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Czeslaw Milosz, poet, literary critic, essayist and Nobel Laureate, is a familiar person to the Anglophone literary community. But American and British critics in the main are not very competent in the intimate features of Polish literary culture and have no access to the Polish language. This volume presents some of the most penetrating commentaries on Milosz's oeuvre by Polish critics. They illuminate both intrinsic poetic matters, such as the verse structure or the genre tradition, and the specific historic background of his poems, such as life under Nazi occupation. This comprehensive outline will be indispensable to anyone wanting to understand the real meaning of the often enigmatic writer and his, as Helen Vendler called it, Shakespearean breadth.
List of contents
Contents: Teresa Walas: Milosz as a Figure of Problematic Identity - Michal Pawel Markowski: The Dilemmas of Self-Presentation - Aleksander Fiut: agary and Skamander - Czeslaw Milosz's Correspondence with Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz - Maria Janion: Kronski - Milosz: An Episode from the History of Ideas and Poetry - Stefan Chwin: The Time of the Bible and the Time of Mr. Cogitp. or the Essence of the Dispute between Herbert and Milosz - Leszek Kolakowski: Ninety Years in Search of a Homeland - Stanislaw Balbus: «The First Movement Is a Singing»: A Preliminary Study of Milosz's Verse - Marian Stala: «Ecstasy at Sunrise»: Among Milosz's Major Themes - Stanislaw Balbus: «Conversation at Easter 1620» - An Intertextual Interpretation - Ryszard Nycz: «Thrown in the Geographically Shaky Position»: Czeslaw Milosz's Experience of Space and Place - Elzbieta Rybicka: Homo Geopgraphicus: The Topographies and Auto-Bio-Geographies of Czeslaw Milosz (A Reconnaissance) - Elzbieta Kislak: Destined Affinities and Eclectic Love - Jacek Lukasiewicz: Poet on Poets - Marek Zaleski: Songs of Innocence and Experience - Lukasz Tischner: Towards Fullness - Stanislaw Baranczak: Dawns - Michal Glowinski: «Outskirts» - Aleksandra Okopoien- Slawinska: «Outskirts» as another «Song on the End of the World»: A Contribution to the Definition of Czeslaw Milosz's Poetic Art - Jerzy Kwiatkowski: Milosz at the Brink of the Occupation: «The River» - Jan Blonski: The Intellect's Return: A Treatise on Poetry (1957) - Adam Dziadek: Poetry as Interpretation of Art: Czeslaw Milosz's Poems about Pictures - Danuta Opacka-Walasek: A Pastiche Against Dying: «In Honour of Reverend Baka» by Czeslaw Milosz - Piotr Sliwinski: A Sinking Life - Ewa Bienkowska: Milosz and the Book of Psalms.
About the author
Zdzislaw Lapinski is a professor in the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Author of books and articles on Norwid and Polish Modernist poets as well as on socialist realism, he recently prepared a volume devoted to poetry by Czeslaw Milosz.
