Born in the current Polish town of Szetejnie in 1911, Czeslaw Milosz began his fight against oppressive governments at an early age. He first began publishing materials in the early part of the 1930s, while he was attending university. Aside from publishing his poems in Alma Mater Vilnenis and the Anthology of Social Poetry , Milosz spread his ideas through his work for Radio Wilno and later Radio Warsaw.

It was during World War II that Czeslaw first began speaking out against the oppressive regimes that continually occupied Poland. The Warsaw underground press was a haven for those wanted to support the resistance to Nazi rule, and Milosz was one of the most popular writers publishing anti-Nazi materials such as OCALENIA to Poles during the war. Although the Nazis were defeated in 1945, Czeslaw Milosz continued his fight against oppression in Poland, with the Polish Communist government and communism as a whole as his targets.

Although he worked briefly with the Polish Communist government as a consulate in New York and Washington, Milosz quickly became disenchanted with the Polish government and requested political asylum in France in 1951. He grew to dislike the government because he realized how oppressive the new Polish government was towards the intelligentsia in the country. He lived for the next ten years in France, where he published numerous books and poems, some the most famous being The Captive Mind and The Seizure of Power, which revealed how life for the intelligentsia in Soviet bloc countries was heavily restricted and censored.

After spending nearly a decade in Paris, Czeslaw moved west to the United States, settling in California. He took up a job at the University of California at Berkeley as a professor of Slavic languages and literature. Students immediately took to Milosz’s classes, making him among the most popular lecturers at the school. While in California, he undertook the task of translating famous authors like William Shakespeare and Walt Whitman into Polish. Milosz also continued to publish his own materials, such as City Without a Name and The Witness of Poetry, in Poland, despite having it officially banned by the Polish government.

Czeslaw Milosz received the Nobel Prize in 1980 for his tremendous literary work. This award provided a great boost to Milosz’s already widespread popularity and quickly turned him into one of the most widely read poets in the United States. He finally returned to his native Poland first in 1981 and eventually moved there, splitting his time between his home in Krakow and Berkeley. Milosz passed away in August of 2004, writing up until his last days.

Read more about Milosz at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1519-2004Aug14.html

http://www.culture.pl/en/culture/artykuly/os_milosz_czeslaw

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/206