Zbigniew Herbert
The Collected Poems: 1956-1998.
Ecco, 600 pages, $34.95
“Fatten your animal for sacrifice,” Apollo warned the ancient Greek poet Callimachus, whom opponents criticized for avoiding civic verse, “but keep your muse slender.” The implication of this directive—that poetry’s aesthetic value depends upon its refusal to engage in contemporary politics—has never been less true than in the case of the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert (1924–1998), whose slender Muse magically digests even the most ungainly of fares. His rejoinder to the ancient warning came late in his career, in the tribute to his own early mentor Henryk Elzenberg in 1992:
The times we lived in were truly a tale told by an idiot
Full of sound and cruelty
Your severe gentleness delicate strength
Taught me to weather the world like a thinking stone
Patient indifferent and tender all at once… .Praise be to your Books
Slender
Spacious
More lasting than bronze.
Forged under the political pressure of the Second World War and the subsequent Soviet occupation, Herbert’s profoundly original vision attests to the truth of this paradox: his own verse, though sparse and slender, opens inward to an abundant spaciousness. Hence the intellectually exciting, unforeseeable trajectory of a poem like “Fortune-Telling,” from his first volume Chord of Light(1956), which begins by distinguishing the mighty life-line that rushes through the “valley of the palm” from the stunted, “helpless” line of fidelity beside it. Maybe the line of fidelity is really this slender,
