which is the title of a talk by Paul Bové, Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh: Misprisions of Utopia: Messianism, Apocalypse, and Allegory: Fri Jan 29, 2010, 2–3pm, at UCSC, Humanities Bldg 1, Room 520.

Paul Bové has published such books as: Destructive poetics: Heidegger and modern American poetry (Columbia University Press, New York, 1980); Intellectuals in power: a genealogy of critical humanism (Columbia University Press, New York, 1986); In the wake of theory (Wesleyan University Press, 1992); Mastering discourse: the politics of intellectual culture (Duke University Press, Durham, 1992); Early postmodernism: foundational essays (Duke University Press, Durham, 1995); Edward Said and the work of the critic: speaking truth to power (Duke University Press, Durham, 2000); Poetry against torture: criticism, history, and the human (Hong Kong University Press, Hong Kong, 2008).

The last title brings me to Czeslaw Milosz,

In Warsaw
….
I did not want to love so.
That was not my design.
I did not want to pity so.
That was not my design.
My pen is lighter
Than a hummingbird’s feather. This burden
Is too much for it to bear.
How can I live in this country
Where the foot knocks against
The unburied bones of kin?
I hear voices, see smiles. I cannot
Write anything: five hands
Seize my pen and order me to write
The story of their lives and deaths.
Was I born to become
a ritual mourner?
I want to sing of festivities,
The greenwood into which Shakespeare
Often took me. Leave
To poets a moment of happiness,
Otherwise your world will perish.

It’s madness to live without joy
And to repeat to the dead
Whose part was to be gladness
Of action in thought and in the flesh, singing, feasts,
Only the two salvaged words:
Truth and justice.

(Warsaw, 1945, from New and collected poems, 1931–2001 [Harpercollins, 2001])