[In] the modern poetry of the West there has been an almost exclusive concentration on perception for perception's sake, ignoring both myth and history. For years one would not have known from the pages of American poetry magazines that there were dangers from fallout, war in Vietnam, starvation abroad, or nations striving for freedom while immersed in bondage. (p. 2)

However, to poets like Milosz, Tadeusz Rozewicz, and Zbigniew Herbert, all of whom saw the Warsaw ghetto gutted and later beheld Warsaw itself leveled and then throttled by a new authoritarianism, philosophy became an imperative of spiritual survival. As Milosz himself points out in his History of Polish Literature, 1969, the imperative centered on poetry for the very pragmatic reason that poetry took up less physical space in the Underground. Its adventures and its explorations thrived. Nevertheless, as Milosz has written: "Nazi rule did not spur clear thinking about the...