Unattainable Earth

by Czesław Miłosz

Book Overview

Begun in the winter of 1955 and completed in the spring of 1956, Treatise on Poetry is a brilliant meditative poem fully expressive of the powers that have made Milosz one of our greatest writers. Expertly translated, the poem is divided into four parts -- Europe at the turn of the century, the condition of Polish culture between the two world wars, the harsh reality of World War II, and the role of the poet in the postwar world. Here Milosz addresses...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0880011025
• ISBN13: 9780880011020
• Release Date: September 1987
• Publisher: PerfectBound
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

This book goes everywhere I go

I bought this book in 1990, and it's travelled with me everywhere I've been since then. Not that I'm constantly reading it -- as a matter of fact, I think I last opened it a year ago -- rather, I think of it as a medicine cabinet of little insights and stories: wisdom in distilled, titrated doses, a portable collection of innoculations against quotidian ennui, antidotes for social blindness. It's hardly Milosz's best book; but it represents something of an apotheosis of the personal literary journal, and as such it's a good reference or example to have on hand. I sincerely recommend it.

Unattainable Earth

So far Unattainable Earth has been awesome. No, I haven't finished the book, but I've read enough to get a biased opinion about it. I'm determined to finish it because I like it a lot. The author put together different poems together from his and other authors' works. The poems are very well expressed, and showed many emotions. One thing that I liked the best was the fact that the author explained how you can never fully express yourself in poetry or anything else because we just don't have words for some things (p. 40). For me, I have a deep sense of love and hate that just can't be put into words. I do my best to write it in poetry, but it never works. I only know what I feel while the reader of my poetry gets just a glimpse of my true feelings. The poems written in Unattainable Earth are very descriptive and metaphoric. They don't all rhyme, but free verse is my favorite type of poetry. "Paradise"(p. 5-6) and "The Boy"(p. 52) have to be my favorite poems so far. I interpreted "Paradise" as being a poem of questioning and confusion. In seems that the author trys to describe paradise, but what is described isn't paradise at all. I love questioning deep subjects as paradise, love, and life. What are the real definitions of these words? I still have yet to learn because no one has been able to tell me. "The Boy" seems to be more lonely. I get the feeling of separation when I read it. I see the whole poem as a metaphor. It just shows how imperfect us humans are. The "gypsy girl" points out all these things we have in our lives. When you look up close you see an innocent boy, but when you look at the whole scheme you notice all the imperfections and you notice how you are like that boy. I gave this book a four-star rating because it is an awesome book. The only problem I had reading it was that when the book went from to inscript to poem to inscript I got confused. I got the mind set of reading poems, so I tried to read the inscript with a rhythm, and it didn't work to well. I love the book and I would reccomend anyone with a open mind to read it.