[Milosz's] entire effort is directed toward a confrontation with experience—and not with personal experience alone, but with history in all its paradoxical horror and wonder.

Such an ambition could only be conceived, let alone undertaken, by a writer who has been immersed in history; and Mr. Milosz, far more than most writers of our time, has witnessed some of its cataclysmic events. (p. 14)

The translations in "Bells in Winter," made by Mr. Milosz in collaboration with Lillian Vallee, reveal a voice that is unadorned and discursive, yet capable of powerful (and delicate) poetic effects; it is a voice that works through traditional forms to transform and revivify tradition. The occasional stiffness of the English I take as a kind of tacit reminder of a wealth of allusion and linguistic play in the original Polish that is impossible to re-create in translation. This astringent and simple style, capable of expressing complete ideas with great compression, and employed in a variety of rhetorical forms—narrative, verse essay, ode, lyric—permits remarkable impersonality of expression though the poet often speaks in the first person or—in a sort of inner dialogue with himself—in the second.

A primary subject for Mr. Milosz … is the poet's relationship to his material…. [His] first responsibility is to register accurately the reality of human experience…. Only an active, reasoned response to experience, however unbearable, will suffice for him. (pp. 14, 25)

[Mr. Milosz has also deplored the] profoundly humanist conviction that poetry should ultimately call attention to what is positive, heroic, generous—in a word, good—in human life….

The concessive note, the ironic recognition of the difficulty of the poet's task and of his poverty of means to accomplish it, is also characteristic; but the essential affirmation is primary, and fundamentally religious. And indeed, in "From the Rising of the Sun," the long autobiographical-spiritual meditation that closes "Bells in Winter," Mr. Milosz reveals a mystical faith in "restoration."…

His own work provides dramatic evidence that in spite of the monumental inhumanities of our century, it is still possible for an artist to picture the world as a place where good and evil are significant ideas, and indeed active forces. Mr. Milosz gives memorable expression to this attitude in "Ars Poetica?"…

Few other living poets have argued as convincingly for the nobility and value of the poet's calling. Whatever its importance to Polish letters, Mr. Milosz's work, as poetry in English, presents a challenge to American poetry to exit from the labyrinth of the self and begin to grapple again with the larger problems of being in the world. (p. 25)