The witness of poetry

If you want to read something fascinating, about a man who seems to have lived in another time and place, which yet overlapped with ours (he died in 2004), I was engrossed by this article about Czeslaw Milosz, who was the Nobel laureate for poetry in 1980 and edited A Book of Luminous Things. It's sprinkled with insights about World War II, Catholic nationalism, the witness of poetry, and gems like this:

"when ambition counsels us to lift ourselves above simple moral rules guarded by the poor in spirit, rather than to choose them as our compass needle amid the uncertainties of change, we stifle the only thing that can redeem our follies and mistakes: love."