"The two poets, with a history of a ten-year friendship, were at each other’s throats, discussing recent Polish history and, particularly, the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. The Uprising, to Herbert, was the moment of national heroism. To Miłosz – an example of political idiocy. When on the warm summer night in Berkeley the two poets got heavily drunk, Miłosz provocatively said that for a nation so deprived of sense, it would be better to be under the Soviet rule. Herbert reacted, in the most unparliamentary language, by accusing Miłosz of cowardice during the war and of conformism under Stalinism (Miłosz, for a while, worked a diplomat in Stalinist Poland)." Jerzy Jarniewicz Arete

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