[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 is a means of sustaining his sense of having survived. Moreover, there can be no letting-up in this effort. Time is too questionable for him to allow himself anything more than a strict and constant registering of essentials.

Różewicz's "In the Midst of Life" [is] … a stark illumination of the post-war perspective of Różewicz and his contemporaries…. The voice here is that of the survivor attempting with fearful care to reason and feel in a shattered world…. The survivor is hesitantly testing in a dialogue with himself his capacity to reestablish order with shreds of the familiar. "Let him once again name things and concepts" was the appeal in ["The Survivor"]. Now, however, there is no question of finding a teacher. Resuming life in a destroyed world is a personal process in which one moves toward complex awareness through a series of painful, halting steps, each of which links thought and observation. Something is defined and then seen in the world…. "In the Midst of Life" is a poem of inescapable power. In it acts of naming and understanding become matters of life and death. The poem itself becomes a crucial instance of the process it describes, defining and justifying its own extreme claim to necessity. In this and in many other poems …, Różewicz presents us with poetry as nothing less than a means of living. (pp. 120-22)