Ars Poetica?

In 1968, Czesław Miłosz translated his famous poem “Ars Poetica?” with the help of translator Lillian Vallee in Berkeley, California. Miłosz was an internationally famous Polish poet. He enters into conversation with a long tradition of ars poetica, or poems that reflect on poetry. The tradition dates back to Quintus Horatius Flaccus, a Roman poet and the author of Ars Poetica, an epistolary poem advising young poets.

As Poets.org discusses, other writers in the tradition of ars poetica include Alexander Pope of the Enlightenment, Lord Byron, a romantic poet, Archibald MacLeish, an American poet and modernist, and Sharon Olds, a contemporary poet. In different ways, these writers meditated on the art of writing. (Ars Poetica: Explore the glossary of poetic terms, Poets.org)

Miłosz’s “Ars Poetica?” acts as a reflection by Miłosz on the nature of poetry, his frustrations with the current literary climate, and an exhortation to himself and other poets.

Poet Biography

Czesław Miłosz was born in Poland in 1911 to prominent parents. Growing up, he moved around due to his father’s conscription in the Russian army once World War I erupted. Even after the war concluded, Miłosz’s young life continued to be defined by conflict as his family was displaced by the Polish-Soviet War. In spite of (or by virtue of) his tumultuous childhood, Miłosz began to gain notoriety for his poetry while in university, where he founded a poetry group called Żagary.

Between the publications of his second and third collection of Polish-language poetry, World War II broke out in Europe. Rather than fleeing the continent or remaining in Paris, where he briefly lived after obtaining his Masters of Law, Miłosz moved back to Poland. For the duration of the war, Miłosz helped Jewish people flee Nazi persecution, published protest literature through underground presses, and only narrowly avoided execution after being captured in 1944.

Miłosz moved to the United States to write and teach, where he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980. After years of being banned in his native Poland, the Nobel Prize allowed Miłosz’s work to finally be published and read. While his lifelong political activism and writing kept Miłosz relatively marginalized for much of his life, the Nobel Prize and loosened political tensions paved the way for him to achieve global fame and central literary canonization. Czesław Miłosz died in 2004 in Poland, where he was given a state funeral attended by prime ministers, presidents, thousands of Polish citizens, and which was broadcast around the world.

Poem Text

Miłosz, Czesław. “Ars Poetica?.” 1968. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

The first stanza expresses the speaker’s frustrations with the limits of poetry, emphasizing that both “poetry [and] prose” make “claims” (Line 2) on language. The speaker would prefer to simply communicate. The poem yearns for a kind of writing that would simply “let us understand each other” (Line 3).

After decrying the limits of poetry in the first stanza, the poem turns its attention to the “very essence of poetry” (Line 5) in its second stanza. For the speaker, poetry brings “forth [what] we didn’t know we had in us” (Line 6). In other words, poetry makes readers (and, presumably, poets) aware of aspects of their experience and inner life which they had not yet noticed or named. The poem clarifies and complicates this essence with an image: A “tiger” which “spr[i]ng[s] out / and [stands] in the light, lashing his tail” (Lines 7, 8).

The third stanza agrees with the classical understanding of poetry, where a “daimonion” or genius “dictate[s]” (Line 9) to the poet. However, the spirit of poetic inspiration is not “an angel” (Line 10). In fact, poetry makes poets feel “shame” (Line 12) by exposing their vulnerability.

The poem questions the dignity of poetry in the fourth stanza, where the speaker asks who would choose to subject himself to the indignities of poetry. At the same time, to be a poet is to “speak in many tongues” (Line 14). It is the act of opening up to a multiplicity of voices.

The poem has a somewhat jovial tone and informal address. However, the speaker makes it clear that their reflections on the nature of poetry are in earnest. In the fifth stanza, they assure the reader that they are not “only joking” (Line 18) or simply “devis[ing] just one more means / of praising Art with the help of irony” (Lines 19, 20).

The speaker looks to the culture of language and reading to clarify their poetic understanding. The poem suggests that humanity has traded “wise books” (Line 21) for the clinical and vapid. In the speaker’s view, the “morbid is highly valued today” (Line 17), in contrast to “a time when only wise books were read” (Line 21). The current literature is merely “works fresh from psychiatric clinics” (Line 24). The literature of the day—and the ways of thinking which result from it—do not answer the questions which they claim.

According to the speaker, people seek stability in their own “silent integrity” (Line 27). The speaker sees this integrity as an illusion. “The purpose of poetry is to remind us” (Line 29) of this illusion. It is also to remind people that “remain[ing] just one person” (Line 30) is difficult. The multiplicity that poetry exacerbates is true to the nature of existence.

In the ninth and final stanza, the speaker says that what they have written “is not […] poetry” (Line 33). For them, “poems should be written rarely and reluctantly” (Line 34). Poems should only be written when the multiplicity that they open up in a person channels “good spirits, not evil ones” (Line 36). In other words, the poem acts as a warning. To write poetry is to work under “unbearable duress” (Line 35).