The 1990s were a momentous period for the country. Instead, I encountered writing that was edgy, brash, and decidedly indifferent to Miłosz’s “weighty, metaphysical” voice. Absent were the neo-romantic registers and nostalgic lyricism I associated with Polish poetry, the prophetic authority radiating from the country’s communist times. There was a different kind of tremor, another set of anxieties, at play. The presumptions I had held about young poets in Poland were promptly dismissed. Not long after I arrived, I met two Polish literary critics, Paweł Kaczmarski and Marta Koronkiewicz, who provided a crash course in contemporary Polish poetry. I wanted to meet contemporary poets, I wanted to see how they managed their anxieties of influence, what and how they composed in the shadow of such giants as Miłosz and Szymborska.

Nine years ago I moved to Poland to immerse myself in its culture, language, history, and art, particularly poetry.

“Even their playfulness,” Mclane wrote, “is weighty, metaphysical.” Polish poetry has become a genre in its own right, with its own set of rules and expectations. Their poetry concerns the rise and fall of nations civilizations and their attendant discontents and the follies and triumphs of human nature, often through the prism of religion, philosophy, and art. as kind of prophets, “unacknowledged legislators,” to quote Shelley, of the past century. Williams, and other writers have echoed such praise, solidifying the reputation of Miłosz & co. Jorie Graham, Robert Haas, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, C. “Here we have world-historical seriousness! Weight! Importance!” “Miłosz, Wisława Szymborska, Adam Zagajewski, Zbigniew Herbert,” Maureen McLane wrote. For many American readers, their poems are homilies pronouncing a distinctly European but universal humanism. As writers who witnessed first-hand the horrors of history most of us merely gleaned from textbooks, they command respect in their poetry they confront the traumas of World War II and the long grayness of Soviet Communism. There are no shortage of greats: Wysława Szymborska, Zbigniew Herbert, Adam Zagajewski, and, of course, Czesław Miłosz, who, as Joseph Brodsky wrote, “is one of the greatest poets of our time, perhaps the greatest.” The Poles can tell the story of the twentieth century like no other nationality can. Postwar Polish poetry has long commanded a faithful following among American readers.

Postwar Polish Poetry by Czesław Miłosz