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with.
    Frankl lived a long life (dying at ninety-two in 1997), and he practiced into old age his twin passions of flying and mountaineering. He liked tosay that whereas Freud, Adler and Jung have given us “depth psychology,” he had given us “height psychology,” “helping people to reach new heights of personal meaning through self-transcendence.” He was once asked to express in one sentence the meaning of his own life. His reply was: “The meaning of your life is to help others find the meaning of theirs.” 20 Is that a too-easy answer?

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    Faith in Detail
    O ne evening in Belfast in 1972, the poet Seamus Heaney had arranged to meet his friend the singer David Hammond. They were to rendezvous in a BBC studio to put together a tape of songs and poems for a mutual friend in Michigan. The idea of the tape was to commemorate an earlier celebration, when the American had been in Belfast and an “expansive” evening had been enjoyed by all. In the event, the tape was never made. On their way to the studio “a number of explosions occurred in the city and the air was full of the sirens of ambulances and fire engines. There was news of casualties.” Both men felt that “to sing at that moment when others were beginning to suffer seemed like an offense against their suffering.” Hammond packed up his guitar, and “we both drove off into the destroyed evening.”
    Heaney tells this story at the beginning of his book of essays on poetry, The Government of the Tongue (1988), and he began in this way, he said, because the episode dramatized a tension that underlay the poetry—and perhaps all the art—of the twentieth century. This tension, which the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz also observed, began for Heaney with the horrors of the First World War. “[I]t is from this moment in our century that radiant and unperturbed certitudes about the consonance between the true and the beautiful become suspect.” 1 Heaney fastened on Wilfred Owen: “Owen so stood by what he wrote that he seemed almost to obliterate the line between art and life. . . . His poems have the potency of human testimony, of martyr’s relics, so that any intrusion of the aesthetic can feel like impropriety . . . the First World War was a wonderful example of amoment when poets functioned as effective and heroic figures in the life of their times.”
    Owen and the others like him in the trenches of Flanders, Heaney argues, were among the first of “a type of poet who increasingly appears in the annals of twentieth-century literature, and who looms as a kind of shadowy judging figure . . . the shorthand name we have evolved for this figure is ‘The poet as witness.’” 2
    The Witness of Poetry was published by Czesław Miłosz in 1983, when he no longer lived in Poland but was professor of poetry at Harvard. These prose books, along with others by poets (Michael Hamburger’s The Truth of Poetry [1982], Joseph Brodsky’s Less Than One [1986] and Kathleen Raine’s The Underlying Order [2008]), suggest Heaney and Miłosz were on to something, something that was in the air. This something may have had to do, as Miłosz said, with the fact that “poetry is a more reliable witness than journalism.” 3 Witness to what? And what, in any case, does that have to do with the theme of this book? There are two related answers, which keep us close to Heaney’s opening story.
    First, much of the poetry of the twentieth century, again in Miłosz’s words, “comes from a blank spot on the map.” He is referring here to his native Poland and also to the Lithuanian poet Adam Mickiewicz, who “is virtually unknown in the West.” This is his point—that the political and self-inflicted humanitarian disasters of the twentieth century created many intellectual and artistic “blank” spots on the map: in Eastern Europe, Soviet Russia and in ex-colonial territories in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa and Asia. Given this, should it come as a