THE MUSIC OF WHAT IS: T.S. ELIOT AND CZESLAW MILOSZ, OR A QUIET MEDITATION ON TIME AND BEING

This paper looks at the unfailing vocation and the voracious passion to grasp the world that bring together Czeslaw Milosz and T.S. Eliot, two of the greatest poets of the 20th century. Eliot wrote Four Quartets, his undisputable masterpiece, at a time of historical upheaval during the Second World War. Milosz wrote his sequence of poems entitled “The World: A Naïve Poem” during the Nazi occupation of Warsaw in 1944. Thus, war was the unexpected witness to the birth of two poetical works of lasting value. Both sequence of poems are a moving and deep meditation on being, but also a pristine look at the world with its welcome mysteries and perfections. Milosz translated the crucial text of High Modernism, Eliot’s The Waste Land, into Polish in Nazioccupied Warsaw, and later he got to read and translate Burnt Norton, the first of the Four Quartets. Both Eliot and Milosz are poets that share the same intellectual lucidity when it comes to unveiling the intricate subtleties of the human condition, with all its contradictions, lights and shadows. This paper explores the essential aesthetic affinities shared by both giants of the Western canon.