[Różewicz] tends in his poems to reflect a cold fury, the rage of someone who has been personally betrayed…. [His poems] show the anguish of a person unable to relinquish the hope in which he no longer has the slightest faith. (pp. 119-120).

The dramatic directness of ["The Survivor"] is typical of Różewicz. It expresses the bleak self-reliance of his search, of what comes across in this collection ["The Survivor" and Other Poems] as a career-long attempt to find that "teacher and master" within himself. The world being what it is, he has nowhere else to look. Różewicz's lines are short, his syntax simple and severe. Only rarely does he allow himself the luxury of a metaphor. His poems are the utterances of a man who can no longer consider individual perceptions, sensory or intellectual, in and for themselves. For him, each impression and thought...