Opinions about treatises by Czesław Miłosz

A few opinions about treatises in verse by Czesław Miłosz, recently translated into Swedish:

“In A Treatise on Poetry there is a short fragment, some forty verses long, that is dedicated to the Spirit of Times. This is the greatest poetic pronouncement that I know. Intellectually it borders to something unfathomable.” – joseph brodsky

“At times, a poem is so powerful that it bursts the bounds in which it was written—the bounds of language, geography, epoch. … Coming upon a poem of that degree of power is a revelatory experience. … [A] Treatise on Poetry seems to me the most comprehensive and moving poem of this half-century. It will be excerpted and anthologized; and its blunt assertions about what poetry must, and must not, attempt will become part of the collective ars poetica of our culture.” – helen vendler

A Treatise on Poetry and A Treatise on Theology have been translated into English by the Author and Robert Hass. Six Lectures in Verse have been turned into English by the Author and Leonard Nathan. A Treatise on Morals remains untranslated.

All treatises in verse by Czesław Miłosz have been rendered into Swedish by Jurek Hirschberg. Read more here.