Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004) felt that part of his role as a poet and critic was to bear witness to bloodshed and terror as well as to beauty. He survived the Soviet invasion of his beloved Lithuania, escaped to Nazi-occupied Warsaw where he joined the Socialist resistance, then witnessed the Holocaust and the razing of the Warsaw Ghetto. After persecution and censorship triggered his defection in 1951, he found not relief but the anguish of solitude...