Milosz's poetry and prose is political only in the higher sense of the word. The seemingly irresolvable plight of modern industrialized man—his loss of identity (national and personal), and especially his "refusal to remember"—disturbs and inspires Milosz's work. One has the feeling that Milosz has been dragged into the political arena reluctantly, that he would have been content to sit at his desk behind volumes of classics and foreign dictionaries. The times into which he was born, however, determined otherwise: neutrality and detachment, especially for a Lithuanian-Pole who was 28 when the Nazi blitzkrieg rolled into Warsaw, became an impossibility….

By nature an artist who demands a cold distance from his material, Milosz has been pushed by the circumstances of his (and his country's) history to immediately confront cruelty, death and destruction.

This combination of control and passion is one that Milosz shares with other great poets...