Niepotrzebna opona na skraju drogi, czyli Miłosz rozlicza się z Ginsbergiem

The article discusses Czesław Milosz’ ambiguous relationship with American beat and confessional poetry, and with the counterculture of the sixties, focusing on one of his late poems dedicated to Allen Ginsberg published in Facing the River in 1994. The poem, though ostensibly about Ginsberg, is in fact one of the most confessional poems Milosz has ever written, presenting his own life as failure, “a discarded tire by the road”, and setting up Ginsberg as an exemplary wiser poet, “who persisting in folly attained wisdom”. Seemingly, it is hard to think of two more different personalities than Miłosz and Ginsberg. On the other hand, however, Ginsberg was to Miłosz the true heir to Whitman, whom Miłosz has always admired. It is argued here that in the poem discussed, Ginsberg served Miłosz as his antithesis, a Yeatsian mask, or a Jungian shadow, representing everything that Miłosz, with his admitted contempt for any trace of weakness and mental instability, has never been or valued.