Dialog Czesława Miłosza z Johnem Robinsonem Jeffersem – w oczach Amerykanów
The Dialogue Between Czesław Miłosz and John Robinson Jeffers – in the Eyes of Americans

Summary/Abstract: The article offers a reinterpretation – within the framework of the environmental humanities – of the dialogue between Czesław Miłosz and the philosophical concept of inhumanism developed by the Californian poet John Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962). The core of their dispute, which concerned fundamental ontological and theological questions such as the status of human consciousness and the place of the human being within the hierarchy of beings, lies in the opposition between Miłosz’s anthropocentric stance and Jeffers’s naturalistic pantheism. Whereas Miłosz, expressing a certain aversion to an “unfriendly” Nature, sought grounding in Christian religion and in the universal “labyrinth of culture,” Jeffers celebrated the elemental force underlying existence and its manifestations in the inexhaustible forms of both animate and inanimate nature. The article also incorporates an American perspective, focusing in particular on the poem Reply to Miłosz’s Poem “To Robinson Jeffers” by the Californian poet Michael Whitt, included in the volume Wild Harvest: Poems from the Land (1995). Whitt’s poetic response to Miłosz’s work, situated within an ecological discourse, attempts to elucidate the reasons – such as cultural differences and divergent historical experiences – why an understanding with the Polish poet proved unattainable. In an era marked by intensifying anthropogenic pressure and accelerating climate change, a renewed reading of the “dispute” between Miłosz, aligned with the “human order,” and Jeffers, who prioritized the well-being of the planet over the particular interests of humankind, appears both timely and necessary.

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