"In order to be able to read his poems and prose, I needed a special permit from the dean of my college." Adam Zagajewski on Czeslaw Milosz • Threepenny Review

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"By the time of his death, on the day consecrated to St. Maximilian Kolbe, Milosz seems to have made a kind of peace with 'unavoidable contradictions'." Cynthia Haven • Poetry Foundation

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"Cavafy may be said simply to have inhabited his various pasts so fully that they are all equally present to him." Daniel Mendelsohn • The New York Review of Books

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"Zbigniew Herbert's poetry has what T.S. Eliot called 'the unpleasantness of great poetry'." Craig Raine • The Telegraph

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"The poet saw Wichita, the ultimate destination of his road-trip poem, as the symbolic heart of this transcendental American vortex." Rolf Potts on Allen Ginsberg • The Believer

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"Language is what stops the heart exploding." Jeanette Winterson • The Guardian

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"On the other side of that kindness, however, lay the irritability of a born crank." David Orr on the letters of Ted Hughes • The New York Times

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"Poetry should not require academic translators to mediate between the poet and his or her audience." Camille Paglia • Arion

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"His poetry, when read in quantity, can at times seem like a repast of macaroons and tawny port." August Kleinzahler on James Merrill • The New York Times

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"To confuse the hell out of people." John Ashbery talks to Hillel Italie • AP

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"When I reflect that the most contemporary-sounding poems sound the least lonely, I wonder where reverie, as a mode of poetic thinking, is going." Ange Mlinko on Devin Johnston • Poetry

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"I can't write a memoir of Milosz: so much was hidden in his life." Adam Zagajewski • Threepenny Review

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