Seeing
Reading Czesław Miłosz’s Nobel Prize Lecture from 1980, I am struck by this paragraph: ‘One of the Nobel laureates whom I read in childhood influenced to a large extent, I believe, my notions of poetry. That was Selma Lagerlöf. Her Wonderful Adventures of Nils, a book I loved, places the hero in a double role. He is the one who flies above the Earth and looks at it from above but at the same time sees it in every detail. This double vision may be a metaphor of the poet’s vocation. I found a similar metaphor in a Latin ode of a Seventeenth-Century poet, Maciej Sarbiewski, who was once known all over Europe under the pen-name of Casimire. He taught poetics at my university. In that ode he describes his voyage – on the back of Pegasus – from Vilno to Antwerp, where he is going to visit his poet-friends. Like Nils Holgersson he beholds under him rivers, lakes, forests, that is, a map, both distant and yet concrete. Hence, two attributes of the poet: avidity of the eye and the desire to describe that which he sees.’ Our time needs such panoramic seers and careful describers.
