Czeslaw Milosz

Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish poet, essayist, and novelist, was born in Lithuania. Milosz received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980 for a body of work that had once circulated secretly under the communist regime in Poland. When stationed with the Polish diplomatic service in Paris, Milosz defected, living in France and later San Francisco, where he taught at the University of California, Berkeley. Beginning with The Captive Mind (1953), Milosz bore witness to artistic life under communism, establishing the dialectic between Eastern Europe and the West that would shape his body of work. Mixing contemporary and medieval Polish, Lithuanian, and Old Church Slavonic languages in poetry, Milosz broke barriers between personal and public history. He worked in close collaboration with poet Robert Hass on English translations of his work. Milosz is known for The Seizure of Power (1953), Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition (1968), The Witness of Poetry (1983), The Separate Notebooks (1984), Unattainable Earth (1986), and New and Collected Poems, 1931–2001 (2001), among other works.

Photo by Artur Pawlowski, Wikimedia Commons