Reading Milosz for the first time, even in translation, is a little like reading a poet who, at one and the same time, would combine something of the early Auden and the Eliot of The Waste Land and Four Quartets, minus the self-allusiveness of the former and the sometimes bookish wisdom of the latter.

The blending of private and public voices, the imaging of lyrical response to historical events, set off by a distinctly modern irony and a classical strictness of form, established the Milosz style—and his reputation as a major poet—as early as in his second volume, published in Poland immediately after the war and now reproduced in [Utwory Poetyckie: Poems]….

Above all what this volume reveals … is that Milosz's range is immense and his voices many, and that both seem to swell as time goes on. (Hence the difficulty of arriving at any final...