“All right, but doesn’t it all boil down to his conviction that literature should be an uplifting business?” I was asked this question by an American friend of mine when we exchanged opinions on the first of Czeslaw Milosz’s six Norton Lectures at Harvard. His skepticism struck me as being out of accord with the usual appraisal of Milosz’s work. After all, Milosz’s name has always been associated by Polish critics with the dark mood of the 1930s—with the “catastrophist” school in prewar poetry. And his more recent poetry and prose hardly show him to be an easygoing optimist. Ironically, Milosz’s lectures coincided with the imposition of martial law in Poland—in other words, with yet another attempt to bury Polish hopes.

And yet the underlying theme of Milosz’s six lectures is nothing less than hope, and poetry as a possible source of hope. Hope against hope, to be sure, since the author himself realizes that almost nothing in either contemporary poetry or the recent history of our civilization seems to justify such expectations. At least in Western societies, the reading public as well as poets themselves have long been reconciled with a poetry reduced to confessing its own helplessness. Milosz begins by looking at the problem from a different perspective. His poetic credo has been shaped, after all, by his experience as an East European poet living in exile in the West. Accordingly, his introductory lecture, “Starting from my Europe” (which condenses the broad range of problems treated