Ecstatic Pessimist

Czelaw Milosz, with his unblinking witness to horror and his insistence on hope for humanity, has never seemed more relevant. To meet this moment, Peter Dale Scott bring his more than fifty years of personal and critical engagement with Milosz. Ecstatic Pessimist simultaneously illuminates the arc of Milosz's oeuvre and narrates a passionate reader's lifelong engagement. A major contribution to Milosz studies.

Czeslaw Milosz is that rare poet whose work has crossed seemingly impassable boundaries of place and time. Peter Dale Scott and Milosz were colleagues at Berkeley, and Scott, who had been a Canadian diplomat in Poland, became one of Milosz's first translators into English. From the unique perspective of a complex friendship, Scott is able to show us, as almost no one else can, the vatic, prophetic role Milosz had in Poland, how it was transformed by war and decades in the United States, and emerged again triumphant in his late years. Learned and beautifully written, Ecstatic Pessimist takes us on a journey to the heart of Milosz's poetry, vibrant with the contradictions that make him a prophet of the post-modern age.

For English language readers of Czeslaw Milosz, nothing could be a richer addition to the critical literature than Peter Scott's Ecstatic Pessimist. Scott is a distinguished poet, knows Polish, has a diplomat's knowledge of Polish politics in the twentieth century. collaborated with Milosz on translation projects, and has written a brilliant and illuminating book on the complex and essential poet.

Of all the great poets of the late Twentieth Century, Milosz is the most multifaceted, even self-contradictory. Peter Dale Scott knew him personally. And he partly shares some of his subject's less fashionable attitudes: a certain sympathy for rural and conservative, as opposed to "neoliberal," values; and a utopian hope that poetry can "save nations or peoples." Scott's own dialectical thinking makes him a perfect guide to Milosz, especially to the texts less well known in American.

When Czeslaw Milosz began his California exile in 1960, poet and former diplomat Peter Dale Scott worked alongside him as a scholar, translator, and fellow poet. Ecstatic Pessimist is the culmination of decades of their thought, study, and friendship. "I have tried to be true to the Milosz I knew and loved," he writes. He has succeeded. We are fortunate to have Scott as a guide to one of the greatest poets of our times, offering us a wise, insightful, and deeply learned journey through Milosz's poems and life in these pages. Scott has waited sixty years to share this rich legacy.