Ecstatic Pessimist

Czeslaw Milosz, Poet of Catastrophe and Hope

Peter Dale Scott

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
• Year: 2023
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781538172452
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Ecstatic Pessimist is a timely book about the Central and Eastern European experience of the mid 20th century, as told through the poetry and experiences of Czeslaw Milosz, Nobel Laureate for literature, who wrote on the horrors of war and the human experience. Written by a colleague and friend of the poet, it is part literary criticism and part memoir.
This biography/memoir of Czeslaw Milosz is a first hand account of the poet's life and his relationship to the author, beginning in the 1960s. Milosz was a Polish-American poet, prose writer, translator, and diplomat. Regarded as one of the great poets of the 20th century, he won the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature. In its citation, the Swedish Academy called Milosz a writer who "voices man's exposed condition in a world of severe conflicts".

Ecstatic Pessimist expands on Czeslaw Milosz's commitment to "unpolitical politics" – working for a revolution in culture, and above all poetry, as a necessary preparation for a revolution in politics.

This is a familiar notion in Poland, which for two centuries was politically divided, but poets preserved and enhanced a lively Polish consciousness, And, as the book shows, Milosz took steps over two decades to help reunite Poles in the successful Solidarity movement, whose struggle eventually changed the regime and forced the Soviet armies to withdraw.

But the book is designed to encouraged a similar development in America. Milosz's ambition for poetry may at first sound exotic, but as the book says, it is in the spirit of what John Adams wrote late in life to Thomas Jefferson: "The [American] revolution was in the mind of the people, and in the union of the colonies, both of which were accomplished before the hostilities commenced."

Though the book is also designed for those who already know and love Milosz, it is primarily written for those looking for someone whose genius could similarly inspire Americans of both left and right to unite in restoring the badly broken politics of this country.

The book argues that Czeslaw Milosz is that genius, as perhaps the only person who has been praised by intellectual leaders like Chris Hedges on the left, and has also spoken at Hillsdale College, the intellectual citadel of the American right.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for Ecstatic Pessimist
• Half Title
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Part I: Milosz, Poetry, and Politics
• Chapter 1: Introduction: My Years with Milosz (1961–1967)
• Chapter 2: Milosz, Solidarity, and “Unpolitical Politics” : Or, Poetry and the Liberation of a People
• Chapter 3: Looking “From Above”: Milosz, Catastrophe, and “Doubleness”
• Part II: Milosz’s Poetry of the War
• Chapter 4: Milosz’s Wartime Poem-Sequence, Ocalenie: Part I: Overview: The Structure of the Book
• Chapter 5: Ocalenie Part II: “The World” as Hub of the Book
• Chapter 6: Ocalenie Part III: “Voices of Poor People”
• Chapter 7: Ocalenie Part IV: “Flight” and the Flight from Warsaw
• Chapter 8: Ocalenie Part V: The Three Final Poems
• Part III: Milosz After the War (1946–1960)
• Chapter 9: Milosz, Auden, and “A Treatise on Morals”
• Chapter 10: Milosz the Émigré: “The Eternal Moment”
• Chapter 11: The Poetic Hegelianism of A Treatise on Poetry
• Chapter 12: “A Treatise on Poetry,” Part IV: “Natura”
• Part IV: Milosz as Transnational Author
• Chapter 13: Milosz in Berkeley, 1961: “Throughout Our Lands”
• Chapter 14: Milosz as a Poet in Later Years (1964–2004)
• Chapter 15: Milosz’s Mature Prose: The Marriage of Blake and Eliot
• Chapter 16: Saning Insanity: Milosz as Healer of a Post-Secular Era
• Appendix: Three Poems to Czeslaw Milosz: Introduced by a Personal Memoir
• Appendix B: Three Poems to Czeslaw Milosz
• Permissions
• Notes
• A Short Milosz Bibliography
• About the Author