Is Non Eschatological Poetry Possible - 1819 Words

â€Å"Is non-eschatological poetry possible?† Answering his own question, Ceslaw Milosz offers a resounding no. No – that is – if one is not to be indifferent to time and to questions of last things, like damnation, judgment, the Kingdom of God, or the ends of history. If poetry is â€Å"the passionate pursuit of the Real,† not only would non-eschatological poetry mean poetic indifference to our experiences of temporality and last things, it would mean a collapse into isolation and solipsism, a poetics severed from the reality of the world that makes human life common. Such stark demands for poetry are indicative of Milosz’s investment poetry as a witness to the world, which also involves a witness to God. Indeed, internal to Milosz’s†¦show more content†¦Put as directly as possible: while his eschatology undergoes significant revision from his Zagarist poetry to his poetry during Poland’s Occupation, Milosz nevertheless co nfirms his conviction about the need for eschatology as an ingredient in poetry’s witness, maintaining an eschatological concern for the fate of the world in his early authorship. During this time, eschatology, for Milosz, while having to do with the â€Å"last things,† most fundamentally names a way of seeing the world’s connectedness to God. In the first part of this paper, I attend to his eschatology known as â€Å"catastrophism.† This catastrophist position is elaborated by the poems â€Å"Hymn and â€Å"To Father Ch.,† where Milosz writes of the natural order as a divine and destructive force, but a force to which human beings might be reconciled. In the second part, I trace an eschatology from his poetic cycle â€Å"The World† which is characterized as â€Å"restorationist.† What emerges is (1) an ongoing eschatological preoccupation that has underwent (2) a shift away from his catastrophic conception and towards a Christian es chatological framework. Last, I conclude by further characterizing the eschatological witness of the poet, suggesting that Milosz’s term â€Å"ecstatic pessimism† is also an apt description of his eschatological imagination. I. A â€Å"Hymn† to Catastrophe Czeslaw Milosz’s interwar poetry of the 1930s, often affiliated with the Zagarist movement in Polish poetry, is characterized by