Czeslaw Milosz (1911 - 2004)

Czesław Miłosz (pronounced ['ʧεsȗav 'miȗɔʃ]; June 30, 1911 –August 14, 2004) was a Polish poet and essayist. Czesław Miłosz won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980, when he lived in America. He spent the last days of his life in Kraków, Poland.

He was born in Szetejnie, Lithuania and always underlined his connection to Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Miłosz studied law at the University in Vilnius. His childhood was spent partly in Russia around the time of Revolution.

In 1944 he refused to take part in the Warsaw Uprising.

A diplomat for the communist People's Republic of Poland, he broke with the government in 1951 and sought political asylum in France. In 1953 he received the Prix Littéraire Européen, a European literature prize.

In 1961 he became a Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. He retired in 1978 but continued to teach there. When the Iron Curtain fell he was able to return to Poland.

In addition to his poetry, his book The Captive Mind is considered one of the finest studies of the condition of intellectuals under repressive regimes.

In The Captive Mind he said that the intellectuals who became dissidents were not necessarily the ones with the strongest minds, but those with the weakest stomachs. The mind can rationalize anything, he said, but the stomach can only take so much.

He also said that as a poet he avoided touching his nation's wounds for fearing of making them holy.

Czesław Miłosz is honored at Israel's Yad Vashem memorial to the Holocaust as one of the "Righteous Among The Nations."

His poems were put on the monuments of fallen shipyard workers in Gdańsk. Many of his books and poems have been translated into English by his friend and Berkeley colleague Robert Hass.

Miłosz died in 2004 at his home in Kraków at age 93. His first wife, Janina, died in 1986. His second wife, Carol, a U.S.-born historian, died in 2003.

The poems are by default sorted according to volume, but you can also choose to sort them alphabetically or by page views.

First Line	Comments
1
A guardian of long-distance conduits in the desert?
All my life to pretend this world of theirs is mine
All was taken away from you: white dresses,
And yet the books will be there on the shelves, separate beings,
Burning, he walks in the stream of flickering letters, clarinets,
Forget the suffering
Human reason is beautiful and invincible.	1 Comment
I have always aspired to a more spacious form
I looked out the window at dawn and saw a young apple tree
I sleep a lot and read St. Thomas Aquinas	1 Comment
In fear and trembling, I think I would fulfill my life	1 Comment
In grayish doubt and black despair,
In Rome on the Campo di Fiori
It does not know it glitters
It is true, our tribe is similar to the bees,
Let us not talk philosophy, drop it, Jeanne.
Love means to learn to look at yourself
Maidenly lake, fathomless lake,	1 Comment
Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year,	1 Comment
On the day the world ends
The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.
The road led straight to the temple.
The same and not quite the same, I walked through oak forests
We wanted to confess our sins but there were no takers.	1 Comment
We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.
When everything was fine
When I die, I will see the lining of the world.	1 Comment
Where does evil come from?
You ask me how to pray to someone who is not.
You whom I could not save
Your hand, my wonder, is now icy cold.
"There where that ray touches the plain