To the Editors:
In the June, 1983, issue of The New Criterion, Stanislaw Baranczak reviewed Czeslaw Milosz’s book The Witness of Poetry. . . . Mr. Baranczak quotes Milosz saying that poetry can sometimes “save nations or people,” and draws from that a conclusion that “in countries such as Poland contemporary poetry more than once proved indispensable to society’s existence; its role as a witness to reality, a defense against oppression, and a source of hope is not an abstract axiom but the concrete and personal experience of many people.”
I personally cannot say for how many people poetry plays this role, but I have a sad feeling that it would not be a difficult task to count them. As for the whole idea, it belongs, when confronted with the reality of the contemporary world, to the category of “wishful thinking.” . . .
It is true that Milosz’s poems were printed in workers’ newsletters during strikes in August, 1980, in Gdansk, and probably all over the country. It is also true that they were often next to “unionist appeals and political analyses,” but that’s the end. Apparently Mr. Baranczak is trying to suggest that there was an immediate relation between the two kinds of writing. There was one indeed, but it had much more to do with the poet than with his works. Although already a legend in literary circles, Czeslaw Milosz was virtually unknown to the general reading public in Poland at this time—especially
