[In "The Witness of Poetry", Mr. Milosz] constantly reminds us of a West-East axis in poetry drawn from contrasting human experiences; if he thinks ours more fortunate, he also, like his hero Dostoyevsky, thinks our writers pitiable.

He draws fervently on the terrible experiences of Polish poets in our time. But far from apologizing for poetry that may well be thought too extreme in the West, he just as fervently believes that the elemental strength of poetry, its ancient ritual quality, is realized "when an entire community is struck by misfortune, for instance the Nazi occupation of Poland."…

What Mr. Milosz presents is obviously the great divide in his mind between West and East—between our "alienated" poetry, full of introspective anxiety, and a poetry emerging under constant tyranny where "a peculiar fusion of the individual and the historical took place, which means that events burdening a whole...