%0 Journal Article
%T Songs of Ecstatic Despair. Miłosz and the Counterculture
%A Jaworski, Marcin
%J Przekładaniec
%V Issues in English
%R 10.4467/16891864ePC.13.021.1210
%N Issue 25/2011– Between Miłosz and Milosz
%P 147-157
%K Czesław Miłosz, counterculture, engaged literature, Marxism, epiphany
%@ 1425-6851
%D 2013
%U https://ejournals.eu/en/journal/przekladaniec/article/songs-of-ecstatic-despair-milosz-and-the-counterculture
%X 
	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.