<P>The Nobel Prize-winning poet Czeslaw Milosz began his remarkable <I>A Treatise on Poetry</I> in the winter of 1955 and finished it in the spring of 1956. It was published originally in parts in the Polish émigré journal <I>Kultura.</I> Now it is available in English for the first time in this expert translation by the award-winning American poet Robert Hass.</P><P><I>A Treatise on Poetry</I> 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.</P>"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.<P><I>A Treatise on Poetry</I> 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.</P>

Czeslaw Milosz is a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.