Reclaiming Romantic Tropes
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Theodor Adorno’s maxim about the obscenity of writing poetry after Auschwitz has been more often quoted than obeyed. Poetry, which in the 19th century fed on mountains and nightingales, and in the Modernist decades on subways and pylons, proved after 1945 that it could digest corpses and ashes as well. But even now, when poets have stopped drinking the “black milk” that Paul Celan wrote about in his Holocaust elegy “Death Fugue,” they have not gone back to feasting on ambrosia and nectar. The taste for transcendence, Romantic splendor – what Adam Zagajewski, in his new book, “A Defense of Ardor: Essays” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 208 pages, $24) calls “ardor” – may not have disappeared entirely. But in the last 50 years, poets and other artists have been able to indulge it only clandestinely, like addicts of a shameful drug.
This state of affairs, evident enough in English-language poetry – compare Auden and Lowell to Tennyson and Whitman – has been still more acute in the poetry of Central and Eastern Europe, theater and victim of the 20th century’s worst atrocities. In the 1970s and 1980s, American readers came to know a Polish poetry utterly purged of Romantic tropes and themes, whose glamour lay, paradoxically, in its modesty. Around the world, Polish poetry means the moral witnessing of Czes law Milosz, the bleak humanism of Zbigniew Herbert, the witty integrity of Wislawa Szymborska.
For Mr. Zagajewski – born in Lvov in 1945, and the leading Polish poet of the generation that followed those masters – this legacy is an inspiration, but also a peculiar kind of burden. In “Writing in Polish” – the last piece in the collection – he asks plaintively, “How do you rebel against truth’s martyrs, the magnificent, gifted witnesses to their age?” The answer he offers in his poetry and prose is that, while paying homage to those martyrs, you try to go beyond them – to reclaim the territory they ceded in their “intellectual articulation of reality.” “Its furious polemics with recent history,” Mr. Zagajewski contends, “meant that Polish literature couldn’t do justice to something we might call the ‘pure,’ ‘a historical’ imagination.”
Like all of Mr. Zagajewski’s work, though sometimes at a lower level of intensity, “A Defense of Ardor” explores the possibilities of reclaiming that imagination. His great subject is transcendence, the kind of fleeting, doubtful epiphany he described in his poem “The Gothic”:
Who am I here in this cool cathedral and who
is speaking to me so obscurely?
Who am I, suddenly subject to a new atmosphere,
pressure? Whose voices fill
this stone space?
Yet Mr. Zagajewski’s mysticism is, to quote the title of one of his poetry collections, “Mysticism for Beginners” – not confident or religious, but secular and skeptical. His self-imposed task is to retain the disabused, liberal humanism of his elders, while still leaving room for the kind of experience – pure, ahistorical, ardent – for which liberalism has no ready vocabulary.
The best essays in “A Defense of Ardor” address this balancing act head-on. In the title essay, Mr. Zagajewski tries to navigate between “the antimetaphysical but politically dependable liberal left (or perhaps rather ‘center’) and the potentially menacing but spiritually engaged right.” He writes of the discomfort, shared by so many readers, of suspecting that the proto- or quasi-fascist thinkers of modernity – Nietzsche, Heidegger – are deeper and truer than their liberal rivals: “as if everything higher, bolder, unironically intellectual must be linked by necessity to a pernicious past.” Mr. Zagajewski invokes Settembrini and Naphta, the famous antagonists of “The Magic Mountain” – the former humane but ludicrously ineffective, the latter seductively cruel and dangerous. Does a poet in search of transcendence have no choice but to succumb to Naptha’s dark allure?
Mr. Zagajewski refuses to believe this. He insists that “there really is a higher voice that sometimes – too rarely – speaks. … The voice we sometimes hear does not deprive us of our liberty; it demonstrates only that this freedom has its limits, that emancipation can only take us so far.” That it is possible to combine emancipation with enchantment is proved by the lives and works of the artists Mr. Zagajewski eulogizes in three of this collection’s most personal and moving essays: Milosz, Herbert, and the painter Jozef Czapski. Mr. Zagajewski calls Czapski “the master of my not-knowing,” a man never content with easy belief or disbelief: “his ‘I don’t know’ also caught spark, became far more powerful and moving than the hundreds of other ‘I knows’ I’ve encountered.” At the heart of “A Defense of Ardor,” even in its slighter and more occasional pieces, there shines that same ardent “I don’t know,” which makes Mr. Zagajewski one of the most appealing and deeply civilized poets of our time.