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“... the Swedish jury awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature to Poland’s greatest living poet, Czeslaw Milosz. He, too, was given a hero’s welcome when he visited his native country, after nearly thirty years’ exile – an event that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. When a Beckett or a Sartre is awarded the Nobel Prize for ...”

“... those coincidences which one is minded mindlessly to call ironical, both arms of Donald Davie’s Czeslaw Milosz and the Insufficiency of Lyric are also embraced in Enright’s book. Enright has a section on ‘Milosz and the Case Against’, a respectful wary circling which becomes incautious only at the moment ...”

“... have fallen out of circulation: Tuwim, Staff, Galczynski, Slonimski. Today it is the voice of Czeslaw Milosz that is listened to in Poland and, above all, that of Norwid. By instinct, the community has found its way back to the side of this 19th-century poet – immortal, yet treated dismissively in his own lifetime and laid in his grave as ‘a ...”

“... it is one of Weissbort’s senior citizens who has blown the whistle on his enterprise. This is Czeslaw Milosz, who accordingly earns the pained comment: ‘One senses in him a reluctance to accept a position that historical and personal circumstances have thrust upon him.’ Translated, this means: Milosz has ...”

“... one case to the next.’ The distinction is not altogether clear, and becomes mystifying when, in Czeslaw Milosz and the Insufficiency of Lyric (1986), he expresses a strong preference for ‘the language of the schools’ in poetry as against the use of non-technical language, where that alternative is available. There is no reason why such terms should ...”

“... sake, and he offers a spirited defence of Larkin’s ‘Aubade’ against tut-tutting readings by Czeslaw Milosz and Seamus Heaney. On the charge of anti-semitism he is implacable, even reprieving the passage in After Strange Gods about too many ‘free-thinking Jews’ being ‘undesirable in a Christian society’. It would be repressive of Jews, in ...”

“... One sees the same development not only in Pound but in Pasternak and in a later modernist like Czeslaw Milosz (who incidentally shares MacDiarmid’s veneration for Lao Shestov). The development is inevitable for any poet who thinks that his calling imposes on him some social responsibility. The lyrist does not recognise that, and is glad not to have ...”

“... There​ was a primed plastic water pistol, yellow or green, on every table at Derek Walcott’s 84th birthday lunch at the Ladera hotel on the west coast of St Lucia. The Walcott entourage had taken over the restaurant and after we’d dined on saltfish with green bananas, the staff gathered and the guests stood up to sing ‘Happy Birthday’. Then came the carving of a three-foot-square cake embossed with a likeness in icing of the poet’s head, his cautious smile carried on layers of sponge in blue and yellow stripes, two of the four colours of the island’s flag, blue for the sea and yellow for sunshine ...”

“... telling account of Ted Hughes’s and Hill’s varyingly suspect appropriations of a passage from Czeslaw Milosz in which Davie defines the ‘distracting sonorities’ of Hill’s prose; in a generously empathetic essay on the critic Kenneth Cox, Davie clearly relishes Cox on Hill’s ‘movement slowed to a processional drag ... all inanimate, embalmed ...”

“... to the police, by swallowing a lying excuse of hers concerning a subversive brother. The poets Czeslaw Milosz and Donald Davie are bothered by the insufficiency and irresponsibility of the lyric genre – and their views are discussed in the next article in this issue. It could be felt that Kundera goes further, in denouncing the lyric, and fares ...”

“... some of the political anguish burned off, perhaps a little as happened with his friends Czeslaw Milosz and Joseph Brodsky.His late poems return to the rustic archaic innocence of Mossbawn and then Bellaghy in County Derry, and it feels like the grateful reassertion of something small and pacific and local that actually never left him: ‘It ...”

“... sense of the difference between living in the world and looking in on it.’ In a fine essay on Czeslaw Milosz, a writer he understands sympathetically because of Milosz’s Tolstoyan healthiness, he writes – accurately, I think – that Milosz ‘is one of the few poets who does ...”

“... and so on) are grounded in the actualities of reading. He starts well, quoting a poem in which Czeslaw Milosz reads the Greek New Testament while running his finger along the lines of text; but he quickly abandons this scene to talk about ethics and the Eucharist. How much of the tactility that Milosz describes ...”

“... Englandism of many of his peers, notably Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis. He wrote a book about Czeslaw Milosz, translated many poems from Polish and Russian. In his memoir, These the Companions, he describes what he improbably calls F.R. Leavis’s charm, but the hero of the book is the Californian critic Yvor Winters, a man whose demands on poetry ...”

“... in the first place. Witness, his own work, had a marked influence on Arthur Koestler and on Czeslaw Milosz and is, indeed, the nativist American equivalent of Darkness at Noon or The Captive Mind. With its ostentatious religiosity and its relentless emphasis on redemption and conversion – and its subplot concerning the triumph of the plain man ...”