Pieśni ekstatycznej rozpaczy. Miłosz i kontrkultura

This article discusses the relationship between American counterculture of the 1960s and Miłosz’s poetry created during that time in Berkeley. The poet observes the student revolt through the prism of his own experience with history, including his leftist sympathies. He is critical both of the naïve hippie postulates and Herbert Marcuse’s new version of Marxism. However, he treats counterculture as a symptomatic response to vital problems of the Western civilization of the second half of the twentieth century. He considers the infl uence of art on power, totalitarian as well as democratic. He sees the necessity of commitment, though he asks about its form and effects. Countercultural experiments coincide also with Miłosz’s own search for “a more capacious form” and with the epiphanies described in his poems.