A Quarrel with Classicism

[…] The audience expects no surprises from the poet, since it knows from The Iliad what occurs after the curtain goes down. The audience expects only good poetic craft in a work on a given topic. 

A given topic, and topoi polished by long use like pebbles in a stream: that’s what both fascinates and irritates twentieth-century poets. For us classicism is a paradise lost, for it implies a community of beliefs which unite poet and audience. No doubt the poet was not then separated from the “human family,” though obviously that was a family of a modest size since the illiterate rural population, comprising the vast majority of the inhabitants of Poland and Europe as a whole, was perfectly indifferent to that system of allusions to Homer and Horace. But even if we take the small number into account, there was still a sense of belonging — thus a situation radically different from the loneliness of the bohemians, who could at best find readers among their peers and whose descendant and heir is the poet of today. Perhaps there is a good craftsman concealed in every poet who dreams about a material already ordered, with ready-made comparisons and metaphors endowed with nearly archetypal effectiveness and, for that reason, universally accepted; what remains then is to work on chiseling the language. Were classicism only a thing of the past, none of this would merit attention. In fact, it constantly returns as a temptation to surrender to merely graceful writing. For, after all, one can reason as follows: all attempts at enclosing the world in words are and will be futile; there is a basic incompatibility between language and reality, as demonstrated by the desperate pursuit practiced by those who wanted to capture it even through “le dérèglement de tous sense”, or by the use of drugs. If this is so, then let us respect the rules of the game as adopted by consensus and appropriate to a given historical period, and let us not advance a rook as if it were a knight. In other words, let us make use of conventions, aware that they are conventions and no more of that. 

[…] I have not permitted myself to introduce into my lecture a tragic and harsh element, seemingly ill adapted to a literary discussion, to belittle the importance of such charming poets as Kochanowski or La Pléiade. Whoever invokes genocide, starvation, or the physical suffering of our fellow men in order to attack poems or paintings practices demagoguery. It is doubtful whether mankind would gain anything if poets stopped writing idyllic poems or painters stopped painting brightly colored pictures just because there is too much suffering on the earth, in the belief that there is no place for such detached occupations. No, all I want is to make clear to myself and to my listeners is that, roughly described, a quarrel exists between classicism and realism. This is a clash of two tendencies independent of the literary fashions of a given period and of the shifting meaning of those two terms. These two opposed tendencies usually also coexist within one person. It must be said that the conflict will never end and that the first tendency is always, in one variety of another, dominant, while the second is always a voice of protest. When thinking of what is beautiful in the literature and painting of the past, what we admire and what fills us with joy simply because it exists, we must wonder at the power of nonrealistic art. Mankind appears to be dreaming a fantastic dream about itself, giving ever new but always bizarre shapes to the simplest relations between people or between man and Nature. This occurs because of Form, which has its own exigencies only partially dependent upon human intentions. Form favors a penchant for the hieratic and the classical; it resists attempts to introduce realistic detail, for instance, in painting, the black top hat and the frock coat that so incenses the critics of Courbet or, in poetry, such words as “telephone” and “train”. This makes for a long history of skirmishes around existing forms which are overcome but then immediately coagulate into forms just as “artificial” as the preceding ones. 

[…] A glass wall of conventions rises between a poet and reality, conventions never visible until they recede into the past, there to reveal their strangeness. One may also ask whether the melancholy tone of today’s poetry will not be recognized at some point as the veneer of a certain mandatory style. Not unlike ancient mythology and the Trojan War for the poets of the Renaissance, a vision deprived of hope may often be just a cliché common to the poetry of our time. And other habits limited freedom of movement. When it is not the perfection of a work that is important but expression itself, “a broken whisper”, everything becomes, as it has been called, écriture. At the same time, a sensitivity to the surface stimuli of each minute and hours changes that écriture into a kind of diary of sore epidemics. To talk about anything, just to talk, becomes an operation in itself, a means of assuaging fear. It is as if the maxim “It’s not we who speak the lgnauge, but the language that speaks us” were taking its revenge. For it is true that not every poet who speaks of real things necessarily gives them the tangibility indispensable to their existence in a work of art. He may as well make them unreal.

Czeslaw Milosz. A Quarrel with Classicism in The Witness of Poetry. HUP (1983)