Miłosz was an avant-garde poet who consequently realized his program
of rejuvenating mid-twentieth-century Polish poetry: he wanted to cure the maladies
of Romantic and nationalistic discourses in order to prevent poetry from addressing
important contemporary issues. Although he fi nally became very critical of avantgardes,
his initial, restoring impulse came from the Poundian need to “make it new.”
Miłosz’s great poetry of the 1970s developed Pound’s formal inventions, particularly
the “ideogrammatic method,” thus generating meanings in the poem by setting its
fragments against one another. The Polish poet often criticized the achievements of the
New York School poets, yet he admired their artistic freedom. He realized, however,
that he himself could not contradict the “poetics of rescue” he had been following for
years. The world presented in Miłosz’s late poems is not obvious. Its most astonishing
feature is the perspective from which the narrator addresses the reader: the timeless
space, where the dead meet the living, has nothing to do with a picture of the world
based on mimesis. Miłosz’s “second space” has a lot in common with the “real reality”
designed by surrealists, which John Ashbery evokes in his recent poems. Both poets
reach a similar mystical point where the word touches upon the mystery.

Miłosz was an avant-garde poet who consequently realized his program
of rejuvenating mid-twentieth-century Polish poetry: he wanted to cure the maladies
of Romantic and nationalistic discourses in order to prevent poetry from addressing
important contemporary issues. Although he fi nally became very critical of avantgardes,
his initial, restoring impulse came from the Poundian need to “make it new.”
Miłosz’s great poetry of the 1970s developed Pound’s formal inventions, particularly
the “ideogrammatic method,” thus generating meanings in the poem by setting its
fragments against one another. The Polish poet often criticized the achievements of the
New York School poets, yet he admired their artistic freedom. He realized, however,
that he himself could not contradict the “poetics of rescue” he had been following for
years. The world presented in Miłosz’s late poems is not obvious. Its most astonishing
feature is the perspective from which the narrator addresses the reader: the timeless
space, where the dead meet the living, has nothing to do with a picture of the world
based on mimesis. Miłosz’s “second space” has a lot in common with the “real reality”
designed by surrealists, which John Ashbery evokes in his recent poems. Both poets
reach a similar mystical point where the word touches upon the mystery.