Conclusion

This Conclusion summarizes the book’s interpretation of Czesław Miłosz’s work as a paradoxically materialist response to what he sees as the violent historical consequences of reductive forms of materialism. The emphasis is placed on deeper exploration of the body as Miłosz’s answer to the dehumanization and secularization that supposedly threaten the human individual in modern times, and on the potential for “transcendence” through material or sensual experience. The Conclusion reviews Miłosz’s concern with poetic form in his efforts to bridge seemingly disparate realities: the human and the divine; the material flesh and the immaterial spirit; horizontal transcendence and vertical transcendence. It ends with a brief final interpretation of a poem that captures the book’s central concerns with the body, transcendence, and poetic form, focusing on rhythm and the blood.