Political catastrophe has defined the nature of our century, and the result—the collision of personal and public realms—has produced a new kind of writer. Czeslaw Milosz is the perfect example. In exile from a world which no longer exists, a witness to the Nazi devastation of Poland and the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe, Milosz deals in his poetry with the central issues of our time: the impact of history upon moral being, the search for ways to survive spiritual ruin in a ruined world.

Translation of his early work, collected in Selected Poems, is foremost a poetry of loss and aftermath. A more recent collection, Bells in Winter, reaches toward a poetry of recovery. The basis of his art, however, remains constant. In "Ars Poetica?," for example, the question mark in the title alerts us to the poem's theme: that although no aesthetic principle is...