Influence …

… Milosz as California poet: “I did not choose California. It was given to me.” | Quarterly Conversation. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Miłosz’s inevitable estrangement would necessarily reach its apogee in California. With its dramatic coastline and deserts, it anticipates a landscape that will endure beyond the last breath of the last man, the endpoint where American energy and aspirations are as negligible as a candle raised against the relentless California sun. As Irena Grudzinska Gross put it, “Here, in California, space is the greatest enemy: too much space imprisons as much as too little of it.”