Author: Czeslaw Milosz Publisher: Macmillan ISBN: 0374527954 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 322
Book Description
"Man has been given to understand/ that he lives only by the grace of those in power./ Let him therefore busy himself sipping coffee, catching butterflies." So muses Polish migr poet and Nobel laureate Milosz in one of his earlier poems, and such might be the principle guiding this most recent collection of his writings. Bits and pieces of memoir are ranged in alphabetical order, making up a curious glossary of a life lived in Poland and the United States and a literary career spanning six decades. Reminiscences of Poland before, during and after WWII occupy much of the volume. Even when Milosz is chronicling his life since he settled permanently in California in 1960, after a period of exile in France, his memories center on friends made in childhood at school in Wilno. Brief character sketches are intermixed with reflections on subjects like Milosz's sense of obligation to the Polish language and Polish literary tradition, his admiration of poets like Walt Whitman and Joseph Brodsky, and, more generally, on themes like curiosity, fame and terror. It is these sections that will engage American readers, who elsewhere are likely to flounder in a sea of names. The fragments of autobiography collected in this edition represent only a selection from the texts of two Polish ABCs, and readers will be grateful for the culling. It is difficult to escape the sense thatDlike butterflies in a dusty caseDthe scraps of memory affixed here have lost their living glitter."--Summary from Publisher
Author: Czesław Miłosz Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux ISBN: 9780374199777 Category : Literary Collections Languages : en Pages : 313
Book Description
Presents a collection of musings on a variety of subjects, listed alphabetically, including literary characters, historical figures, and real and imagined places.
Author: Czeslaw Milosz Publisher: ISBN: 9780756793913 Category : Literary Collections Languages : en Pages : 313
Book Description
The ABC book is a Polish genre, a literary form loosely composed of short, alphabetically arranged entries. Here, Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz's telling eye for detail & sharp judgments create unforgettable portraits as he combines sketches of characters from his earlier prose works & his poems with references to real historical figures. Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Edward Hopper, & Arthur Koestler are among those who come under his scrutiny, along with the poets Charles Baudelaire & Robert Frost & the Polish writers Witold Gombrowicz & Zbigniew Herbert. Witty, erudite, eloquent, & outspoken, this is at once a fascinating self-portrait & a unique reflection on 20th-century politics, poetry, & prose. Winner, Nobel Prize in Lit.
Author: Jerry Harp Publisher: University of Iowa Press ISBN: 0877459959 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 165
Book Description
A timely and informative collection, A Poetry Criticism Reader brings together eleven essays and reviews that constitute some of the best and most illuminating poetry criticism from the past decade.In his introduction to the book, editor-poet Jerry Harp gives an overview of poetry criticism and its pluralistic traditions after the high modernist years of T. S. Eliot. In the essays that follow, esteemed critics and poets explore varied aspects of poetics, make aesthetic statements, relate to postmodernism with its array of meanings, and examine particular poets and poems. Works by Donald Justice, James Tate, Paul Muldoon, Jorie Graham, Seamus Heaney, and Czeslaw Milosz are among those studied. None of the pieces was written in direct response to any of the others; nonetheless, they complement each other, forming a kind of dialogue. Because editors Jerry Harp and Jan Weissmiller selected writers who give us a broad range of perspectives on our postmodern moment as they reach into history for context, the collection offers students---the next generation of poets and critics---and their teachers exemplary models of fine critical writing and thought.
Author: Czeslaw Milosz Publisher: Macmillan ISBN: 9780374530464 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 294
Book Description
Now available in English for the first time, this collection brings together some of noted poet Czeslaw Milosz's early essays and letters, composed in German-occupied Warsaw during the winter of 1942-43.
Author: Stephen Watson Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa ISBN: 0143527819 Category : Literary Collections Languages : en Pages : 380
Book Description
In this collection of essays, Stephen Watson turns to the writers who have endured for him; to the places that have formed him; and always to the nature of writing and literature itself. The range is remarkable: he moves from Leonard Cohen to Dante, from Albert Camus to Allen Ginsberg, not excepting Czeslaw Milosz and T.S. Eliot. Closer to home, there are essays on Robben Island and the meaning of the Cedarberg. More personally, movingly, a final section of the book returns to the site of a love affair, the birth of a daughter, and what it is that defines his native city, Cape Town. Whatever Watson touches on, he gives substance to the line from Pasternak that provides this collection with its title: 'the music in the ice'. In Watson's hands the essay form itself becomes an instance of that music. Here is a book that demonstrates again why Justin Cartwright has called Stephen Watson 'South Africa's foremost essayist'.
Author: Czeslaw Milosz Publisher: Macmillan ISBN: 9780374528591 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 484
Book Description
Collects five decades of essays by the Nobel Prize-winning writer, covering topics including war, human nature, faith, communism, and Polish culture.
Author: Peter Dale Scott Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield ISBN: 1538172453 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 377
Book Description
Ecstatic Pessimist is a timely book about the Central and Eastern European experience of the mid 20th century, as told through the poetry and experiences of Czeslaw Milosz, Nobel Laureate for literature, who wrote on the horrors of war and the human experience. Written by a colleague and friend of the poet, it is part literary criticism and part memoir. This biography/memoir of Czesław Miłosz is a first hand account of the poet’s life and his relationship to the author, beginning in the 1960s. Milosz was a Polish-American poet, prose writer, translator, and diplomat. Regarded as one of the great poets of the 20th century, he won the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature. In its citation, the Swedish Academy called Miłosz a writer who "voices man's exposed condition in a world of severe conflicts". Ecstatic Pessimist expands on Czeslaw Milosz’s commitment to “unpolitical politics” – working for a revolution in culture, and above all poetry, as a necessary preparation for a revolution in politics. This is a familiar notion in Poland, which for two centuries was politically divided, but poets preserved and enhanced a lively Polish consciousness, And, as the book shows, Milosz took steps over two decades to help reunite Poles in the successful Solidarity movement, whose struggle eventually changed the regime and forced the Soviet armies to withdraw. But the book is designed to encouraged a similar development in America. Milosz’s ambition for poetry may at first sound exotic, but as the book says, it is in the spirit of what John Adams wrote late in life to Thomas Jefferson: “The [American] revolution was in the mind of the people, and in the union of the colonies, both of which were accomplished before the hostilities commenced.” Though the book is also designed for those who already know and love Milosz, it is primarily written for those looking for someone whose genius could similarly inspire Americans of both left and right to unite in restoring the badly broken politics of this country. The book argues that Czeslaw Milosz is that genius, as perhaps the only person who has been praised by intellectual leaders like Chris Hedges on the left, and has also spoken at Hillsdale College, the intellectual citadel of the American right.
Author: Czeslaw Milosz Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux ISBN: 9780374532727 Category : Literary Collections Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Polish Wilno—now Vilnius, in Lithuania—was the city of Czeslaw Milosz's youth and adolescence. In this collection of essays and reminiscences, written over a span of three decades, the Nobel Prize–winning poet traces an informal autobiography againstthe street map of an extraordinary city—a crossroads of languages, cultures, and beliefs—that lies at the very heart of his internal geography. Beginning with My Streets, available for the first time in paperback, gathers portraits of the writers Aleksander Wat, Dwight MacDonald, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, as well as the great Swedish scientist Emanuel Swedenborg; an exchange of letters from the 1950s with the novelist and diarist Witold Gombrowicz; and a selection of speeches delivered between 1967 and 1987, including Milosz's Nobel Lecture. These diffuse reckonings, distinguished throughout by the flavor of personality and the aura of place, have a cumulative power—they are quintessential Milosz.
Author: Czeslaw Milosz Publisher: Macmillan ISBN: 9780374528300 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 324
Book Description
The autobiography of the Nobel laureate Before he emigrated to the United States, Czeslaw Milosz lived through many of the social upheavals that defined the first half of the twentieth century. Here, in this compelling account of his early life, the author sketches his moral and intellectual history from childhood to the early fifties, providing the reader with a glimpse into a way of life that was radically different from anything an American or even a Western European could know. Using the events of his life as a starting point, Native Realm sets out to explore the consciousness of a writer and a man, examining the possibility of finding glimmers of meaning in the midst of chaos while remaining true to oneself. In this beautifully written and elegantly translated work, Milosz is at his very best.
Author: Czeslaw Milosz
Author: Czesław Miłosz
Author: Czeslaw Milosz
Author: Jerry Harp
Author: Czeslaw Milosz
Author: Stephen Watson
Author: Czeslaw Milosz
Author: Peter Dale Scott
Author: Czeslaw Milosz
Author: Czeslaw Milosz