Farewell to Greatness
A few years before his death, Zbigniew Herbert, the prominent Polish poet, published a slim volume of nineteen poems titled Elegy for the Departure. Many of the poems had a clearly valedictory theme. The title poem, “Elegy for the Departure of Pen Ink and Lamp,” is particularly significant: it seems to announce the end of Herbert’s lifelong project as a poet. The poet bids farewell to three companions of his childhood that might have set him on his literary path: the pen, the “outlet of the critical mind, messenger of soothing knowledge;” the ink of “wise depths” smelling of “a gentle volcano / the call of the abyss;” and the oil lamp, “a bright allegory / a spirit stubbornly battling / the demons of gnosis,” yet also familiar with ”the surf of passions” and able to call up “landscapes of a savage city repeated in water.”
Elegy for the Departure was not Herbert’s last book. The poet had still eight more years of life and three more poetic volumes ahead of him, but he was already very ill, tired, and aware that his best days were behind him. What he was bidding farewell — apologetically, as if the departure was his fault — in these three objects was both his turbulent life and his poetry based on the struggle of reason and light against the “demons of gnosis” and the “gentle volcano” of existential mystery. It was not a gentle farewell. The last line sounds like a door slammed shut in anger: “and / it will be / dark.”
Reading this poem again thirty years later, I cannot resist the feeling it is also a farewell to a whole poetic epoch, or to a certain type of poetry that had prevailed in Eastern Central Europe in the postwar decades, especially after the relative relaxation of the political and aesthetic strictures of Communism around 1956. It was as if the poet felt that after his departure, and the departure of several members of his generation, no one is going to write like them. He expected a literary extinction.
This is exactly what happened. The young Polish poets of the 1990s, those born in or around the 1960s, loudly foreswore the legacy of the giants of the previous generations. And a similar revolution was taking place in practically all the countries of the now post-Communist region. This was not surprising, considering the immensity of social and cultural change that occurred with the end of the Communist regime. But what was the era that had so spectacularly ended with the victory of the dreams of all the postwar generations? Did it have to end? And was it replaced with anything that promises equally lasting value?
The first of these questions may be the most important and also the most difficult to answer. In the postwar decades the poetic scene was dominated by a handful of great names scattered throughout the region subjugated by the Soviet Union after the Second World War: Czesław Miłosz, Zbigniew Herbert, Tadeusz Różewicz, Wisława Szymborska, and Adam Zagajewski in Poland; Vladimír Holan and Miroslav Holub in Czechoslovakia; János Pilinszky in Hungary; Vasko Popa and Ivan Lalić in Yugoslavia. The list may be longer, but it is certainly not shorter.
What, if anything, links all those poets? For a start, they shared a tragic time and tragic circumstances. Most of them were born in the 1920s. They were teenagers when the war broke out and young adults when it ended. There were the older ones, like Miłosz or Holan, who started writing and even gained prominence before the war, and younger ones, born after the war, such as Adam Zagajewski. But most of them grew up during the Nazi atrocities, sometimes as members of the resistance and sometimes as helpless witnesses. After the war, they faced the momentous political disruption in the form of the Soviet Communist takeover. Some of them, such as Herbert, met it with inner resistance, some with hope, or resignation, or even, like Szymborska, with enthusiasm.
In every case, however, the political and social transformation must have been a moral and psychological jolt. Those who were favorably disposed towards the new order were usually quickly disappointed, leading some of them to open opposition, but more often to poetic resistance against the ideological and aesthetic vulgarity that surrounded them. During the years of the strict and forcefully imposed doctrine of socialist realism, they were often reprimanded and sometimes silenced by the monitors of official culture for their pessimism or alleged obscurity. With very few exceptions they staunchly refused to write “for the masses” in the prescribed propagandistic mode. In many cases, their true poetic debuts took place in or around 1956.
Many of these poets knew and respected each other, met or corresponded, formed friendships or practical alliances, and generally felt a bond of fraternity, a certain “genetic attraction” to each other. They constituted what is called a “biographical” literary generation linked by a set of historical facts and private experiences that defined their lives. It would be hard, however, to call them a literary school, or group, or movement. In the strictly literary sense, there are few similarities and much diversity among their particular poetic idioms. At first glance, what can link Miłosz’s elegantly versed declarations, meditations, and “treatises” on poetry, philosophy, and theology with Popa’s rich, oneiric, near-surreal imagery, or with Różewicz’s stripped-down, unfigurative, deliberately un-poetic style, or Herbert’s ironic anecdotes, and perfectly balanced “classical” lines with the texture of ancient marble, or with Holub’s tongue-in-cheek philosophizing and free use of scientific language, or with Pilinszky’s prison-camp tableaus, where realistic description flows into a set of metonymies so accurate that one can easily take them for plain speech? (Upturned faces of hungry prisoners pulling a heavy cart seem “strained for a scent / of the far-off celestial trough.”) Is it possible to talk about all those very different poets as a common literary phenomenon?
When, in the 1960s, the works of these poets were discovered in the West, mainly in the English-speaking world, among others by Ted Hughes and the poet and translator Daniel Weissbort, the editors of Modern Poetry in Translation, or by the British critic Al Alvarez, the editor of Penguin’s Modern European Poetry series, and a bit later by Seamus Heaney and the Irish poets from the North, it was soon noted that the voices from East Central Europe were similar in that they were quite different from what was happening at that time in the English language. “This poetry is more universal than ours,” declared Hughes in a letter to Weissbort. It was more “insistent,” and could “stimulate poetry-making in this country.” In his introduction to a selection of Pilinszky’s poems, Hughes mentions the Hungarian’s “simple, unambiguous, direct” language, but also notes something reaching beyond poetic style. “Critical judgment cannot rest in the aesthetic excellence of his work: it inevitably ends up arguing the ethical-religious position of Pilinszky himself.” Speaking about Holub, the poet Andrew Motion observed that poets from the East managed to express in language “the great humanitarian breakdown, including the breakdown of language, that occurred in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century.” The Northern Irish poet Tom Paulin saw in Holub’s poetry “the art of a prison-camp society, of a closed world where poetry is written without hope but with an obstinate integrity that negates as it creates.” Donald Davie, the indefatigable campaigner for “purity of diction” in English verse, observed that the experience of living under oppressive regimes confirmed those poets “in their values, in the value of the poetic act, in the act of the imagination.” In the United States this poetry was greeted especially by poets like Anthony Hecht, W.S. Merwin, Philip Levine, Robert Hass, Edward Hirsch, and Charles Simic, who positioned themselves outside the then dominant “schools” of American verse: the confessionalism of Berryman and Lowell, the programmatic mundanity of the New York School, and the loud strident protest of the Beats.
It was evident that the voices from East Central Europe possessed a form of grandeur and dignity that seemed to have been banished from postwar English language poetry. They could combine dispassion with urgency and pathos, irony with seriousness and conviction. They showed that modern poetry was still able to talk about great subjects without sounding quaint and pretentious, and could engage critically with reality in a calm, deliberate, and rigorous way.
Perhaps the most complete analysis of what separated Eastern Central European poets from their English-language colleagues can be found in Seamus Heaney’s book of essays The Government of the Tongue, in which he pays tribute to Miłosz, Herbert, and Holub. He noted that this poetry ran contrary to many “orthodox assumptions” of the poetic practice of the time. It eschewed “inwardness,” and “cadences that drink at the spot of time.” It was full of “aerated adjectives” and great abstract words. Through its “laconic accuracies” this verse laid bare “the shape of relationships, politics, history; the rhythms of affection and disaffection; the ebb and flow of faith, hope, violence, art.” It was analytic rather than sympathetic. It “aspired to deliver what we had once long ago been assured it was not any poem’s business to deliver: a message.” Most of all it reminded the Irish poet that all the “things forbidden within an old dispensation” pointed towards the very origins, the mystical source of poetic expression. Can it be, wrote Heaney, that “the shortest way to Whitby, the monastery where Caedmon sang the first Anglo-Saxon verses, is via Warsaw or Prague?”
The Eastern European, or, more specifically, the Central European “wave,” did leave some rather direct traces in the English language poetry of the time. Critics noted Pilinszky’s and Holub’s influence on Hughes’ “Crow” cycle. According to Paulin, he and other Northern Irish poets discovered in their Eastern colleagues a shared “invisible reference” to “the idea of being dominated by a foreign power.” The chilling sequence “Legion” by the English “minimalist” David Harsent, a disturbing account of an anonymous, seemingly endless war, sounds sometimes like Pilinszky’s realism and sometimes like Herbert’s mythical allegory. Sometimes the influence took the form of direct borrowings or paraphrases: Ken Smith’s “Cogito at the British Museum” not only borrows Zbigniew Herbert’s poetic persona (“Mr. Cogito”) but also the Polish poet’s unique ironic-reflective style. The English-language poet perhaps the closest to the mood of Eastern Central European poetry was Geoffrey Hill, the author of “Ovid in the Third Reich” and “Two Formal Elegies for the Jews of Europe,” who acknowledged the influence in his “Triumph of Love” sequence. It can be seen also in English-language poetic works that addressed the Holocaust and Nazi atrocities, such as Anthony Hecht’s dispassionate yet horrifying poem “More Light! More Light!” (It contrasts favorably with Hughes’ similar attempt in “Lines about Elias,” where music played by prisoners before they are marched to gas chambers rather absurdly transports and unites the inmates and their guards, making them “Innocent all equally / Innocent equally and defenseless.”)
Those various homages hardly arrange themselves in a coherent definition of Eastern Central European poetry and its uniqueness in the eyes of Western poets and critics, but they touch upon some important characteristics responsible for its appeal in their own countries and abroad. What strikes the reader first is a similar approach to language, which is often an indicator of a larger poetic philosophy. This approach can be defined as restorative and protective rather than innovative and disruptive. It is visible in the predominantly straightforward, clear, and direct diction — neither lofty nor pedestrian, free of grammatical disjunctions, phraseological idiosyncrasies, and semantic games. It was what Eliot called “The common word exact without vulgarity, / The formal word precise but not pedantic.” The choice of this idiom was as much ethical as aesthetic. In his “Dedication,” addressed to those who did not survive, Miłosz pledges to use “simple speech as I would be ashamed of another.” “I speak to you with silence like a cloud or a tree,” he continued.
It was during the war that poetry of the region started to turn away from its dominant French — that is, symbolist and surrealist — influences and towards a more reflective Anglo-Saxon brand of modernism. “The symbolists discovered the idea of a poem as an autonomous, self-sufficient unit, no longer describing the world but existing instead of the world,” wrote Miłosz, the translator of Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” According to Miłosz, poetry’s raison d’etre rests “somewhere outside poetry itself — in the spiritual and interhuman domain.” Not everybody would go as far as Miłosz, who linked the symbolists’ linguistic license to the “sack of cities,” and found a connection between “theories of literature as écriture and the growth of the totalitarian state.” But many would agree with Miłosz that such poetries were “not prepared to cope with those catastrophes.” Even those who were ardent symbolists in the interwar period, such as the Czech poet Miroslav Holan, felt the inadequacy. “How to live? How to be simple and literal?” he asked in a poem titled “How?” After what happened, could reality be disregarded as an obstacle to a free play of individual imagination? (There were such attempts in the post-war poetry of the region, and they were treated as politically innocuous, and with a good measure of forbearance by cultural bureaucrats, but the great poets of the time would have nothing to do with them.)
Language had fallen victim to power as much as people and cities. It was now to abandon its flights of fancy and come down to earth. It could no longer pretend to be a separate, self-sufficient universe parallel to and competing with reality. It suffered immensely at the hands of ideologues and propagandists and should be healed rather than experimented upon. It was also faced with the challenge of expressing the inexpressibility of violence, and in order to be even marginally suitable for this task it should undergo, to use Paul Celan’s words, the purification of “terrible silence.” This was one of this poetry’s main goals.
Another often noted characteristic, obviously linked to the directness of language, was its preoccupation with the objective, the demonstrable, the empirical. It can be argued that all poetry is the expression of the subjective, of the poet’s self. Where else can a true poem germinate, unless it is a stylistic exercise or a work on assignment? But in this poetry we see a constant effort to objectify the subjective, to give it an impersonal character, to turn it (in Herbert’s words) “into a person or a thing,” something located safely outside the self, with clearly delimited borders, that can be regarded from a distance and analyzed with a degree of cool detachment. Hence the frequent fascination with, even envy of, inanimate objects, perfect essences, never alive and therefore immortal, with no business whatsoever with the vagaries of human existence. The motif of a conversation with a stone can be found in Herbert, Popa, and Szymborska. Herbert’s pebble appears as “a perfect creature / equal to itself / mindful of its limits / filled exactly / with a pebbly meaning.” Popa’s stone-hero of the cycle “The Quartz Pebble” “listens to itself / Among the worlds a world.” Szymborska’s arrogant stone refuses to open his door: “You may get to know me but you’ll never know me through. / My whole surface is turned toward you, / all my insides turned away.”
Objects often rebuke people but their presence, their inviolable sameness, is also a source of reassurance, a strategy of perseverance. For Herbert, objectivization of our volatile, paradoxical existence into “a person or a thing,” locking it in a sculpture, a piece of architecture, or a myth is the very essence of culture, a source of aesthetic delight but also a strategy of survival. And in his introduction to Vasko Popa’s collection Homage to the Lame Wolf, the American poet (and Popa’s translator) Charles Simic writes: “One might be reading Euclid on the triangle here. He is so deadpan. The usual drama of the self is completely absent. The archetypal forms that emerge are employed for cognitive ends. Popa meditates on myth. He talks to it, and it talks back.” It is probably owing to this “deadpan” objectivity among the greats of Eastern Central Europe that whenever the poetic “I” appears we are often forced to ask who it is, who is actually speaking. The tone makes us suspect a persona, whether or not openly introduced, like Herbert’s Mr. Cogito, which puts a distance (but what distance?) between itself and the poet’s voice. What is more, persona, even in the singular, often sounds like a voice of a collectivity: a chorus, a generation, a nation, or maybe, as in Herbert’s “Envoy of Mr. Cogito,” the whole civilization. Quite definitely not Herbert’s “small broken soul with a great self-pity.”
And there is still another seminal paradox. Having assumed the immense burden of speaking in the name of many, this poetry is constantly skeptical about its expressive powers. It dwells in the shadow of Adorno’s famous warning that writing poetry after Auschwitz would be “barbaric.” It answers that after Auschwitz it would be barbaric not to write poetry, but it must be a very different poetry, stripped of all “poetic” trappings, it would have to be poor poetry, an anti-poetry using non-poetic tools and sources: hard, unsentimental, clear-sighted, and relentless, responding to existential rather than esthetic needs. “You are asked again and again why you write poems. To find out why you are alive — that is why you write poems,” declared Popa.
The poet who went furthest in this direction was Tadeusz Różewicz. It is said that he read his poems in a monotonous, almost apathetic tone, as if reading from a newspaper. “I regard my own poems with acute mistrust,” he said in an interview. “I fashion them from the great rubbish dump, the great cemetery.” Michael Hamburger observed that Różewicz and other poets of his generation “have made themselves at home in the silence.” “Should someone ask, what, after all, is my poetic language,” said Pilinszky, “in truth I should have to answer: it is some sort of lack of language, a sort of linguistic poverty. . . . I would like to write as if I had remained silent.” Silence is a frequent trope in Holub’s poetry, as in the poem “The Lesson” where it is “cutting like a knife” through the drone of voices from the loudspeakers.
Silence and understatement come to the rescue of constantly threatened language. Was it a political stratagem, a way to avoid censorship and let the readers fill in the gaps? Perhaps, but such evasions were not to the detriment of the poetry itself. Also, although born out of a certain political situation, it was not, by and large, political poetry, although it was often presented as such. When read today, even poets who were publicly engaged as citizens, such as Herbert and Holan and Holub, seem to be preoccupied with ethical and metaphysical problems rather than pointless squabbles with the regime.
It is true that almost all of them, from time to time, were tempted to write something that sounded like political satire or an Aesopian comment on current events. Herbert, with his mythical allusions, comes to mind, as does Zagajewski in the early stage of his career when he was a member (with Stanisław Barańczak, Julian Kornhauser, and Ryszard Krynicki) of the poetic group called the New Wave, advocating for a more direct involvement of poetry with the social and political “here and now.” These were usually not their best productions, although they were adored by their readers and passed around like Masonic handshakes. In my youth it was habitual to look for contemporary political innuendos almost everywhere. Al Alvarez called it the favorite Polish game of “Find-the-Allusion.” (The proclivity was unfortunately shared also by censors, who often suppressed quite innocent poems in case they were “wrongly” understood.) For the most part, however, poetry aimed much higher than just sticking it to the regime, and Zagajawski openly repudiated those efforts in his extraordinary essay “Solidarity and Solitude.”
Yet the shadow of history, both the memory of the war and the reality of Communist strictures, was always reflected in their writing. They were poets of ruins, of a disintegrated and debased world, of broken human relations, philosophical confusions, and moral uncertainties. In that, they resembled the moderns of the Eliot generation, except that they were moderns whose anxieties and dark premonitions had been most cruelly actualized. Their wastelands and their hollow men were not metaphors. They were part of the physical reality that surrounded them. Where the great moderns of the past suffered from ennui, alienation, and the indefiniteness of their lives, the postwar moderns from the East saw terror, dehumanization, moral collapse, and ever-present threat. Eliot’s protagonists dwelled in Limbo, “without infamy or praise.” His East-Central followers saw man descend into the lower rings of Hell. Their world ended both in a bang and a whimper.
The older moderns believed that they had reached an end, but the question of what comes next, though disturbing, could still be thrilling. It posed an intriguing aesthetic challenge, the task of inventing new styles and literary forms to express it all. The East Central Europeans knew that what comes next may be annihilation. For them, searching for the right word was a moral rather than an aesthetic task, the expression of their need to find a path among Różewicz’s “great rubbish dump, the great cemetery.” This is, perhaps, how we should understand Popa’s dictum about writing in order to know why one still lives.
Yet the great poets never succumbed to total despair, or its smirking nihilistic twin called “postmodern irony.” Even the writing of Tadeusz Różewicz, who in his early poetry seems to abandon all hope, is an unending quest to prove himself wrong. Herbert, by contrast, temperamentally an enemy of pessimism, stubbornly invoked “the old incantations of humanity,” which do not promise victory but at least keep the human person from dissolution. Miłosz finds nourishment and hope in his repeated returns to his “native realm” in pre-modern Lithuania and tries to restore the human universe that had been destroyed, in his view, by the “scientific outlook,” while Holub’s sharp scientific eye takes apart facts and events and then puts them back together to prove that objective truths can be extracted from the sea of doubt and confusion. And Popa peruses cryptic Balkan yarns and fables in an effort to find the source of what he calls “word-keys” that give the human soul a fighting chance “when the very existence of this tiny, fertile star — whose shine should be mankind itself — is in question.”
This poetry was never far from the last things, even when it spoke from agnostic or atheistic positions, never far from the human drama even when speaking about stones, wooden cubes, onions, or, like Holub, about “ugly, grunting creatures” of the microbial world. And even at the most apolitical, it was never far from history, because, as my poet-friend Michael March helpfully suggests, it often originated as “civilized resistance to circumstances.” It spoke with urgency, as if what it had to say was of real and general importance. It was concerned with ideas, sometimes expressed directly but more often through a particular blend of thought and feeling, not unlike in Eliot’s definition of the metaphysical poets of sixteenth-century England. It was poetry of unmistakable grandeur and power, though often wry and self-ironic.
Is it possible to sum it up in a neat phrase that would gather it all? Was it a poetry of “ardor,” to borrow Zagajewski’s term from one of his essays, or a “wisdom project,” from Susan Sontag’s essay on Zagajewski? Or, to use the German theologian Paul Tillich’s term, was it a “concern about being?” (For Tillich, those who deemed being — their own, everybody else’s, and Being in general — as worthy of concern were already on the side of faith, even if they defined themselves as atheists.) Or was it — in the awkward, unscholarly term — a poetry of greatness? Greatness is something quite different from “excellence,” which is akin to what Eliot called “word mastery,” a virtuosity that in his view can push out everything else, especially insight into the human soul. (He used Dryden and Milton as cautionary examples, although Milton at least got Satan’s soul right.) An excellent poet can excel in anything he or she endeavors — grand or trivial, true or conceited, wise or silly — and leave us in awe of his or her craft. Poetic greatness, on the other hand, is entirely a matter of soul.
Excellence can be described and analyzed with the ever-expanding toolbox of supposedly precise academic terms and definitions to show how a poem “works.” It can be evaluated according to various, often conflicting, critical approaches. Greatness is much more mysterious, elusive, difficult to grasp; but given the right sensitivity, it is usually unmistakable even to the uninitiated. It is about a largeness of vision that includes and unifies all strata of human experience — from the empirical to the intellectual, from the individual to the collective, from the historical to the ethical and the metaphysical. Greatness properly understood is not, as Hughes rightly observed about Pilinszky, an exclusively aesthetic phenomenon. A great poem is more than a verbal construct of considerable beauty and complexity. It stands with one foot outside its own text. It requires the encounter of a poet and a reader who are both interested in more than poetry.
The three long decades between 1956 and the late 1980s were definitely the era of poetic greatness in East Central Europe. Then, abruptly, a reaction came. The young poets, born in the 1960s, proclaimed that they were sick and tired of this sort of greatness. They wanted a clear break from it, and from their venerated elders. A Polish poet of this generation, Andrzej Sosnowski, born in 1959, declared in his programmatic poem “What is poetry?”:
Certainly not a strategy of survival,
or a way of life. Your insistence is droll
when you invoke mystic lakes,
rustling forests or abysmal caves where voice
can echo forever. The caves
of Sybil?
He might have been addressing Miłosz (“What is poetry which does not save / Nations or people . . .”) or Herbert, or maybe one of their younger followers, such as Zagajewski. For Sosnowski, such salvific ambitions are “droll.” What really matters, he continued, were little stones you can play ducks and drakes with. A tiny room in a tenement house can be more interesting than a magical cave. This is what our world is made of — small everyday facts, common objects waiting until the draft of poetry picks them up and scatters them “like confetti.”
It was a rather elegant sendoff, and one that ended on a consolatory note. The young poet asks his exalted colleague not to leave in offense, to stick around and listen, because the new poetry of leaves and stones may also carry a grain of knowledge, may “suddenly say / about peoples and wars, struggles and sea voyages / about how things are and how the business goes.” There were, however, much more violent attacks. A Polish critic found it necessary to declare the formation of the League to Defend Polish Poetry from Herbert. “The poetry of slaves feeds on ideas, / Ideas are watery substitutes of blood,” inveighed Maciej Świetlicki, one of the young poets, mocking poetry where “even trees have crosses / — inside under their bark — made of barbed wire. . . .” Even older poets who chose, or were chosen, to be the mentors of the young rebels, added their quotient of invectives. “Words huge like beans and as hard to swallow,” said one of them in a poem. This poetry was “not beautiful, but suddenly all reach for their hands / And clap, so it must be right.” (Piotr Sommer, “Liberation in language.”) And another one (Bohdan Zadura), known for subtle lyricism and formal refinement, fulminated in a prose diatribe (possibly ironic, but I cannot be sure) about “toothless gums of empty rhetoric,” and the “vanity and shittyness” of “the old and infirm, and only youth is allowed to be vain.”
Hardly anybody tried to be fair, thoughtful, or to use the standard language of literary criticism. It was mortal combat and the point was to hit, and hit hard, no matter where. Most of the assaults were based on crass misreadings or directed against straw men with little resemblance to the alleged targets. The attacked poets hardly used “words large like beans,” or pretentious symbols like “crosses made of barbed wire.” But the characteristics that so enraged the poetic newcomers were the perceived loftiness, abstraction, intellectualism, didacticism, and ethical rigor (Herbert’s “yes, yes, no, no”). They were calling into question the very aspiration to poetic greatness.
The clash was most raucous in Poland, but similar battles were taking place throughout the region. What was supposed to replace the poetry of great subjects and high concerns? Everything that was its direct opposition. The new poetic idiom had to be down to earth, open to chaos, to the contingency and the banality of daily existence. It should be personal, even autobiographical, focused on details and eschewing abstractions and grand ideas. Its language should step down to the level of street talk, common speech as practiced by the young generation, including vulgarities and slang. It should constantly remind the reader of its awkwardness as a tool of serious communication. The poet should address the reader as an equal, that is, as someone equally confused, bored, or annoyed by “all that.” High cultural references — those eternal myths and timeless masterpieces — should be replaced by mass culture tropes. Poetry should accept its inevitably marginal status, something to be enjoyed in a close circle of friends rather than on a national stage. In sum, it was a general lowering of poetic register and narrowing of the range of interest to things observed “outside the window.”
The change began a few years before the miraculous year 1989, in the gloomy and uncertain time, anxious and lethargic, when it was obvious that Communism was finished but it was by no means clear what was going to replace it. When the breakthrough finally came, the intoxication with new freedom quickly gave way to disappointment. The post-communist countries did not turn overnight into mature and stable liberal democracies. Where the older generation saw a lot of unfinished work, the young ones noticed vulgarity, emptiness, primitive consumerism, economic uncertainty, frenetic money chasing, and rapid commercialization of culture. That was their world. The older poets kept writing, but it seemed that they completely overlooked these realities and talked above the heads of the crowds that not long ago listened to them in rapture.
One of the reasons for the pique of the younger generation might have also been the extremely elevated, almost prophetic status that the great few enjoyed in the post-war decades. Especially, but not exclusively, in Poland, great poets were treated, often against their will, as moral arbiters, spiritual guides, guardians of their nation’s soul. They were asked to read in churches and at secret gatherings where the public eagerly “reached for their hands” to attest that this poetry was not only beautiful but also “right.” What passed for literary criticism of their work often amounted to blatant hagiography, while rare attempts at respectful critique were suspected of a nefarious political agenda. In other words, they were forced into the old Romantic role of “unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Inevitably, this kind of reception simplified and diminished their poetic message. During these mystery rites the devotees heard what they wanted to hear. The powerful echo drowned the original tune. Such spectacles could provoke jeers from the more skeptical in the audience. Was it time to blaspheme against the gods, to be naughty, and finally to break some things?
Interestingly, the new generation of poets from Eastern Central Europe sought inspiration primarily among English-language poets — not among their contemporaries but those one or two generations older: the New York School, especially Frank O’Hara (in Poland, “Oharism” became a handy critical term); English “minimalists” (Tony Morrison, David Harsent) with their attentive, unadorned descriptions of everyday life; the “Liverpool poets” (Brian Patten), with their penchant for pop, humor, and performance; the British “New Fantasts” or “Martians” (Craig Raine) searching for strange and “denaturalizing” perspectives on familiar objects and situations; and also poets from Northern Ireland (Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Andrew Motion, Derek Mahon) cultivating, at least at that time, their provincialism and treating the political drama in their own realm with a tad of detachment. Some of those “influences” were merely imitations and unwilling parodies. In some cases, however, the young apprentices managed to turn them into a fresh, personal idiom. One of the Polish “Oharists,” Marcin Sendecki, can draw in few quick lines a brilliant image with a small intriguing point:
Shadows glow from billboards. After
Crossing the tracks the boy stops
To rush the dog. Do not expect
A miracle from a factual photo. This
Is a chair. This is a table.
Or,
The dust seems lighter, the leaves
Breathe: slowly, carefully.
We made love and now we talk
To each other. Bronze drops swell and
Fade with every flap of the lids.
Andrzej Sosnowski evolved into probably the most hermetic poet in his generation, fond of intertextual games and sudden surrealist riffs, as in this impression of a watch left on a beach:
And moisture will be able to dream about a museum
Wandering among springs and stones
And steaming under a golden watchcase
Till the end of the sea and time.
The young rebels of the 1990s are now in their sixties. It is they who are now the leading generation in their countries. They gather awards named after their once-rejected elders. There are already younger ones, who try to add something new — references to the digital world, social media, cyber- and hyper-textual experiments — although they usually stay within the same zone of the quotidian, the domestic, the private, and within the same colloquial registers. Their gift of observation can be impressive. I have recently read — with pleasure — a poem by the Polish poet Sara Akram about a young “girl in golden sequins” vomiting and undressing in a metro station, while her amused companions take pictures and post them online. As Eliot said, “the possible interests of a poet are unlimited.”
The question I hear sometimes, “So what is happening now in Central European poetry?” is simple to answer, but the answer is usually unsatisfactory. There is absolutely everything there: conceptual poetry, intertextual poetry, language poetry, surrealist poetry, lyrical poetry, confessional poetry, poetry about death (a lot of it), poetry of social criticism (mostly anti-consumerist), feminist poetry, queer poetry, and environmental poetry. But greatness, at least as I have tried to define it here, is nowhere to be found. The question that often follows, impatiently, “So who, in your view, are the three best poets writing today?” is not only impossible to answer, but somehow beyond the point. Critics have frequently noted that in the new poetic environment hierarchies got flattened. It is as if reaching too high, trying to be too different, was somehow undemocratic, or impolite towards one’s fellow poets. The field is full, even crowded, but at the same time it looks empty. Within their particular niches, poets sound strikingly similar to each other and similar to their contemporaries in other countries. It would be hard to distinguish a poem written today in Poland or the Czech Republic from one written in the United States, or Great Britain, or Germany. The poets of the region have finally joined the world and “softly and suddenly” vanished in it.
An era has ended. All eras have to end. Perhaps this is exactly as it should be. After all, as Auden declared, “poetry makes nothing happen.” But few care to read on in Auden’s poem: poetry “survives, / A way of happening, a mouth.” Poetry does not change the world (for that we need real muscles and good politics), but it is a part of what happens, a way of seeing the world and articulating it. So we must ask ourselves some more questions. Have we really put all the “great narratives” of humanity behind us? Is it not obvious that, for all the astonishing transformations of our time, the world has not completely changed? Are we not living again in times when (to stay with Auden’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”) “intellectual disgrace / Stares from every human face?”
History teaches us that poetry does not remain for long satisfied with marginality and dispersion. Is it not the pursuit of greatness that kept this strange, some say unnatural, art alive as “a part of what happens” for millennia? True, much of its intensity comes from the intensity of its times, from the often terrifying historical drama within which it is composed, and no one should wish for more historical tragedy, for another bout of madness, to “hurt us into poetry.” But tragedies are never too far away. In fact they are happening right now, in Europe and elsewhere. It is possible that the stimulation that Hughes saw in Eastern Central European poets will come from parts even farther east. There is something happening in contemporary Ukrainian poetry, suddenly confronted with existential questions — individual and collective — that not too long ago seemed like the songs of the past. A Belarusian prose writer and poet, Alhierd Bacharevič, called his recent novel The Dogs of Europe. Yes, the same dogs that bark in Auden’s poem. We already hear them, too, but they sound louder in the darker peripheries. Their poetry, too, may prove “more universal than ours.”
