Word: milosz
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...announcing the award, worth $212,000, the Swedish Academy cited Milosz's "uncompromising clear-sightedness" in a world thick with moral and intellectual conflicts. This is the familiar yet urgent condition of the modernist tradition into which Milosz was thrust by history. As he wrote in Mid-Twentieth-Century Portrait (1945): "Keeping one hand on Marx's writings, he reads the Bible in private./ His mocking eye on processions leaving burnt-out churches./ His backdrop: a horseflesh-colored city in ruins...
Irony, pathos and wistful disenchantment color the writer's prose. Reflecting on World War II and the Nazi occupation that shaped his outlook, Milosz observed: "The act of writing a poem is an act of faith; yet if the screams of the tortured are audible in the poet's room, is not his activity an offense to human suffering? And if the next hour may bring his death and the destruction of his manuscript, should the poet engage in such a pastime...
This tension between private vision and public violence unified a group of Polish wartime writers. Milosz went underground in Warsaw where he battled the Germans with a clandestine press, firing the spirit of resistance with articles and anti-Nazi poetry. From 1946 to 1950, he served in Washington and Paris as a member of Warsaw's diplomatic corps. He translated T.S. Eliot, Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg and wrote articles for the Polish press. But all was not well between the private and public man. Having escaped Hitler's oppression, Milosz now felt hemmed in by the Stalinist...
...Milosz, his wife and two sons moved to Berkeley, where the poet joined the faculty of the University of California. Reminiscent of another émigré professor, Vladimir Nabokov, the new laureate has a reputation as a dazzling lecturer...
...addition to The Captive Mind, Milosz's prose available in English includes The Seizure of Power, a novel of wartime Poland; Native Realm, an autobiography; The History of Polish Literature; and Emperor of the Earth: Modes of Eccentric Vision, a collection of essays...