The Nobel Prize-winning poet Czeslaw Milosz began his remarkable A Treatise on Poetry in the winter of 1955 and finished it in the spring of 1956. It was published originally in parts in the Polish émigré journal Kultura. Now it is available in English for the first time in this expert translation by the award-winning American poet Robert Hass.
A Treatise on Poetry is a great poem about some of the most terrible events in the twentieth century. Divided into four sections, the poem begins at the end of the nineteenth century as a comedy of manners and moves with a devastating momentum through World War I to the horror of World War II. Then it takes on directly and plainly the philosophical abyss into which the European cultures plunged."Author's Notes" on the poem appear at the end of the volume. A stunning literary composition, these notes stand alone as brilliant miniature portraits that magically re-create the lost world of prewar Europe.A Treatise on Poetry evokes the European twentieth century, its comedy and terror and grief, with the force and expressiveness of a great novel. A tone poem to a lost time, a harrowing requiem for the century's dead, and a sober meditation on history, consciousness, and art: here is a masterwork that confronts the meaning of the twentieth century with a directness and vividness that are without parallel.

A Treatise on Poetry

Literature & Fiction

Czesław Miłosz

Poetry

The Ecco Press

THE COLLECTED POEMS - 1931-1987

Miłosz, Czesław

Eight essays describe the author's travels in Ceylon, Central America, and Africa, and his impressions of each land's culture

Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue

History

Paul Bowles

Africa

Childhood And Other Neighborhoods

DYBEK, Stuart

Short Stories & Anthologies

The poems of Walt Whitman meant little to me when I read them in high school and college. Lucidly, when I was teaching at the University of Grenoble in my late twenties, I was required to give a course on Whitman. My experience of Leaves of Grass then was intense.... Soon I understood that poetry could be transcendent, hymn-like, a cosmic song, and yet remain idolatrously attached to the creatures and things of our world .... Once again, as when I first began writing, it seemed it might be possible to say everything in poetry.

The Essential Whitman

Galway Kinnell

Walt, Whitman

The Selected Poems of Tomaz Salamun (Ecco's Modern European Poetry Series)

Tomaž Šalamun

Poems deal with walks, leaves, starlings, flowers, aging, faithfulness, spring, childhood and travel

Boy on the Step: Poems(American Poetry Series)

Stanley Plumly

Suggests interpretations of paintings by the controversial modern artist, and discusses the influence of Rilke and Picasso on his work

A Balthus Notebook

Arts & Photography

DAVENPORT, Guy

Graphic Design

Paris, Texas/Screenplay

Sam Shepard

Depicts the daily experiences and associations of the American writer in Tangier

DAYS TANGIER JOURNAL

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

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