Written in 1955 and 1956, it was first published in book form in 1957 and won that year's literary prize from Kultura.
[1][2] It is divided into four cantos, with a short introductory poem:[1][3] The original Polish version was written between 1955 and 1956 and was published as a book in 1957 in France by the Instytut Literacki.
[3][4] Because of its form and its culturally-specific subject matter, Miłosz believed for some time that it could not be translated into English.
[1][7] Writing for The New York Review of Books, Helen Vendler described the Treatise as one of the few poems "so powerful that it bursts the bounds in which it was written—the bounds of language, geography, epoch", writing that "to enter the current of this poem is to hurtle downstream through history on a flood of eloquent and passionate language that is in turn philosophic, satiric, tender, angry, ironic, sensuous, and, above all, elegiac".
[3] In The Guardian, Charles Bainbridge singles out the third section, Warsaw 1939–1945, as "one of Milosz's most remarkable and moving pieces of writing.