'Leave a Few Gulps for the Future'

“Robert Hass recalled how his contemporaries often reached for [Zbigniew] Herbert and [Czesław] Miłosz as an antidote to Frank O’Hara because ‘Polish poetry contains a great deal of sobriety, irony, a sense of intricate history. . . and that was something which gave literature force . . . It roused me, inspired, taught me to be vigilant, intelligent, sensitive towards history, which one might get entangled in.’”

This comes from Miłosz: A Biography (trans. Aleksandra and Michael Parker, Belknap Press, 2017) by Andrzej Franaszek. Straight talk is always welcome. O’Hara’s accidental death at age forty placed him beyond criticism. Strictly speaking, what he wrote was not poetry but that’s heresy among certain readers. O’Hara’s work, like Ashbery’s and Schuyler’s, was popular and influential because it looked easy to write. In fact, it was: anything goes. Ephemeral incoherence and navel-gazing, the default mode of the ungifted.

Hass is right to contrast it with the work of the Poles, especially Herbert. It’s like comparing adolescents and grownups. Sentiment is on the side of the former, and the maturity of the latter remains a reproach. One is tempted to set up a Jamesian opposition between jejune Americans and seasoned Europeans, but that’s simplistic. Take these lines from “Mr. Cogito Reflects on Suffering” (The Collected Poems 1956-1998, trans. Alissa Valles, 2007):

“use suffering mildly with moderation

like a prosthetic limb

without false shame

but without pride also”

Conventional self-help wisdom assures us that pain is inevitable, suffering optional. That’s not always the case. Herbert understands human weakness and veniality. We turn suffering into a badge of honor. For him, veteran of the Hitler and Stalin wars, wisdom is no balm:

“drink an extract of bitter herbs

but not to the dregs

be careful to leave

a few gulps for the future”