz’s poetic career.¹⁴ However, this approach accounts for
own History of Polish Literature (1969). See Czesław Miłosz, The History of Polish Literature (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1983), 542. Examples of syllabic meters include most of the common
forms mentioned above—for instance, the thirteen-syllable line with the caesura after seven syllables,
and the eleven-syllable line with caesura after five. The syllabotonic system involves lines organized
around accented and unaccented syllables, which form rough equivalents of the metric “feet” that
underpin much of English poetry. The tonic system is based upon the number of accents per line, but
without a breakdown into regular feet. Much Polish poetry combines aspects of multiple systems. The
less clearly defined fourth system—which came to prominence in the twentieth century—refers to
rhythmic organization not based on accents or syllables, often taking the form of free verse.
⁹ Czesław Miłosz and Aleksander Fiut, Autoportret przekorny: Rozmowy (Kraków: Wydawnictwo
¹⁰ Miłosz himself likened the form to that of a children’s “primer.” See Czesław Miłosz, “Afterword,”
in Poezje wybrane—Selected Poems, trans. Czesław Miłosz, Robert Hass et al. (Kraków: Wydawnictwo
¹¹ Stanisław Balbus, “ ‘Pierwszy ruch jest śpiewanie’ (O wierszu Miłosza—rozpoznanie wstępne),” in
Poznawanie Miłosza: Studia i szkice o twórczości poety, ed. Jerzy Kwiatkowski (Kraków: Wydawnictwo
¹² See Zdzisław Łapiński, “Oda i inne gatunki oświecone,” in Poznawanie Miłosza, ed. Kwiatkowski,
446–60.
¹³ Czesław Miłosz, ed., Postwar Polish Poetry: An Anthology, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1983), 73.
¹⁴ The volume of his posthumously published Last Poems (Wiersze ostatnie, 2006) boasts several
ostentatiously anachronistic forms, including eighteenth-century doggerel and the Romantic ballad.
Specifically, I refer here to “In Honor of Reverend Baka” (“Na cześć księdza Baki”) (W 1345) and “The
148  ’    
only a relatively small proportion of his total poetic output. Much more charac-
teristic is a thorough mixing of forms and genres. In the early part of his career, he
uses classical lines and rhyme without ironic intent, interspersing these lines with
free verse and fragments of prose poetry. Later he would be more inclined toward
the free verse forms typical of much Polish poetry of the second half of the
twentieth century. Yet the classical lines recur surprisingly often, generally in
partial or deconstructed forms, and largely without rhyme. Particularly noticeable
is the regular presence of the thirteen-syllable Alexandrine, the equivalent of the
English iambic pentameter in its prevalence within the Polish tradition. Miłosz
often uses this “ceremonial” meter to give key lines a particular loftiness or
solemnity.¹⁵ Sometimes the Alexandrines are unusually arranged, as in the
pathos-filled opening to “In Szetejnie” (“W Szetejniach,” 1995), addressed to the
memory of the speaker’s mother, where the first line consists of two Alexandrines
joined together, though without the standard caesura in the second phrase:
You were my beginning and again I am with you, here, where I learned the four
quarters of the globe. (NCP 640)
Ty byłaś mój początek i znów jestem z Tobą, tutaj gdzie nauczyłem się czterech
stron świata. (W 1110)
In this poem—as in most of Miłosz’s later work—there is no regular rhyme.

Indeed, he would describe his abandoning of rhyme as an irreversible process
prompted by the broader evolution of Polish poetry and by the trauma of the
war.¹⁶ Classical meter could still be used for various effects, but a decisive shift in
literary fashion and his own deeper knowledge of suffering had made rhyme an
impermissibly frivolous decoration. In another late interview, Miłosz underlines
his dislike of the forced necessity of rhyme, while claiming not to know why
he occasionally returns to its use.¹⁷ Yet a general survey of his works shows
that rhyme reappears after the war almost exclusively for ironic, or sometimes
nostalgic, effect.
In the second half of Miłosz’s career, loose classical forms increasingly interact
with freer and more expansive forms on the border between poetry and prose. In
Princess” (“Księżniczka”) (W 1323). See Czesław Miłosz, Selected and Last Poems, 1931–2004, trans.
Czesław Miłosz, Robert Hass, and Anthony Milosz (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), 280, 310. Also see
Anthony Milosz’s translation notes: Miłosz, Selected and Last Poems, 328, 332.
¹⁵ For instance, Krzysztof Biedrzycki notices this ceremonial use of the Alexandrine in the opening
to “City Without a Name” (“Miasto bez imienia”). See Krzysztof Biedrzycki, Poezja i pamięć: O trzech
poematach Czesława Miłosza, Zbigniewa Herberta i Adama Zagajewskiego (Kraków: Wydawnictwo
Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, 2008), 38.
¹⁶ “The first line is given, and then, brother, you have to keep writing—there’s no other way.”
Czesław Miłosz, Czesław Miłosz: Conversations, ed. Cynthia Haven (Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2006), 94–5.
¹⁷ Czesław Miłosz and Renata Gorczyńska, Podróżny świata: rozmowy (Kraków: Wydawnictwo
, ,    149
his “Ars Poetica?” (1968), he famously declares: “I have always aspired to a more
spacious form / that would be free from the claims of poetry or prose” (NCP 340)
[“Zawsze tęskniłem do formy bardziej pojemnej, / która nie byłaby zanadto poezją
ani zanadto prozą” (W 588)]. In a later interview, he explains that he found a
partial solution to this aspiration in what he calls the “verset,” a looser and longer
line borrowed from the biblical psalms and from the biblically inspired free verse
of Walt Whitman (1819–92).¹⁸ By using these looser forms, Miłosz also partici-
pates in the wider poetic trends of the twentieth century. Like Ezra Pound
(1885–1972) in English, he joins other Polish poets in “breaking” the Polish
equivalents of the pentameter.¹⁹ However, like T. S. Eliot (1888–1965)—and,
indeed, like Pound—he also remains deeply engaged in the reinvention of tradi-
tion, as the regular metrical forms never disappear from his work.²⁰
In his own terms, Miłosz’s persistent “classicism” constantly interacts or comes
into conflict with an opposing principle he describes as “realism.” As he explains
in his post-Nobel-Prize lectures on poetry at Harvard University, classical formal
conventions tend to abstract poetic language from its object, while poetry’s
mission should be the “passionate pursuit of the Real.”²¹ On a certain level, this
task is impossible, as there is a fundamental disconnect between any form of
human language—always governed by artificial structures and rules—and natural
reality. Yet, as we have already seen, Miłosz continues to aspire to an impossible
“poetry of the future,” which would make contact with the material “real” in its
most intimate dimension: the fluids, membranes, and flesh of the body.
In pursuit of this aim, Miłosz becomes a fundamentally “anti-systemic” poet,
drawing on various metrical systems but refusing to be restricted by them.²²
A “typical” Miłosz poem might begin with a few declamatory lines in the classical
thirteen-syllable Alexandrine, then shift into a sequence of longer, amorphous
versets, then return into a rough stanza of more regular eleven-syllable lines,
before moving into a paragraph of prose or even a citation from another writer.
¹⁸ Miłosz and Gorczyńska, Podróżny świata, 272. Miłosz credits Whitman as the main cause of the
broader “revolution in versification by discarding meter and rhyme in favor of free verse.” See Miłosz,
“Against Incomprehensible Poetry,” in To Begin Where I Am: Selected Essays, eds. Carpenter and
Levine, 377. More generally, Clare Cavanagh points out that the expansion of Miłosz’s poetic form and
diction flowed from his wide reading of modern English-language poetry, with T. S. Eliot’s influence
particularly noticeable in this respect. See Clare Cavanagh, Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia,
Poland, and the West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 248–9. He had also encountered a
similar idea in the prophecies of his distant cousin, the French-language symbolist poet Oscar Milosz,
who wrote that “the form of the new poetry will probably be the form of the Bible: freely flowing prose
hammered into versets.” O. V. de L. Milosz, “Kilka słów o poezji,” in Czesław Miłosz, Prywatne
obowiązki (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2001), 56. Czesław Miłosz translated his cousin’s short
text on poetry from the French into Polish.
¹⁹ Ezra Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), 518.
²⁰ See Peter Dale Scott, “Miłosz, Eliot, and the Generative Canon: Literature, the Past, and the
Future,” Sarmatian Review 37, no. 3 (2017): 2110–20.
²¹ Czesław Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 69.
²² Balbus, “ ‘Pierwszy ruch jest śpiewanie’,” 462, 479. Stanisław Barańczak, “A Black Mirror at the
End of a Tunnel: An Interpretation of Czesław Miłosz’s ‘Świty’,” Polish Review 31, no. 4 (1986): 277.
150  ’    
His basic response to the trap of form is to relativize it through a kind of poetic
syncretism, so that all historical conventions, including the most contemporary
ones, are precisely exposed as conventions. Indeed, the continued presence of
classical models lays bare the equivalent conventionality of the “freer” or more
“natural” types of versification of the twentieth century. Like Eliot, Miłosz is aware
that the deconstruction of forms always implies the creation of new ones.²³ By
working across multiple systems, he hopes to break free of the most rigid formal
limitations, and thus perhaps to capture more of “the real.”
Yet this clash between classicism and “the real” sits uncomfortably with what
I have already described as a conflict between “symbolic” and “semiotic” types of
signification in Miłosz’s work. Before discussing the possible contradictions, it
would be useful to recapitulate and expand on this symbolic–semiotic divide. On
the one hand, Miłosz’s poetry signifies through a controlled, rational, discursive,
or purely semantic meaning, separated from the body and associated with the
strong self as pure, “masculine” consciousness. On the other hand, it expresses
pre-rational or subconscious meanings, conveyed through rhythm, sound, and
melody, rooted in the body, and connected with a fluid, “feminine” self. This
unconscious, bodily aspect reflects the “embarrassing” proximity of poetry to the
most “intimate” functions. In response, Miłosz redoubles his efforts to establish
control through the imposition and interpolation of discursive language to tram-
mel the rhythms of the more lyrical forms of poetic language.²⁴
Miłosz argues that this deep suspicion of rhythm (and rhyme) is characteristic
of his poetic generation, resulting from an aspiration to restore “equilibrium
between emotional and intellectual elements.”²⁵ From this point of view, the
poet should not merely be a passive conduit for a “lyrical stream,” but also an
active, “thinking creature” of discourse. Critic Stanisław Balbus famously
describes this attitude as Miłosz’s “struggle against verse,” which he understands
as a “struggle against the irrational side of poetry” or as a conflict between
“expression and communication.”²⁶ Like the semiotic, the “expressive” side of
poetry is closer to rhythm, melody, incantation, and to the body or “biological”
nature, while the “communicative” side, like the symbolic, suggests the rationality
²³ As Eliot puts the question: “Only a bad poet could welcome free verse as a liberation from form. It
was a revolt against dead form, and a preparation for new form.” T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), 33.
²⁴ In effect, this move would serve to counteract what Roman Jakobson defines as the radical power
of “poeticalness” to disrupt or reevaluate discourse. See Roman Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics,” in
Style in Language, ed. Thomas Albert Sebeok (Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T. Press, 1960), 377. Jakobson
was an important influence on Kristeva’s work. For instance, see Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language:
A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 40–9.
²⁵ Czesław Miłosz, “On Pasternak Soberly,” in To Begin Where I Am, eds. Carpenter and
Levine, 409.
²⁶ Balbus, “ ‘Pierwszy ruch jest śpiewanie’,” 469, 465.
, ,    151
of the conscious “I” and “words” as semantic units.²⁷ Yet, for all of Miłosz’s
resistance to the “expressive” or semiotic dimension, he still continues to assume
that the underlying power of poetry—and what separates it from other forms of
language—lies predominantly in its embodied meaning.
It is difficult to capture this idea directly in theoretical terms precisely because
such meaning realizes itself outside the rational or “communicative” functions of
language. Philosopher of language Mark Johnson associates this type of significa-
tion with the sensual, corporeal reactions evoked by verbal images, along with the
discrete “rhythms” and “pulsations” of the sounds of words.²⁸ Amittai Aviram
refers to the “meaningless meaning of poetry,” inherent in all its non-verbal
significations—that is, in the “surface features of the signifiers” and their material
or sonic aspects.²⁹ He argues that the “physical effect” of rhythm in language has a
“sublime power” over its receiver, inspiring intense bodily sensations, movement,
and a sense of co-participation.³⁰ Poetic rhythms may even express some aspect of
the “fundamental existence” of the body, prior to any social constructions of it.³¹
The rhythm of poetry is the meaning of poetry, which—in turn—expresses an
underlying corporeal reality, inaccessible to reason.
Miłosz, too, confesses that the “meaning” of his poetry formulates itself “imme-
diately in rhythm,” not in words or symbols.³² In an obscure essay published in
1967, he elaborates his own understanding of rhythm as the meaningless meaning
of poetry: “A very strong poetic-cognitive experience is mute: if words accompany
it, they are only a vague outline, the shadow of a rhythmic incantation.”³³ The
semantic significations of mere “words” are secondary to the “mute” meanings
embodied in rhythm. The deepest sense of poetry cannot be rationally understood,
but rather perceived or intuited on an unconscious level: “Behind the words the
reader can divine their barely intimated internal charge.”³⁴ Crucially, this
“charge,” which represents the essence of poetry, emerges from the body of a
poetic subject who is “here, corporeal, tangible, positioned in relation to corporeal,
²⁷ Balbus, “ ‘Pierwszy ruch jest śpiewanie’,” 467–72. Poet and translator Stanisław Barańczak picks
up Balbus’s observations to propose that the “struggle against verse” is really a poetic expression of
Miłosz’s deeper philosophical rebellion against “the blind necessities of existence, against its arbitrary
constraints, against its despotic rhythms and rule.” See Barańczak, “A Black Mirror at the End of a
Tunnel,” 284.
²⁸ Johnson, The Meaning of the Body, 219.
²⁹ Amittai F. Aviram, Telling Rhythm: Body and Meaning in Poetry (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1994), 50. As Antony Easthope puts it, “meter inscribes a precedence of the signifier
into the very basis of poetry.” See Antony Easthope, “Problematizing the Pentameter,” New Literary
History 12, no. 3 (Spring 1981): 475.
³⁰ Aviram, Telling Rhythm, 19. ³¹ Aviram, Telling Rhythm, 29, 35.
³² Miłosz and Fiut, Autoportret przekorny, 45.
³³ Czesław Miłosz, “Punkt widzenia czyli o tak zwanej Drugiej Awangardzie,” Oficyna Poetów 2, no.
1 (1967): 7–17. Quoted in Aleksander Fiut, The Eternal Moment: The Poetry of Czesław Miłosz, trans.
Theodosia S. Robertson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 192.
³⁴ Quoted in Fiut, The Eternal Moment, 192.
152  ’    
tangible things.”³⁵ In this “semiotic” dimension, poetry is intimately connected

with the mute language of the body—and perhaps of the underlying “real”—
through the elusive “thought-feelings” expressed by the “charge” of rhythm and
sound. Miłosz’s “struggle against verse” represents his attempt to suppress or
control this unconscious meaning with the meaning of rational discourse.
However, these neat binary oppositions generate puzzling contradictions with
respect to rhythm. After all, rhythm expresses itself most noticeably in the regular
metrical schemes of what Miłosz calls “classicism”—in opposition to “the real.” These
conventionalized systems belong to the formal or historical dimensions of poetry, and
thus surely to the rational structures of the “symbolic.” And yet rhythm is also
strongly associated with the “semiotic,” the body, and the “charge” of pre-rational
meaning. In other words, rhythm seems somehow to belong to both dimensions.
Rhythm in poetry embodies the formal structures and conventions that most radically
separate language from natural reality, but also the deeper “charge” through which the
“vague outline” of this reality finds expression beneath the semantic surface of mere
words. Accordingly, it becomes unclear whether deconstructing rhythm or submit-
ting to it might bring the poet closer to capturing “the real.”
So how should we characterize rhythm in poetry? Does it primarily reflect the
corset of controlled, rational form or the underlying “real” of the body? Are there
two different types of poetic rhythm: the formalized patterns of metered verse and
the primitive pulsations of the flesh? Can we refer to “symbolic” and “semiotic”
varieties of rhythm? If so, how might they be related? These questions are crucial to
understanding not only Miłosz’s poetic work, but also wider trends in twentieth-
century poetics. Ultimately, Miłosz’s “struggle with verse” constitutes a clash not
only between rhythm and discourse, but also between different rhythmic principles.
In the sections to come, I will discuss the relations between several distinct types of
rhythm, and—more broadly—between rhythm and “the real.”
3. Metrical Rhythm: Patterns of Accent and Stress
In the last chapter, I briefly discussed a key passage from the long poem From the
Rising of the Sun (Gdzie wschodzi słońce i kędy zapada, 1974) that has captured the
interest of most critics concerned with the question of rhythm in Miłosz’s work:
This time I am frightened. Odious rhythmic speech,

Which grooms itself of its own accord, moves on.
Even if I wanted to stop it, weak as I am from fever,
. . . Again the other, unnamed one, speaks for me. (NCP 278–80)
³⁵ Quoted in Fiut, The Eternal Moment, 192.

, ,    153
[ A mnie straszno tym razem. Obrzydliwość rytmicznej mowy, / Która sama

siebie obrządza, sama postępuje, / Choćbym chciał ją zatrzymać, słaby z przyc-
zyny gorączki . . . Znowu tamten nienazwany mówi za mnie. (W 631–3)]
The passage comes from “The Unveiling” (“Posłuchanie”), the opening section
of the poem, in which the lyric speaker adopts a protean identity ranging across
both the span of his own life and a much wider history. The poet seeks a link
between his younger self on the streets of interwar Vilnius and the present-day self
in his sixties, gazing over San Francisco Bay at the apocalyptic signs of a “dark-
blue cloud with a glint of the red horse” (NCP 280) [“pod granatową chmurą z
błyskiem konia rydzego” (W 633)]. The challenge is to construct a unified self
from a seemingly disconnected series of moments across time.³⁶ In the opening
lines, the speaker identifies with poets of all eras, from classical Rome to
nineteenth-century Lithuania, wielding all manner of instruments from the
stylus to the ballpoint. All these poets and Miłosz’s autobiographical speaker
in his different phases are vessels for the same impersonal force of poetry—
or for “speech” (“mowa”), which “rolls on” and “flies by . . . new and the same”
(NCP 279) [“toczy się, mija . . . nowa, ta sama” (W 632)]. Poetry is a “nameless”
element that speaks through the poet in rhythm.
These descriptions of poetic language reveal the defensive reaction of Miłosz’s
rational masculine subject to the power of rhythm as an “odious” external force
that permeates, weakens, instrumentalizes, and “feminizes” him. Accordingly, this
rhythm appears at first glance to be linked with the “semiotic,” as I have defined it.
Other critics have described the same unconscious force in the poem as a
“daimonion” or as “the id of the poetic psyche.”³⁷ Crucially, Miłosz himself
seems to associate this suspicious automatism with metrical forms of rhythm,
whose limitations precisely motivate the search that culminates in his discovery of
the verset as a freer, more supple rhythmic form.³⁸ As he explains in an interview
with Renata Gorczyńska: “Rhythm limited to classical meter, to those metrical
forms that we have in Polish versification—be it syllabic or syllabotonic verse—
somehow did not suffice for me.”³⁹ In response, he deploys the “more spacious
form” that precisely reaches its apogee in the long lines and rhythmic diversity of
From the Rising of the Sun.
Yet—as I have already suggested—this metrical interpretation comes into
conflict with understandings of rhythm as an expression of the unconscious.
³⁶ Karina Jarzyńska, “Postsecular Instruments of Acculturation: Czesław Miłosz’s Works from the
Second American Stay,” Open Cultural Studies 1 (2017): 148.
³⁷ Łukasz Tischner, Miłosz and the Problem of Evil, trans. Stanley Bill (Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press, 2015), 152; Balbus, “ ‘Pierwszy ruch jest śpiewanie’,” 469.
³⁸ Joanna Dembińska-Pawelec, “Poezja jest sztuką rytmu”: O świadomości rytmu w poezji polskiej
dwudziestego wieku (Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, 2010), 220.
³⁹ Miłosz and Gorczyńska, Podróżny świata, 272.
154  ’    
After all, if the “odious” rhythm of the passage above is a kind of poetic “id,” then
surely it does not express itself through conventional, highly intentional metrical
forms. If we must have a psychoanalytic analogy, then these culturally instituted
rules might represent the loose equivalent of the “superego.” On the one hand,
Miłosz characterizes this suspicious rhythm as something primal, from before
culture; on the other hand, it appears to manifest itself as an artificial product of
culture and tradition, and thus of what he calls “classicism.” In fact, these two
apparently contradictory interpretations might both hold true at the same time.
The “odiousness of rhythmic speech” can be understood as unconscious and
rational, semiotic and symbolic, natural and artificial, primal and metrical.
A closer examination of the rhythms of the passage itself will open a clearer
perspective on these paradoxes:
A mnie | straszno | tym razem. | Obrzyd- | liwość | rytmicznej | mowy,

Która | sama | siebie | obrządza, | sama | postę- | puje,
Choćbym | chciał ją | zatrzymać, | słaby | z przyczyny | gorączki.
In Miłosz’s poetic complaint on rhythm, we find certain rhythmic qualities

noticeably asserting themselves. First of all, the lines are relatively regular in
length: sixteen syllables, fifteen syllables, fifteen syllables. The lines are longer
than most of the classical syllabic lines of Polish poetry, but shorter than the
common lengths of Miłosz’s looser versets elsewhere. There is a half-rhyme
between the first and third lines. In both these lines, a strong caesura comes
after seven syllables, suggesting the classical first hemistich of the thirteen-syllable
Alexandrine. However, the second hemistich expands beyond the traditional
bounds of six syllables to nine and eight syllables. The classical form disintegrates
into something less formally restricted and controlled, and yet the similar line
length maintains the impression of regularity. The poet enacts a deconstruction of
system—a breaking of the Alexandrine—for the needs of individual expression.
And yet the process might also be viewed in reverse to suggest that the structures
of the Alexandrine keep arising, almost unconsciously, to attack the poet’s aspi-
ration to more individual forms of expression. The final line of the stanza settles
back into another half-Alexandrine for a lofty declaration of apocalyptic expecta-
tions: “Because of daylight and the neighing of the red horse” (NCP 278) [“Dlatego
| tylko, | że dzień | i rżenie | konia | rydzego” (W 631)].
While the half-Alexandrines of the key lines cited above seem either to dissipate
into looser forms or to haunt those forms, other rhythmic structures also persist
very powerfully throughout them. Above all, the lines are dominated by a rocking
rhythm of amphibrachs and trochees, which gathers momentum to the end of the
word “gorączki” (“fever”). According to my notation above, the first line begins
with a spondee, followed by a trochee and an amphibrach, while the second
, ,    155
hemistich begins with a pyrrhic, followed by a trochee, an amphibrach, and

another trochee. The second line begins with three trochees and an amphibrach
in the first hemistich, followed by a trochee, a pyrrhic, and another trochee. The
third line begins with a spondee, a trochee, and an amphibrach in the first
(Alexandrine) hemistich, followed by a trochee and two amphibrachs. The next
line concludes with the same double amphibrach: “Because of a flu like the last one
that brought mournful revelations” [“Grypy | jak ta | ostatnia | i jej | żałobnych |
objawień”]. The double amphibrach repeats in different places in two of the
following lines, before the final line of the stanza mixes another series of trochees
and amphibrachs with its half-Alexandrine.
The striking accumulation of the same impetuous metric feet over the course of
these lines strongly suggests that they might embody the very “odious” rhythm
that progresses of its own impersonal accord, attacking the poetic subject like a
“fever.” In other words, Miłosz literally shows what he is talking about in the
rhythms of the poem—a tendency I have also highlighted in my readings of other
poems. In fact, these telling trochees and amphibrachs first enter the poem very
powerfully in its opening three lines:
Cokolwiek | dostanę | do ręki, | rylec, | trzcinę, | gęsie | pióro, | długopis,

Gdziekolwiek | odnajdą | mnie, | na taflach | atrium, | w celi | klasztornej, | w sali
| przed portretem | króla,
Spełniam | do czego | zostałem | w prowincjach | wezwany.
[Whatever I hold in my hand, a stylus, reed, quill or a ballpoint, / Wherever I may

be, on the tiles of an atrium, in a cloister cell, in a hall before the portrait of a king, /
I attend to matters I have been charged with in the provinces. (NCP 278)]
The first line begins with three consecutive amphibrachs; the second begins with
two amphibrachs—with the familiar caesura after seven syllables. In the third line,
the description of a poetic summons is seized by the insistent rhythm of a trochee
followed by four consecutive amphibrachs. These feet then become less prevalent
in the next few lines, though still present at their ends, before returning with full
force at the key moment on the “odiousness” of rhythm. Even in the English
translation, co-authored by Miłosz himself, some of this rhythm is detectable in
what fellow poet Seamus Heaney describes as an “irresistible cadence.” The Irish
Nobel laureate also notices that the form of this section of From the Rising of the
Sun effectively represents an “elucidation of [its] import.”⁴⁰
The lines in question are not regularly syllabotonic, or accentual, just as they are
not regularly syllabic, and yet—in the original Polish—they are seized by trochees
⁴⁰ Robert Faggen, Seamus Heaney et al., “Miłosz and World Poetry,” Partisan Review 66, no. 1
(Winter 1999): 22–3.
156  ’    
and amphibrachs when the “weakness” of the speaker appears. So exactly what
kind of rhythm do these metric feet represent in combination with the vestiges of
the Alexandrine? Are they the natural, pre-subjective rhythms of the body, and of
natural “necessity,” asserting themselves in verse and weakening the individual
subject in the process? Or are they rather the socially conditioned corset of form,
imposed on top of the dangerous call of biology? Both these questions can be
answered—at least to a certain degree—in the affirmative.
In the first instance, the forms of the Alexandrine and of the amphibrach and
trochee clearly constitute the rhythms of tradition, not of the body. The thirteen-
syllable Alexandrine is the dominant classical form in the history of Polish
literature. The amphibrach and the trochee are even more deeply rooted in
history, since their prevalence in Polish syllabotonic verse springs from a funda-
mental characteristic of the language itself—namely, its stable accent on the
penultimate syllable of multisyllabic words.⁴¹ Indeed, this aspect of poetic tradi-
tion is so primary in its origin that it almost appears to be natural. In Miłosz’s
terms, when the Polish language “grooms itself, and, of its own accord, moves on,”
its natural tendency is to do so in trochees and amphibrachs. Of course, this stable
paroxytonic stress in Polish also has a cultural history, probably dating back only
as far as the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.⁴² Nevertheless, the trochees and
amphibrachs that emerge from paroxytonic stress appear to be somewhere
between natural outgrowths and contingent conventions. To a certain extent,
they are both primal and artificial.
This naturalized expression of the forms of tradition is also evident in a hidden
reference to a lyric by Miłosz’s Romantic predecessor Adam Mickiewicz
(1798–1855) in the same section of From the Rising of the Sun: “So that what is
stone in me could be dissolved, / So that nothing would remain but my tears,
tears” (NCP 278) [“Żeby co we mnie kamienne rozwiązało się, / Żeby nic już nie
było prócz moich łez, łez” (W 631)]. Here, the emotional expression of the
speaker’s own youthful turmoil turns out to be the mere repetition of frozen
forms from the past—in this case, from Mickiewicz’s poem “My Tears Flowed”
(“Polały się łzy”).⁴³ Miłosz’s lines are also once again overtaken by approximations
of the Alexandrine—respectively, thirteen syllables with an irregular caesura after
eight, and twelve syllables with a regular caesura after seven. Both the unconscious
⁴¹ Miłosz himself points this out in his summary of Polish versification. See Miłosz, The History of
Polish Literature, 542.
⁴² Bogdan Walczak, Zarys dziejów języka polskiego (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu
Wrocławskiego, 1999), 73. Miłosz also seems to have been aware of this history. In the introduction
to this translation of the Book of Psalms, he even claims to see evidence of what he sees as a pernicious
“weakening of the accent” in a comparison of medieval translations of the psalms with sixteenth-
century versions. See Czesław Miłosz, “Przedmowa tłumacza,” Księgi biblijne (Kraków: Wydawnictwo
⁴³ Mickiewicz’s famous poem comes from the late cycle Lausanne Lyrics (Liryki lozańskie, 1839–40).
See Tischner, Miłosz and the Problem of Evil, 152.
, ,    157
poetic “id” and the clichéd forms of cultural history attack the autonomy and even
the very existence of the poetic self as an individual.⁴⁴
More broadly, there is much evidence to suggest that Miłosz’s suspicion of
poetic rhythm is closely associated with trochees and amphibrachs. In The Garden
of Knowledge (Ogród nauk, 1979), he writes that a strong “rhythmicity”
(“rytmiczność”) is “difficult to achieve” in Polish because of its stable paroxytonic
accent and the prominence of sibilant sounds.⁴⁵ In The History of Polish
Literature, he explains that “the language does not favor a regular ‘beat’ which,
when attempted, creates monotony” because of the stable accent in multisyllabic
words.⁴⁶ For Miłosz, the insistent beat that seems so easily to impose itself through
paroxytonic feet represents a “weak” form of rhythm. Elsewhere, he adds an
element of comparative analysis when he asserts that the influence of accented
languages like Russian is harmful to “weakly accented languages like Polish.”⁴⁷
Polish has a stable stress, but paradoxically it is also a syllable-timed language, not
a stress-timed language like Russian or English, meaning that stress should be less
noticeable in Polish poetry.⁴⁸ Indeed, it is precisely for this reason that Polish
tends toward syllabic rather than syllabotonic verse in the first place.
In Miłosz’s view, the naturally regular stress of trochees and amphibrachs
within a broader system of weak stress and sibilant consonants creates either
complete monotony or an insipid kind of “easy melodiousness” in the Polish
language, especially when combined with rhyme. Therefore, Miłosz’s history of
Polish poetry gives precedence to poets like the Romantics Mickiewicz and Juliusz
Słowacki (1809–49), whose verse is—in his opinion—“never monotonous”
because they do not use metric feet “rigidly.”⁴⁹ By contrast, he strongly criticizes
the “pounding rhythms” of their post-Romantic successors. He describes the verse
of the latter half of the nineteenth century as “melodious in a rather trite way,”
with explicit emphasis on the overuse of trochees and amphibrachs in conjunction
with rhyme.⁵⁰ For the same reason, he denigrates the legacy of the leading poet of
the Young Poland movement, Kazimierz Przerwa-Tetmajer (1865–1940), for the
“easy melodiousness” of his work.⁵¹
Miłosz finds a similarly detrimental “musicality” in the poetry of the later
interwar Skamander movement, whose members were both important models
and stylistic antagonists for the young poet. Most famously, he writes in A Treatise
on Poetry of the “flaw of harmony” (“skaza harmonii”) that supposedly marred the
prosody of the Skamander poets under the continued influence of their own
Young Poland “masters” (NCP 119 [W 400]). Elsewhere, Miłosz mocks the
⁴⁴ Jarzyńska, “Postsecular Instruments of Acculturation,” 146.

⁴⁵ Czesław Miłosz, Ogród nauk (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Znak, 2013), 166.
⁴⁶ Miłosz, The History of Polish Literature, 542. ⁴⁷ Miłosz, Native Realm, 123.
⁴⁸ Miłosz, Ogród nauk, 136. ⁴⁹ Miłosz, The History of Polish Literature, 266.
⁵⁰ Miłosz, The History of Polish Literature, 317.
⁵¹ Miłosz, The History of Polish Literature, 338.
158  ’    
“rocking singsong” of Skamander verse, and suggests that his own poetic gener-
ation reacted against this quality in the name of a less aestheticized, less “instinc-
tive” poetry more consciously attuned to intellectual and social problems.⁵² In
other words, the younger poets sought a poetry that would be more discursive and
less effortlessly, or “weakly,” rhythmical.
The concept of a “flaw” inherent in melodious, metrical, or rhymed poetry
would become a touchstone for Miłosz scholars. Balbus talks about the flawed
“musicality” of the Skamandrites as a powerful influence against which Miłosz
reacts, but which he also reproduces in his own poetic “singing” (“śpiew”),
especially in his early period.⁵³ His later “struggle against verse” is a reaction to
this “flaw,” which he finds deep in Polish poetic history, with its modern epitome
in the Young Poland movement, where the “style” of Miłosz and his own
contemporaries was “born” (NCP 113 [W 387]). More specifically, he finds this
flaw above all in the excessive use of amphibrachs and trochees, and in rhyme. He
suggests that these metrical rhythms seem to spring from “the subconscious,”
underlining an instinctive naturalness that co-exists uneasily with the symbolic
and historical qualities of their conventional structures.⁵⁴ Metrical rhythm partly
belongs to the semiotic, weakening the subject with its paroxytonic “fever.”
Against this “rocking singsong” or “lyrical stream,” Miłosz places the “chores of
discourse” and the poet as a “thinking creature.”⁵⁵ Yet discourse would also turn
out to have its own rhythm.
4. Sense Rhythm: Patterns of Syntax and Breath
Despite the apparent naturalness of the metrical tendencies of Young Poland and
its successors, Miłosz critiques the movement for the incorporeality of its poetry.
He associates its style with the formal “corset” of a high-sounding language that
veils the underlying “real” of the body. The monotonous rhythm and melody of its
regular forms underscore an artificiality that sharply divides its language from
everyday speech and experience. In his history of Polish poetry in verse, A Treatise
on Poetry, Miłosz elaborates further on this distinction in a key section satirizing
the stylistic ideology of Young Poland, with its supposed contempt for simpler
forms of expression: “The breath of normal syntax will be banned: / ‘Eh, journal-
ism. Let them write in prose.’ ” (NCP 113) [“Wzbroniony będzie oddech zwykłej
składni. / ‘Phi, publicystyka. Niech mówi prozą’ ” (W 387)].
This ironic observation reveals a crucial opposition between the “trite” rhythms
of excessively regular stress and the rhythms of breath or “natural” speech, as
Miłosz understands them. In conversation with Aleksander Fiut, Miłosz expresses
⁵² Miłosz, “On Pasternak Soberly,” 408–9. ⁵³ Balbus, 472–3.

⁵⁴ Miłosz, Czesław Miłosz: Conversations, 94. ⁵⁵ Miłosz, “On Pasternak Soberly,” 408–9.
, ,    159
his own preference for a less tightly regulated rhythmical structure, not based on
mere “counting on the fingers,” but which only becomes apparent when he reads
his poems aloud, “strongly [emphasizing] the end of each line.”⁵⁶ The rhythm
expresses itself through the natural cycles of breath, making it possible to establish
a “strong rhythmic structure” even in unrhymed lines of uneven syllabic length.⁵⁷
Miłosz concurs with Fiut’s observation that he “[seeks] out instinctively, some-
what unconsciously, a kind of utterance that would be close to [his] biological
rhythm, to [his] breath.”⁵⁸ Indeed, in one of his earliest poems, the poetic
speaker describes the “joy” of meditative focus on this rhythm, which allows
him to transcend the flatness of everyday experience: “The spell of perpendicular
days that you pass by, engrossed in the calm, beautiful rhythm of breath”
[“Czar dni prostopadłych, które mijasz, idąc, zasłuchany w spokojny, piękny
rytm oddechu” (W 40)].
For Miłosz, the importance of breath is not unique to his own poetry, but rather
it underpins the looser approaches to versification that would dominate Polish
poetry in the twentieth century—“a poetry without meter and without rhyme,
based on breathing units.”⁵⁹ In the interview with Fiut, he expands this context to
link the “rhythm of breath” with American modernist poet William Carlos
Williams’s (1883–1963) poetic strategy to avoid the use of “metrical wholes.”⁶⁰
Although he describes Williams’s innovation as a parallel development rather
than a direct influence, the connection further suggests Miłosz’s embeddedness in
the modernist poetics of his time, especially in its English-language varieties,
despite his later self-identification as an “anti-modernist.”⁶¹
An early critical piece on Williams offers a helpful insight into the connection
between rhythm and breath:
Williams has tried to break down the iambic line. His substitute is what he calls
measure. Poetry, he says, is based on measure. He seems to mean something like
the natural and subtly varying rhythms of the spoken voice, based on the natural
rhythms of breathing.⁶²
Without the specific reference to the iambic line, this description could easily
apply to Miłosz’s poetry. In the second half of his career, the Polish poet breaks
down the classical metrical structures of his language, replacing them with the
⁵⁶ Miłosz and Fiut, Autoportret przekorny, 44. ⁵⁷ Miłosz and Fiut, Autoportret przekorny, 45.
⁵⁸ Miłosz and Fiut, Autoportret przekorny, 43. ⁵⁹ Miłosz, Czesław Miłosz: Conversations, 94.
⁶⁰ Miłosz and Fiut, Autoportret przekorny, 43.
⁶¹ As Miłosz explains, this suspicion of modernism largely sprang from his opposition to experi-
mental forms that distance poetry from comprehensible meanings accessible to wider groups of
readers. See Czesław Miłosz and Justyna Kobus, “Jestem antymodernistą,” in Miłosz, Rozmowy polskie.
Vol. 2: 1999–2004, 445.
⁶² Richard Eberhardt, “The Speaking Voice and Direct Wisdom,” in William Carlos Williams: The
Critical Heritage, ed. Charles Doyle (London: Routledge, 1980), 295.
160  ’    
“strong rhythmic structure” of the “verset.”⁶³ He does not specifically refer to the
concept of “measure,” but the musical origins of this term fit his meaning well.
The musical measure constitutes a fixed duration that can accommodate various
rhythmical structures within it.⁶⁴ Miłosz’s “measures” are not quite as regular, but
the same basic idea holds. In conversation with Renata Gorczyńska, Miłosz says
that the longer cadences of his irregular versets take their phrasing directly from
the “musical” cadences of the psalms, where “the caesuras are musical pauses.”⁶⁵
Indeed, when Miłosz talks about “not counting on his fingers,” he echoes Ezra
Pound’s famous exortation “as regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of
the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.”⁶⁶ Accordingly, the Polish
poet’s experiment unfolds somewhere between the modernist poetics of his own
time and the sacred, seemingly timeless model of the psalms.
The key intermediary between the Bible and the modernist moment—both for
Miłosz and Williams—is Walt Whitman. As Miłosz explains, Whitman was the
first instigator of the modern poetic “revolution” that rejected meter and rhyme.⁶⁷
From the 1960s onward, the Polish poet partly emulates Whitman’s long line
along with his ecstatic embrace of material reality and determination to capture as
much of it as possible in words.⁶⁸ Indeed, the latter aim precisely seems to
necessitate the expansion or loosening of form. The length of the lines and the
dispensing with metrical constraints facilitates the kind of inspired cataloguing in
which both poets engage, though Miłosz’s work is shadowed by a pessimism that
enters more rarely into Whitman’s work. Despite the freedom of the Whitmanian
style, Miłosz recognizes that his American predecessor’s work still very much
embodies a concrete form.⁶⁹ Indeed, Whitman scholars have pointed to his
regular use of parallelism, the logic of the poetic line as a grammatical sentence,
and an “organic” rhythm of “period” between stresses.⁷⁰
The rhythms of Miłosz’s versets share some of these Whitmanian character-
istics, but the Polish poet himself specifically links his own long phrases to breath.
In fact, most of his versets are too long literally to be intoned in a single breath.
However, they can usually be broken into fragments punctuated by a semi-regular
⁶³ Miłosz and Fiut, Autoportret przekorny, 42.

⁶⁴ Christopher F. Hasty, Meter as Rhythm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 13.
⁶⁵ Miłosz and Gorczyńska, Podróżny świata, 277.
⁶⁶ Ezra Pound, The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions,
1954), 3.
⁶⁷ Czesław Miłosz, “Against Incomprehensible Poetry,” 377.
⁶⁸ See Marta Skwara, “The Poet of the Great Reality: Czesław Miłosz's Readings of Walt Whitman,”
Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 26, no. 1 (2008): 1–22; Stanley Bill, “Translation as Talking to
Oneself: Miłosz Makes Whitman Speak,” Wielogłos: Journal of the Faculty of Polish Studies at the
Jagiellonian University 3, no. 17 (2014): 43–56.
⁶⁹ Czesław Miłosz, Miłosz’s ABC’s, trans. Madeline G. Levine (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2001), 299–300.
⁷⁰ For instance, see Scully Bradley, “The Fundamental Metrical Principle in Whitman’s Poetry,”
American Literature 10, no. 4 (1939), 437–59.
, ,    161
number of breaths, often marked by commas and other natural syntactical breaks.
Accordingly, the rhythm of breath demonstrates an intimate connection with
semantic meaning, as the versets frequently match semantic and syntactical units.
In most cases, they constitute whole sentences. The “musical pauses” at the ends of
lines come at natural points for the breath, but they also tend to coincide with
periods and other punctuation marks. This synchronized pattern is strongly
apparent in the opening to “With Trumpets and Zithers” (“Na trąbach i na
cytrze,” 1965), an important long poem from the very beginning of Miłosz’s
period of experimentation with the verset:
The gift was never named. We lived and a hot light created stood in its sphere.
Castles on rocky spurs, herbs in river valleys, descents into the bays under ash trees.
All past wars in the flesh, all loves, conch shells of the Celts, Norman boats by the
cliffs.
Breathing in, breathing out, o Elysium, we would kneel and kiss the earth
A naked girl crossed a town overgrown with green moss and bees returned heavy
for their evening milking.
Labyrinths of species at our headrest up to the thick of phosphorous woods at
the entrance of limestone caves.
And in a summer rainstorm putting out paper lanterns on the dark village
square, couples laughing in flight.
Water steamed at dawn by Calypso’s island where an oriole flutters in the white
crown of a poplar.
I looked at fishermen’s dinghies stopped at the other shore and the year once
again turned over, the vintage season began. (NCP 225)
[Dar był nienazwany: żyliśmy i stało w górze gorące światło stworzone. / Zamki
na skalnych ostrogach, zioła w dolinach rzek, wstępowanie w zatoki pod jesio-
nami. / Wszystkie dawne wojne w ciele, wszystkie miłości, konchy Celtów, łodzie
Normanów w obrywach. / Wdech i wydech, o Elizjum, klękaliśmy i całowaliśmy
ziemię. / Naga dziewczyna szła miastem, które porósł zielony mech i pszczoły
wracały ciężkie do wieczornego udoju. / Labirynty gatunków u naszego
wezgłowia aż do wnętrza fosforycznych lasów przed bramami wapiennych
jaskiń. / I w letniej ulewie gaszącej lampiony na ciemnym placu wioski ucieczka
zdyszanych par. / O świcie dymiła woda pod wyspą Kalipso, gdzie żółta wilga lata
w koronie siwego drzewa. / Patrzyłem na czółna rybaków nieruchome po drugiej
stronie i znowu obrócił się rok, zaczynało się winobranie. (W 566)]
Like the later From the Rising of the Sun, this poem is concerned with the
paradoxical identity of the self. On the one hand, the poetic “I” appears as
“consciousness” both struggling to identify itself with its earlier manifestations
and capable of soaring over vistas from the whole of human history and
162  ’    
mythology. On the other hand, the poem constantly returns to the physical
delimitation of the self, which is subject to death and assigned only for “this
place, this time . . . an awakening of this particular body” (NCP 229) [“to miejsce,
ten czas, wyznaczone przebudzeniu osobnego ciała” (W 571)]. The speaker
laments the impossibility of capturing the concrete reality of an individual being
in language, which is always frustratingly general and historical: “And whatever
once entered a bolted house of the five senses now is set in the brocade of a style. /
Which, your honor, does not distinguish particular cases” (NCP 228) [“I cokol-
wiek raz weszło w zaryglowany dom pięciu zmysłów, stygnie w brokat stylu. /
Który, wysoki sądzie, nie zna poszczególnych wypadków” (W 570)].
The shape of the poem itself represents an attempt to address this problem of
tyrannical style. With its “more spacious form,” aligned with breath and the
natural syntax of the sentence, the poem may be construed as being more free
of the restrictive brocade. Of course, as Miłosz well knows, this Whitmanian
“liberation” ultimately represents the exchange of one form for another. The
rhythmic units of the poetic lines correspond precisely with the syntax and logic
of full sentences, explicitly regulated by the cycles of “breathing in, breathing out”
(“wdech i wydech”). Although the length of the lines in syllables in this opening
section ranges from 20 to 35, there is a degree of uniformity in the time of each
line and the number of breaths. In this way, the poem delivers the impression of
strong rhythmic cadences in spite of what looks at first glance like an
amorphous form.
Each line of the passage above contains two natural breaks for breath, with the
exception of the two penultimate lines, which have one each (of course, these
estimates are to some degree subjective). The contraction of the penultimate lines
intensifies their rhythmic effect, which is further accelerated by chains of impet-
uous amphibrachs (five of them consecutively in the first line: “I w letniej / ulewie
/ gaszącej / lampiony / na ciemnym / placu / wioski / ucieczka / zdyszanych /
par”), before the final line of the section settles back into the slower rhythm of two
breaths. This alternating rhythm of breath gives the whole poem a distinctive
pattern of rising and falling cadences. Even in the English translation, this effect is
clear. In a recorded reading of the eighth section of the poem, the pattern of
Miłosz’s own breaths over the nine lines is as follows: 1, 2, 2, 2, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2 (NCP
228–9).⁷¹ The lines expand, accelerate, and then expand again, while remaining
regular in their shape as full sentences of relatively similar length, ranging between
twenty-three and thirty-seven syllables.
In these lines, breath, meaning, and syntax are united. Here, Miłosz follows in
the footsteps of yet another English-language modernist, William Butler Yeats
⁷¹ Stephen Fisher Productions, “Czesław Miłosz Poetry and Interview,” YouTube video, 19:01, July
21, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-NWe5A98Co.
, ,    163
(1865–1939), who aspired to achieve “complete coincidence between period and

stanza” on the example of biblical models.⁷² This synergy is not entirely dominant
in Miłosz’s work, where syntax occasionally comes into conflict with meter.⁷³
However, the longer versets tend to follow the synchronized pattern, not just at
the level of the stanza, but in each poetic line. Miłosz uses the same approach in his
translations of the psalms, which are linked to “With Trumpets and Zithers”
through a reference in the poem’s title to Psalm 150: “Praise him with the sound of
the trumpet: praise him with the psaltery [zither] and harp” (King James Version)
[“Chwalcie go na głośnych trąbach; chwalcie go na cytrze i na harfie”].⁷⁴
Indeed, Miłosz builds the musical phrases of his versets partly on the basis of
his translations of the psalms from the original Hebrew, in which he highlights the
“rhythmic-intonational cohesion” of the biblical verset.⁷⁵ In the psalms, he
explains, each verset is a “rhythmical whole,” whose length and shape serve the
purposes of musical or incantational performance in religious ritual. This basic
form and function were maintained in the Latin translations, which preserved
something of the original phrasing for the needs of liturgical recitation.⁷⁶ In a
similar way, Miłosz suggests that the “musicality” of his modern verset is tied to
the voice, the breath, and the needs of recitation. He emphasizes the non-metrical
rhythms imparted and supported by his own vocal performance of his poems,
shaped by the unique biological cycles of his breath.⁷⁷ He almost seems to
approach Pound’s idea of an “absolute rhythm” specific to the emotion of each
work and to the individuality of its author, a rhythm that is “uncounterfeiting,
uncounterfeitable,” and thus independent of convention.⁷⁸ At the same time, the
conventional aspects of “liturgical recitation” persist in a connection between
poetic language and religious ritual.
Biblical scholars have described the correspondence of syntax, semantics, and
poetic line as a key characteristic of the original Hebrew psalms, which exhibit a
“rhythm of meaning” or a “sense rhythm” based on “the natural units of meaning
in the mind.”⁷⁹ The basic pattern of a psalm unfolds in a series of discrete ideas or
propositions conveyed in the roughly equivalent grammatical structures of whole
⁷² W. B. Yeats, “A General Introduction for My Work,” in The Major Works, including Poems, Plays
and Critical Prose (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 386. Miłosz also translated various poems
by Yeats. See Czesław Miłosz, Przekłady poetyckie (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Znak, 2005).
⁷³ Joanna Dembińska-Pawelec argues that there is a “constant tension . . . between the rhythm of the
syntax and the rhythm of the line.” See Dembińska-Pawelec, “Poezja jest sztuką rytmu,” 213.
⁷⁴ Uwspółcześniona Biblia Gdańska, https://www.bible.com/pl/bible/138/PSA.150.1-6.PUBG.
⁷⁵ Czesław Miłosz, “Posłowie tłumacza,” in Księgi biblijne (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie,
2003), 255.
⁷⁶ Czesław Miłosz, “Przedmowa tłumacza,” 40.
⁷⁷ Miłosz and Fiut, Autoportret przekorny, 42.
⁷⁸ Pound, The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, 9.
⁷⁹ Sigmund Mowinckel, The Psalms in Israel’s Worship, trans. D. R. Ap-Thomas (Cambridge:
William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2004), 159. Also see Bernhard W. Anderson with Steven
Bishop, Out of the Depths: The Psalms Speak for Us Today (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox
Press, 2000), 23.
164  ’    
sentences. This revelation suggests the reverse of Amittai Aviram’s claim that
the rhythm of poetry is its meaning. Instead, we find here that the meaning is the
rhythm. The alternation of semantic structures creates the rhythm of the psalms.
Partly inspired by these sacred texts, Miłosz describes his own creative process as a
coalescing of rhythm and semantic meaning into an inseparable whole: “Sense
formulates itself in the sentence, immediately in rhythm.”⁸⁰ The rhythm of his
sentence-based verset is a type of “sense rhythm,” founded on semantic meaning,
grammar, and syntax. In other words, it turns out that “discourse” in his poetry
has its very own rhythm.
The fundamental conflict in Miłosz’s poetry arises not primarily between
rational discourse and dangerous rhythmic speech, but rather between different
types of rhythm: above all, between sense rhythm and metrical rhythm. Miłosz
himself suggests that the looser “rhythm of breath” is directly opposed to “classical
meter.”⁸¹ Yet both these forms persist in his work, and their interaction signifi-
cantly complicates any distinction between “communicative” and “expressive”
aspects of poetry. At least to some extent, the two types of rhythm combine both
aspects. The “communicative” aspect of sense rhythm is precisely what gives it
expressive power, while the “expressive” aspect of metrical rhythm changes the
nature of what it communicates.⁸² Nevertheless, perhaps sense rhythm still
favors the communicative dimension, while metrical rhythm gives preeminence
to the expressive element. Accordingly, the distinction might fall between the
rhythm of meaning and the meaning of rhythm. Sense rhythm formulates itself
through semantic meaning, while non-semantic meaning formulates itself in
metrical rhythm.
This opposition interacts with the other conflicts in Miłosz’s poetics: between
the semiotic and the symbolic, the corporeal and the rational, the poetic and the
discursive. Rhythm does not belong to only one side of these divides. Moreover,
even the specific opposition between metrical rhythm and sense rhythm does not
map easily onto the other binaries. After all, metrical rhythm belongs to the
semiotic, the expressive, or the subconscious in its apparently instinctive, self-
propelling character, and yet its social conventionality and tightly organized
structure link it to the symbolic. Conversely, sense rhythm belongs to the sym-
bolic, the rational, and the communicative in its close relation with syntax and
semantic meaning, and yet its strong connection with the underlying breath ties it
⁸⁰ Miłosz and Fiut, Autoportret przekorny, 45.

⁸¹ Miłosz and Gorczyńska, Podróżny świata, 272. The critic Jan Potkański argues more broadly that
the opposition is between meter and looser rhythmic forms. Jan Potkański, Sens nowoczesnego wiersza:
wersyfikacja Białoszewskiego, Przybosia, Miłosza i Herberta (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Wydziału
Polonistyki Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2004), 177.
⁸² Also see Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics,” 377.
, ,    165
to the semiotic and the body. Miłosz insists that “poetry is an art of rhythm,” but
this broad definition remains open to the most diverse understandings.⁸³
5. Rhythm and “the Real”
On the basis of his own lived experience as a poet, Miłosz often claims that poetic
language emerges from the body, separates itself from the body, and yet remains
tied to it. But what is the precise relationship of the various rhythms of poetry with
the underlying “real,” with the natural rhythms of the body, with “the thing in
itself,” or with the materiality of “what we [human beings] really are” [“tego, czym
naprawdę jesteśmy” (W 802)]? How are different types of corporeal rhythm
related to Miłosz’s central “struggle with verse,” which I have defined as a series
of distinct, though interrelated conflicts between the semiotic and the symbolic,
“singing” and discourse, metrical rhythm and sense rhythm? These questions lie at
the heart of Miłosz’s own search for the origins and purpose of poetry.
According to Friedrich Nietzsche, the human body contains “an infinite num-
ber of rhythms,” and thus any form of metrical poetic rhythm is bound to make “a
direct attack on the body” in one way or another.⁸⁴ The highly structured aspects
of poetic rhythm may interact with the underlying rhythms of the body in both
uneasy harmony and productive struggle. Sometimes the metrical rhythms of
poetry seem to echo or strengthen the pulsations and cycles of the heartbeat, the
step, or the breath; sometimes the metrical beat works against them.⁸⁵ For
instance, the human heart may appear to beat in iambs, but not necessarily in
time with the iambic pentameter of any specific poem. Formalized meter—be it
syllabic or syllabotonic—gives poems a material or non-semantic meaning that is
both connected with and separated from the underlying materiality of the body.
The same can be said of the looser rhythms of the breath or the longer cadences
of Miłosz’s irregular versets. Especially in his discussions of reading aloud, he
seems to understand breath as constitutive of both the rhythm and materiality of
his verse. When read, poems literally become the materiality of sound waves,
which interact with and affect the bodies of listeners. Ultimately, it is these sound
waves that pull the listener into a physical, bodily co-participation in a poem as a
⁸³ Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry, 25.

⁸⁴ Friedrich Nietzsche, “Rhythmische Untersuchungen,” in Nietzsches Werke: Historisch-Kritische
Ausgabe, ed. Malcolm Brown (Charlottesville, NC: Intelex, 1995), KGW II/3, 312. Quoted in Elaine
P. Miller, “Harnessing Dionysos: Nietzsche on Rhythm, Time, and Restraint,” Journal of Nietzsche
Studies 17 (Spring 1999): 2. Also see Lexi Eikelboom, Rhythm: A Theological Category (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2018), 70–1.
⁸⁵ According to Stephen Arata, “poetry’s rhythms insinuate themselves into our bodies, working
sometimes with, sometimes against, the pulses and rhythms of those bodies.” See Stephen Arata,
“Rhyme, Rhythm, and the Materiality of Poetry: Response,” Victorian Studies 53, no. 3 (Spring
2011): 518.
166  ’    
“sensory experience” transcending any purely semantic meaning.⁸⁶ Breath con-

stitutes the very substance of poetry as it emerges from the body of the reader and
engages listeners in their separate bodies. On the other hand, the process of words
appearing to exit the body in the breath and then to disappear into the air suggests
the “soaring above” the body that Miłosz also associates with poetry. Indeed,
various religious traditions associate breath with spirit—that is, with the aspect of
human identity that separates itself from the body. In Hebrew, the word ruach
(‫ )רוח‬can mean breath, wind, or spirit; in biblical Greek, pneuma (πνεῦμα) means
breath or spirit. Like poetry, breath is both embodied and disembodied.⁸⁷ In
breath, poetry belongs to the body and goes beyond it.
The simultaneously repulsive and productive underlying reality of the body is
also closely connected with the question of fluids in Miłosz’s poetry. A key symbol
for the unrepresentable “real” is the “gluiness” of the hidden parts of the female
body, whose “seeping liquid” and “formless flow”—as Elizabeth Grosz critically
describes them—suggest the porousness of the body and of the self. The body and
the self are constantly engaged in processes of productive exchange with external
agents and influences, so that their very borders are called into question. This
traditionally defined “feminine” receptivity is threatening, but also potentially
liberating in its disintegration of the hard limits that detach alienated “masculine”
subjectivity from the rest of the material world. Miłosz asserts that poetry itself
emerges mysteriously from the gluey “mucous membrane” that forms the border
between seeping fluid and the structured flesh of the individual body. The positive
task of the “poetry of the future”—as he sees it—is to break through the corset of
form in order to reach back down to this fluid and symbolically feminine reality.
Yet Miłosz’s ambivalence about fluidity never diminishes. Indeed, he often uses
related terms to characterize a type of language he particularly distrusts. In Native
Realm, he announces his dislike of any poetry that is “too fluid” (“zbyt płynna”),
which he directly contrasts with his “love for rhythm.”⁸⁸ Miłosz links this dan-
gerous fluidity with a poetry excessively dominated by meter—that is, with the
irresistibly melodious, musical forms discussed above.⁸⁹ In The Garden of
Knowledge, Miłosz strongly criticizes the “wateriness” (“wodnistość”) of certain
types of literary language.⁹⁰ He associates this liquid quality with the traditional
“garrulousness” of Polish literature, and especially with the “speech-swoosh”
(“mowa-szum”) of late-nineteenth-century poetry, with its excess of amphibrachs
and trochees. The poetry of Young Poland—with its insidious influence on
⁸⁶ Aviram, Telling Rhythm, 43, 153.

⁸⁷ According to Alan Bennett: “Here is the paradox: there is nothing more intimately embodied than
breath (that by which speech is produced, that which speech just is), while at the same time there is
nothing—nothing, that is, of the body—that is less material.” See Alan Bennett, “Language and the
Body,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, eds. David Hillman and Ulrika Maude
⁸⁸ Miłosz, Native Realm, 75. ⁸⁹ Potkański, Sens nowoczesnego wiersza, 177.
⁹⁰ Miłosz, Ogród nauk, 165.
, ,    167
Miłosz’s own era—“flows and waves, ineffable” (NCP 113) [“płynie, faluje
nieprzetłumaczalne” (W 389)]. Elsewhere, he describes a more general tendency
of the Polish language to “overflow capriciously” [“skłonność do rozlewania się
kapryśnie” (W 834)], which he associates with a lack of “the sense of form” [“brak
zmysłu formy”]. This shortcoming even has political implications, as the speaker
asks whether fluidity and formlessness in language could have brought about
Poland’s various historical downfalls. Weakness in the rhythms of language
engenders political weakness.
These evocative descriptions resonate with Grosz’s critique of the male vision of
the female body as “formless flow”—or as a “formlessness that engulfs all form, a
disorder that threatens all order.”⁹¹ Miłosz’s analogous representations of female
corporeality coalesce with his theory of poetry to reveal a symbolically feminine
and corporeal language associated with weak, metrical rhythms interpreted as
“flow.” Perhaps this association lies behind his misogynistic youthful description
of the Skamander lyricist Julian Tuwim as a “female poet” in contrast with his own
aspiration to become a strong, “male poet.”⁹² Feminine fluidity and formlessness
are juxtaposed with strong masculine structure and form. The male poet’s sense
of the repulsiveness of feminine fluids echoes his distaste for the odiousness of
self-propelling metrical rhythms dictated by the corporeal “subconscious.”⁹³ The
easy “flow” or “overflow” of a syllabotonic verse founded in a natural paroxyton-
ism is rhythmical, but in a fundamentally weak and destabilizing way.
This concept of rhythmic language as flowing and overflowing self-reproduction
parallels Nietzsche’s idea of a “Dionysian rhythm” embodying the flux of “pure
becoming”—the shapeless, endless flow of material existence.⁹⁴ Against this cha-
otic rhythm, the German philosopher posits “Apollonian rhythms” that restrain
or harness it. These rhythms constitute “the form of becoming.”⁹⁵ In other words,
they impose form upon the eternal flux of the world. From this perspective, strong
poetic form represents a temporary moment of order seized from disordered flow,
like Miłosz’s famous “eternal moment” plucked from the current of a black river
(W 376) or Oscar Milosz’s prophetic ideal of biblical versets “hammered” from
“freely flowing prose.”⁹⁶ For the Polish poet, probably borrowing his French
⁹¹ Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1994), 203.
⁹² Czesław Miłosz and Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, Portret podwójny: wykonany z listów, wierszów,
⁹³ Miłosz, Czesław Miłosz: Conversations, 94.
⁹⁴ Nietzsche, “Rhythmische Untersuchungen.” Quoted in Miller, “Harnessing Dionysos,” 4.
⁹⁵ Nietzsche, “Rhythmische Untersuchungen.” Quoted in Miller, “Harnessing Dionysos,” 4. Here
I also draw on Miller’s interpretations of Nietzsche’s texts with respect to the “harnessing” of Dionysian
flow. Miller, “Harnessing Dionysos,” 16.
⁹⁶ de L. Milosz, “Kilka słów o poezji,” 56.
168  ’    
symbolist cousin’s imagery, the basic rhythmic unit of form captured from flux
corresponds with a basic unit of syntax—the sentence:
To find my home in one sentence, concise, as if hammered in metal. Not to

enchant anybody. Not to earn a lasting name in posterity. An unnamed need for
order, for rhythm, for form, which three words are opposed to chaos and
nothingness. (NCP 452)
[Zamieszkać w zdaniu, które byłoby jak wykute z metalu. Skąd takie pragnienie?
Nie żeby kogoś zachwycić. Nie żeby utrwalić imię w pamięci potomnych.
Nienazwana potrzeba ładu, rytmu, formy, które to trzy słowa obracamy prze-
ciwko chaosowi i nicości. (W 906)]
In the conditions of the weakly accented, syllable-timed Polish language, Miłosz

paradoxically finds a stronger type of form in the looser “sense rhythm” that links
breath, phrase, measure, and syntax. The forging hammer that imposes momen-
tary form on flow may also be identified here with William Blake’s mythological
poet, Los, whose hammer blows of rhythm Miłosz identifies with blood and the
beating of the human heart.⁹⁷ In this respect, “sense rhythm” is closer to “the
symbolic,” establishing rational or imaginative meaning, and consolidating the
masculine subject against disorder. As Miłosz puts it elsewhere, this subject finds
“shelter” from chaos in “rhythm and the order of syntax.”⁹⁸ By contrast, he
associates the most ostentatiously metrical, artificial, and especially syllabotonic
forms of rhythm with flux, disorder, and a correspondingly weak sense of form.
These unmistakably artificial structures are paradoxically connected with “the
semiotic” and with the underlying natural fluidity of the inexpressible “real” of the
body. In this case, the “corset” of form—the continued influence of the melodious,
liquid verse of Young Poland in Miłosz’s own poetry—is identified with the body.
The corset is the underlying, “odious,” and fluid reality.
Here, Miłosz approaches the self-evident, but ever-obscured secret of poetry,
and of all language, in relation to its referent, or what he characterizes as
“underneath”: there is no underneath. Real, material bodies can never directly
be present in poetry.⁹⁹ They manifest themselves as mere representations filtered
⁹⁷ The “hammer” is only explicitly present in the English translation of the poem, but the “forging”
(“wykute z metalu”) of the original Polish makes the connection with Blake equally clear. Notably,
Blake’s visionary poems are written in a long, somewhat amorphous line often described as biblical in
its origins. In Milton (1804–10), Blake writes: “For every Space larger than a red Globule of Mans
blood. / Is visionary: and is created by the Hammer of Los.” See Blake, Complete Poetry and Prose, 127.
⁹⁸ Miłosz, Road-side Dog, 84.
⁹⁹ David Hillman and Ulrika Maude explain: “Not only there is no obvious way for the concrete
materiality of the body to be fully present in or on the written page; even more profoundly, there would
seem on the face of it to be an apparent mutual exclusivity of the body and language—the one all brute
facticity, the other presupposing precisely the absence of matter.” See David Hillman and Ulrika
Maude, “Introduction,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, eds. David Hillman
and Ulrika Maude (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 3.
, ,    169
through verbal conventions. The body “in itself” is only accessible to thought and
to poetry in the artificial forms of language, which then function partially to
construct it. Insofar as “the real” or the rhythms of the body express themselves
in poetry at all, they necessarily do so in the artificial rhythms of poetic forms,
either in stricter meter or in looser cadences. These formal features not only define
the controlling framework for the “symbolic” dimension of poetry’s meaning,
but they also mediate the deeper “semiotic” dimension supposedly rooted in the
body. In Visions from San Francisco Bay (Widzenia nad Zatoką San Francisco,
1969), Miłosz refers to clothing and conventional bodily practices to explain the
socially—or symbolically—constructed nature of the body itself:
The body always bears a trace of the clothes which covered it—e.g. belts or
stays—but, above all, the trace of the bearing, gestures, and postures imposed by
the clothes commonly worn. What is most important here, however, is the
constantly changing manner in which we see the body . . . . Perhaps the “body
in itself” is as much beyond our grasp as the “thing in itself.”¹⁰⁰
The very shape of the human body has changed over time together with prevailing
tastes, beauty standards, diets, and garments. Miłosz links the shifting styles that
dress and mold the body—from sartorial fashions to hairstyles—with the histor-
ical styles of poetry. Just as clothing both veils and visibly defines an inaccessible
“body in itself,” the specific forms of poetic creation both mask and express the
underlying rhythms and fluids of the body. For this reason, as Miłosz seeks a new
poetry that would make contact with the reality of the body—with the quasi-
transcendent “thing in itself”—he finds constant frustration in the “non-
adherence of language to what we really are” [“nieprzyleganie języka do tego,
czym naprawdę jesteśmy”] through the unavoidable limitations of its contingent
forms: “And each of my attempts to say something real ended the same way,
in driving me back within the enclosure of form, like a sheep that has strayed
from the flock” [“I każda moja próba powiedzenia czegoś rzeczywistego kończyła
się tak samo, zagnaniem mnie z powrotem w opłotki formy, niby owcy odbijającej
od stada” (W 802)]. Forms and styles simultaneously conceal, express, and
create the body and its rhythms—from which, Miłosz claims, they have originally
emerged.
Ultimately, the rhythms of the body are inexpressible. “The real” is held fast “in
a great silence” (NCP 374) [“w wielkiej ciszy” (W 736)], as the “nameless woman”
from The Separate Notebooks (Osobny zeszyt, 1977–9) observes. Miłosz’s own
attempts to make contact with “the real” of the underlying body inevitably end in
the “enclosure of form.” The body manifests itself indirectly through the struggle
in poetry between classical forms and individual rhythms, between metrical
¹⁰⁰ Czesław Miłosz, Visions from San Francisco Bay, trans. Richard Lourie (New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 1982), 100.
170  ’    
rhythm and sense rhythm—which, in turn, may belong to both the semiotic and
symbolic dimensions of meaning. All these conflicts are intertwined. All these
dichotomies reverse or disintegrate. In consequence, Miłosz is left with the same
vague sense that poetry is always tied to the body and always transcends it, while
the body “in itself” always lies beyond or beneath poetry’s expressive capacities. At
the same time, the diverse rhythms of poetic language may either undermine or
liberate the poetic subject, which—like poetry itself—is both incorporeal and
tethered to the body.
6. Poetic Language and the Weakening of the Self
The freer lines of Miłosz’s versets preserve the preeminence of syntax, grammar,
and rational meaning in his poetry, but they remain in constant dialogue with
partial or deconstructed versions of more classically metrical forms. This poetic
polyphony has further implications for Miłosz’s conceptions of the self. Initially,
I linked the “symbolic” dimension of discursive language with a strong, rational,
incorporeal, masculine subject, and the “semiotic” of rhythmic, poetic language
with the weakened, irrational, corporeal, feminine subject. In the more nuanced
terms I have now established, the conflict is between different types of poetic
rhythm: above all, between sense rhythm and metrical rhythm. Both rhythms
are connected to the body, through breath, blood, fluids, and other biological
cycles. They may also be linked in different ways with both weak and strong
forms of subjectivity, as Miłosz conceives them. Sense rhythm is perhaps more
closely connected with the stronger, “masculine” subjectivity, while metrical
rhythm is linked with what he stereotypically presents as the weaker, “feminine”
self. However, the specific conditions and consequences of this weakening signif-
icantly complicate the picture.
In From the Rising of the Sun, Miłosz’s poetic speaker perceives the “odious”
metrical fluidity of amphibrachs and trochees as a “fever” enfeebling his subjec-
tivity. This weakening is dangerous, but it also seems to be intimately connected
with the poet’s fundamental identity and gift. His “feminine” passivity and
instrumentality are what open him up to the influence of pulsating rhythm. In
this sense, the “feminine” porousness of the corporeal subject makes a certain kind
of poetry possible; conversely, the possibility of poetry exposes most clearly the
penetrability of the boundaries supposedly defining the individual self, both male
and female:
The purpose of poetry is to remind us

how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will. (NCP 241)
, ,    171
[Ten pożytek z poezji, że nam przypomina, / jak trudno jest pozostać tą samą
osobą, / bo dom nasz jest otwarty, we drzwiach nie ma klucza, / a niewidzialni
goście wchodzą i wychodzą. (W 589)]
The fever of rhythm is not exclusively an instinctive element that rises up from the
body to attack the rational self. My earlier analysis shows that it also has strong
roots in poetic and linguistic tradition. After all, the classically metrical forms that
impose themselves on the poetic speaker originate both in literary history and in
fundamental accentual characteristics of the Polish language. In this sense, the
weakness of the rational subject is not only a result of the desubjectivizing power
of the body’s irrational impulses and rhythms, but also of the subject’s embedd-
edness in human language, society, culture, and history. The available forms
inevitably come from outside the author, and he or she merely submits to the
permeating influence of their rhythms.
Miłosz sometimes refers to this historicizing perspective simply as “structural-
ism.” According to one of his fictional narrators, structuralism teaches “that it was
not [the authors] who used language, but language that used them, not they who
created style, but style that created them.”¹⁰¹ For Miłosz, this perspective repre-
sents the most deterministic vision of literary form, entirely subjugating the
individual creator to a cultural history of styles, just as the individual body is
subject to the laws of biology and the history of bodily fashions. He argues that
subjection “to the laws of a given language” ensure that the poet has free will only
“to a very limited extent.”¹⁰² Miłosz’s constant need to break down the established
forms implies rebellion against them in the name of an impossible freedom from
“necessity.”¹⁰³ Accordingly, he modifies, mixes, and deforms the classical meters,
ignores rhyme, and implements his own version of free verse. Yet there is no final
escape from the laws of form, which inevitably shape the poetic subject and his
works.
At the same time, the restriction of subjectivity inherent in meter also has a
positive dimension for Miłosz. “Impersonal” modes give his work a more univer-
sal and objective aspect.¹⁰⁴ This effect of objectivity applies equally to the non-
classical forms of his poetry. For instance, the verset ostensibly represents a looser
and more individual type of meter, but its “sense rhythm” remains deeply
embedded in poetic history. The biblical scholar Sigmund Mowinckel even claims
that “sense rhythm” is the original poetic rhythm in many cultures, and that it
tends to reassert itself in later styles against the “artificial” or “classical” metrical
¹⁰¹ Czesław Miłosz, “Ephraim’s Liturgy,” in The Mountains of Parnassus, trans. Stanley Bill (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), 124–5.
¹⁰² Miłosz, Czesław Miłosz: Conversations, 34.
¹⁰³ Barańczak, “A Black Mirror at the End of a Tunnel,” 284.
¹⁰⁴ Many poets have noticed that the conventional metrical forms are fundamentally “impersonal.”
See Easthope, “Problematizing the Pentameter,” 484.
172  ’    
rhythms.¹⁰⁵ Anticipating Miłosz’s quest for a more universal and “spacious” form,
William Butler Yeats suggests that the Bible offers “a form midway between prose
and verse that seems natural to impersonal meditation.”¹⁰⁶ The personal becomes
impersonal when conveyed in structures that have been established or shaped by
the deepest processes of cultural history. This type of transformation is very
congenial to Miłosz, whose poetry constantly pores over his own biography, and
yet strives to depersonalize it in order to achieve a “fusion of the individual and the
historical.”¹⁰⁷ This project has aesthetic, ethical, and psychological motivations.
First of all, Miłosz follows his cousin Oscar Milosz in condemnation of a
supposedly “impoverished” modern poetry locked in the “circle of subjectivism,”
and thus alienated from everyday human concerns. In his 1980 Nobel lecture, he
emphasizes the necessity of a rootedness in the body that connects the poet with
others through a “feeling of solidarity.” Without it, the poet’s sense of proud
separation may breed aestheticist indifference or even active hostility toward the
“toiling masses” of ordinary people—the “totalitarian” temptation.¹⁰⁸ By connect-
ing his own biography with Poland’s traumatic twentieth-century history,
Miłosz aims to close the gulf previously opened by the symbolists and
various experimental modernists between the isolated poet and the human
crowd. As an example of a universal fate, his own life takes on a new
meaning.¹⁰⁹ Simultaneously, depersonalization allows for an escape from the
alienated self—or, at least, for a social reinterpretation of a painful individual
past. Admittedly, Miłosz also problematizes this move, remaining suspicious of
collective identities and national histories or myths. He presents himself as a poet
who simultaneously bears witness to tragic national experience and keeps his
distance from it.¹¹⁰ Nevertheless, he sometimes describes submission to the forms
of tradition as a liberation from the oppressive self.
More broadly, the depersonalization of Miłosz’s poetry is inherent in its
“polyphony” of voices representing the conflicting worldviews of modernity.
The poetic speaker is “an instrument . . . snatching voices out of a babbling chorus,
translating them into sentences with commas and periods” (NCP 612) [“Byłem
instrumentem . . . wyławiając głosy z bełkotliwego chóru, tłumacząc na zdania
jasne, z przecinkami i kropką” (W 1073)]. On the one hand, the process of
“translation” here represents a controlling mechanism. Through a heterogeneous
¹⁰⁵ Mowinckel, The Psalms in Israel’s Worship, 160.

¹⁰⁶ Yeats, “A General Introduction for My Work,” 386.
¹⁰⁷ Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry, 94. Ryszard Nycz refers to this approach as “the poetics of
parabolic autobiography.” See Ryszard Nycz, “Four poetics: Miłosz and literary movements,” trans.
Anna Warso, Teksty Drugie 1, Special English Edition (2012): 58.
¹⁰⁸ Czesław Miłosz, “The Nobel Lecture,” in Beginning With My Streets: Essays and Recollections,
trans. Madeline G. Levine (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), 280.
¹⁰⁹ Miłosz, “The Nobel Lecture,” 280.
¹¹⁰ Clare Cavanagh discusses these complex maneuvers in detail. See Cavanagh, Lyric Poetry and
Modern Politics, 255–64.
, ,    173
style, the poet asserts the controlling power of his own individuality, finding the
uncounterfeitable essence of his own “absolute rhythm” in a unique mixture of
forms. Miłosz both acknowledges poetic history and attempts to escape it through
this process of formal relativization. On the other hand, polyphonic form also
reveals once again the poetic subject’s loss of control and radical openness to
external influences—his passivity and receptivity to multiple voices and styles.
Arent van Nieukerken observes that Miłosz’s multi-voicedness expresses the
basic “fluidity” of the subject in his work.¹¹¹ The poet himself argues that this
quality simply reflects the broader fluidity of the subject in a secularized world in
which the old metaphysical truths are either dead or locked in dialogue with rival
discourses, languages, and beliefs. The poetic subject becomes a “self-
contradictory multitude,” a porous entity trying to understand “the screams,
prayers, blasphemies, hymns which [have chosen] him for their medium” (NCP
360) [“tych krzyków, modlitw, bluźnierstw, hymnów, które jego obrały za
medium” (W 747)]. In this sense, Miłosz’s polyphony is intimately connected
with his attempts to find new forms of expression for religious ideas and
experience.¹¹² The old forms, hierarchies, and pieties no longer suffice for the
defense of religious faith. Powerful new materialist perspectives must be
addressed, and perhaps even coopted. As Miłosz explores the interactions of
the body and the self with poetic rhythm, his heterogeneous style both springs
from and shapes his attempts to reaffirm religious conceptions of transcendence
in dialogue with secular materialism.
7. Poetry, Ritual, and Transcendence
The use of poetic forms borrowed directly from the psalms—or rather from
Miłosz’s own translations of them—suggests a desire to restore a lost sacred
dimension to poetry. In various weaker or stronger forms, he aspires to
reflect the basic conviction inspired by Blake that “poetry and religion . . . are
synonymous.”¹¹³ Later, in Road-side Dog (Piesek przydrożny, 1997), he declares
that modern poetry now fills the role of theology, quoting American poet Jean
Valentine to describe this new social function, however marginal it may be: “Of
course, all poetry is prayer. . . . Poetry offers many people—including poets—the
consolation they no longer find in traditional religion.”¹¹⁴ This substitute role is
partly connected with the innate tendency of poetic language—as Miłosz
¹¹¹ Arent van Nieukerken, “Poezja wyjaśniająca swój własny rodowód: Czesław Miłosz a John
Ashbery,” Teksty Drugie 5 (2011): 37.
¹¹² See Joanna Zach, Miłosz i poetyka wyznania (Kraków: Universitas, 2002), 124.
¹¹³ Miłosz, The Land of Ulro, 181. ¹¹⁴ Miłosz, Road-side Dog, 20–1.
174  ’    
understands it—to reach beyond the reductively materialist meanings of scientific

or everyday language.
Miłosz sometimes views poetry as fundamentally at odds with natural reality in
a positive sense, soaring above it—though still tied to it—together with disem-
bodied consciousness. Poetry yields a “surplus of meaning,” since poetic words
tend to open up fields of reference and connotation beyond their literal
meanings.¹¹⁵ Even in a modern context in which this “surplus of meaning” is
under attack from reductive materialist positions, Miłosz suggests that the poetic
word remains a “tireless messenger,” straining beyond purely material references
toward a transcendent or sacred “meaning,” however uncertain its existence. This
persistent hope is partly an expression of what Fiut describes as an abiding
“yearning for faith.”¹¹⁶ Yet Miłosz’s poetry most often remains agnostic in its
basic assumptions. Even the increasingly religious preoccupations of his very late
period almost never produce explicitly devotional poems.¹¹⁷ Overall, Miłosz finds
the religious function of poetry in the logic of its form rather than in its explicit
content.
In part, this function is inherent in what Miłosz describes as the “incantational”
aspect of his own poetry. He sometimes associates this poetic “incantation” with
an atavistic, magical language bearing non-Christian religious connotations. The
poet is a “witch-doctor, shaman, a possessor of incantations which protect, cure,
or harm.”¹¹⁸ In the ironic idealizations of The World, “incantations” (“zaklęcia”)
and “magic” (“czar[y]”) are associated with the mythical “Father” figure whose
presence sustains the existence of a poetically constructed universal order (NCP
42; W 198). Yet this is a consciously naïve worldview. In the later Treatise on
Poetry, the speaker confesses that in the real world “the magic has fled from magic
spells” (NCP 120) [“daremne przepis i zaklęcie” (W 403)].
The rhythmical forms of poetry as a late-nineteenth-century “stand-in for
religion” soon reveal their emptiness as purely aesthetic and increasingly indivi-
dualized codes. Here, Miłosz describes a kind of “disenchantment” affecting not
just perceptions of the world in the process of secularization, but also poetic
language. In the face of this process, he finds some potential for “reenchantment”
in the very different type of incantational musicality embodied by his versets,
¹¹⁵ Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny
with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello (London: Routledge, 2004), 171–4.
¹¹⁶ Aleksander Fiut, “Pragnienie wiary,” in Poznawanie Miłosza 3: 1999–2010, ed. Aleksander Fiut
(Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2011), 654.
¹¹⁷ Instead, Miłosz poet explores doubts, contradictions and heretical points of view. The “theology”
of his Treatise on Theology (Traktat teologiczny, 2002) is decidedly unorthodox, including the meta-
physical systems of Jakob Böhme, Adam Mickiewicz, Emmanuel Swedenborg, and even of Buddhist
karma.
¹¹⁸ Miłosz, Road-side Dog, 34. This identification has strong roots in Polish Romanticism, especially
in the shamanic poet figure of Adam Mickiewicz’s Forefathers’ Eve, Part II and Part III (Dziady, 1823,
1832).
, ,    175
founded on the breath and on the original needs of liturgical recitation.

Specifically, his interest in the liturgical origins of the psalmic verset leads him
to the idea of a reinvigorated religiosity linking the body and rhythmical language
through the communal forms of ritual.¹¹⁹
In an essay on the modern fate of Christianity, Miłosz underlines the impor-
tance of ritual for faith, arguing that changes to priestly robes after the Second
Vatican Council (1962–5) contributed to a decline in belief in Europe: “Ritual and
theater are ruled by similar laws: we know that the actor dressed up as a king is not
a king, or so it would seem, but to a certain extent we believe that he is.”¹²⁰ The
repeated suspension of disbelief in ritual is part of what makes belief possible. In
his unfinished novel The Mountains of Parnassus (Góry Parnasu, 2012), Miłosz
imagines a dystopian future world in which traditional religion has collapsed
precisely as a result of the emptying of its rituals. One of the characters, a dying
cardinal, bemoans the consequences of a “reform of the liturgy” intended to
extract the priest from the “theater,” and to bring him closer to the congregation.
Instead, the changes simply confounded believers with a relativizing message that
“the immutable and sacred had always been conventional and historical.”¹²¹
De-ritualization forms a crucial part of a secularization process described as the
collapse of a house of faith “eaten from within by termites.”
Miłosz’s view chimes with sociological explanations of secularization as the
“de-ritualization” or “disembedding” of religion.¹²² Charles Taylor also argues
that secularization began with an “excarnating” detachment of worship from
ritual movements and gestures, so that the “relation to the highest” was no longer
mediated by the body.¹²³ Miłosz makes consistent attempts to restore this bodily
mediation, even as the bodiless ego and an accompanying revulsion for social
rituals also remain strongly present in his work.
Some of Miłosz’s poetic speakers and narrators attack religious ritual as a
superficial social practice of “apes,” bearing nothing in common with “true
religion.”¹²⁴ Yet, especially in the later period, he increasingly advocates a reclaim-
ing of ritual in its fundamentally communal and embodied dimensions. This
mature position demands a rejection of the ego’s claims to stand apart as
“pure consciousness” from the fleshly mob of other human beings engaged in
¹¹⁹ As Zdzisław Łapiński points out, Miłosz does not imitate the canonical forms of ritual speech,
but rather invents them anew in his own rhythmical language. See Zdzisław Łapiński, Między polityką a
metafizyką: O poezji Czesława Miłosza (London: Odnowa, 1981), 32.
¹²⁰ Miłosz, “If Only This Could Be Said,” in To Begin Where I Am, eds. Carpenter and Levine, 324.
¹²¹ Miłosz, The Mountains of Parnassus, 70.
¹²² See Brian S. Turner, “Religion in a Post-secular Society,” in The New Blackwell Companion to the
Sociology of Religion, ed. Brian S. Turner (Chichester: Blackwell, 2010), 658.
¹²³ Taylor, A Secular Age, 554.
¹²⁴ In Native Realm, he writes: “Taking part in rituals along with apes humiliated me. Religion was a
sacred thing; how could their God be mine at the same time?” Miłosz, Native Realm, 81.
176  ’    
collective worship.¹²⁵ Accordingly, the purpose of Miłosz’s late Treatise on

Theology is precisely to bridge the gap between “private religion” and “the religion
of the rite” [“religia obrzędu” (W 1274)] through renunciation of “the sin of
pride” [“grzech samolubnej pychy” (W 1258)], or the ego’s claim to purity and
separation.¹²⁶ Rhythmical poetic language, with its weakening of subjectivity
through simultaneously social and corporeal forms, offers a promising path.¹²⁷
Even in the bleak future vision of The Mountains of Parnassus, a glimmer of
hope flickers in a remote community of believers who have rebuilt their faith on
the foundations of shared ritual and rhythmic speech.¹²⁸ The implication seems to
be that belief in “something higher” can be recovered not through an emphasis on
the otherworldly dimension itself, but first through a return to the most embodied,
social, and ritualized forms of religion. At the same time, individuals may over-
come or transcend their atomized individuality by recognizing their common
bodily identity, giving religious ritual a quasi-erotic undercurrent in what he
describes elsewhere as the “[almost amorous] transformation of my ‘I’ into ‘we’ ”
(NCP 737) [“niemal miłosnej przemiany mojego ‘ja’ w ‘my’ ” (W 1203)].¹²⁹ In the
novel’s separately published epilogue, “Ephraim’s Liturgy” (“Liturgia Efraima,”
1969), a peculiar “sermon” reveals the same liberating transformation in a “rhyth-
mical speech” taking the looser form of Miłosz’s own poetic sense rhythm:
For you and you and I repeat the words to ourselves: I am,
I am here. My hand, my knee, my face, so familiar to the touch,
my face, from reflections in mirrors and the eyes of other people.
My hunger, my bodily greed, my tears, my weariness.
And yet—how is it possible?—we come together to say “we,”
recognizing ourselves in others.¹³⁰
¹²⁵ Karina Jarzyńska examines the central conflict between Miłosz’s negative view of social forms of
religion and a more positive understanding of ritual as a very corporeal experience of meaning beyond
the merely individual. See Karina Jarzyńska, “Pamięć rytuału: między biologią a strategią
tożsamościową. Przypadek Czesława Miłosza,” in Od pamięci biodziedzicznej do postpamięci, eds.
Tereza Szostek, Roma Sendyka, and Ryszard Nycz (Warszawa: IBL, 2013). Fiut also describes ritual
as Miłosz’s “solution” to the problem of co-existence with the human community. See Fiut, The Eternal
Moment, 105.
¹²⁶ Czesław Miłosz, Second Space: New Poems, trans. Czesław Miłosz and Robert Hass (New York:
HarperCollins, 2004), 63, 48.
¹²⁷ This path also has a familiarly gendered aspect. Miłosz connects the “feminine” principle of the
receptive poetic imagination with the ritual of the Catholic Church, which he tellingly genders in the
same way: “Una Sancta Catholica Ecclesia—note that grammatically the word is of feminine gender.”
He credits his Catholic upbringing with preserving the creative potential of his “female anima,” since
“that rite liberates the feminine within us.” The allegedly “feminine” emphasis of the Catholic rite—
with the associated connotation of “feminine receptivity”—makes it an ideal preparation for a similarly
gendered poetry. See Miłosz, The Land of Ulro, 183.
¹²⁸ Miłosz, The Mountains of Parnassus, 9, 132, 134.
¹²⁹ Jarzyńska refers to “the experience of a superindividual dimension.” See Jarzyńska, “Postsecular
Instruments of Acculturation,” 152.
¹³⁰ Miłosz, The Mountains of Parnassus, 141.
, ,    177
[Gdyż ja, i ty, i ty, powtarzamy sobie: jestem, / ja jestem tutaj, moja ręka,
moje kolano, moja twarz / znana z dotyku, z odbić w lustrach, w oczach innych
ludzi. / Mój głód, moja cieleśna chciwość, mój płacz, moje znużenie. /
A zarazem—jak to jest możliwe? łączymy się wymawiający “my”; / rozpoznając
w innym siebie.¹³¹]
The alienation of the individual “I” from his or her own fragile body is partly
ameliorated by a social ritual involving bodily co-participation and synchronized
rhythmic speech. In A Treatise on Theology, the poetic speaker connects this
bodily ritual and recitation with the very possibility of belief: “Yet I feel warmth
among people at prayer. / Since they believe, they help me to believe” [“Ale jest mi
dobrze w modlącym się tłumie. / Ponieważ oni wierzą, pomagają mi wierzyć”
(W 1273)].¹³² Faith emerges from the warmth of the body in contact with other
bodies as they pronounce the sacred words together. However, this focus on
corporeality re-exposes the central contradiction of both human life and poetic
language as Miłosz understands them. In religious ritual, a community of beings
mired in the limitations of material biology comes together to make contact with
an immaterial, vertically transcendent dimension. Like poetry, ritual is at once
embodied and disembodied in its form and aspirations, prompting both wonder
and embarrassment:
Suddenly I have a vision of the whole congregation naked—animal creatures of

both sexes, with their furriness, genitals and deformations on display, joining
together in a high ritual, in incorporeal adoration—could there be anything more
amazing?
[Nagle mam wizję całego zgromadzenia nago—istoty zwierzęce obojga płci, z ich
włochatościami, seksem, deformacjami na widoku, łączące się w obrzędzie wyso-
kiej, niecielesnej adoracji—czy może być coś bardziej niesamowitego?¹³³]
From an anthropological point of view, ritual is a form whose logic must always be
embodied. The “body and breath” of the participants give life to the ritual.¹³⁴
Underlying, interpenetrating, and creating the form of the ritual are human bodies
in motion, and breath giving substance to words, often in a rhythmical pattern.
¹³¹ Czesław Miłosz, Góry Parnasu: Science fiction (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej,
2012), 96.
¹³² Miłosz, Second Space, 63. ¹³³ Miłosz, Piesek przydrożny, 28. Translation my own.
¹³⁴ Roy A. Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), 3, 118. As Jarzyńska points out, Miłosz anticipates the work of contemporary
anthropologists when he recognizes that ritual creates meaning through “biological and cognitive
mechanisms.” See Jarzyńska, “Postsecular Instruments of Acculturation,” 152.
178  ’    
Yet, as Miłosz notes, these forms strive toward something “high” and incorporeal,
even as the physical bodies that combine to create them are “low,” imperfect, and
animal. The ritual aspires to rise above the body and its membranes, though—in
fact—even the most basic moral concepts of “high” and “low” themselves spring
from the body’s anatomical construction. Meanwhile, the form of the ritual is
frozen in between the two spheres, as Miłosz’s dying cardinal observes: “In ritual
we always yearn to reach beyond form, and yet this is never possible. A gesture
intended to be the purest and most sincere expression of the spirit petrifies into
form, retreating into it, and surrendering to it.”¹³⁵ Any attempt to reach above the
material body and above the ritual that the body creates must fall back into the
enclosure of form.
For Miłosz, human meanings are cut off both from the material “real” below
and from the hypothetical world of the spirit above. In this sense, the form of the
ritual mirrors the form of poetry, extended between two inaccessible, transcendent
dimensions: the underlying reality of the body and the ideal realm of God. Poetry
assumes a surplus of meaning beyond any purely material reality, and yet the
collapse of vertical transcendence in the secular age leaves the poetic word to “run
and run” through an indifferent material universe. In response, Miłosz proposes
to turn that word inward to the fluids, organs, and flesh of the human body, where
the very origins of religious experience may lie. Yet the word gains no purchase
there either, since language is alien to the body’s obscure processes, symbolized in
the mute articulation of a “megalithic gurgle” in “dark tunnels” (NCP 321 [W
672]). Poetry springs from the pulsation of the blood, and yet it cannot “inhabit”
the chambers of the heart or percolate in the mysterious fluids of the body. At the
same time, the very fragility and destructibility of the body undermines its own
ultimate meaning. Only the “word” remains after the “lips” that waken it have
perished.
8. The Human Cathedral
In the face of mortality, the only real transcendence is available through the
creations of human form, stretched between two shadows of meaning that define
it and are themselves defined by it. In his poetry, Miłosz aims to plumb two
abysses: the horizontal transcendent of the perishable body, and the collapsed
vertical transcendent of God or the “supersensory world.”¹³⁶ Yet the only certain
¹³⁵ Miłosz, The Mountains of Parnassus, 69.

¹³⁶ I refer here to Martin Heidegger’s broad interpretation of the meaning of Nietzsche’s famous
“death of God” as the end of metaphysics or the “supersensory world.” See Martin Heidegger, “The
Word of Nietzsche: ‘God is Dead’,” in The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays, trans.
William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 64–5.
, ,    179
meaning subsists in the very verbal structures and rhythms of the poetry con-
structed between these horizons. More broadly, Miłosz expresses this idea through
the recurring image of a single mythical structure composed of all the historical
productions of human creativity: works of art, architecture, ideologies, rituals,
political institutions, and the smallest artefacts of material culture. This transcul-
tural, transhistorical monument appears as the only shelter from the cold of a
meaningless universe and the uncertainty of bodily identity.¹³⁷ In a late poem, this
edifice of human form is specifically related to verbal creation, while taking its
shape from a Christian form of sacred architecture:
A huge cathedral was being erected,

Made of sighs, shouts, hymns, and tears,
To make a home for us all, believers and skeptics,
To overcome our primordial fears.¹³⁸
[Trwało wznoszenie ogromnej katedry / Z westchnień, okrzyków,

hymnów i lamentów / Na dom dla wszystkich, wiernych i niewiernych
/ Na poskromnienie prymitywnych lęków. (W 1314)]
According to Miłosz, poetry and religion are parallel manifestations of the form-
making vocation of “Homo Ritualis.”¹³⁹ Despite its limitations, this activity still
retains the positive purpose of creating a “home” of social meanings. Without the
shelter of a collectively constructed “interhuman Form”—a notion Miłosz adapts
from fellow Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz (1904–69)¹⁴⁰—human beings
would be condemned to metaphysical homelessness in the material universe
and to the radical political violence caused by self-reduction to purely natural or
biological identity.
Miłosz, too, contributes to the “cathedral” of his native language, and of world
poetry. His heterogeneous style combines a range of different rhythmic forms—
metrical and syntactical, accentual and breath-based, syllabic and syllabotonic,
¹³⁷ In this conception, Miłosz was probably influenced by the ideas of Polish philosopher Stanisław
Brzozowski (1878–1911). See, for example, Andrzej Franaszek, Miłosz: Biografia (Krakow:
Wydawnictwo Znak, 2011), 597.
¹³⁸ Miłosz, Selected and Last Poems, 291. ¹³⁹ Miłosz, “If Only This Could Be Said,” 325.
¹⁴⁰ Miłosz’s term derives directly from Gombrowicz’s atheist idea of the “interhuman Church” as a
representation of a purely human sphere of created values and institutions. However, as Bogdan
Czaykowski points out, for Miłosz “this is hardly the whole story,” precisely because he does not
close off the possibility of a dimension beyond the purely human or material. See Bogdan Czaykowski,
“Witold Gombrowicz and Czesław Miłosz: the two Polarities of Twentieth-Century Polish Literature?,”
Toronto Slavic Quarterly 2 (2002), http://sites.utoronto.ca/tsq/02/gombrowicz.shtml. Fiut makes sim-
ilar arguments on Miłosz’s distance from Gombrowicz’s atheist idea of an “interhuman God.” See Fiut,
The Eternal Moment, 106–7.
180  ’    
traditional and free. In diverse registers, he opposes the “chaos” of formless flux,
while recognizing that even the most capacious human forms remain relative,
contingent, and historical. Through form and in form, human beings hopelessly
seek to reach beyond form—above it and beneath it, higher and deeper, without
and within. The same search constitutes the beating heart of Miłosz’s mission
in poetry.
OUP CORRECTED PROOFS – FINAL, 12/11/2021, SPi
Conclusion
Belief in the Body
In this book, I have presented an interpretation of Czesław Miłosz’s work as a

paradoxically materialist response to what he sees as the baleful historical con-
sequences of reductive materialism. His primary aims are to defend the human
individual against dehumanizing biologization and to preserve the possibility of
transcendence in a secularizing age. I have laid out the diverse range of Miłosz’s
poetic strategies in pursuit of these aims. However, my own interpretive emphasis
has been on solutions that lead through the body. In many of his works, the Polish
poet suggests contact with transcendence precisely through material or sensual
experience. Sometimes he presents secular varieties of immanent or “horizontal”
transcendence; sometimes the body opens the human subject to contact with a
“vertical” dimension of transcendence, or even with God. Finally, the book has
shown how these strategies cohere with Miłosz’s understanding of poetry itself as
simultaneously embodied and striving beyond the body. Both these tendencies
find their limit in the constraints of poetic language as a type of aesthetic form.
Miłosz’s poetic works contain a multiplicity of different forms, as he searches
for verbal structures through which to tackle the key dilemmas of his thought. Yet
none of these structures seems equal to the task, since poetic language—like all
other language—is unable to capture the inexpressible dimensions of either the
physical body or “the beyond.” Over the course of a long career, Miłosz loosens
and strengthens form, varies form, and breaks it open, but nothing brings form
closer to either material reality below or to the vertical dimension of an other-
worldly God. Indeed, a common separation from the formal constructions of
human meaning connects these two dimensions: the bodily fluids of “the real”
with God; the material body with the immaterial world of the spirit; the horizon-
tally transcendent with the vertically transcendent. In the combination of its
metrical and discursive rhythms, poetic form brings these two unreachable hor-
izons together in a fruitful intertwining. At the same time, this hybrid form best
reflects the mixed materiality and immateriality of the human self. As a final
illustration of this convergence, I will conclude with a brief interpretation of a key
poem that captures this book’s central concerns with the body, transcendence, and
poetic form.
In “Father Ch., Many Years Later” (“Ksiądz Ch., po latach”) from Unattainable
Earth (Nieobjęta ziemia, 1984), Miłosz uses the death of his former high school
182  ’    
catechist—who lived out his days resisting oppression in Soviet Lithuania—as a

pretext to take stock of his own religious commitments. In a series of autobio-
graphical and theological reflections, the poet-speaker depicts the spiritual
struggle of his life as a dialectic between rejection and embrace of the body.
On the one hand, he wishes to resist the fleshly “Prince of This World” (NCP
436); on the other, he pictures himself not as an ascetic disciple of Jesus
“preparing the Empire’s collapse,” but rather as a hedonist “in the marketplace,”
among amphoras of wine, sizzling meats, and dancers (NCP 440). The speaker
cannot ultimately decide if he is “against the world” or passionately entangled
with it.
In its own dialectic, the poem constitutes a catalogue of Miłosz’s various
approaches to verbal form, structured in an overarching rhythm of alternation
between them. It begins in uneven, unrhymed lines shaped by the looser “sense
rhythm” of long phrases. Then it shifts into stanzas featuring tighter forms,
ranging between twelve and fifteen syllables, with some examples of half-rhyme
and even rhyme. Two subsequent sections are written in prose. The last five lines
include two regular thirteen-syllable Alexandrines, followed by fourteen-syllable,
eleven-syllable, and twelve-syllable lines. The poem concludes in Miłosz’s decon-
structed, unrhymed “classical” mode to link the symbolic rhythm of blood with a
God who gives no other signs of his presence or plan:
I could not understand from whence came my stubbornness

And my belief that the pulse of impatient blood
Fulfills the designs of a silent God (NCP 440).
[Nigdy | nie mogłem | zrozumieć, | skąd brał się | mój upór. / I skąd |
wiara, | że tętno | niecierpliwej | krwi / Spełnia | zamysły | milczącego |
Boga (W 856).]
Once again, an instinctive faith springs from the animal warmth and rhythms of
the body, imbued with the familiar metrical forms of trochees and amphibrachs.
In the poem’s culminating moment, the speaker goes even further, identifying
God directly with the pulsation of his own blood. In this stanza, irregular
fourteen- and fifteen-syllable lines are invaded by the self-propelling, “fluid”
rhythms of paroxytonic meter: “And yet I could not distinguish Him from the
rhythm of my blood / And felt false reaching beyond it in my prayer” (NCP 436)
[“Nie mogłem | Go jednak | odróżnić | od rytmu | mojej | krwi / I fałsz | jakiś |
czułem, | dążąc | modlitwą | w zaświaty” (W 852)]. The amphibrachs are espe-
cially palpable in the sonic repetition around the very word “rhythm” (“odróżnić |
od rytmu”), and in the weakness of “prayer” straining toward the “other world”
(“modlitwą | w zaświaty”). Intimations of God, the supersensory world, and
bodily rhythms find expression together in a partly metrical poetry, both natural
:     183
and artificial, grooming itself “of its own accord,” and subject to the historical
conventions of a particular language and tradition. Through this language, the
speaker embraces the body as the node connecting him to transcendence.
In Miłosz’s striking neologism from the same poem, the subject is “wciałowzięty”:
literally, seized or carried into the body, “flesh-enraptured.” Among lines ham-
mered into the forms of discursive “sense rhythm,” the monotonous fluidity of
“odious” metrical rhythm intercedes to weaken the poetic subject’s control. This
instinctive rhythm carries him into a bodily state of instrumental receptivity—into
“Dionysian dances” [“dionizyjskie tańce”]—and perhaps opens him to God.
Characteristically, the poem then turns back upon itself yet again in the
“Manichaean” fear that ecstatic consent to the material world might simply
confirm the dominion of its diabolical “Ruler” [“Władc(a)”]. The speaker wonders
whether his joy in bodily “feeling” and in erotic union with a female “other” must
doom him to the fate of a blind dancer “on the edge of a pit” [“na brzegu |
otchłani”]. Perhaps he has been trapped in a mere illusion of transcendence by the
power of biological instinct—and by the rocking rhythm of amphibrachs. Yet he
concludes with the affirmation that no other faith is possible. Any belief he can
muster has its sources in the body, in the “impatient pulse of blood” that is also the
origin of poetry.
Like religious faith and the conscious self, poetry comes into being at the
crossing of the material and the immaterial. No form of language turns the
receiver’s attention more decisively to its material aspects, to its meaningless
meaning, to the pure sound of signifiers, to the physical evocations of sensual
imagery, and their interaction with the rhythms of breath and blood. Yet no form
of language aspires more radically to transcend the material realm in a surplus of
meaning that reaches beyond any function merely to describe physical reality.
Most importantly, these functions are not distinct from each other. Poetry trans-
cends reductively descriptive language precisely in and through its sonic or
material qualities, through the combination of the meaning of rhythm and the
rhythm of meaning. In Miłosz’s theory and practice, poetry’s forms and meanings
realize themselves in the space between the corporeal and the incorporeal—in
transcendent material.
For Miłosz, the human being embodies the same combination, as a non-dualist
duality—or as an inseparable mixture of body and consciousness, soma and soul.
Each person has immeasurable value as an irreplaceable concentration of thoughts
and experiences in a unique physical body. Against the abstractions of biological
reductionism, Miłosz places his poetic faith in the concrete importance of each
individual: in the significance of a “hunchback librarian” who perished in the
bombing of Warsaw, in “her little skeleton” and “the spot where her heart was
pulsating.”
In his poetry, the body believes, offering intimations of transcendence and the
existence of God. But he also believes in the body, finding in it the sources of
184  ’    
poetry and the deepest meaning of this-worldly human existence. In the broad
applicability of this poetic creed, his oeuvre opens itself to the interpretations,
intuitions, and arguments of believers and non-believers alike. As Miłosz affirms,
all systems of meaning begin with the body. And it is in our bodies that we must
find something worth living for.
Works Cited
Works by Czesław Miłosz

Miłosz, Czesław. “A Body of Work.” The Three-Penny Review 23 (Autumn 1985): 4–5.
Miłosz, Czesław. A Year of the Hunter. Translated by Madeline G. Levine. New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994.
Miłosz, Czesław. Beginning with My Streets: Essays and Recollections. Translated by
Madeline G. Levine. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991.
Miłosz, Czesław. The Captive Mind. Translated by Jane Zielonko. New York: Vintage, 1990.
Miłosz, Czesław. Czesław Miłosz: Conversations. Edited by Cynthia Haven. Jackson:
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Miłosz, Czesław. Człowiek wśród skorpionów: studium o Stanisławie Brzozowskim. Paris:
Instytut Literacki, 1962.
Miłosz, Czesław. “Dostoevsky and Swedenborg.” Slavic Review 34, no. 2 (1975): 302–18.
Miłosz, Czesław. “Dostoevsky and Western Intellectuals.” Cross Currents 5 (1986):
493–505.
Miłosz, Czesław. Emperor of the Earth: Modes of Eccentric Vision. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1977.
Miłosz, Czesław. “The Fate of the Religious Imagination.” New Perspectives Quarterly 21,
no. 4 (2004): 141–7.
Miłosz, Czesław. Gdzie wschodzi słońce i kędy zapada. Gdańsk: Słowo Obraz Terytoria,
2004.
Miłosz, Czesław. Góry Parnasu: Science fiction. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Krytyki
Politycznej, 2012.
Miłosz, Czesław. The History of Polish Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1983.
Miłosz, Czesław. The Issa Valley. Translated by Louis Iribarne. London: Penguin, 2001.
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2005.
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S. Leach. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002.
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Critical Works
Antoniuk, Mateusz. “Przybranie formy z dawna wyglądanej (dosięganej / obiecanej /
wysnowanej . . . ): brulion Czesława Miłosza—próba lektury.” Teksty Drugie 147, no. 3
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wstępne).” In Poznawanie Miłosza: Studia i szkice o twórczości poety. Edited by Jerzy
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Banowska, Lidia. Miłosz i Mickiewicz: Poezja wobec tradycji. Poznań: Wydawnictwo
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Barańczak, Stanisław. “A Black Mirror at the End of a Tunnel: An Interpretation of Czesław
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Barańczak, Stanisław. “Język poetycki Czesława Miłosza: wstępne rozpoznanie.” Teksty:
teoria literatury, krytyka, interpretacja 58–9, nos. 4–5 (1981): 155–84.
Bereś, Stanisław. “Wokół ‘Poematu o czasie zastygłym’ Czesława Miłosza.” Pamiętnik
Literacki 72, no. 4 (1981): 45–85.
Bernacki, Marek. “Czeladnik i mistrz: Czesława Miłosza spotkania z Oskarem
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Herberta i Adama Zagajewskiego. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego,
2008.
Bieńkowska, Ewa. W ogrodzie ziemskim: Książka o Miłoszu. Warszawa: Sic!, 2004.
Bill, Stanley. “Dualism, Dostoevskii and the Devil in History: Czesław Miłosz’s ‘Neo-
Manichaean’ Theory of Russian Culture.” Slavonic and East European Review 93, no. 3
(July 2015): 401–28.
Bill, Stanley. “Melting in the Mirror: Woman, Body and Self in the Poetry of Czesław
Miłosz.” Slavic and East European Journal 58, no. 4 (Winter 2014): 645–62.
Bill, Stanley. “Translation as Talking to Oneself: Miłosz Makes Whitman Speak.” Wielogłos:
Journal of the Faculty of Polish Studies at the Jagiellonian University 3, no. 17 (2014): 43–56.
Błoński, Jan. “Duch religijny i miłość rzeczy.” In Poznawanie Miłosza 3: 1999–2010. Edited
by Aleksander Fiut, 643–8. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2011.
Błoński, Jan. “Epifanie Miłosza.” Teksty 4–5, nos. 58–9 (1981): 27–51.
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Bolecki, Włodzimierz. “Proza Miłosza.” In Poznawanie Miłosza 2: Część druga. Edited by
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Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009.
Chrząstowska, Bożena. “Stary poeta—mądrość i zachywt.” Polonistyka 5 (2011): 57–65.
Chwin, Stefan. “Czesław Miłosz wobec powstania warszawskiego.” Teksty Drugie 131, no. 5
(2011): 62–81.
Czaykowski, Bogdan. “Witold Gombrowicz and Czesław Miłosz: The two Polarities of
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Dale Scott, Peter. “Miłosz, Eliot, and the Generative Canon: Literature, the Past, and the
Future.” Sarmatian Review 37, no. 3 (2017): 2110–20.
Davie, Donald. Czesław Miłosz and the Insufficiency of Lyric. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1986.
Delaperrière, Maria. “Dialog Miłosza z Mickiewiczem.” Postscriptum Polonistyczne 1, no. 7
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Dembińska-Pawelec, Joanna. “Poezja jest sztuką rytmu”: O świadomości rytmu w poezji
polskiej dwudziestego wieku. Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, 2010.
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tywie postsekularnej. Kraków: Universitas, 2018.
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Kaźmierczyk, Zbigniew. “ ‘Wcielenie’: wczesny wiersz Miłosza.” Tytuł 2–3 (1999): 152–73.
Kiślak, Elżbieta. Walka Jakuba z aniołem: Czesław Miłosz wobec romantyczności.
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Kłoczowski, Jan Andrzej. “Miłosz mistyczny.” In Poznawanie Miłosza 3: 1999–2010,
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Index
abject 56, 133–34, 136, 138 fluid self 114, 138

Abrams, M. H. 83 introduction 1–2, 4–6
accent 146–47 n.8, 152, 155–57, 168, 171, poetry and the body 144, 146, 173,
179–80 175–76, 177
‘Accuser, The’ (Miłosz) 42–9, 52, 63, 68, 70 totalitarian self 51, 62, 65, 67
Adorno, Theodor 23–24 see also embodiment; faith; innate;
Agamben, Giorgio 10, 10 n.9, 22 instinctive
Alexandrine 18, 44–48, 147–49, 154–56, 182 belly 120, 142
alienation Berdyaev, Nikolai 65, 65 n.69
beyond the body 34–37, 40–41 Bible, The/biblical 17, 141, 149, 160, 163,
the embodied self 74, 78, 82, 101–4 166–67
the fluid self 108–9, 113, 120–21, 132–33, 139 Biology 5, 22, 39, 58, 90, 156, 171, 177
poetry and body 145, 147 biopolitics 2, 22 see also politics
totalitarian self 45, 51–53, 57 Blake, William 9, 20, 24–26, 26 n.74, 43, 81–82,
amphibrach 44, 70, 78–79, 154–58, 162, 166, 85, 128, 168, 168 n.97, 173
170, 182–83 blood
‘An Appeal’ (Miłosz) 104 beating of heart 44, 80, 82, 97–99, 104, 136,
androgyny 138, 138 n.107 138, 168
Anima 109–10, 109–10 n.6, 124, 136 embodied self 90, 102–6
animals 1, 10, 21, 46–47, 57, 59–60, 64, 138 fluid self 130
‘Anybody’(Miłosz) 61 introduction 5–6
A Poem on Frozen Time (Miłosz) 78–79, 118 pulsation of 44, 58, 76–82, 86–88, 92, 96–100,
‘Apollonian rhythms’ (Nietzsche) 167 104, 136
‘A Portal’ (Miłosz) 37 Błoński, Jan 91, 91 n.68, 131
Aquinas, Thomas 100–101 bodily products
Arendt, Hannah 23–24 excrement/shit 132–33
Arnold, Matthew 15 menstruation 125, 127, 134–35, 145
‘Ars Poetica?’(Miłosz) 149 sperm 64, 128, 133, 136–37
arteries 58, 128 urine 128, 133, 137
Auschwitz 21, 97 body parts/functions
Aviram, Amittai F. 17, 151, 164 arteries 58, 128
A Year of the Hunter (Miłosz) 28, 49, 75 belly 120, 142
bowels 137
Balbus, Stanislaw 150–51, 151 n.27 brain 89, 94, 94 n.77, 120, 145
Balzac, Honoré de 25 breasts 109, 112, 122, 122 n.58, 125, 135, 142
Barańczak, Stanisław 151, 151 n.27 breathing 5–6, 27, 53, 58, 61, 96, 130, 132, 140,
Baudelaire, Charles 124–27 158–70, 177–79
‘Beautiful Stranger’ (Miłosz) 122, 124, 126 buttocks 58
Beauvoir, Simone de 71, 71 n.86 elbows 31
Beckett, Samuel 25 entrails 103, 138
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library eyes 10, 31, 46, 51, 101, 115, 131, 142, 176
(Yale University) 34, 34 n.101 face 29–30, 43, 52, 97
belief fingers 7, 46–47, 159–60
belief in the body 181–83 hair 7, 31, 47–49, 53, 59, 62, 108, 132,
beyond the body 9–10, 15, 26, 29, 32, 38 135–36
embodied self 74–75, 86, 88–89, 94–95, 106 hands 35, 46, 78, 101, 115, 117, 155, 176
198 
body parts/functions (cont.) classicism/classical 9, 18, 44–45, 48, 70, 148–56,

heart 53, 58, 70, 76, 92, 105, 128, 145, 165, 159, 164, 169–71, 182
168, 183 class (social)
intestines 58, 120, 128, 137 proletarian 57, 64, 78
kidneys 145 working 57, 78
knees 176 clothing
legs 1, 46, 53, 68, 98, 132–34 corsets 112, 114, 124–27, 132
lips 12, 16, 92, 142, 145, 178 dress 1, 7, 124–27, 138, 169, 175
liver 2, 58, 61, 125, 137, 145 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 96, 96 n.189
lungs 58, 125, 137 Communism
muscles 103, 138 Bolshevism 66, 90
neck 58, 134 Soviet 22–24, 65–66, 73, 88
spleen 58, 137 Stalinism 66
thighs 58, 120, 134 consciousness
toes 120 beyond the body 11, 28–32, 34, 34 n.104, 40
veins 78, 80, 80 n.22 conclusions 183
Borowski, Tadeusz 23, 23 n.58 embodied self 75–76, 79, 87–89, 91–92, 101–6
bowels 137 fluid self 108–10, 112, 114–18, 121, 124,
brain 89, 94, 94 n.77, 120, 145 130–32, 135–37, 141, 143
breasts 109, 112, 122, 122 n.58, 125, 135, 142 introduction 2, 4–6
breathing 5–6, 27, 53, 58, 61, 96, 130, 132, poetry and the body 144–45, 174–76
140, 158–70, 177–79 totalitarian self 41, 44–52, 55–57, 61–64,
Brothers Karamazov, The (Dostoevsky) 65, 67, 70–72
67 n.77 ‘Consciousness’ (Miłosz) 161–62
Brzozowski, Stanisław 22, 22 n.53, 179, Copernicus, Nicolaus 8, 23
179 n.37 Counter-Enlightenment 82, 85
buttocks 58
Bynum, Caroline Walker 4, 4 n.13, 84, Dante 100
84 nn.46–7 Darwin, Charles 2, 8, 10, 19–23
Darwinism 2, 20–23, 22 n.53, 33, 67
caesura 18, 48, 79, 148, 154–56, 160 Davie, Donald 4, 4 n.11
Camus, Albert 16, 16 n.28 death/dying
Captive Mind, The 22, 65–66, 66 n.74, 68, 71, beyond the body 10–14, 22, 28, 35, 37
71 n.86 fluid self 111, 135, 139
Catholicism poetry and the body 145, 162
Catholic 77, 77 n.17, 103, 106, 176, totalitrian self 43, 47, 53–56, 60–62, 67–69,
176 n.27 69 n.81, 80, 86, 105–6
Roman 38, 38 n.112, 49, 83–84 see also God, death of
Cavanagh, Clare 5, 70, 149, 149 n.18 ‘death of God’ (Nietzsche) 8–9, 11, 18,
Chardin, Pierre Teilhard de 90 178 n.136
Christianity Dembińska-Pawelec, Joanna 59, 59 n.40, 76,
beyond the body 8–10, 14–20, 20 n.39, 26, 76 nn.12–13, 103, 103 n.106, 129, 129 n.78,
33–34, 34 n.104, 38–40 138, 163, 163 n.73
and embodied self 72, 75–76, 80–85, 90, Demons (Dostoevsky) 65, 65 n.68
95, 102–5 Derrida, Jacques 85
and fluid self 139–41 Descartes, René 56, 56 n.33
introduction 2, 4 ‘Descent to the Earth’ (Miłosz) 57, 59–60, 63–65,
and poetry/body 174–75 74–80, 136
Christ, Jesus 79, 81, 182 Devil, the 33, 39, 67, 67 n.77, 72
church 33, 45, 179, 179 n.40 Dialectic of Enlightenment, The 23
Chwin, Stefan 21, 21 n.45 Dionysian 87, 167, 183
City of My Youth (Miłosz) 58 ‘Dionysian’ (Nietzsche) 85
City Without a Name (Miłosz) 104, 132 disembodiment 49, 72
Cixous, Hélène 111, 111 n.15 see also excarnation
 199
Divine, The 3, 15, 57, 87, 102, 138, 140 poetry and the body 173–77
see also God totalitarian self 56–57, 65, 67, 72
Dostoevsky, Fyodor 9, 25, 65, 65 n.69, 67, see also belief; innate; instinctive; incarnation
67 n.77, 71, 90 ‘Father Ch., Many Years Later’ (Miłosz) 87
‘Dover Beach’ (Arnold) 15 feminism 108, 110–11, 110 n.11, 111 n.15, 118
dualism Fik, Ignacy 35, 35 n.106, 63, 65
anti-body 83, 83 n.40 fingers 7, 46–47, 159–60
basic 34 Fiut, Aleksander 16, 59, 59 n.40, 92, 92 n.71, 138,
Cartesian 50 138 n.107, 158–59, 174
Christian 38 flesh
dangers of 39–40 hatred of 36, 41–49
empirical 56 universal/‘one flesh’ 41, 52, 56–62, 69, 71
Gnostic 36, 39 of the world 108–43
heretical 39 fluids
human existence 49 female 111, 132, 134, 136–38, 143, 149,
metaphysical 121 166–67, 170
property 50 formlessness 135–36, 167
radical 17, 34, 45, 67, 116–17 gluey 124, 126, 133, 137, 166
substance 50 masculine 64, 111, 132–33, 136–38, 143, 149,
word and flesh 17 169–70, 178, 181
menstrual 127, 134–35
ecstasy 59, 68, 87, 135 mucous 136–39, 166
Einstein, Albert 76, 90 pulp 133, 137
elbows 31 foot, metrical see metrical
‘Elegy to N. N.’ (Miłosz) 112 Foucault, Michel 85
Eliot, T. S. 9, 149–50, 150 n.23 Franaszek, Andrzej 55, 71, 71 n.88, 80,
embodied mind theory 98 80 n.22, 112
embodiment 6, 49, 72, 85, 99 France 36, 67
see also belief; faith; innate; instinctive; Franz Joseph I of Austria 48
incarnation free verse 148–50, 149 n.18, 150 n.23, 171
enlightenment 20, 20 n.39, 58, 147 Freud, Sigmund 8, 115–16, 116 n.29, 127
entrails 103, 138 From the Rising of the Sun (Miłosz) 26, 26 n.74,
Eros 68, 92–93 41–42, 49, 60, 91, 129, 133, 152–56, 170
eroticism 58, 68–69, 69 n.81, 93, 97–98, 111, 132, Frye, Northrop 27, 27 n.80
135, 138–43 Fuller, Robert C. 94–95
see also love
Eucharist 79, 81, 83, 103 Galileo, Galilei 8, 23
Europe gender
culture of 8, 19–20, 23–24, 65–66, 71 essentialism 109, 111, 111 n.15, 119, 141, 143
history of 2, 6, 10–11, 147, 175 and fluids 136–37
evil 24, 33, 39, 63, 98 gendering 136
evolution 10, 20–21, 44, 67, 89–90, 94, 96 introduction 6
excarnation 49, 71–73, 82, 85, 138 notion of the abject 133–34
excrement/shit 132–33 roles 122–23
existentialism 16, 34, 52 semiotic theory 130–31
eyes 10, 31, 46, 51, 101, 115, 131, 142, 176 and sex 141–43
Gnosticism 34, 39
face 29–30, 43, 52, 97 God
faith beyond the body 12–15, 18, 32–34, 39
beyond the body 9, 15, 18, 26, 28, 32, 37, 40 conclusion 181
conclusion 182–83 death of 8–11, 29, 105, 139
embodied self 75–76, 80, 82, 86, 88–90, 94–96, and embodied self 74–75, 77, 80, 82, 85,
99, 102, 105–6 87–90, 95–96, 100–106
introduction 2, 6 and fluid self 138–40, 143
200 
God (cont.) biologization of 80

introduction 4, 6 collective 53, 60, 69, 99, 179
and poetry/body 146, 178 and literature 25, 47–49
sun as symbol of 81 as mass 57, 59–64, 66–68, 71–73, 133, 172
totalitarian self 67, 72 and Miłosz 53
‘Gods of Greece, The’ (Schiller) 15 and transcendence 32
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 20 Hymn of the Pearl (Miłosz) 36–38
Gombrowicz, Witold 179, 179 n.40
Gorczyńska Renata 124, 135, 149, 149 n.18, 153, identity
160, 164 beyond the body 11–12, 21, 28–29, 36–41
Grosz, Elizabeth 118, 118 n.38, 134, 136, 142, embodied self 73, 76, 82–87, 102, 107
166–67 fluid self 113, 115–22, 134, 136, 138–43
Grudzinska Gross, Irena 119, 136, 136 n.99 introduction 2, 5–6
poetry and the body 153, 161, 166, 170,
hair 7, 31, 47–49, 53, 59, 62, 108, 132, 135–36 176, 179
hands 35, 46, 78, 101, 115, 117, 155, 176 totalitarian Self 49–50, 56–61, 68–69
Hass, Robert 113 illness see suffering
Haynes, Patrice 139, 139 n.10 immanence 41, 105–6, 138
Health 92, 96–100, 104, 123, 139 immortality 28–29, 43, 56, 62, 72, 84, 84 n.44,
Heaney, Seamus 155 105, 139
heart 53, 58, 70, 76, 92, 105, 128, 145, 165, incarnation 72, 75, 83, 102–6, 118, 122,
168, 183 122 n.58, 139
Heaven 13, 26, 28, 35, 86–7, 99–101, 105, 143 see also embodiment; faith; instinctive
Hebrew 42, 163, 166 ‘Incarnation’ (Miłosz) 35, 45, 78, 81
Heidegger, Martin 8, 85, 85 n.52 innate 89, 94–95, 102, 173–74
Heraclitus 112, 112 n.18 see also embodiment; faith; instinctive
Herbert, Zbigniew 17, 23 n.60, 145 insectivized humanity 59
Herling-Grudziński, Gustaw 35, 35 n.106, 66, insects 21, 24, 59, 65, 102
66 n.74 instinctive 35, 75, 88–96, 102, 105–6, 126, 131,
hierarchy 14, 39, 97, 111, 122, 124, 132, 158–59, 164, 171
136–37 see also belief; embodiment; faith
History of Polish Literature, The ‘In Szetejnie’ (Miłosz) 148
(Miłosz) 146–47, 146–47 n.7, 156–57 intestines 58, 120, 128, 137
Hitler, Adolf 22–23 Irigaray, Luce 112, 116, 136–39, 141–42,
Holocaust, the 141 n.115
deaths of young women 69 irony 26, 32, 39, 43, 54, 80, 105, 110, 147–48
extermination of Jews 22–23 Iwaszkiewicz, Jarosław 64, 111, 111 n.13
Warsaw Ghetto 2, 68
Hooks of a Corset, The (Miłosz) 31, 58 Jakobson, Roman 150, 150 n.24
Horkheimer, Max 23–24 James, William 90
human beings Jarzyńska, Karina 129, 129 n.79, 176, 176 n.25,
beyond the body 16, 19–23, 25–26, 28, 31–32, 177, 177 n.34
34, 38–40 Jeleński, Konstanty 60, 60 n.48, 110
embodied self 73–74, 77, 80, 89, 93–94, John Paul II, Pope 83, 83 n.40, 85
96–104 Johnson, Mark 92, 92 n.70, 98–100, 151
fluid self 127, 133, 137–38 Johnston, Adrian 51, 51 n.16
introduction 2, 4, 6 Jonas, Hans 34, 39
poetry and the body 165, 175–76, 179–80 ‘Journey’ (Miłosz) 28
totalitarian self 46–48, 57, 59–60, 63–65, Jung, Carl 109–10
68, 70
humanity kidneys 145
in 20th century history 18 Kierkegaard, Søren 16
as species 2, 20–21, 41–46, 59–71, 74, 99, knees 176
135–36 Kochanowski, Jan 13, 18
 201
Kristeva, Julia 130–31, 131 nn.85–6, 132–34, introduction 4–6

132 n.89 poetry/body 145
Kunat, Gabriela (Ela) 112 totalitarian self 50–53, 69, 72
‘Meaning’ (Miłosz) 12, 14–16, 18–19, 24, 27,
La Belle Époque (Miłosz) 112, 115, 117–18, 30, 34
121–22, 126 ‘Meditations on a Time of Conflagration’
Lacan, Jacques 118, 118 n.38, 132, 132 n.89 (Miłosz) 1, 7
Lakoff, George 98–100 menstruation 125, 127, 134–35, 145
Land of Ulro, The (Miłosz) 9, 11, 19–20, Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 5, 85, 116–17, 139
20 n.40, 25, 25 n.69, 82–83, 83 n.37, ‘Metaphysical Pause, The’ 50, 103
109–10, 124 metaphysics 4, 8, 67, 85, 136, 139
language metrical
form 16, 25–29, 45–47, 76, 81, 92–93, 98–99, amphibrach 44, 70, 78–79, 154–58, 162, 166,
123–34, 143–53, 157–83 170, 182–83
poetic 5–13, 17–20, 25–27, 69–70, 92, 125–30, iamb 148, 159, 165
143–53, 163, 170–77, 181 pyrrhic 155
Larkin, Philip 25, 25 n.69 spondee 154–55
Legends of Modernity (Miłosz) 25, 25 n.66 trochee 78–79, 154–58, 166, 170, 182
legs 1, 46, 53, 68, 98, 132–34 Miłosz, Janina 54
Lipking, Lawrence 42 Mickiewicz, Adam 18, 82, 156–57, 156 n.43, 174,
lips 12, 16, 92, 142, 145, 178 174 n.18
Lithuania 14, 58, 88, 95, 153, 182 Milbank, John 51, 51 n.16
liver 2, 58, 61, 125, 137, 145 Milosz, Oscar Vladislas de Lubicz 76
logos 111, 118–19, 122, 132 mind
love 78–79, 92–93, 106, 112, 135, 140 beyond the body 29, 31–32
see also eroticism embodied self 76, 82–83, 87–90, 97–98,
lungs 58, 125, 137 102, 104
fluid self 117, 123–24, 130–31, 136–37, 143
McClure, John A. 26, 26 n.78 poetry and body 146, 163
makeup totalitarian self 44, 46, 49–50, 53, 55
cosmetics 1, 125 mirror 31, 41, 57–61, 108–18, 122, 132, 134–37,
lipstick 2 142, 178
maquillage 125–26 Mirror of Consciousness 49–53
maladjustment 35, 41, 63, 104 modernity 10, 18, 85, 100, 106, 172
see also alienation Monod, Jean-Claude 10, 10 n.9
Mandarins, The (Beauvoir) 71, 71 n.86 morality
Manichaeism 33–34, 39, 41, 45, 65, 106, beyond the body 9–11, 21
106 n.112, 127 embodied self 75, 93, 106
see also neo-Manichaeism introduction 1
Markowski, Michał Paweł 63 meaning in the body 96–102
Marxism 21–22, 65 ‘Morning’(Miłosz) 77–81, 78 n.19, 87, 91,
Marx, Karl 8 103, 118
masculinity 58, 85, 107, 110–11, 118–24, 130–32, Mountains of Parnassus, The (Miłosz) 10, 71,
136–9, 143, 150, 153 71 n.87, 175–76
materialism muscles 103, 138
emergent 50–51, 89 n.60 music 157–58, 160–61, 163, 166
non-reductive 49, 51, 51 n.16, 90, 96, 112 ‘My Tears Flowed’ (Mickiewicz) 156
reductive 2–3, 9–11, 18–23, 27–29, 38–42, 57, Myth of Sisyphus, The (Camus) 16
67, 86–89, 174, 181
transcendent see transcendent materialism Nałkowska, Zofia 24
matter Nancy, Jean-Luc 56, 56 n.33
beyond the body 16, 19, 21, 29, 33–36, 39 Nasiłowska, Anna 110, 110 n.11
embodied self 77, 79, 81, 102 naturalism 14, 22, 22 n.53, 89, 89 n.60
fluid self 133, 136–38, 143 Nausea (Sartre) 52, 71, 71 n.86
202 
Nazi Germany politics 5, 8, 10–11, 19–25, 39–42, 47, 66–67,

death camps 22 71–73, 131
Nazism 10, 21, 24 polyphony 12, 12 n.18, 26, 146–47, 170,
neck 58, 134 172–73
neo-Manichaeism 17, 33, 65, 73 Pound, Ezra 100–101, 149, 160, 163
see also Manichaeism power
neo-Romanticism 127 beyond the body 11, 22–31, 33, 36, 40
‘New Faith’ (Miłosz) 22, 65 conclusion 183
Newton, Isaac 19–21, 20 n.39, 23 embodied self 86, 93, 108
Nicholas II, of Russia 48 fluid self 120–21, 127–30, 139, 142
Nietzsche, Friedrich 8–11, 85, 85 n.52, 139, 165, poetry/body 145, 150–51, 150 n.24, 153, 164,
167, 178, 178 n.36 171, 173
Nihilism 34, 43 totalitarian self 47–48, 57–59, 64, 66–67,
Nobel Prize 149 70–71
Nussbaum, Martha 3, 3 n.9 ‘Presence’(Miłosz) 95–96, 102, 105
prose
old age 43, 53–55, 106, 108 beyond the body 11–17, 33
‘On the Beach’ (Miłosz) 135 totalitarian self 42
‘Orpheus and Eurydice’ (Miłosz) 97 embodied self 75
Other, the 56–62, 141 fluid self 139–40
poetry and body 148–9, 158, 167, 172
Painter of Modern Life, The (Baudelaire) conclusion 182
124–25 Provinces (Miłosz) 12, 135, 135 n.98, 155
Pan Tadeusz (Mickiewicz) 111, 111 n.12 Przerwa-Tetmajer, Kazimierz 157
Pantheism 14, 95, 95 n.84 purity 40, 42–46, 64, 67, 72, 74, 98, 176
philosophy
beyond the body 11, 16, 22, 30 realism 115, 115 n.26, 149
embodied self 85, 93 reason
fluid self 111, 111 n.16, 117, 121, 121 n.54, beyond the body 23, 32
122, 124, 127, 130, 139 embodied self 74, 82, 85, 93–94
introduction 5–6 fluid self 118, 122, 124, 132–33, 136, 140
totalitarian self 51 poetry/body 151
piety 72, 96, 99, 140 totalitarian self 45, 67, 72
see also faith reductionism 6, 19, 24, 183
poetic line 15, 125, 160, 162–63 religion
poetic speakers beyond the body 9, 11, 22, 25–26, 38–39
beyond the body 35, 37 embodied self 89–90, 94–96, 100–101
embodied self 91, 93, 95, 104 fluid self 127, 131, 133, 139
fluid self 109, 114–15, 118, 120, 130–32, introduction 4, 5, 7
137, 140 poetry/body 145–46, 173–76, 179
poetry and body 159, 170–72, 175, 177 totalitarian self 65–66
totalitarian self 47, 51, 56, 65, 70 resurrection 38, 72, 84, 84 n.44, 86
poetry rhyme 78–79, 147
lyric speaker 38, 86, 153 rhythm
poetic speakers see poetic speakers body 104–5, 130, 159, 169–75, 183
poetic word 6, 11, 13, 16–18, 27, 30, 34, 39, metrical 18, 129, 129 n.78, 147, 152–58, 163,
145, 174, 178 171, 179, 181, 183
prose see prose sense 158–65, 168, 170–1, 183
Poland Ricoeur, Paul 27
language 18–19, 44, 102, 111, 111 n.15, ritual 38, 48–49, 70, 74, 74 n.8, 79, 83, 134, 137,
114–16, 153–57, 167–71 146, 163
poetry 118–19, 157–58 Road-side Dog (Miłosz) 62, 173–74, 174 n.118
traumatic history of 172 Romanticism 4, 20, 82, 96, 174, 174 n.118
Young 127, 157–58, 166–68 Russia 22, 25, 48, 65, 157
 203
Słowacki, Juliusz 157 suffering 21, 33, 38, 54–56, 71, 74, 92–93, 106,
Sartre, Jean-Paul 52–53, 71, 71 n.86 121, 148
Satan see Devil, the surplus of meaning 174, 178, 183
Schiller, Friedrich 15 surplus of meaning (Ricoeur) 27–28
Schopenhauer, Arthur 30, 52, 55, 55 n.30, 64, 93, Swedenborg, Emanuel 26, 26 n.74, 81, 174
102, 111–12, 111 n.16, 127 Swift, Jonathan 147
Second Space 28, 40 Świrszczyńska, Anna 118–22, 118 n.39,
secularization 4–5, 8–11, 10 n.9, 20, 26–29, 121 n.54, 132
32–42, 49–51, 62, 72, 82–8, 105 syllabic system 146, 146–7 n.8, 153–9, 165, 179
Seizure of Power, The (Miłosz) 59 syllabotonic system 146, 146–47 n.8, 153,
semiotic, the 128–38, 143, 150–54, 158, 164–65, 155–56, 157, 165, 167–68, 179–80
168–70 Symbolic, the xx
senses symbolism 42, 76–77, 76 n.13, 81, 102, 104,
sensual experience 2, 6, 27, 30, 72, 114, 141, 135, 141
144, 181 syntax 158–65, 168, 170
sight 54–55, 114, 114 n.23, 124, 124 n.62
touch 61, 96, 98, 109, 112–15, 115 n.28, Taylor, Charles 4, 4 n.10, 28, 72, 82, 84–85,
121–22, 131, 143 84 n.43, 106, 175
touching and looking 51, 78, 131 ‘The Accuser’ 42–49
Separate Notebooks, The (Miłosz) 52, 92–93, 112, theology 26, 26 n.75, 83, 105, 130, 145, 173
123, 125, 128, 134–35, 169 Theology of the Body (John Paul II) 83, 83 n.40
sex 68–69, 83–84, 83 n.40, 92–93, 92 n.71, 111, thighs 58, 120, 134
111 nn.15,17, 140–45 Thigpen, Carol 55, 97
‘Siegfried and Erika’ (Miłosz) 67 ‘Three Talks on Civilization’ (Miłosz) 133
Sierakowski, Sławomir 74 Three Winters (Miłosz) 35, 59, 59 n.44, 95, 110
silence 16, 123–24, 134, 169 Tischner, Łukasz 84, 84 n.43
‘Six Lectures in Verse’ 70, 100 toes 120
Skamander (poetry movement) 157–58, 167 Tolstoy, Leo 25
Snyder, Timothy 10, 10 n.23 ‘To Mrs. Professor in Defence of My Cat’s
‘Song, The’ (Miłosz) 112, 135 Honour’ (Miłosz) 101, 104
soul totalitarianism 6, 21, 23, 41–72
beyond the body 17, 28–29, 36–38, 40 transcendence
conclusions 183 crossing 5, 75, 80, 88, 138–39, 143, 146, 183
embodied self 83, 85–88, 100, 103–4 horizontal 3–5, 38, 75, 78, 80–83, 86–88, 92,
fluid self 117–20, 120, 125, 136 92 n.70, 104–9, 136–46
totalitarian self 43, 44, 49–50, 57, 62, 65, 67 reinventing 8–40
sperm 64, 128, 133, 136–37 vertical 3–7, 11, 28–41, 71, 87, 99–106,
spirituality 94, 101, 105–7, 146 136–38, 143, 178
spleen 58, 137 transcendent materialism
Stalin, Joseph 65–66 conclusion 181–83
Stendhal 25 embodied self 45–53, 56, 62, 64, 72, 74–76,
Storge (Oscar Milosz) 81 76 n.13, 104–5
Strauss, Leo 39 fluid self 115, 118, 131, 136, 139, 141,
stress 44, 143, 146, 152–8 143–44
subjectivity introduction 4, 6
dissolution of 135, 137, 143 poetry and body 146, 174, 178–80
female 42–43, 109, 116, 118, 122–28 totalitarian self 11–13, 21, 26–31, 34–35,
intersubjectivity 138–43 40–41, 45–53, 56, 62, 64, 72
masculine 85, 118, 130, 136, 138, 143, 170 ‘Translating Anna Swir’ (Miłosz) 119
and objectivity 115–16, 115 n.27, 171 Treatise on Morals (Miłosz) 147
strong 130–36, 141–44, 170 Treatise on Poetry (Miłosz) 21, 69, 74,
weak 109, 115–19, 130–31, 135, 143–44, 156, 157–58, 174
158, 170–71, 176 Treatise on Theology 14, 26, 111, 174 n.117,
sublimation 87, 93, 126 176–77
204 
trochee 78–79, 154–58, 166–67, 182 ‘What Do You Want from Us Lord for
Tuwim, Julian 110, 110 n.8, 167 Your Bounteous Gifts?’
(Kochanowski) 13
Unattainable Earth (Miłosz) 37, 64–65, 87, 96, Whitman, Walt 30–31, 30 n.90, 46, 135,
102, 128, 139–42, 181–82 135 n.98, 149, 149 n.18, 160, 162
United States 23, 67 Williams, William Carlos 159–60
‘Unveiling, The’ (Miłosz) 153 ‘With Trumpets and Zithers’ (Miłosz) 60, 76,
urine 128, 133, 137 161, 163
Witness of Poetry, The (Miłosz) 22
veins 78, 80, 80 n.22 women 6, 60, 68–70, 108–16, 111 nn.13–17,
verse 70, 100, 110, 147–53, 156–8, 165–8 122–26, 132–39, 141, 145
verset 149, 153–54, 160–61, 163–65, 167, wonder 21, 75, 91–6, 103–6, 119, 121
170–71, 174–75 World, The (Miłosz) 13–14
Visions from San Francisco Bay (Miłosz) 11, 57, Wyka, Kazimierz 63
60, 65, 65 n.67, 68, 73, 99–100, 169
vitalism/vitalistic 68–9, 78, 87, 90, 109 Yeats, William Butler 162–63, 172
Voices of Poor People (Miłosz) 59 Young Poland (artistic and cultural movement)
127, 157–58, 166–68
Węgrzyniakowa, Anna 121 ‘You Whose Name’(Miłosz) 133
Warsaw 2, 7, 68, 70, 88, 147, 183
‘wciałowzięty’ 83, 83 n.37, 87, 91, 183 Zach, Joanna 20, 20 n.39
Weil, Simone 81, 81 n.31, 146, 146 n.7 Zaleski, Marek 5, 5 n.16

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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 12/11/2021, SPi

Czesław Miłosz’s Faith in the Flesh

Czesław Miłosz’s Faith in

Introduction: The Mystery of the Body 1

Works Cited 185

In 1940, a twenty-nine-year-old Czesław Miłosz wrote a short essay on his fresh

2  ’    

³ Czesław Miłosz, “Notatnik amerykański,” in W cieniu totalitaryzmów: Publicystyka rozproszona z

:      3

4  ’    

horizontal understandings of transcendence are often—though not exclusively—

:      5

6  ’    

:      7

¹⁷ Miłosz, “Rozmyślania o czasie pożogi,” 673.

1. Miłosz and the Death of God

  :   9

10  ’    

⁹ Jean-Claude Monod distinguishes two main streams of secularization theory, describing an

  :   11

2. “Meaning”: The Mission of Poetry

12  ’    

—When I die, I will see the lining of the world.

—Even if that is so, there will remain

[—Kiedy umrę, zobaczę podszewkę świata. / Drugą stronę, za ptakiem,

  :   13

14  ’    

  :   15

disagreement to agreement, from confusion to understanding: “What never added

16  ’    

²⁷ Mateusz Antoniuk, “Przybranie formy z dawnacwyglądanej (dosięganej / obiecanej /

  :   17

of Christian dogma, the poem establishes a fundamental dualism between word

Liberated from the phantoms of psychosis,

[Oswobodzona z majaków psychozy, / z krzyku ginących tkanek, / z

18  ’    

3. The Roots of Mass Violence in the Twentieth Century

At the center of Miłosz’s literary project is a response to what I have called

  :   19

of analogous terms: “crass materialism”;³² “the reductionism and crude material-

That only matter remains to be examined

[Że pozostaje tylko materia do badania / i tylko jej ciekawa tajemnica /

20  ’    

inﬂuential in his own time—but he also presents evolutionary theory as a step

  :   21

processes of matter’s transformations. This biological perspective also offers the

22  ’    

  :   23

24  ’    

4. The Task of Literature: Reaching for Transcendence

In the short poem “Meaning,” Miłosz presents an image of poetry’s stubborn

  :   25

conﬁrmation of dehumanized images of humanity. As he succinctly puts it: “Man

26  ’    

  :   27

constantly seeks new, often unorthodox paths to transcendence. As I will show in

28  ’    

5. Soaring over the Earth: The Self as Consciousness