Written in Paris in the early 1950s, this book created instant controversy in its analysis of modern society that had allowed itself to be hypnotized by socio-political doctrines, and to accept totalitarian terror on the strength of a hypothetical future.

Milosz Czeslaw (b. 1911), Polish-American author, translator, and critic who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980. Czeslaw Milosz worked with the Polish Resistance movement in Warsaw during World War II and defected to France in 1951. His work brings to bear the political awareness of an exile -- most notably in A Treatise on Poetry, a forty-page exploration of the world wars that rocked the first half of the twentieth century.