76. “not verses but facts”

Tadeusz Rozewicz, a defiantly modernist, globally acclaimed Polish poet whose answer to the Holocaust and other 20th-century horrors was a renunciation of literary ornament and a call for poetry of “not verses but facts,” died on April 24 at his home near Wroclaw, Poland. He was 92.

Poland’s culture ministry announced the death.

Mr. Rozewicz (pronounced roo-ZHEH-veech) was awarded the European Prize for Literature in 2007, and his work has been translated into 49 languages. Seamus Heaney, the Irish poet who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995, called him “one of the greatest European poets of the 20th century.” / New York Times 21.5.