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  A World Gone Up in Smoke Charles Simic December 20, 2001 issue Reviewed: New and Collected Poems, 1931–2001 by Czeslaw Milosz Ecco, 776 pp., $45.00 To Begin Where I Am: Selected Essays by Czeslaw Milosz, edited and with an introduction by Bogdana Carpenter and Madeline G. Levine Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 462 pp., $30.00 Czeslaw Milosz; drawing by David Levine Buy Print In this world we walk on the roof of Hell gazing at flowers —Issa “They wrote as if History had little to do with them”—that’s how I imagine some future study of American poetry describing the work of our poets in the waning years of the twentieth century. Like millions of their fellow citizens, they believed they could, most of the time, shut their eyes to the world, busy themselves with their lives, and not give much thought to evil. A hermetic literary culture, Czeslaw Milosz would say, is a cage in which one spends all one’s time chasing one’s own tail. To realize from one’s own experience that there’s nothing...