This is a piece from Czesław Miłosz’s book A Road-Side Dog, which contains a mixture of poetry and prose. I am not sure whether the prose piece below is a parable or a meditation or a snatch of fiction or a very short essay, but I think in any case it might be one of what Miłosz called “Subjects to Let”: he was 87 when he published the book, and offered these sketches of things he knew he wouldn’t develop to anyone who wanted to flesh them out.
A CERTAIN POET
That poet lived all his life in a quiet provincial town, at a time when there were no wars or revolutionary upheavals. It is possible to reconstruct from his poems his circle of people. It is included his father and mother, the enigmatic aunt, Adele, her husband, Victor, a young person by the name of Helene, and his close friend, the owner of a local printing shop and a philosopher, Cornelius. And those few characters were enough to bring to life a poetry of descent into the abyss and of soaring ecstasy, a testimony of dark passions, sins, and terrors.
This should lead us to conclude that the importance of an oeuvre is not measured by the importance of the events which led, one way or another, to its creation. No doubt, the facts we try to guess had no significance for the history of mankind. Whether Adele was the mistress of the poet’s father, whether and why her husband tolerated that arrangement, whether the poet was jealous or simply took his mother’s side, what his relationship with Helene was like, and whether it was a triangle with Cornelius as one of its sides—those components of the human cosmos are too common to have much meaning ascribed to them. And yet what depth in those stanzas where, encoded, the most ordinary human dramas glow with a glare of ultimate things, what force in the transformation of the very stuff of people’s everyday life into that marvelously muscular body of verse!
That oeuvre is a warning to all those who envy poets with rich biographies, possessing at their disposal images of burning cities, of the wanderings of crazed humanity, and of murderous cohorts marching.
[Thanks to Ray Olson from Booklist for his helpful review.]