Miłosz, Czesław (chĕs`wäf mē`wŏsh), 1911–2004, poet, essayist, and novelist, b. Szetejnie, Lithuania (then in Russia). Widely considered the greatest contemporary Polish poet, Miłosz was born into an ethnically Polish family, studied law in Vilnius and literature in Paris, lived in Warsaw during World War II, joined (1946) the diplomatic service, and in 1951 gained political asylum from Communist Poland while he was a cultural attaché in France. He lived in the United States from 1960, when he began teaching at the Univ. of California, Berkeley, until 1989, when he returned to a non-Communist Poland. He began writing verse in 1931, developing his own distinctive poetic voice some five years later. Although fluent in a number of languages, he wrote in his native Polish throughout his career. The main source of his early poetry was the Lithuanian countryside of his youth, which also figures prominently in his autobiographical novel The Issa Valley (1955, tr. 1981). Often tragic and ironic, his poetry was profoundly affected by World War II and, later, by the Communist dictatorship in Poland. He has been characterized as a poet of exile, memory, and witness, and much of his mature verse and many of his essays are modest yet profound meditations on the fate of humanity and culture in a fallen world. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980.

His best-known prose work, The Captive Mind (1953, tr. 1955), is an essay collection that studies the spiritual condition of society under Stalinist totalitarianism. He is also well known for the novel The Seizure of Power (tr. 1955) and the long poem A Treatise on Poetry (1957, tr. 2001). Among his many other works are the classically styled verse of Bells in Winter (tr. 1978), Provinces (tr. 1991), New and Collected Poems, 1931–2001 (tr. 2001), and the posthumously published Second Space (2004). His work also includes History of Polish Literature (1969, 2d ed. 1983); and the essay collections Emperor of the Earth (1977), Visions from San Francisco Bay (tr. 1982), The Witness of Poetry (tr. 1983), and Beginning with My Streets (1985, tr. 1991).

Bibliography

See his Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition (1968), A Year of the Hunter (1994), and the partially autobiographical Milosz's ABC's (2001); E. Czarnecka and A. Fiut, ed., Conversations with Czesław Miłosz (1987); R. Faggen, ed., Striving Towards Being: The Letters of Thomas Merton and Czesłelaw Miłosz (1997); studies by D. Davie (1986), E. Mozejko, ed. (1988), A. Fiut (1990), and L. Nathan and A. Quinn (1991).

Milosz, Czeslaw

(born June 30, 1911, Šateiniai, Lith., Russian Empire—died Aug. 14, 2004, Kraków, Pol.) Polish-U.S. author, translator, and critic. Milosz was a socialist by the time he published his first book of verse at age 21. During the Nazi occupation of Poland, he was active in the resistance. After serving briefly as a diplomat for communist Poland, he immigrated to the U.S., where he taught for decades at the University of California at Berkeley; he became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1970. His poetry, including such collections as Bells in Winter (1978), is noted for its classical style and preoccupation with philosophical and political issues. His well-known essay collection The Captive Mind (1953) condemned the accommodation of many Polish intellectuals to communism. U.S. critic Helen Vendler wrote that Milosz's Treatise on Poetry (1957) seemed to her “the most comprehensive and moving poem” of the latter half of the 20th century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980.

Milosz, Czeslaw (1911– ) poet, man of letters; born in Szetejnie, Lithuania. A founder of the "catastrophist" school of Polish poetry, cofounder of the literary periodical Zagary, and author of a book of essays called The Captive Mind, he was a leader of the avant-garde before World War II. During the war he worked for the Warsaw underground and was a member of the Polish diplomatic service (1946–50). Rejecting the Communist government, he exiled himself to Paris to write (1951–60); he won the Prix Littéraire European (1953). He emigrated to America (1960) where he joined the University of California: Berkeley faculty as a professor of Slavic languages and literature (1961), and was named professor emeritus (1978). Although his poetry was considered dense and full of cultural-linguistic allusions, its depth of soul won over the literary critics who awarded him the Nobel Prize in literature (1980). He continued to write and do translations in retirement, publishing 11 books (1980–91).