Czeslaw Milosz, poet, literary critic, essayist and Nobel Laureate, is a familiar person to the Anglophone literary community. But American and British critics in the main are not very competent in the intimate features of Polish literary culture and have no access to the Polish language. This volume presents some of the most penetrating commentaries on Milosz's oeuvre by Polish critics. They illuminate both intrinsic poetic matters, such as the verse structure or the genre tradition, and the specific historic background of his poems, such as life under Nazi occupation. This comprehensive outline will be indispensable to anyone wanting to understand the real meaning of the often enigmatic writer and his, as Helen Vendler called it, Shakespearean breadth. The most comprehensive book in English on the Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz combines literary and historical approaches to his poems, essays, literary criticism and translations and to his poetic self-image. It offers an account of the Polish cultural milieu in the 20th century and interprets the fate of poetry under two totalitarian regimes.