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surprise that some of the great poets of modern times have emerged from the blank spots? Poets such as Witold Gombrowicz, Zbigniew Herbert, Tadeusz Rozewicz, Anna Swir, Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam, whose work Heaney also explores in his book, adding for good measure Pablo Neruda and Derek Walcott.
    RECOGNIZING OUR TRUE DESIRES
    We see, then, that poets have indeed been witness to the omnipresent gloom of the twentieth century. “How did it happen,” Miłosz asks, “that tobe a poet of the twentieth century means to receive training in every kind of pessimism, sarcasm, bitterness, doubt?” This gloom, he says, answering his own question, owed something to “the victorious scientific Weltanschauung ” and to the nihilism resulting from religion having been “hollowed out from inside,” the idea being that art would replace it as “the only dwelling place of the sacred.” 4
    Elsewhere in his book, Miłosz draws on the sentiments of a distant relative, Oscar Miłosz (1877–1939), who defined poetry as “a companion of man since his beginnings,” “[a] passionate pursuit of the Real . . . bound more rigorously than any other mode of expression to the spiritual and physical Movement of which it is the generator and a guide . . . fully aware of its terrible responsibilities, the mysterious movements of the great soul of the people . . . the incessant transformations of religious, political and social thought.” 5
    Czesław Miłosz makes a rather different second point: that modern poetry, as well as serving as a witness (and therefore as a warning), builds on that fact—partly by means of its continued existence—to offer what the pragmatists also argue is the greatest virtue we can display in these troubled times: hope. That beauty continues to be made is a form of hope, Miłosz says. He surveys briefly the more negative aspects of modern culture, from Dostoevsky forward, to the dystopian science fiction of H. G. Wells, the totalitarian dystopias of Yevgeny Zamyatin and Aldous Huxley, the decadence of the various bohemias, existentialism, above all perhaps the cruelties of the First World War.
    And he does this in order to make a point not often made: “It should be remembered,” he writes, that after the disasters of the Great War “the next war was envisioned as a poison-gas war, and the Yperite, or mustard gas, employed at the end of World War I at Ypres, became a symbol like the atomic bomb later on. Here . . . the prophecies proved not quite correct. When the next world war broke out, its horrors were of a sort unforeseen by anyone, and neither side made use of gas on the battlefield.”
    Introducing this idea of failed prophecies leads him to what he sees as an even bigger failure, that of democracy itself, which he characterizes as “a model taken by Rousseau from the assemblies of the entire population of a small Swiss canton.” His real point is that democracy “has shown little ability to expand beyond its area of origin” (he was writing in 1983). No less important, more often than not its rulers “appear as an incarnation of a general will that, if left to itself, would not know its own true desires.” And this, it would appear, is Miłosz’s overriding point: that the more reliable witness of poetry offers the best hope for recognizing our true desires.
    Here he is on his friend the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz, who died in 1969. Amid all the misery of the twentieth century, Gombrowicz declared himself to be like the baritone in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, who says: “Friends, enough of this song. Let more joyous melodies be heard.” He plays down alienation: “Alienation? No, let us try to admit that this alienation is not so bad, that we have it in our fingers, as pianists say . . . [to] give the workers almost as many free and marvellous holidays a year as work days.” Then the other nightmares of the modern condition: “Emptiness? The absurdity of existence?