Ambassador of Dreams

An important difference between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries,” observed the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz, “probably derives from the crossing of a certain threshold: things too atrocious to think of did not seem possible” before World War I. “But, beginning in 1914, they proved to be more and more possible. A discovery has been made that ‘civilizations are mortal,’” including Western civilization, which stands on the brink of destruction. For Miłosz, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980, poetry was called upon to bear witness to the atrocious, especially in Poland, which in World War II probably suffered more destruction than any other country. In the shadow of the Nazis and the Soviets, poetry had to be “eschatological.”