Between the Quotidian and the Transcendent
2005; University of Oklahoma; Volume: 79; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/40158665
ISSN1945-8134
Autores Tópico(s)Education and Cultural Studies
Resumo/W dam Zagajewski writes serious poems an age of irony and doubt. The {j^Twj* severely skeptical attitude of the era has come to expect discrepancy ^y what is said and what is meant, and as result our epoch, accoping to the poet, worships perversity. Zagajewski arrives at gravitas not \hi<migh lament over this modern fate of disillusionment and skepticism the face of fallen ideals of all sorts (romantic, Enlightenment, religious). Nor does he achieve seriousness by dismissal of the currency of the day: irony has won intellectual and literal freedoms by undercutting many barbarous monoliths of authority, including the totalitarian state. Nevertheless, as excessive doubt prevails today, its polemic arches over beauty to cut down the possibility of revelation and threatens to render poetry itself impossible. Against this prospect Zagajewski presents A Defense of Ardor, his recent volume of essays. Here he affirms life of seriousness that dares to open itself to pathos and beauty and their potentially uncontrollable, irrational illuminations. And while he acknowledges that we shall never rest the highlands of the beautiful, he finds life most meaningful when it moves in between materiality and mystery. This vital human situation arrives via poetry poetry that reaches beyond leveling irony. Elsewhere A Defense of Ardor, Zagajewski claims that he won't propose diagnosis but will instead offer meditation on the culture of doubt that has left much contemporary writing meager, gray, anemic. Appropriately, his poems surpass meditation. Zagajewski's recent full selection of poems, Without End, chronicles poetry that diagnoses the world and then becomes its vaccine, its cure. Here Zagajewski risks casting off doubt while maintaining irresolution; his lyrics move adroitly confidence and uncertainty. With the lyric, he will leverage the pieces of the world front of him into responsible understanding of both the everyday and the sacred. Zagajewski simultaneously lowers his sights and raises them he sees the heavens while staring at the floor. In his emblematic poem Transformation, Zagajewski faces what he calls an essay very ironic and skeptical landscape and relies on the transformative potential of poetry, the one thing that guides him. Failing to write a single poem months, he humbly stares at the mundanities of the world its newspapers, birds, sunsets, and windowsills but finds only their riddles and muteness rather than any lever of transcendence. Remarkably, instead of retreating E
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