Czesław Miłosz

Czesław Miłosz ( , ,

Life in the United States University of California, Berkeley

In 1960, Miłosz was offered a position as a visiting lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley. With this offer, and with the climate of McCarthyism abated, he was able to move to the United States. He proved to be an adept and popular teacher, and was offered tenure after only two months. The rarity of this, and the degree to which he had impressed his colleagues, are underscored by the fact that Miłosz lacked a PhD and teaching experience. Yet his deep learning was obvious, and after years of working administrative jobs that he found stifling, he told friends that he was in his element in a classroom. With stable employment as a tenured professor of Slavic languages and literatures, Miłosz was able to secure American citizenship and purchase a home in Berkeley.

Miłosz began to publish scholarly articles in English and Polish on a variety of authors, including Fyodor Dostoevsky. But despite his successful transition to the U.S., he described his early years at Berkeley as frustrating, as he was isolated from friends and viewed as a political figure rather than a great poet. (In fact, some of his Berkeley faculty colleagues, unaware of his creative output, expressed astonishment when he won the Nobel Prize.) His poetry was not available in English, and he was not able to publish in Poland.

As part of an effort to introduce American readers to his poetry, as well as to his fellow Polish poets' work, Miłosz conceived and edited the anthology , which was published in English in 1965. American poets like W.S. Merwin, and American scholars like Clare Cavanagh, have credited it with a profound impact. It was many English-language readers' first exposure to Miłosz's poetry, as well as that of Polish poets like Wisława Szymborska, Zbigniew Herbert, and Tadeusz Różewicz. (In the same year, Miłosz's poetry also appeared in the first issue of Modern Poetry in Translation, an English-language journal founded by prominent literary figures Ted Hughes and Daniel Weissbort. The issue also featured Miroslav Holub, Yehuda Amichai, Ivan Lalić, Vasko Popa, Zbigniew Herbert, and Andrei Voznesensky.) In 1969, Miłosz's textbook The History of Polish Literature was published in English, the language in which it was written. Miłosz's relationship to student protesters was sometimes antagonistic: he called them "spoiled children of the bourgeoisie" and their political zeal naïve. At one campus event in 1970, he mocked protesters who claimed to be demonstrating for peace and love: "Talk to me about love when they come into your cell one morning, line you all up, and say 'You and you, step forward—it’s your time to die—unless any of your friends loves you so much he wants to take your place!'" Comments like these were in keeping with his stance toward American counterculture of the 1960s in general. For example, in 1968, when Miłosz was listed as a signatory of an open letter of protest written by poet and counterculture figure Allen Ginsberg and published in The New York Review of Books, Miłosz responded by calling the letter "dangerous nonsense" and insisting that he had not signed it.

After 18 years, Miłosz retired from teaching in 1978. To mark the occasion, he was awarded a "Berkeley Citation", the University of California's equivalent of an honorary doctorate. But when his wife, Janina, fell ill and required expensive medical treatment, Miłosz returned to teaching seminars. The year 1978 also marked the publication of his second English-language poetry anthology, Bells in Winter.

Nobel laureate On 9 October 1980, the Swedish Academy announced that Miłosz had won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The award catapulted him to global fame. On the day the prize was announced, Miłosz held a brief press conference and then left to teach a class on Dostoevsky. In his Nobel lecture, Miłosz described his view of the role of the poet, lamented the tragedies of the 20th century, and paid tribute to his cousin Oscar. thumb

Many Poles became aware of Miłosz for the first time when he won the Nobel Prize. After a 30-year ban in Poland, his writing was finally published there in limited selections. He was also able to visit Poland for the first time since fleeing in 1951 and was greeted by crowds with a hero's welcome. He met with leading Polish figures like Lech Wałęsa and Pope John Paul II. At the same time, his early work, until then only available in Polish, began to be translated into English and many other languages.

In 1981, Miłosz was appointed the Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, where he was invited to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures. He used the opportunity, as he had before becoming a Nobel laureate, to draw attention to writers who had been unjustly imprisoned or persecuted. The lectures were published as (1983).

Miłosz continued to publish work in Polish through his longtime publisher in Paris, including the poetry collections Hymn of the Pearl (1981) and Unattainable Earth (1986), and the essay collection Beginning with My Streets (1986).

In 1986, Miłosz's wife, Janina, died.

In 1988, Miłosz's Collected Poems appeared in English; it was the first of several attempts to collect all his poetry into a single volume. After the fall of communism in Poland, he split his time between Berkeley and Kraków, and he began to publish his writing in Polish with a publisher based in Kraków. When Lithuania broke free from the Soviet Union in 1991, Miłosz visited for the first time since 1939. In 2000, he moved to Kraków.

In 1992, Miłosz married Carol Thigpen, an academic at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. They remained married until her death in 2002. His work from the 1990s includes the poetry collections Facing the River (1994) and (1997), and the collection of short prose Miłosz’s ABC’s (1997). Miłosz's last stand-alone volumes of poetry were (2000), and The Second Space (2002). Uncollected poems written afterward appeared in English in New and Selected Poems (2004) and, posthumously, in Selected and Last Poems (2011).

Death

Miłosz's sarcophagus. The Latin inscription reads "May you rest well"; the Polish inscription reads "The cultivation of learning, too, is love." Czesław Miłosz died on 14 August 2004, at his Kraków home, aged 93. He was given a state funeral at the historic Mariacki Church in Kraków. Polish Prime Minister Marek Belka attended, as did the former president of Poland, Lech Wałęsa. Thousands of people lined the streets to witness his coffin moved by military escort to his final resting place at Skałka Roman Catholic Church, where he was one of the last to be commemorated. In front of that church, the poets Seamus Heaney, Adam Zagajewski, and Robert Hass read Miłosz's poem "In Szetejnie" in Polish, French, English, Russian, Lithuanian, and Hebrew—all the languages Miłosz knew. Media from around the world covered the funeral.

Protesters threatened to disrupt the proceedings on the grounds that Miłosz was anti-Polish, anti-Catholic, and had signed a petition supporting gay and lesbian freedom of speech and assembly. Pope John Paul II, along with Miłosz's confessor, issued public messages confirming that Miłosz had received the sacraments, which quelled the protest.

Family Miłosz's brother, Andrzej Miłosz (1917–2002), was a Polish journalist, translator, and documentary film producer. His work included Polish documentaries about his brother.

Miłosz's son, Anthony, is a composer and software designer. He studied linguistics, anthropology, and chemistry at the University of California at Berkeley, and neuroscience at the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center. In addition to releasing recordings of his own compositions, he has translated some of his father's poems into English.

Honors

In addition to the Nobel Prize in Literature, Miłosz received the following awards:

Polish PEN Translation Prize (1974) Neustadt International Prize for Literature (1978) National Medal of Arts (United States, 1989) Robert Kirsch Award (1990) Order of the White Eagle (Poland, 1994)

Miłosz was named a distinguished visiting professor or fellow at many institutions, including the University of Michigan and University of Oklahoma, where he was a Puterbaugh Fellow in 1999. He was an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. He received honorary doctorates from Harvard University, the University of Michigan, the University of California at Berkeley, Jagiellonian University, and Vytautas Magnus University in Lithuania. Vytautas Magnus University and Jagiellonian University have academic centers named for Miłosz.

In 1992, Miłosz was made an honorary citizen of Lithuania, where his birthplace was made into a museum and conference center. In 1993, he was made an honorary citizen of Kraków. The Seizure of Power received the Prix Littéraire Européen (European Literary Prize). The collection Roadside Dog received a Nike Award in Poland.

In 1989, Miłosz was named one of the "Righteous Among the Nations" at Israel's Yad Vashem memorial to the Holocaust, in recognition of his efforts to save Jews in Warsaw during World War II. at Yale University, and at the Dublin Writers Festival, among many other locations. The same year, he was featured on a Lithuanian postage stamp. Streets are named for him near Paris, Vilnius, and in the Polish cities of Kraków, Poznań, Gdańsk, Białystok, and Wrocław. In Gdańsk there is a Czesław Miłosz Square. In 2013, a primary school in Vilnius was named for Miłosz, joining schools in Mierzecice, Poland, and Schaumburg, Illinois, that bear his name.

Legacy

Cultural impact

In 1978, the Russian-American poet Joseph Brodsky called Miłosz "one of the great poets of our time; perhaps the greatest". Miłosz has been cited as an influence by numerous writers—contemporaries and succeeding generations. For example, scholars have written about Miłosz's influence on the writing of Seamus Heaney, and Clare Cavanagh has identified the following poets as having benefited from Miłosz's influence: Robert Pinsky, Edward Hirsch, Rosanna Warren, Robert Hass, Charles Simic, Mary Karr, Carolyn Forché, Mark Strand, Ted Hughes, Joseph Brodsky, and Derek Walcott.

By being smuggled into Poland, Miłosz's writing was a source of inspiration to the anti-communist Solidarity movement there in the early 1980s. Lines from his poem "" are inscribed on the Monument to the Fallen Shipyard Workers of 1970 in Gdańsk, where Solidarity originated.

Of the effect of Miłosz's edited volume Postwar Polish Poetry on English-language poets, Merwin wrote, "Miłosz’s book had been a talisman and had made most of the literary bickering among the various ideological encampments, then most audible in the poetic doctrines in English, seem frivolous and silly".

Miłosz's writing continues to be the subject of academic study, conferences, and cultural events. His papers, including manuscripts, correspondence, and other materials, are housed at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.

From May 2024, Czesław Miłosz's Nobel Prize medal, Nobel Prize notebook of Czesław Miłosz and a fair copy of his poem Rays of Dazzling Light (Polish: Jasności promieniste) are presented at a permanent exhibition in the Palace of the Commonwealth in Warsaw.

Nationality Miłosz's birth in a time and place of shifting borders and overlapping cultures, and his later naturalization as an American citizen, have led to competing claims about his nationality. Although his family identified as Polish and Polish was his primary language, and although he frequently spoke of Poland as his country, he also publicly identified himself as one of the last citizens of the multi-ethnic Grand Duchy of Lithuania. But in his Nobel lecture, he said, "My family in the 16th century already spoke Polish, just as many families in Finland spoke Swedish and in Ireland English, so I am a Polish, not a Lithuanian, poet". Others have viewed Miłosz as an American author, hosting exhibitions and writing about him from that perspective and including his work in anthologies of American poetry.

But in The New York Review of Books in 1981, the critic John Bayley wrote, "nationality is not a thing [Miłosz] can take seriously; it would be hard to imagine a greater writer more emancipated from even its most subtle pretensions". Echoing this notion, the scholar and diplomat Piotr Wilczek argued that, even when he was greeted as a national hero in Poland, Miłosz "made a distinct effort to remain a universal thinker".

Catholicism Though raised Catholic, Miłosz as a young man came to adopt a "scientific, atheistic position mostly", though he later returned to the Catholic faith. He translated parts of the Bible into Polish, and allusions to Catholicism pervade his poetry, culminating in a long 2001 poem, "A Theological Treatise". For some critics, Miłosz's belief that literature should provide spiritual fortification was outdated: Franaszek suggests that Miłosz's belief was evidence of a "beautiful naïveté", while David Orr, citing Miłosz's dismissal of "poetry which does not save nations or people", accused him of "pompous nonsense".

Miłosz expressed some criticism of both Catholicism and Poland (a majority-Catholic country), causing furor in some quarters when it was announced that he would be interred in Kraków's historic Skałka church. Cynthia Haven writes that, to some readers, Miłosz's embrace of Catholicism can seem surprising and complicates the understanding of him and his work.

Work

Form While Miłosz is best known for his poetry, his body of work spans multiple other literary genres: fiction (particularly the novel), memoir, criticism, personal essay, and lectures. His letters are also of interest to scholars and lay readers; for example, his correspondence with writers such as Jerzy Andrzejewski, Witold Gombrowicz, and Thomas Merton have been published.

At the outset of his career, Miłosz was known as a "catastrophist" poet—a label critics applied to him and other poets from the Żagary poetry group to describe their use of surreal imagery and formal inventiveness in reaction to a Europe beset by extremist ideologies and war. While Miłosz evolved away from the apocalyptic view of catastrophist poetry, he continued to pursue formal inventiveness throughout his career. As a result, his poetry demonstrates a wide-ranging mastery of form, from long or epic poems (e.g., A Treatise on Poetry) to poems of just two lines (e.g., "On the Death of a Poet" from the collection This), and from prose poems and free verse to classic forms such as the ode or elegy. Some of his poems use rhyme, but many do not. In numerous cases, Miłosz used form to illuminate meaning in his poetry; for example, by juxtaposing variable stanzas to accentuate ideas or voices that challenge each other.

Themes Miłosz's work is known for its complexity; according to the scholars Leonard Nathan and Arthur J. Quinn, Miłosz "prided himself on being an esoteric writer accessible to a mere handful of readers". Nevertheless, some common themes are readily apparent throughout his body of work.

The poet, critic, and frequent Miłosz translator Robert Hass has described Miłosz as "a poet of great inclusiveness", with a fidelity to capturing life in all of its sensuousness and multiplicities. According to Hass, Miłosz's poems can be viewed as "dwelling in contradiction", where one idea or voice is presented only to be immediately challenged or changed. According to English poet Donald Davie, this allowance for contradictory voices—a shift from the solo lyric voice to a chorus—is among the most important aspects of Miłosz's work.

The poetic chorus is deployed not just to highlight the complexity of the modern world but also to search for morality, another of Miłosz's recurrent themes. Nathan and Quinn write, "Miłosz’s work is devoted to unmasking man’s fundamental duality; he wants to make his readers admit the contradictory nature of their own experience" because doing so "forces us to assert our preferences as preferences". That is, it forces readers to make conscious choices, which is the arena of morality. At times, Miłosz's exploration of morality was explicit and concrete, such as when, in The Captive Mind, he ponders the right way to respond to three Lithuanian women who were forcibly moved to a Russian communal farm and wrote to him for help, or when, in the poems "Campo Dei Fiori" and "A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto", he addresses survivor's guilt and the morality of writing about another's suffering.

Miłosz's exploration of morality takes place in the context of history, and confrontation with history is another of his major themes. Vendler wrote, "for Miłosz, the person is irrevocably a person in history, and the interchange between external event and the individual life is the matrix of poetry". Having experienced both Nazism and Stalinism, Miłosz was particularly concerned with the notion of "historical necessity", which, in the 20th century, was used to justify human suffering on a previously unheard-of scale. Yet Miłosz did not reject the concept entirely. Nathan and Quinn summarize Miłosz's appraisal of historical necessity as it appears in his essay collection : "Some species rise, others fall, as do human families, nations, and whole civilizations. There may well be an internal logic to these transformations, a logic that when viewed from sufficient distance has its own elegance, harmony, and grace. Our reason tempts us to be enthralled by this superhuman splendor; but when so enthralled we find it difficult to remember, except perhaps as an element in an abstract calculus, the millions of individuals, the millions upon millions, who unwillingly paid for this splendor with pain and blood".

Miłosz's willingness to accept a form of logic in history points to another recurrent aspect of his writing: his capacity for wonder, amazement, and, ultimately, faith—not always religious faith, but "faith in the objective reality of a world to be known by the human mind but not constituted by that mind". At other times, Miłosz was more explicitly religious in his work. According to scholar and translator Michael Parker, "crucial to any understanding of Miłosz’s work is his complex relationship to Catholicism". His writing is filled with allusions to Christian figures, symbols, and theological ideas, though Miłosz was closer to Gnosticism, or what he called Manichaeism, in his personal beliefs, viewing the universe as ruled by an evil whose influence human beings must try to escape. From this perspective, "he can at once admit that the world is ruled by necessity, by evil, and yet still find hope and sustenance in the beauty of the world. History reveals the pointlessness of human striving, the instability of human things; but time also is the moving image of eternity". According to Hass, this viewpoint left Miłosz "with the task of those heretical Christians…to suffer time, to contemplate being, and to live in the hope of the redemption of the world".

Influences Miłosz had numerous literary and intellectual influences, although scholars of his work—and Miłosz himself, in his writings—have identified the following as significant: Oscar Miłosz (who inspired Miłosz's interest in the metaphysical) and, through him, Emanuel Swedenborg; Lev Shestov; Simone Weil (whose work Miłosz translated into Polish); Dostoevsky; William Blake (whose concept of "Ulro" Miłosz borrowed for his book ), and Eliot.

Selected bibliography

Poetry collections 1933: Poemat o czasie zastygłym (A Poem on Frozen Time); Wilno: Kolo Polonistów Sluchaczy Uniwersytetu Stefana Batorego 1936: Trzy zimy (Three Winters); Warsaw: Władysława Mortkowicz 1940: Wiersze (Poems); Warsaw (clandestine publication) 1945: Ocalenie (Rescue); Warsaw: Spółdzielnia Wydawnicza Czytelnik 1954: Światło dzienne (Daylight); Paris: Instytut Literacki 1957: Traktat poetycki (A Treatise on Poetry); Paris: Instytut Literacki 1962: Król Popiel i inne wiersze (King Popiel and Other Poems); Paris: Instytut Literacki 1965: Gucio zaczarowany (Gucio Enchanted); Paris: Instytut Literacki 1969: Miasto bez imienia (City Without a Name); Paris: Instytut Literacki 1974: Gdzie słońce wschodzi i kedy zapada (Where the Sun Rises and Where it Sets); Paris: Instytut Literacki 1982: Hymn o Perle (Hymn of the Pearl); Paris: Instytut Literacki 1984: Nieobjęta ziemia (Unattainable Earth); Paris: Instytut Literacki 1989: Kroniki (Chronicles); Paris: Instytut Literacki 1991: Dalsze okolice (Farther Surroundings); Kraków: Społeczny Instytut Wydawniczy Znak 1994: Na brzegu rzeki (Facing the River); Kraków: Społeczny Instytut Wydawniczy Znak 1997: Piesek przydrożny (Roadside Dog); Kraków: Społeczny Instytut Wydawniczy Znak 2000: To (This), Kraków: Społeczny Instytut Wydawniczy Znak 2002: Druga przestrzen (The Second Space); Kraków: Społeczny Instytut Wydawniczy Znak 2003: Orfeusz i Eurydyka (Orpheus and Eurydice); Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie 2006: Wiersze ostatnie (Last Poems) Kraków: Społeczny Instytut Wydawniczy Znak 2025: Poet in the New World--Poems, 1946-1953; HarperCollins

Prose collections 1953: Zniewolony umysł (The Captive Mind); Paris: Instytut Literacki 1959: Rodzinna Europa (Native Realm); Paris: Instytut Literacki 1969: The History of Polish Literature; London-New York: MacMillan 1969: Widzenia nad Zatoką San Francisco (A View of San Francisco Bay); Paris: Instytut Literacki 1974: Prywatne obowiązki (Private Obligations); Paris: Instytut Literacki 1976: Emperor of the Earth; Berkeley: University of California Press 1977: Ziemia Ulro (The Land of Ulro); Paris: Instytut Literacki 1979: Ogród Nauk (The Garden of Science); Paris: Instytut Literacki 1981: Nobel Lecture; New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux 1983: The Witness of Poetry; Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press 1985: Zaczynając od moich ulic (Starting from My Streets); Paris: Instytut Literacki 1986: A mi Európánkról (About our Europe); New York: Hill and Wang 1989: Rok myśliwego (A year of the hunter); Paris: Instytut Literacki 1992: Szukanie ojczyzny (In Search of a Homeland); Kraków: Społeczny Instytut Wydawniczy Znak 1995: Metafizyczna pauza (The Metaphysical Pause); Kraków: Społeczny Instytut Wydawniczy Znak 1996: Legendy nowoczesności (Modern Legends, War Essays); Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie 1997: Zycie na wyspach (Life on Islands); Kraków: Społeczny Instytut Wydawniczy Znak 1997: Abecadło Milosza (Milosz's ABC's); Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie 1998: Inne Abecadło (A Further Alphabet); Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie 1998: Un libro de cosas luminosas, Antología de poesía internacional (A Book of Luminous Thing); Boston: Mariner Books 1999: Wyprawa w dwudziestolecie (An Excursion through the Twenties and Thirties); Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie 2001: To Begin Where I Am: Selected Essays; New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2004: Spiżarnia literacka (A Literary Larder); Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie 2004: Przygody młodego umysłu; Kraków: Społeczny Instytut Wydawniczy Znak 2004: O podróżach w czasie; (On time travel) Kraków: Społeczny Instytut Wydawniczy Znak

Novels 1955: Zdobycie władzy (The Seizure of Power); Paris: Instytut Literacki 1955: Dolina Issy (The Issa Valley); Paris: Instytut Literacki 1987: The Mountains of Parnassus; Yale University Press

Translations by Miłosz 1968: Selected Poems by Zbigniew Herbert translated by Czesław Miłosz and Peter Dale Scott, Penguin Books 1996: Talking to My Body by Anna Swir translated by Czesław Miłosz and Leonard Nathan, Copper Canyon Press