"Ars Poetica" by Horace (19BC)

This long treatise on the craft of poetry was written in 19 BC by the renowned Roman poet Quintus Horatius Flaccus, or simply Horace. Translated here in prose, the original Latin hexameter was composed as a long letter to Roman senator Lucius Calpurnius Piso and his two sons. It is sometimes known as the “Epistle to the Pisos.” While this poem does not share too much with Miłosz’s poem of (almost) the same name, it represents the starting point for the tradition into which Miłosz enters. Like Miłosz, Horace explores what he thinks about poetry and how it ought to be written.

“Ars Poetica” by Archibald MacLeish (1952)

While MacLeish does not receive too much attention in contemporary circles, his take on the ars poetica remains one of the most famous American examples of the modal form. Written and published in 1926, it is not unlikely that Miłosz would have read or heard of this keystone poem of the New Critical movement.

“A Song on the End of the World” by Czesław Miłosz (1988)

Like “Ars Poetica?”, this poem is one of Miłosz’s most famous texts. Unlike “Ars Poetica?”, it gives an explicit and emotive window into Miłosz’s poetic grapples with living through political tumult.