Czeslaw Milosz: Poems

Life in the United States

University of California, Berkeley

Miłosz in mid-career

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.[64] He proved to be an adept and popular teacher, and was offered tenure after only two months.[65] 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.[66] 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.[67][f]

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.)[68] 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 Postwar Polish Poetry, 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.[69] 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.)[70] In 1969, Miłosz's textbook The History of Polish Literature was published in English. He followed this with a volume of his own work, Selected Poems (1973), some of which he translated into English himself. This was his first anthology of poetry published in English language.

At the same time, Miłosz continued to publish in Polish with an émigré press in Paris. His poetry collections from this period include King Popiel and Other Poems (1962), Bobo’s Metamorphosis (1965), City Without a Name (1969), and From the Rising of the Sun (1974).

During Miłosz's time at Berkeley, the campus became a hotbed of student protest, notably as the home of the Free Speech Movement, which has been credited with helping to "define a generation of student activism" across the United States.[71] Miłosz's relationship to student protesters was sometimes antagonistic: he called them "spoiled children of the bourgeoisie"[72] 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!'"[73] 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.[74]

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.[75] But when his wife, Janina, fell ill and required expensive medical treatment, Miłosz returned to teaching seminars.[76] This year 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.[77] 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.[78] 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.[25]

Miłosz, 1998

Many Poles became aware of Miłosz for the first time when he won the Nobel Prize.[79] 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.[80] 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.[81] 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 The Witness of Poetry (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.[82] In 2000, he moved to Kraków.[83]

In 1992, Miłosz married Carol Thigpen, an academic at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. They remained married until her death in 2002.[84] His work from the 1990s includes the poetry collections Facing the River (1994) and Roadside Dog (1997), and the collection of short prose Miłosz’s ABC’s (1997). Miłosz's last stand-alone volumes of poetry were This (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).


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