Images of America in "Daylight" by Czesław Miłosz

Daylight has a special place in Miłosz’s poetic work: it is the first volume of poetry after his defection to the West, but it contains texts written during his first visit to the United States in the late 1940s. At that time he held a post at the Polish Embassy and looked at America from the other shore of ideology and personal experience. The article examines the author’s selection of poems for the successive editions of Daylight. The first, full edition of that volume is critical of both European nihilism and American primitivism (the latter refers to lack of concern about the horrors of war). In the following editions the poet’s perspective begins to change. The ‘American’ poems now foreground his experience of the continent’s natural landscape. Its primeval magnificence offers shelter and, through a sense of ecstatic communion with the sources of being, new strength. Likewise, the denunciation of European cynicism, which dominates the verse selected for the first edition, is later allowed to fade away. Eventually the experiences on both sides of the Atlantic are brought into balance. In the subsequent, slimmer editions of Daylight it is the ‘Song about china’ that represents the key tone of the volume. Although it may look slight, it manages to contrast the brutality of history and the vulnerability of an individual life with remarkable precision and poetic lightness. One clear stanza can take more weight / Than a whole wagon of elaborate prose