Wednesday, September 15, 2004
In gratitude
Seamus Heaney writes on the life and work of his fellow poet Czeslaw Milosz, from last Saturday’s Guardian Review, while threading a simultaneous discourse on the nature and power of poetry.
Within characteristically dense but measured prose Heaney pays tribute to Milosz and his “wish that poetry in general should be capable of providing an elevated plane of regard” while the poet should seek to imbue the work with “awareness of the triteness and tribulations of other people’s lives [that is] needed to humanise the song”. A duality of being that Heaney identifies in Milosz’s work as “the speech of the whole man.”
