Jurek Polanski: In your poem "Dedication," you wrote: "That I wanted good poetry without knowing it,/That I discovered, late, its salutary aim,/In this and only this I find salvation."
Milosz: I consider myself, to a large extent, to have been saved by poetry. At one time, I was too much under the influence of philosophy, and I noticed that that was very detrimental to my internal equilibrium. I had to go back to poetry to save myself from philosophy. To this day I still believe that in poetry there is much more wisdom. For example, in the work of the American poet better known than all others taken together, Walt Whitman.
This resonates with my own experience. Corbin was instrumental in saving me from philosophy and freeing me for poetry - both because of the nature of his own relation to philosophy and because of his privileging of Imagination as the primary human act. Perhaps even more important, partly at least because I read him first, was James Hillman. I think both of them can help to save us from "fundamentalism" which comes in a tremendous variety of disguises and requires constant attention to unmask and energy to defend against. For that reason alone both of them deserve our attention and our thanks.
Photo from Poetry Foundation here.
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