Milosz calls one of his chapters [in The Witness of Poetry] "Poets and the Human Family," and it is that bond, which he explores both historically and critically, that marks the best work, in Poland or anywhere. Milosz does not call for poems about political situations. Rather, he seems to wonder how good work can be written, no matter how private its subject matter, without the poet having been aware of the pain and threat of the human predicament, so tormented in so many ways and places—including our own neighborhoods and courtrooms and bedrooms, in our own history both social and familial. Milosz describes a poetic style that is apparently not very adaptable to American life—the characteristically laconic, bitter, ironic style of many Eastern European poets, whose distrust of language comes not out of semiological distaste for blatant reference to the tangible world, but out of...