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Biography of Czeslaw Milosz

Name: Czeslaw Milosz
Bith Date: June 30, 1911
Death Date:
Place of Birth: Russia
Nationality: Polish
Gender: Male
Occupations: poet

Czeslaw Milosz

The Polish author and poet Czeslaw Milosz (born 1911), winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature, explored in his work both the rebirth of Christian belief and the corruption of thought by ideology.

Czeslaw Milosz is one of the most important writers and poets to have emerged in Poland since World War II. Terence De Pres stated that Milosz' poetry deals "with the central issues of our time: the impact of history upon being, the search for ways to survive spiritual ruin in a ruined world." He was born on June 30, 1911 in Szetejnie, Lithuania then in Tsarist Russia, to Polish-Lithuanian parents. His father, Alexander, was a road engineer and was recruited by the Tsar's army during World War I. Young Milosz and his mother traveled with Alexander on the dangerous bridge-building expeditions to which he was dispatched near Russian battle zones.

His family returned to Lithuania in 1918, and Milosz began a strict formal education in his hometown of Wilno, the capital of Polish Lithuania. In his early 20s, he published his first volume of poems, A Poem on Frozen Time. In 1934, he graduated from the King Stefan Batory University, and in 1936 his second volume of poetry appeared. He earned a scholarship to study at the Alliance Française in Paris, where he also met up with his distant cousin, Oscar Milosz, a French poet who became his mentor.

Milosz returned to Poland to work for the Polish State Broadcasting Company up to the outbreak of World War II. He stayed in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation, where he joined the underground resistance movement. Milosz was inclined toward socialism, and had an uneasy relationship with the Communist government that came to power in Poland in 1946. Milosz had an anthology of anti-Nazi poetry, The Invincible Song published by underground presses in Warsaw, where he also wrote "The World (A Naive Poem)" and the cycle Voices of Poor People. When Warsaw was destroyed, he lived for a bit outside of Cracow, whose state publishing house brought out his collected poems in a volume called Rescue.

At the end of World War II, Milosz worked as a cultural attaché for the Polish communist government, serving in New York and Washington. He left his position with the Polish Foreign Service in 1951 and sought (and received) political asylum in France. Milosz spent ten years in France, and he found himself having difficulty with the strongly pro-socialist and communist intellectual community. He penned two novels during his time in Paris, Seizure of Power and The Issa Valley. His most famous book, The Captive Mind (1953) was a bitter attack on the manner in which the Communist Party in Poland progressively destroyed the independence of the Polish intelligentsia.

He continued to speak out against the Polish intellectuals, comparing them to Charlie Chaplin in The Gold Rush, bustling about in a shack poised on a cliff. Too often his contemporaries would end up agreeing with their new masters, while secretly believing that they could in some way maintain at the same time an area of their own intellectual autonomy. This phenomenon he termed "Ketman" and he saw the downfall of a free intelligentsia in Poland. In a novel entitled The Usurpers (1955) that graphically described the communist seizure of power, he wrote of a rather pathetic classical scholar, Professor Gill, who had been deprived of a chair at the university. Gill was busy translating Thucydides for a small edition for the state publishing house as a means, he hoped, of keeping some idea of classical culture alive.

Milosz' early writing was strongly shaped by the culture of his adopted city, Wilno, which was a major center of both Catholic and Jewish learning before 1939. Milosz considered himself to be both a poet and an intellectual. His poetry at this time reflected a mood of youthful romanticism as well as recognition that kingdoms rise and fall. As his poem "Hymn" put it in 1935, "Forms come and go, what seems invincible crumbles." This world of Milosz' youth did, indeed, crumble after the German invasion. He saw Warsaw destroyed by the Germans in 1944 after the failure of Stalin's advancing armies to rescue the Polish partisans. Milosz came increasingly to distrust Marxist ideology and its ideal of a classless millennium.

Milosz saw many of his intellectual contemporaries compromising their ideals in the interest of naked power politics. He came to treat the intellectual generally with suspicion, writing in Native Realm (1968) that he was "not sure that all intellectual talents are not like orchids, which nourish themselves on the rotten wood of decaying trees." With such strong opinions, Milosz found his poetry banned in Poland, but was published in Paris by the Instytut Literacki.

Milosz ultimately felt that the only way to maintain his own intellectual autonomy, claiming to be "imprisoned as I am in my I," was an exile in the West. He regretted that works like The Captive Mind came to be used as Cold War propaganda and hoped that Eastern Europe would be able to regenerate its culture once the wave of communism was passed. He remembered his cousin, Oscar, castigating Eastern Europeans for simply imitating other "centres of culture" instead of creating one themselves. It was a memory he did not forget.

Milosz continued his exile even further West. At age 50, he began a new career as a professor of Slavic languages and literature at the University of California at Berkeley in 1961 (some sources say 1960). He was initially an unknown member of a small department; but eventually became popular for his courses on Dostoyevsky, and known to those outside the university as a translator of the poems of Zbigniew Herbert. In the poetry he wrote after going into exile, Milosz consciously sought to build on his earlier romanticism by stressing the true meaning of words that had become corrupted by political ideology. "Yes I would like to be a poet of the five senses," he wrote in In Milan (1955). "That's why I don't allow myself to become one./Yes, thought has less weight than the word lemon/That's why in my words I do not reach for fruit." At the same time identification with nature allowed him to maintain an identity even in exile. As the poem in Throughout Our Lands, written in 1961 while at Berkeley, put it,

Wherever you are, you touch the bark of trees

testing its roughness different yet familiar,

grateful for a rising and a setting sun

Wherever you are, you could never be an alien.

By the 1970s, Milosz' poetry and fiction was increasingly attracting the attention of Western critics. In 1976, he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship. In 1978, he published Bells in Winter, for which he received the Neustadt International Literature Prize. In 1980, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. By this time, many of his poems had become infused with a more orthodox and settled Christianity. There was also a growing sadness and premonition of oncoming death, especially after the death of his wife Janina in 1986. This was frequently a difficult and obscure poetry that was burdened by a sense of the oncoming collapse of civilization. Milosz' poetry, though, did not contain any premonition of the collapse of the Eastern European Communist régimes.

After winning the Nobel Prize, Milosz published many volumes of prose and poetry. His prose collections include Visions from San Francisco Bay,Beginning With My Streets,The Land of Ulro, and his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures from Harvard, The Witness of Poetry. In 1988, his Collected Poems were published, followed most recently by another collection entitled Provinces.

Milosz chronicled his life in 1988. This diary became the book A Year of the Hunter, published in 1994. A review in the Boston Book Review called it "an elegiac, autumnal work--a reassessment of a long and complicated career, marriage and exile." After returning to Lithuania in the spring of 1989, Milosz was flooded with sentiment about is childhood in the Issa River Valley. In this collection, Milosz explores "the nature of imagination, human experience, good and evil--and celebrates the wonders of life on earth," an abstract from Ecco press noted. David Biespiel's review of the collection notes that Milosz, as always, speaks to his readers "with a passionate mixture of lament, rage, joy, resignation, and officium landis, despite his self-questioning: "Did I fulfill what I had to, here, on earth?" Despite being afflicted with asthma and declining health, Milosz managed to also release another volume of poetry in 1995, Facing the River. In 1997, his correspondence with poet and monk Thomas Merton was published, a speculative epistolary history of their inner worlds. He followed this with 1998s Roadside Dog, which collected new reflections, poetry and ideas for stories that Milosz never expected to develop.

In 1999, Milossz traveled to the University of Oklahoma where he met with students. Writing of the visit, one Oklahoma academic wrote, "Even at age 87 Milosz is still remarkably active and vigorous, and he seems to have enjoyed his visit every bit as much as we did, even confessing to me at week's end that he had not realized how much he missed teaching and interacting with eager, interested students and faculty."

Writing of Milosz's ABC's, a loose collection of short, alphabetical entries published in 2000, Edward Hirsch said in The New York Times Book Review, "It is a source of wonderment and pleasure that at the age of 89, Czeslaw Milosz, arguably the greatest living poet, continues to publish exploratory works of self-definition and commemoration... In the end, Milosz's A B C's is a benedictory text, an alphabetical rescue operation, a testimonial to those who have suffered and gone before us, a hymn to the everlasting marvel and mystery of human existence." But noting the following lines from one of Milosz's early poems, "Man has been given to understand/ that he lives only by the grace of those in power./ Let him therefore busy himself sipping coffee, catching butterflies," a critic for Publishers Weekly wrote, "It is difficult to escape the sense that--like butterflies in a dusty case--the scraps of memory affixed here have lost their living glitter."

In April of 2001, Milosz published a book length poem entitled Treatise on Poetry (translated by Robert Hass). The four parts of the poem deal in turn with turn-of-the-century Europe, Poland between the two world wars, World War II, and the place of the poet in the postwar world. Later that year, a book of essays entitled To Begin Where I Am: The Selected Prose of Czeslaw Milosz made its appearance. These essays chiefly deal with Milosz's attempts to sustain his religious faith, and with his battle for poetry that is "on the side of man." The poems in Milosz's New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001, also published in 2001, deal largely with the nature of imagination, human experience, good and evil, and the wonders of life.

Milosz' confrontation with both a revival of Christian belief (he feels chosen by God, he told Biespiel, to transform what he's experienced into art) and the corruption of thought by ideology has made him a figure of our time.