SOURCE: Introduction to Tremor: Selected Poems, by Adam Zagajewski, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1985, pp. xi-xii.

In the following introduction to the first English translation of Zagajewski's poems, Milosz praises him for transcending protest poetry and admires "the steady increase of his creative powers."

What a joy to see a major poet emerging from a hardly differentiated mass of contemporaries and taking the lead in the poetry of my language, a living proof that Polish literature is energy incessantly renewed against all probabilities! Born in 1945, Zagajewski belonged to the angry "generation of 1968" and started by satirizing both in his verse and in his prose the surreal character of the totalitarian state. While mocking the official language, he gradually developed a taste for expressing the political opposition of his generation through a "naked" speech practically stripped of metaphors. I discovered him then and praised the freshness of his style, not expecting...