Table of Contents

1. Starting from My Europe 2. Poets and the Human Family 3. The Lesson of Biology 4. A Quarrel with Classicism 5. Ruins and Poetry 6. On Hope Index

About the Author

Czeslaw Milosz was the first Slavic poet to hold the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship at Harvard University. He was Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Emeritus, at the University of California, Berkeley.

Reviews

Milosz is at all times direct, even simple. He has the ability to return the pleasure of poetry to ordinary readers, and in his prose, as here, he makes you suspect that the great intellectual sin of our time may be a fear of the obvious.
*Vanity Fair*

By the strength of its condensed and lucid exposition, The Witness of Poetry provides us with a key to Milosz’s poetic historiosophy, philosophy, and aesthetics. Of course, Milosz’s entire work offers one of the most profound responses to the dilemmas of our century.
*New Criterion*

[Milosz] speaks in The Witness of Poetry with the sort of quiet, preeminent brilliance that makes his defense [of poetry]…a classic for our time.
*Saturday Review*