SOURCE: Milosz, Czeslaw. “Dostoevsky and Swedenborg.” Slavic Review 34, no. 2 (June 1975): 302-18.

In the following excerpt, Milosz explores two twentieth-century interpretations of Swedenborg—the psychological portraits by Karl Jaspers and Paul Valéry—and compares them with William Blake's approach, which characterized Swedenborg's writings as supreme works of the imagination.

During the first half of our century much attention was paid to so-called symbolism in poetry, and it seems strange that despite this preoccupation Swedenborg was little known. After all, Baudelaire's sonnet “Les Correspondances,” a poem crucial to symbolist poetics, took its title and contents from Swedenborg. Curiosity alone should have directed critics to explore the original concept, not just its derivatives. The truth is that every epoch has dusty storage rooms of its own, where disreputable relics of the past are preserved. Swedenborg was left there, together with the quacks, miracle workers, and clairvoyants so typical of the...