Czesław Miłosz

Czesław Miłosz: The Poet Who Broke the Spell

In Gdańsk, on the monument to the shipyard workers shot down in 1970, there are lines from a poem called "You Who Wronged." Their author was at the time a Polish exile teaching Slavic literature in California, his books banned in his own country and smuggled back in. When the Swedish Academy telephoned him on 9 October 1980, Miłosz gave a short press conference and then went and taught his scheduled class on Dostoevsky.

A Nobleman from the Kovno Governorate

He was born on 30 June 1911 in Šeteniai, in the Kovno Governorate of the Russian Empire, now Lithuania, to Aleksander Miłosz, a civil engineer, and Weronika Kunat. The family descended from Polish and Lithuanian nobility with a line traceable to the thirteenth century — a borderland inheritance of several languages and no single nation that shaped everything he later wrote about identity. He went to the Sigismund Augustus Gymnasium in Wilno and then, in 1929, to Stefan Batory University to read law. There he helped found the Żagary poetry group alongside Jerzy Zagórski and Teodor Bujnicki. His first poems appeared in a university magazine in 1930 and his first collection, *A Poem on Frozen Time*, in 1933. In Paris in 1931 he met a distant cousin, the poet Oscar Miłosz, who became his mentor and remained a presence in his mind for the next seventy years. *Three Winters* (1936) drew comparisons to Mickiewicz.

Occupied Warsaw

He moved to Warsaw in 1937, and the German occupation caught him there. Miłosz spent the war in clandestine education and underground publishing: under a pseudonym he arranged the 1940 appearance of *Poems*, possibly the first underground book published in occupied Warsaw, and in 1942 he organised the anthology *Invincible Song: Polish Poetry of War Time*. He also used the underground socialist organisation "Freedom" to help Jews survive, among them the Tross family and Felicja Wołkomińska and her siblings. Yad Vashem named him Righteous Among the Nations in 1989. Out of those years came *Rescue* (1945), containing "Campo dei Fiori" and "A Song on the End of the World" — poems about watching an atrocity from the wrong side of a wall, which became his permanent subject.

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Attaché and Defector

From 1945 to 1951 he served the new communist government as a cultural attaché in New York, Washington and Paris, promoting Polish culture abroad and carrying Western writing home in translation, including Shakespeare and T. S. Eliot. A visit to Poland in 1949 showed him what the regime had become. Recalled to Warsaw in December 1950, he had his passport confiscated and then, improbably, returned; in January 1951 he defected in France and did something nobody in his position had done — he published his reasons, becoming the first artist of consequence from a communist country to explain the break in public. The West repaid him ambivalently: McCarthy-era America refused him entry, and much of the Polish émigré community distrusted him for having served the regime at all.

The Captive Mind

*The Captive Mind* appeared in 1953, the year his family finally joined him in France. It is not a polemic but a clinical study of how intelligent people talk themselves into totalitarianism, built from case histories of writers he had known. Karl Jaspers called it a significant historical document; Susan Sontag was among those on the left who credited it with changing how the West understood communism. The Paris decade also produced the collections *Daylight* (1954) and *A Treatise on Poetry* (1957), the novels *The Seizure of Power* and *The Issa Valley*, and the memoir *Native Realm* (1959). His biographer Andrzej Franaszek regards *A Treatise on Poetry* as the magnum opus; Helen Vendler set it beside *The Waste Land*.

Berkeley

He arrived at the University of California, Berkeley in 1960 as a visiting lecturer and was offered tenure within two months despite having no doctorate. He took American citizenship. For years he was read there as a political figure rather than a poet, and he answered by doing the unglamorous work: teaching well, publishing scholarship in English, editing *Postwar Polish Poetry* (1965) — the book that introduced English readers to Wisława Szymborska and Zbigniew Herbert as well as to himself — and writing *The History of Polish Literature* (1969). *Selected Poems* (1973) was his first English-language gathering. Meanwhile the Polish work kept coming out through the Paris émigré press: *King Popiel and Other Poems* (1962), *From the Rising of the Sun* (1974).

Stockholm, Gdańsk, Kraków

The 1980 Nobel citation named a writer who "voices man's exposed condition in a world of severe conflicts." The prize let him enter Poland for the first time in thirty years; he met Lech Wałęsa and John Paul II, and his banned books were finally printed at home. Smuggled copies had already fed Solidarity, which is why his lines ended up carved into the Gdańsk monument. Harvard made him Norton Professor of Poetry in 1981, and the lectures became *The Witness of Poetry* (1983). After 1989 he divided his life between Berkeley and Kraków; in 1991 he saw Lithuania again for the first time since 1939; in 2000 he moved to Kraków for good. He married Carol Thigpen in 1992 and outlived her. He died on 14 August 2004, aged ninety-three, and was buried after a state funeral at Skałka, with Seamus Heaney, Adam Zagajewski and Robert Hass reading "In Szetejnie" in six languages.

Why Czesław Is Called a Genius

Joseph Brodsky, himself a Nobel laureate and not a generous man about rivals, wrote in 1978 that Miłosz was "one of the great poets of our time; perhaps the greatest." The specific faculty behind that judgement is described best by Robert Hass, who called him a poet of great inclusiveness whose work "dwells in contradiction" — a mind that could hold several irreconcilable voices in a single poem and refuse to arbitrate between them. That is rarer than lyric gift. It let him write about God, atrocity, erotic pleasure and Californian sunlight without any of them cancelling the others, across a formal range running from epic-length treatises to two-line poems, in free verse, prose poetry and classical forms. The critic Donald Davie argued that his example pushed English-language poets toward engagement with subjects of intellectual and historical importance and away from what Davie called privileged irresponsibility. And *The Captive Mind* is the rare case of a poet producing a first-rank work of political psychology.

The counter-case is worth making. Much of his Western authority came from where he had stood rather than from what he invented: he was present for the occupation of Warsaw and the Stalinisation of Poland, and a writer with that biography accrues moral weight independent of craft. His Berkeley colleagues read him for years as a Cold War figure, and the 1980 Nobel landed at a politically convenient moment, with Solidarity rising in Poland on writing of his that had been smuggled in. Nearly all his readers meet him in translation, which makes the verdict on his verse partly a verdict on his translators. And he had served the regime he later exposed, a fact his émigré critics never let go. What survives all of that is a body of work that stayed intellectually honest about its own compromises for seventy years.

Legacy

Miłosz gave Polish poetry an international readership and gave American poetry a conscience it had partly mislaid. His influence runs through Heaney, Robert Pinsky, Edward Hirsch and Carolyn Forché. Poland made him an honorary citizen of Kraków, gave him the Order of the White Eagle, and declared 2011 the Year of Miłosz; streets carry his name in Paris and Vilnius. The durable thing, though, is the stance: a writer who watched the twentieth century do its worst at close range and refused both despair and consolation.