Emblematy nieskończoności w poezji Czesława Miłosza. Rekonesans

• Authors: Zofia ZARĘBIANKA

Title variants

EN

The Emblems of Infinity in the Poetry of Czesław Miłosz: A Reconnaissance

• Languages of publication: PL

Abstracts

EN

The first part of the paper offers an insight into the meanings attributed to infinity in the poems by Czesław Miłosz, and into the conceptual and figurative equivalents of infinity in his poetic output. It appears that, to Miłosz, infinity marks the creative act as such, as well as it marks poetry or, broadly speaking, art, which he sees as a reality in a way immortalizing the perishable earthly existence and attributing eternal permanence to it. The second part of the paper is focused on an interesting mechanism one can observe in the functioning of the concept of infinity in the poetry of this Polish winner of the Noble Prize in literature: in his poems, the abstract notion of infinity finds a correspondence in particular images, evoked by the memories oflandscapes, which (in particular in the poems from his later output) become an emblem of infinity conceived of as eternity. Interestingly, the temporal understanding of infinity (provided eternity can be considered a temporal category) involves spatial images present in the lyrical subject’s reminiscences of the landscapes of his childhood. Thus the reader encounters a peculiar transposition of the spatial into the temporal and of the temporal into the spatial. The phenomenon in question appears significant and needs to be taken into account in a description of the determinants of Miłosz’s religious imagery, as well as in a reconstruction of its deep and hidden structure. Both conceptions of infinity (infinity as art and infinity as eternity) have theirjustification and common denominator in Miłosz’s idea of philosophy and in his understanding of poetry. Translated by Dorota Chabrajska

Keywords

EN

literary studies, the history of 20th century Polish literature, Czesław Miłosz, poetry, interpretation

• Publisher: Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski Jana Pawła II
• Journal: Ethos. Kwartalnik Instytutu Jana Pawła II KUL
• Year: 2012
• Volume: 25
• Issue: 3 (99)

Dates

published

2020-02-19

Contributors

author

Zofia ZARĘBIANKA