Objectivity as Technique in Milosz's Poetry

Milosz’s analogy for reality as writers must see it is of the earth “as seen…from the back of the Pegasus” (Nobel Lecture, 1980). The rider of the Pegasus will see the earth in its totality, even as he is aware of the way individual objects relate to one another to constitute a whole. The rider’s perspective illustrates Milosz’s idea of artistic objectivity, which requires subjective experiences to be taken out of their immediate contexts and positioned in a broader framework of reality. Milosz feels that writers, like the rider of the Pegasus, must be capable of a “double vision”: they should be able to look at the earth “from above but at the same time sees it in every detail” (Nobel Lecture, 1980). The perspectives acquired from Milosz’s two ways of looking are similar to two views of a house – as seen from the inside and as seen from the outside. The view of a house from the inside will encourage a sense of attachment. Objects inside the room are likely to be personified: a nuance of personality is usually evident in the furniture that is arranged in the manner of the owner’s preference, and in the assortment of photographs and memorabilia. Such a view is emotive and rich in details, but limited, in that it is contained within the walls of the house. To look at the house from the outside is a different thing altogether: this view does not allow the kind of attachment that is possible with the inside view, but it does offer possibilities for the observer to draw contrasts and parallels (with other houses as seen from the outside), which consequently encourages insights. Milosz’s idea of a ‘double vision’ – the poet’s vision that must be a compromise between subjectivity and objectivity – combines these two perspectives and is reflected in his poetry.

Milosz’s dilemma lies in the difficulty of reconciling the contradiction “between art and solidarity with one’s fellow men” --- between the need for artistic objectivity and what Milosz feels is a moral responsibility to his immediate surroundings. Milosz’s sense of conflict is understandable given his experience of living through the Second World War and, later, through the Cold War as an exile. Occasions of wars necessarily drag individual subjects into a play of allegiances. Milosz himself remarks that in such occasions “man (become) a plaything of powerful collective movements expert in reversing values, so that from one day to the next black would become white, a crime a praiseworthy deed, and an obvious lie an obligatory dogma” (The Witness of Poetry, 90). Individuals are reduced to collectives, the membership to which immediately becomes critical – especially when they are made up of marginal groups – because such collectives work to empower individuals. For the marginalized the collective becomes, in efforts to challenge an oppressive authority, a medium for individual members to assert their subjectivity on the basis of a commonality of purpose.

On the subject of the Polish resistance movements in the Nazi-occupied Poland, Borodziej writes, “(m)any advantages could result from the obviously illegal and dangerous membership in a resistance organization under the especially threatening conditions of life under the Occupation: emotional support and security, potential support from the personal environment, or material assistance in the broadest sense of the word” (17). While collectives like Polish resistance organizations offer individuals emotional support and a medium for resistance, it goes without saying that individuals themselves are required to be committed to the cause of the collective. It is necessary for individuals to adopt certain lines of thoughts in order to work to promote the interests of the collective. This obligation to commit to the interest of the collective arguably contradicts, in the case of the poet, the need to be detached from immediate circumstances. To do so is likely to bring about accusations of a breach of faith -- to produce feelings of guilt in the subject who seeks (artistic) objectivity. Milosz speaks of this conflict in his Nobel address: “to embrace reality in such a manner that it is preserved in all its old tangle of good and evil, of despair and hope, is possible only thanks to a distance, only by soaring above it - but this in turn seems then a moral treason”.

In a conversation with Ayyappa Paniker, Milosz admits that while he recognizes that socially or politically engaged poetry is written for “noble causes”, such poetry “is in considerable danger of drying up…(because it turns) towards generalizations” (25). He continues to comment on the short life of political poetry that can become irrelevant as circumstances change. The value of poetry produced as a direct response to particular political situations is conditional to the immediate context of its production, and as such is not likely to be relevant in other contexts. If, however, the writing subject “(soars) above” his or her immediate circumstances, subjective experience can be extricated from its direct context and rewritten with a measure of detachment so that it can be meaningful in other circumstances.

It can be argued, then, that Milosz means by ‘double vision’ the ability to repossess subjective experience by viewing it with an objective perspective. This concept is similar to Schorer’s idea in his 1948 essay, “Technique as Discovery”, where he discusses the concepts he calls ‘content’ and ‘achieved content’. Schorer understands ‘content’ to mean experiences that writers draw on to create their works, whereas ‘achieved content’ is the insight that literature extracts from the subject matter of experience through the process of writing. For Schorer, literary techniques employed to create the written work are a tool that mediates the writers’ subjective engagement with their experience. To make use of this ‘tool’ is similar to riding on the back of Milosz’s Pegasus: it affords writers the sense of detachment needed to enable them to dig out insights from experience through the process of writing. The writer must be able to dislodge experiences from their immediate milieu and, through the process of writing, make them over into symbols that can be meaningful in other contexts.

“Ars Poetica?” reflects Milosz’s idea of detachment. The poem has this to say about the function of poetry: “(t)he 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 an out at will” (PoemHunter, 25 Feb. 2009). The poem admits that there is a multitude of aspects to any individual. People are susceptible to circumstances, to changes, demands and atmospehre of their surroundings, so that it is difficult to sum a person up in terms of set ways of thinking and behaving. A similar idea is echoed in “Magpiety”, which demonstrates the difficulty of pinning down a quality to essentially define a magpie:

What is magpiety? I shall never achieve
A magpie heart, a hairy nostril over the beak, a flight
That always renews just when coming down,
And so I shall never comprehend magpiety. (PoemHunter, 25 Feb. 2009)

The poem goes on to argue that if it is difficult to sum up a magpie that exists without consciousness, it is all the more difficult to try to define human beings: “(if)…magpiety does not exist/ my nature does not exist either”. The question that the speaker asks at the end of the poem then becomes ironic: “Who would have guessed that, centuries later, I would invent the question of universals?”

“(T)he question of universals” refers to society’s tendency to reduce individuals – who exist as complex entities, much as a magpie does – into rationalized collectives. When regarded primarily as constituents of a collective, individuals are gradually denied their autonomy. The ideologies of collective groups become perspectives that limit people’s capacity for thoughts and actions. To return to the analogy of the house provided in the beginning of this essay: to define the self in terms of ideologies limits thinking, in that it is similar to being provided only with the interior view of a house.

“Ars Poetica?” and “Magpiety” assert that, apart from human beings’ tendency to categorize and self-define, there really are no parameters to assess people and their potential to truly know what they are. The corollary to this thinking is that to obtain a close-to-comprehensive view of people and reality, individual subjectivity must be moderated by a detached outlook. This seems to be the rationale of Milosz’s poetry.

“Not Mine” carries clear overtones of life under an authoritarian regime where access to media (the “screens and microphones”), and consequently dissemination of information, is in total control of the governing authority. The speaker, recognising the pointlessness of active confrontation, decides to resort to silence. His tone is one of amusement as he declares: “I smile and keep quiet…(knowing that) (t)hey won’t get me now”. The speaker is silent not because he is oblivious to the reality of his circumstances, but because he recognizes silence as a survival strategy. The poem suggests that even as those in the position of authority are taken in by the speaker’s seeming complience, the speaker is placated, almost triumphant, in the knwledge that his silence is not in fact a gesture of deference or compliance. The speaker acquires his ironical standpoint at this point where he takes himself out of the immediacy of his circumstances and seeks refuge in a perspective that in some way enables him to transcend his circumstances. Like in “The Song on the End of the World”, the speaker of “Not Mine” responds to reality not as one mixed up in reality’s frays, but as one who revisits experience with detachment, such that his reponses are more objective than subjective, and are more analytical than emotional. The detachment that mediates the observer’s perspective is not “an inability to feel the terrible seriousness of life, (but is rather) a refusal to be overwhelmed by it” ( Muecke 36).

In “The Song on the End of the World”, there is juxtaposition between two apparently contrasting situations.

On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A Fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be. (PoemHunter, 25 Feb. 2009)

The poem contrasts, through images, the idea of annihilation with that of continuity. Annihilation, the poem suggests, can occur at the heart of continuity. It is almost as if continuity itself contains the possibility of annihilation: in the lifecycles of the bee, the fisherman, the porpoises, the sparrows, and the snake, there is contained the possibility – certainty, even – of death. The subject who apprehends the world can of course be either aware or unaware of the idea that the apparent continuity of life contains the eventuality of death, of annihilation. The speaker in the poem does not respond subjectively or emotionally to this knowledge, but assumes a standoffish stance instead – as if the speaker is himself exempt from the eventual annihilation.

The speaker is in this case privileged with an insight into his situation and considers those who are unaware of that insight as victims, almost, of circumstances. This insight allows him to adopt an ironical position, where he is “(aware) of the victim’s unawareness…(and therefore can) see the victim as bound or trapped where he feels free; committed where he feels disengaged; swayed by emotions, harassed, or miserable, where he is dispassionate, serene, or even moved to laughter; trustful, credulous, or naïve, where he is critical, sceptical, or content to suspend judgement” (Muecke 37). Muecke writes further that “the archetypal victim of irony is man, seen, per contra, as trapped and submerged in time and matter, blind, contingent, limited, and unfree – and confidently unaware that this is his predicament” (38). In order to be an ironic observer, therefore, the speaker must rise himself above circumstances instead of being implicated by it.

Milosz’s poems do not exhibit subjective emotional responses to reality, neither are they blatant criticism of life circumstances. The technique of distancing allows Milosz to comment on reality from a perspective that is not restricted by ideologies, enabling him to have a more rounded view of reality. The position of the poet is one that is expounded in “Love”, where the self must “learn to look at (itself) the way (it) looks at distant things”. In Milosz’s case, the poet is no longer only a consciousness that defines, subjectifies, or categorizes, but one that, while experiencing reality subjectively, is capable of a more comprehensive and analytical view of it because he can detach himself from his immediate surroundings.
Even in the process of acquiring detachment, however, no subject can completely disregard reality as it is subjectively experienced. For this reason, Milosz’s poems can be thought of to exist as artifacts in which there is synthesis between the poet’s detached view of reality and his subjective responses towards it.

Works Cited

Borodziej, Wlodzimierz. “Occupation and Resistance”. The Warsaw Uprising of 1944. Trans. Barbara Harshav. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006. 14-24.

Muecke, D.C. Irony. Ed. John D. Jump. New York: Methuen, 1982.

Milosz, Czeslaw. “Ars Poetica?”. PoemHunter. 25 Feb. 2009.

Milosz, Czeslaw. “Love”. PoemHunter. 25 Feb. 2009.

Milosz, Czeslaw. “Magpiety”. PoemHunter. 25 Feb. 2009.

Milosz, Czeslaw. “Not Mine”. PoemHunter. 25 Feb. 2009.

Milosz, Czeslaw. Nobel Lecture, 8 December 1980. The Nobel Prize Website. Ed. Frangsymr, Tore and Sture Allen. 1993. The Nobel Foundation.25 Feb. 2009. .

Milosz, Czeslaw. “Ruins and Poetry”. The Witness of Poetry. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1984. 77-98.

Milosz, Czeslaw. “Song on the End of the World”. PoemHunter. 25 Feb. 2009.

Panikker, Ayyappa K. “A Dialogue with Czeslaw Milosz”. 25 Years of Conversations with Czeslaw Milosz. Ed. Cynthia L. Haven. Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 2006. 24-35. Google Books. 1 Mar. 2009. .

Schorer, Mark. “Technique as Discovery”. 20th Century Literary Criticism. Ed. David Lodge.
London: Longman, 1972. 387-400.