Here was this life.
Anyway, let me read you what a Polish scholar says
about him at this time.
"After all, this poet, the future author of The Captive
Mind," which is his prose book about the totalitarian
imagination, "this Polish citizen,
after the experience of war, occupation, the imposition
of a totalitarian system in his homeland,
finds himself on the other end of the world, where
historical experience seems to shape
individual and collective attitudes only
to a small extent.
This witness to the brutal degradation of humanity,
to cruel Nazi terror, roundups on the streets, executions,
the Holocaust, the Warsaw ghetto uprising in 1943,
the Warsaw uprising in 1944, the total extermination
of a city of more than a million residents,
and the invasion of the Red Army.
This poet is confronted with a society
for which the war happened far away, while respect
for individual rights and for fundamental principles
remained-- where respect for individual rights
and fundamental principles remained
obvious and indisputable.
This European, coming from the old world that
was ruined and impoverished by war,
finds himself in the new world which boasts of its prosperity,
a far higher level of development
and forms of social and political organization
little known to him."