The Witness of Poetry by Czesław Miłosz
Published 1983 · 65,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is The Witness of Poetry to read?
The Witness of Poetry scores 55 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 58 out of 100
- Lucid and accessible; written for a Harvard public lecture audience.
- Sentence structure: 52 out of 100
- Abstraction: 72 out of 100
- High-level aesthetic and moral argument grounded in specific poetic examples.
- Information density: 70 out of 100
- Dense with literary and historical reference but paced for the lecture format.
- Narrative indirection: 14 out of 100
- Direct argument with Miłosz's characteristic essayistic intelligence.
- Symbolic density: 18 out of 100
- Poetry and witness carry near-symbolic weight in the argument.
- Ironic distance: 15 out of 100
- Earnest moral argument; irony appears only in the poets Miłosz discusses.
- Resolution withholding: 12 out of 100
- Each lecture reaches its conclusion; the overall argument is cumulative.
- Structural complexity: 32 out of 100
- Six lectures with a unified argument about the vocation of poetry.
How The Witness of Poetry is regarded
The Witness of Poetry holds a literary regard score of 86 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.