Wersja ang. dostępna online; tekst w j. pol.: 10.4467/16891864PC.12.009.0436. Bibliogr. s.145.

This article discusses Czesław Miłosz’s ambiguous relationship with American beat and confessional poetry as well as with the counterculture of the 1960s. It focuses on one of Miłosz’s late poems dedicated to Allen Ginsberg, published in Facing the River in 1994. The poem, though ostensibly about Ginsberg, is in fact one of the most confessional poems the Polish poet has ever written, presenting his own life as a failure, “a discarded tire by the road,” and setting up Ginsberg as an exemplary wiser poet, “who persisting in folly attained wisdom.” On the one hand, it seems diffi cult not to see Miłosz and Ginsberg as two very different personalities. On the other hand, Miłosz saw Ginsberg as the true heir to Whitman, whom he himself had always admired. The discussion of the poem reveals that Miłosz uses Ginsberg as his own antithesis, a Yeatsian mask or a Jungian shadow, representing everything that the Polish poet, with his admitted contempt for any trace of weakness and mental instability, has never been or valued.