Czesław Miłosz’s feminism : woman, body, the self

Streszcz. po ang.

This paper examines the peculiar poetic "feminism" of Czesław Miłosz. The author emphasizes Miłosz’s positive engagement with the problems of the physical body and corporeality, suggesting certain poetic solutions to the modern philosophical dilemma of the metaphysical “I” alienated from its own corporeal existence. Specifically, the author analyzes certain key passages in which the potential dissolution of the integral, metaphysical and traditionally "masculine" subject appears in a distinctly positive light. Miłosz sometimes embraces a "feminine" and corporeal model of what the author terms the "weak self", which the Polish poet links both with certain highly traditional archetypes of ‘femininity’ and with the basic nature of his own poetic art. Poetry itself is "feminine" in gender according to Miłosz since it "opens itself and waits for a creator, a spirit, a daemon". The author argues that this poetic feminism is simultaneously conservative and radical since it tends to express itself through schematic stereotypes, while potentially re-evaluating them. Finally, the paper explores the ways in which Miłosz’s feminism raises fundamental questions about how poetic language functions.