Milosz the Anthologizer

It's tempting to say that we get a poetry anthology from Czeslaw Milosz because he is, well, Czeslaw Milosz, and as the voice of Western Civilization, he gets to publish anything he wants.

That was my ungracious first impulse when I first happened upon A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry just lately (the copyright is 1996; Milosz died in 2004).

A more considered judgment would infer that maybe he gets to publish it because he is a very good anthologizer and because exhibits his remarkable personality in all its luminosity. Anthologizing itself can be, after all, a creative act: what to choose and what to leave out? But more than just choosing, Milosz has fleshed out his collection with commentary, to the end of explaining what he is about.

His program is ambitious. "I have always felt," he declares in an introduction,

that a poet participates in the management of the estate of poetry ... . Thinking about that estate, such as it is at the present moment, I decided I could contribute to its possessions provided, however, that instead of theory, I brought to it something of practice. . . . My intention is not so much to defend poetry in general, but, rather, to remind readers that for some very good reasons it may be of importance today. (xv-xvi)

And so we are off on an quest that brings back no Byron, no Shelley, no Keats, no Shakespeare nor (for what it is worth) any T. S. Eliot or Hart Crane--not even any Berthold Brecht. It is, then, a highly personal collection. There is a sort of a "theme" in that virtually all the poems are short, pithy and to the point. It is heavy on Asian--maybe there is an Asian tendency to be pithy and to the point. There's a bit of Polish and other Eastern European but not, perhaps, quite as much as you might expect. It's all organized thematically ("Epiphany," "Travels," "Woman's Skin," that sort of thing). There are 11 such; the last one is called "History," but Milosz explains:

This chapter is in reality an anti-chapter. For poets of the wentieth century, history has been all-pervading, and much as they owuld like to turn to the eternal subjects of love and death, they ahve been forced to be aware of wars, reovlutions, and the changes of political systems. (293)

Milosz says that he is "reticent" even so much as to offer such a chapter in troubled times. But he declares:

... I rejoice in being able to make an anthology such as this one, and it may be source of optimism that in this cruel century such an anthology can be made. (Id.)

Here's one of the translations, this from the Chinese:

On branch tips the hibuscus bloom
The mountains show off red calices.
Nobody. A silent cottage in the valley.
One by one flowers open, then fall.

--Wang Wei, "Magnolia Basin,"
Czeslaw Milosz, A Book of Luminous Things 136 (1996)
Translation by Tony and Willis Barnstone and Xu Haixin