"Is non-eschatological poetry possible?" A smart shudder of embarrassment passed through the crowd at Harvard University when Czeslaw Milosz asked this question. It seemed to put the burden of proof upon the enemies of the eschaton. It was surely not a proper question of poetics. The occasion was the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, which were not set up as a spiritual exercise. But Czeslaw Milosz's were….

The Witness of Poetry, the text of his Norton Lectures, is the credo of a great poet. It reveals that Milosz is really a religious thinker. His religiousness is not "tacit," as a critic recently claimed; it is explicit, as it has been in his poems for many years. What is tacit, in this book, is his politics. The politics, to be sure, are anti-Communist; and the authority of Milosz's anticommunism is pretty much absolute. He is angry at universalism and utopianism...