Fighting with Czesław Miłosz
Czesław Miłosz.
It is a blessing for a poet to have a Great Poet to fight with, forever.
I don’t mean a Great Poet one merely despises. That’s nothing. It has to be someone you partly love, partly revere, but who lets you down over and over and over and makes you want to scream.
The Great Poet has to be one from whom you are continuously learning, even if most of the time what you’re getting is a kind of cautionary tale. He or she has to be someone you can never get rid of. You keep going back.
Does everybody remember Ezra Pound’s little epigram about his deal with Walt Whitman? Here, I can do it from memory:
A Pact
I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman. I have detested you long enough. I come to you like a grown child Who has had a pigheaded father. I am old enough now to make friends. It was you that broke the new wood; Now is a time for carving. We have one sap and one root: Let there be commerce between us.
