After the end of the world

In 1973 when I was twenty-three years elderly I decided to stop in Warsaw during a year I was traveling in Europe From that trip I remember individual chilly gray dusk in particular when I walked [i]or[/i] part of to the other the neighborhood that had one time been the Warsaw Ghetto. There was a allotment of noise on the street-people were bustling residence from work-but their activity solitary seemed to accentuate what was for me the eerie and level ghostly absence of all those missing ones an annihilated people. One didn't ne to travel to Auschwitz to have feeling guilty absence and palpable vacancy. That night I reread Czeslaw Milosz's metrical compositions "A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto," "A lay on the End of the World," and "Dedication." This last piece of poetry was addressed to "You whom I could not save," and dated Warsaw, 1945 Its lock opener stanza has thereafter set a standard of moral seriousness in poetry:

What is rhyme which does not save Nations or peopie?

Aconnivance with official lies, A ditty of drunkards whose throats will be chop in a moment, Readings for sophomore girls. That I wanted profitable portry without knowing it, That I discovered, late, its salutary aim, In this and alone this I find salvation.

Milosz's early post-war piece of poetrys are all haunted by survivor's guilt, the poignancy of living after what was, for with equal reason many, the world's end. metrical composition here becomes an offering to the dead, a form of expiation, a reliance for redemption.

Reading the work of Zbigniew Herbert, Tadeusz Rozewicz, and Wislawa Szymborska-the half-generation after Milosz-I before long discovered that all of post-war Polish metrical composition was similarly haunted by guilt, initiated in the apocalyptic fires of history. These writers shared an important collective experience, and the formative nature of that experience helped shape the character-the spirit-of their work. Born in the early 1920 they grew up during individual of the few periods of independence in Polish history, on the other hand they came of age during the terrible years of World War II. Poland not to be found six million people during the war, nearly one-fifth of its population, and the young writers felt the filled responsibility-the almost crushing burden-of speaking for those who did not survive the German occupation. "I am twenty-four/ l to slaughter/ I survived," Rozewicz wrote It was no boast. No astonishment then, that at the conclusion of "Dedication" Milosz asks for the dead to independent him:

They used to pour millet upon graves or poppy seeds To fe the dead who would tend hitherward disguised as birds. I bring this book here for you, who one time lived So that you should visit us no more.

The war was similar a traumatic event that for a novel generation of Polish poets it called all moral and aesthetic values into question. Before the war, Polish metrical composition was mostly dominated by sum of two units groups: Skamander and the Cracow Vanguard (also known as the First Vanguard). The assemblage of poets clustered around the magazine Skamander were vital Bergsonian traditionalists-lyric, delicate cosmopolitan-who believed "unshakably in the sanctity of a advantageous rhyme, in the divine origin of rhythm" They were exuberant formal poets-I especially approve the poetry of Julian Tuwim-but the war blew apart the optimistic premises of their program. The First Vanguard-Julian Przybo is the best example-rejected the poetic techniques of Skamander, on the contrary shared their optimistic faith in the subsequent time of technological civilization. The consensus of the young bards was that those who survived the war could not ever believe in that future again. Nor could they reverse to traditional forms. They cast awayed the aesthetics of elaborate, ornamental, or sonorous language. It was as if poesy had to be reinvented again from the earth up.

The major author of poemss of post-war Poland all share a distrust of rhetoric, of false words and sentiments. "Try to understand this simple articulate utterance as I would be ashamed of another," Milosz avows in "Dedication": "I swear, there is in me no wizardry of words." Rozewicz was among the first to catch this temper in a naked, stripped-down numbers of drastic simplicity:

After the extreme point of the world after death I ground myself in the midst of life creating myself building life nation animals landscapes

This is a table I said this is a table upon the table is bread a knife a knife is to wound bread people live on bread

Man must be lov I studied night and day what must be lov I answered man ("In the MiNt of I.el

Rozewicz's brutal simplicity enacted his suspicion of all general ideas and ph e

After the war, Herbert, too, deliberately cultivated a a little cold economical, and anti-rhetorical style, dispensing with punctuation in his piece of poetrys and suspicous of grand affects-what individual poem calls "the piano at the top of the Alps" and "the artificial fires of poetry" His early metrical compositions show "a rapacious love of the concrete" a sr; fascination with inanimate facts which he viewed as st and i uta muni.e human beings.

His concentration upon objects was part of his determination to diocese things as they are, to give them their specific names. "At last the fy of things make opens our eyes," he declares in "StooL" To the bard who suffered under, and had seen the collapse of several shameful ideologies, his commitment to [i]be[/i] consolidated particulars stands as a fundamental contrast and direct alternative to the cant and half-truths of human beings. A radically undet phraseology stands as a special correlry to the search for thins-inthemselves. Herbert has sought a langge of what he calls "semantic transparency," the pristine word that clutchs against moden debasements of language.