Rowan Williams at Literary Review:
In a late poem about a friend’s death, Czesław Miłosz writes of the long passage between youth and age as one of learning ‘how to bear what is borne by others’. It could be a summary of his own poetic witness. Eva Hoffman’s moving and eloquent essay traces the ways in which that simultaneously guilty, compassionate and fastidious response characterises Miłosz’s work from its earliest days. Bearing what is borne by others is, for Miłosz, close to the heart of the poetic task, but it is also fraught with risk. Hoffman pinpoints how Miłosz’s hypersensitivity to the risks of sentimentality and grandstanding led to what many readers saw as an evasion of necessary commitment. He stood aside during the Warsaw Rising of 1944, wary of the overheated and unrealistic rhetoric surrounding it; he saw his first duty as being to the integrity of his poetry, not to the mythology of a sacrificially heroic Poland. Yet, as Hoffman stresses, the poetry itself reveals his full awareness of ambivalent motives and the dangers of willed detachment. Was he nervous of ‘being overwhelmed by emotions from which no detachment was possible’? The lines (from 1945), ‘You swore never to touch/The deep wounds of your nation’ – indeed, the whole poem in which they occur – reveal both a concern not to cheapen such wounds by sacralising the agonies of others and a recognition of the unbearable character of the pain involved: ‘My pen is lighter/Than a hummingbird’s feather. This burden/Is too much for it to bear.’
more here.