Larkin, Miłosz and the Pathos of Western Civilisation

This paper compares poetic strategies of Czesław Miłosz and Philip Larkin in the context of the sublime—category constitutive for the modern aesthetics. Kantian sublime implies the exclusion of cognitive and ethical subjectivity of the so-called wild man. According to Kant, “savage,” as a non-entity incapable of the sublime, cannot experience world in an aesthetic way and, as a result, has no access to – mediated by the aesthetics—rationality of a civilized man. Miłosz’s and Larkin’s poetic strategies represent in a different way the modern lyrical pathos of subjectivity and meaning.