The Witness of Poetry

Charles Eliot Norton Lectures

By: Czeslaw Milosz

Narrated by: Peter Bishop

Czeslaw Miosz, winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature, reflects upon poetry's testimony to the events of our tumultuous time. From the special perspectives of "my corner of Europe", a classical and Catholic education, a serious encounter with Marxism, and a life marked by journeys and exiles, Milosz has developed a sensibility at once warm and detached, flooded with specific memory yet never hermetic or provincial.

Milosz addresses many of the major problems of contemporary poetry, beginning with the pessimism and negativism prompted by reductionist interpretations of man's animal origins. He examines the tendency of poets since Mallarmé to isolate themselves from society, and stresses the need for the poet to make himself part of the great human family. One chapter is devoted to the tension between classicism and realism; Milosz believes poetry should be "a passionate pursuit of the real". In "Ruins and Poetry" he looks at poems constructed from the wreckage of a civilization, specifically that of Poland after the horrors of World War II. Finally, he expresses optimism for the world, based on a hoped-for better understanding of the lessons of modern science, on the emerging recognition of humanity's oneness, and on mankind's growing awareness of its own history.

©1983 Czeslaw Milosz (P)2012 Redwood Audiobooks

Critic reviews

"By the strength of its condensed and lucid exposition, The Witness of Poetry

provides us with a key to Milosz's poetic historiosophy, philosophy, and aesthetics. Of course, Milosz's entire work offers one of the most profound responses to the dilemmas of our century." (New Criterion)

"Milosz is at all times direct, even simple. He has the ability to return the pleasure of poetry to ordinary readers, and in his prose, as here, he makes you suspect that the great intellectual sin of our time may be a fear of the obvious." ( Vanity Fair)

"[Milosz] speaks in The Witness of Poetry with the sort of quiet, preeminent brilliance that makes his defense [of poetry]...a classic for our time." ( Saturday Review)

excellent content narration just ok.

great lecture, but the narrator has too strong of an accent, its a little off putting.

Poetry's Witness of Us

The lectures are oracular and wide-ranging, a visionary view of poetry at the end of a brutally violent century—but one that nevertheless looks with hope to the future, both poetry's and humanity's.

Audible needs more university press books

Fantastic narration job, and I'm glad to see accessible lectures and thought provoking lectures offered through audible. This merits multiple listens and thus the price tag for such a short audiobook. Narration was fantastic!

Interesting analysis of the role of the Poets over the years

The best part of this work is hearing the Author’s encyclopedic knowledge of European Poetry’s evolution in the Late 19th and 20th Centuries pour out. His personal experiences with the rise and fall of Totalitarian Regimes in Central and East Central Europe related in The Captive Mind lends credence to the binding of Poetry to the Life and Times of the Poets.

Reflecting on these theories allowed this Reader to appreciate the long dismissed importance of the Art of Poetry in understanding the History occurring all around us all the Time.

I gave Witness of Poetry only three stars due to so many references to Poems and Poets of Eastern Europe with whom I was unfamiliar. My problem, not Milosz’s. 😰
Three Stars. *** Four for the Narration. ****