TY - JOUR TI - Songs of Ecstatic Despair. Miłosz and the Counterculture AU - Jaworski, Marcin TI - Songs of Ecstatic Despair. Miłosz and the Counterculture AB - This article discusses the relationship between the American counterculture of the 1960s and Miłosz’s poetry created during that time in Berkeley. The poet observes the student revolt through his own experience with history, including his leftist sympathies. He is critical both of the naïve hippie postulates and Herbert Marcuse’s new version of Marxism. However, he treats counterculture as a symptomatic response to vital problems of the Western civilization in the second half of the twentieth century. He refl ects upon the infl uence of art on power, totalitarian as well as democratic. He sees the necessity of commitment, though he asks about its form and effects. Countercultural experiments coincide also with Miłosz’s own search for “a more capacious form” and with the epiphanies described in his poems.   VL - Numery anglojęzyczne IS - Issue 25/2011– Between Miłosz and Milosz PY - 2013 SN - 1425-6851 C1 - 1689-1864 SP - 147 EP - 157 DO - 10.4467/16891864ePC.13.021.1210 UR - https://ejournals.eu/czasopismo/przekladaniec/artykul/songs-of-ecstatic-despair-milosz-and-the-counterculture KW - Czesław Miłosz KW - counterculture KW - engaged literature KW - Marxism KW - epiphany