On Czesław Miłosz, by Eva Hoffman (Princeton University Press, 2023).

My initial encounter with Polish poet Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) was through an interview about his poetry on Mars Hill Audio in 2004. Ken Myers interviewed Roger Lundin. Miłosz was quoted to say that when he arrived at the University of Paris from his native city of Šeteniai (now Vilnius) in Lithuania, formerly part of Poland, that many students showed disdain for their homelands. He engages this experience in his 1981 poem “Bypassing Rue Descartes”:

Ashamed to remember the customs of our homes,
About which nobody here should ever be told:
. . .
I had left the cloudy provinces behind,
I entered the universal, dazzled and desiring.[1]

He deplored this attitude, especially as one who felt he was an exile from Europe because he came from “the other (Eastern) Europe,” considered inferior by the rest of Europe. I became a fan. The local is where we live and is the soil for the best poetry but much of modernity works against thick local connections. In his autobiographical novel The Issa Valley, he reminds us, “Until recently everything a man needed was manufactured at home” (8). In the poem Miłosz also satirizes the “universal” as at the root of the beautiful utopianism of Marxism and National Socialism which led to the extermination of millions.

He lived most of his childhood in Czarist Russia. In 1918 Poland regained its independent nationhood and Lithuania declared independence from the new country. His native city, the capital of Lithuania, consisted of a rich cultural, ethnic, and religious diversity including Lithuanian, Jewish, Polish, and Belorussian citizens. His family was considered Polish minor nobility. As a young man he wrestled with the teachings of Polish Catholicism, deploring “organized religion.” His intellectual curiosity, honesty, and sensitivity led him to lament the cruelty he witnessed in the world. At university he was the only one to defend his fellow Jewish students from anti-Semitism (12–13).

During my first pastorate as a church planter in New Rochelle, New York, I was bi-vocational, working part time for a Jewish engineer, Gustav Getter and Associates. One of the engineers was a Polish Jew who was born in Auschwitz near the end of World War II. She was excruciatingly thin due to her near starvation diet in the camp. Then to my astonishment I discovered that the author of the book under review, Eva Hoffman, is also a Polish Jew who was born in Auschwitz.

Unlike the solipsistic stream of consciousness of so much contemporary poetry, Miłosz deals with the large and difficult questions of life in concrete lyrical language. This was no doubt borne of the anguish he suffered throughout his early life until he fled Nazism and then Communism. His early training at school in Vilnius

in Latin classics and translation instilled in him a basic but crucial lesson that “what one says changes, depending upon how one says it,” and also the hard-earned conviction, conveyed by a demanding teacher, that “perfection is worth the effort . . . in other words, he showed us how to respect literature as the fruit of arduous labor.” (15)

He resisted the idea that literature was the “outpouring of some creative genius” (15). His approach to poetry as craftmanship is beautifully expressed when he says, “The peasant is honest because his energy is transformed into bread. The artisan is honest because he makes over wood, hide, or metal.” Hoffman adds, “The energy of labor is what converts stone into cathedrals, plants into food, steel into bridges, perceptions into understanding—and words into poetry” (15–16).

After a brief flirtation with Marxism, Miłosz turned from politics to poetry. He always needed a larger framework for perception and understanding, what Hoffman calls “a metaphysics of particularity” (19). Poetry for Miłosz meant exploring the foundations of life in the particularities of one’s life situation. He was no fan of generalization. This yielded what Hoffman calls “the music of thought” (19). During the war Miłosz recounts in Native Realm (1059)[2] an incident that provides clear insight into his idea of poetry. Lying in a field that was being bombarded by airplanes with bombs whistling by, “I riveted my eyes on a stone and two blades of grass in front of me. . . . I suddenly understood the value of matter: that stone and those two blades of grass formed a whole kingdom, an infinity of forms, shades, textures, lights.” For Miłosz, meaning inheres in the concrete particularities of existence (30). In high school my English teacher commented on an essay of mine, observing that it was too general and needed to be more specific. I never forgot that criticism; it forms part of my attraction to Miłosz.

Religiously, he had an affinity for Judaism, perhaps because their religion was not associated with a national identity like Polish Catholicism. He learned Hebrew in order to translate the Old Testament (20). Having visited Warsaw after the German retreat left it in utter devastation, he wrote in his 1945 poem “In Warsaw,” “It’s madness to live without joy.”[3] In his essay “If Only This Could Be Said,” Miłosz points to the veracity of the Gospels and their account of Jesus’s resurrection,

Scientific-technological civilization has no place for death . . . I must ask if I believe that the four Gospels tell the truth. My answer to this is: “Yes.” So I believe in an absurdity, that Jesus rose from the dead? Just answer without any of those evasions and artful tricks employed by theologians: “Yes or no?” I answer: “Yes,” and by that response I nullify death’s omnipotence. . . . So what remains is the covenant, the Word in which man trusts. Who however will inherit life? Those who are predestined to do so. . . . I am with all those people who have proclaimed their distrust of Nature (it’s contaminated) and relied solely on the boundless freedom of the divine act, of Grace.[4]

His love of the particularity of the created order, especially our embodied existence, cultivated a deep attraction to the resurrection of Jesus.

During Miłosz’s year of study in Paris in 1935 he encountered the suffering of displaced migrant Poles. In 1936 he wrote a poem, “Ballad of Levallois,” about their “barracks for the unemployed, Levallois-Perret,” later published in Polish in Rescue (Ocalenie) in 1945.

O God, have mercy on Levallois,
Look under these chestnut trees poisoned with smoke,
Give a moment of joy to the weak and the drunk,
O God, have mercy on Levallois.

“We were sensitive to the smell of misery and brutality” (27). Between the Nazi occupation and their persecution of Jews, three million Poles lost their lives. Miłosz lived most of the terrible years in Warsaw, but he eventually made his way to Lviv, Ukraine (29–30). He made his way back to occupied Warsaw to be near his future wife Janka. There he found freedom, despite the Nazi presence, to read and write to his heart’s content because the Nazis did not adhere to a rigorous ideology like the Communists. Intellectually they were a zero.[5]

He learned English by reading the works of T. S. Eliot and translating Shakespeare’s As You Like It. The influence of Eliot can be seen in poems like the poetic series The World (1943) and the poem “Faith” (34–5). Hoffman sees echoes of Eliot’s Four Quartets. I see a powerful resemblance to The Wasteland in Miłosz’s “Two Men in Rome”: “And there’s the dancing girl. / Ta tada tada . . .”[6] Perhaps Eliot more than any other English speaking poet helped Miłosz achieve “deeper layers” in his poetry (34). Hoffman considers that the two best poems written by Miłosz during this period were “Campo dei Fiori” and “A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto” (36).

“Campo dei Fiori” is the result of Miłosz witnessing a failed uprising in the Warsaw ghetto in which many lost their lives, outside the ghetto walls people were enjoying a beautiful spring evening, indifferent to the tragedy (37). He laments, “that day I thought only / of the loneliness of the dying.”[7]

“‘A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto’ is a more severe and perhaps more profound feat of metaphoric thought, imagining an underworld of the dead” (38). Miłosz’s empathy for the persecuted Jew also reveals his interaction with the Bible and his action in helping Jews in Warsaw escape the Nazis in coordination with the British foreign intelligence MI5. Also compelling is Hoffman’s memories of her parents living through the Holocaust in a tiny village in the Polish part of Ukraine (41). No wonder she connects with Miłosz’s poetry of memory and witness. Miłosz also had to deal with survivor guilt as reflected poignantly in his 1944 poem “Café” written in Warsaw. “The waiter whirls with his tray / and they look at me with a burst of laughter / for I still don’t know what it is to die at the hand of man, / they know—they know it well.” A man of deep emotion, Miłosz avoided entering into the deep emotion connected with his country’s tragic past and present. His poem “In Warsaw” (1945) expresses it well: “My pen is lighter / than a hummingbird’s feather. This burden / is too much for it to bear” (48–9). The only survivors of the devastation of the war were two important words, “Only two salvaged words: / Truth and justice.” These he would pursue for a lifetime beyond mere politics.

He chafed under the Communism in postwar Poland; But he sought and accepted the post of cultural attaché at the Polish embassy in Washington, DC. The “DP” on his license plate, which stood for “Diplomatic Personnel,” he insisted was for “displaced person” (53). American “aggressive individualism” and lack of a sense of history did not make a good first impression. This would change in 1960 with his professorial appointment to the University of California in Berkeley.

Under suspicion due to his lack of Communist party membership and his poetry, Miłosz was recalled by the Polish government from Washington, DC, to Warsaw in 1950. This often meant imprisonment or death. He was in a state of deep despair, when a friend, Natalia Modzelewska, whose husband was Minister of Foreign Affairs, arranged for Miłosz to be sent back to Paris. Once there he slipped out of the Polish embassy and hid at the offices of his émigré publisher, Kultura, for three and a half months.[8] He remained in Paris even though he deplored western Europe’s capitulation to National Socialism as well as Eastern Europe’s succumbing to Communism. Through it all he never relinquished his vocation as a poet.

You who have wronged a simple man . . .
Do not feel safe. The poet remembers.
You can kill one, but another is born.
The words are written down, the deed, the date. (60)[9]

Throughout it all, during these years of anguish, he developed his poetic skills with great intensity and assiduity.

In France he found few sympathizers among the intelligentsia except Albert Camus.  The rest were under the thrall of Communism (63). In 1953 he published a brilliant analysis of totalitarianism in The Captive Mind.[10] With Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn he shared the belief that susceptibility to Communism lay in the lack of religion. Christianity gives human life morality and meaning. Dialectical materialism is a substitute god, Diamat (68–9).[11]

In 1960 Miłosz came to America to assume his new position as professor of Slavic Languages and Literature at University of California in Berkeley. “Miłosz could combine genuine gratitude to America with a deep critique of some of its cultural features.”  

California is a “mecca for seekers of mystical unity, for consciousness-expanding drugs, ecstatic sects, publications devoted to Hinduism and Zen Buddhism, for prophets preaching wisdom from Tibetan monks.”—tendencies that make it, in his view, “the capital of everything that is turning against Western man’s fondness for intellectual precision.”

His poem “To Raja Rao” embodies this critique (102–105). In his essay “The Agony of the West,” he wrote that the catastrophism and utopianism of the hippie was a way for sensitive people to deal with “the horrors accompanying technological progress” (109–10). Whitman and Thoreau represented nostalgia in contrast with the revolutionary impetus of Marxism (111). The Berkely rebellions, unlike the European resistances during World War II, “were almost entirely costless: no gulag, no Lubyanka prison, no Siberian exile” (115). Miłosz concluded that middle-class Americans

spend their lives working, often in dull and meaningless jobs, and this does not allow them to “break through their habits of mind.” There is also the nefarious influence of television and roadside ads, “which become richer in brutality, and more moronic the further one goes from the big cities.” And no bookstores anywhere in sight, no time (or urge) to read. (122)

More positively, he felt that “auto trips about America result in admiration for man and compassion” (125). Hoffman concludes:

For all his gratitude to America and his admiration for the United States, he didn’t find it a comfortable country to live in, and a lingering sense of estrangement—creatively so fruitful and personally so difficult—never entirely left him. (127)

This is why in 1993 he returned to Poland and lived out his days in Kraków.

On the other hand, Miłosz admired the local color of village life and the diligence of the American worker, especially the farmer. He deeply appreciated the patriotism and the democratic freedoms which allowed people to advance. He understood Europe to be the past and America to be the future (135).

Despite his melancholic proclivities, he also had a robust capacity for pleasure, which is especially evident in his late poetry (139). This may be clearly witnessed in his short poem written in Berkeley in 1971, “Gift”[12]:

A day so happy.
Fog lifted early, I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers.
There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
I knew no one worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man did
Not embarrass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
When straightening up, I saw the blue sea and sails. (138)

In his long poem “A Treatise on Poetry” Miłosz provides “a kind of aesthetic manifesto” in the first section, “Preface” (82).[13] He begins almost predictably,

First, plain speech in the mother tongue.
Hearing it you should be able to see,
As if in a flash of summer lightning,
Apple trees, a river, the bend in a road.[14]

The particulars of place in speech, nature, and artifacts Miłosz “wanted—needed—to assert that his native realm, his small corner of the world, mattered; that it contained interesting personalities and great writers; that—however obscure its history—it was part of the civilized world” (144).

The range of Miłosz’s interests, and thus the subjects of his poetry, is enormous: from the Museum of Modern Art in Berkeley to the Bible, from Gregory of Nyssa to Pascal, and on and on. The Greek goddess of memory, Mnemosyne, was an inspiration to many exiles, since what they could recall might never otherwise be remembered (149). Miłosz wanted us to remember and to be remembered.

In 1980 he received the Nobel Prize; the hitherto unknown poet seemed to be associated with the Polish movement known as Solidarity. He was thus afforded the pleasure of a trip to Poland, where he met Lech Walesa, the leader of Solidarity, and Pope John Paul II. “Eventually, the words from his poem ‘You Who Wronged’ were inscribed on the memorial to the fallen shipyard workers in Gdańsk, where the Solidarity movement started and heroically continued against great odds.” “You who have harmed simple man, mocking him with your laughter, you kill him, someone else will be born, and your deeds and words will be written down.” “His books were officially published in Poland for the first time since 1951” (154–55).

Miłosz saw himself as a voice crying in the wilderness. His poetic endeavor was “a quest for reality, or esse—a serious and ethical task. . . . He thought of himself not as an inspired individual ‘artist’ but as a voice representing an underestimated literary tradition and emerging from the insufficiently understood Other Europe” (157–58).

While most of Miłosz’s poetry is translated from Polish, it translates well because most is not rhyming in the original. This gives the translator more linguistic latitude. Also, many poems are translated by Miłosz himself, so much less is lost in translation.

In 1991 Lithuania had broken away from the Soviet Union, and Miłosz visited the country of his birth for the first time in seven decades. His essay “Happiness” commemorates the event (174). But his second wife, who was much younger than him, died of cancer in 2002 (188). He lost his first wife in 1986. So sorrow overshadowed much of his life. But conventional Catholicism appears more prominently in his later poems (201). After his poem “Heaven” Miłosz has a commentary. The poem has a passage from the Catholic catechism explaining heaven as the abode of the Father. He refers to the “biblical allegory of original sin” resulting in human death. But the creativity of mankind paradoxically comes from his rebellion. This is the riddle of Christian theology.[15] After his death in 2004 he received an elaborate funeral in Kraków (204).

Czesław Miłosz’s religious commitment has been a matter of controversy. John Wilson referred to Miłosz as “a decidedly unorthodox Roman Catholic, one who expressed ecstatic praise and perennial doubt, eschatological hope and a questioning wonderment.”[16] This is a fair conclusion based on what we know. Miłosz’s 1974 poem, “Bells in Winter,” the last poem of the series From the Rising of the Sun,[17] confesses:

Yet I belong to those who believe in apokatastasis.
That word promises reversed movement,
Not the one that was set in katastasis,
And appears in Acts 3, 21.

It means: restoration. So believed St. Gregory of Nyssa,
Johannes Scotus Erigena, Ruysbroeck, and William Blake.

In his wrestlings Miłosz surely plumbed the depths.

The book has no chapter divisions but is divided into sections of various lengths by a square printer’s device. It also lacks an index.

I must confess to my readers that I have felt out of my depth, as I have often felt after years of reading Eliot, with Miłosz. Their classical training, native brilliance, and intense devotion to poetry are simply dazzling. But I remain content to be dazzled. I highly recommend this biography and the poetry of Czesław Miłosz.

Recommended Reading

Andrzej Franaszek, Miłosz: A Biography (Belknap, 2017)

Czesław Miłosz, New and Collected Poems 1931–2001 (Penguin, 2001)

Czesław Miłosz, Selected and Last Poems 1931–2004 (HarperCollins, 2006)

Czesław Miłosz, Poet in the New World: Poems 1946–1953 (HarperCollins, 2025)

Czesław Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry (Harvard University Press, 1983)

Endnotes

[1] Czeslaw Miłosz, New and Collected Poems 1931–2001 (Penguin, 2001), 393–94.

[2] Czesław Miłosz, Rodzinna Europa (Native Realm) (Instytut Literacki, 1959).

[3] Czesław Miłosz, Poet in the New World: Poems 1946–1953 (HarperCollins, 2025), x, 4.

[4] Czesław Miłosz, “If Only This Could Be Said,” Cross Currents, excerpted from Begin Where I am: Selected Essays, eds. Bogdana Carpenter and Madeline G. Levine (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2001), 64–66.

[5] Adam Kirsch, “Czeslaw Milosz’s Battle for Truth,” The New Yorker (May 22, 2017), https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/29/czeslaw-miloszs-battle-for-truth.

[6] Miłosz, Poet in the New World, 13.

[7] Miłosz, New and Collected Poems 1931–2001, 34.

[8] Kirsch, “Czeslaw Milosz’s Battle for Truth.”

[9] Miłosz, New and Collected Poems 1931–2001, 103.

[10] Zniewolony umysł The Captive Mind (Instytut Literacki, 1953).

[11] Diamat is a name for Marxist philosophy defining the relationship between knowledge and the material world.

[12] Miłosz, New and Collected Poems 1931–2001, 277.

[13] Miłosz, New and Collected Poems, 109. “A Treatise on Poetry” is not an easy read, but it is deeply rewarding for the effort. It reminds me so much of Eliot.

[14] Miłosz, New and Collected Poems, 109.

[15] Czesław Miłosz, Selected and Last Poems 1931–2004 (HarperCollins, 2006), 298–300.

[16] John Wilson, “The Milosz Year: Longing for the Restoration of All Things,” Books and Culture (December 29, 2010), https://www.booksandculture.com/articles/2011/janfeb/miloszyear.html.

[17] Miłosz, New and Collected Poems, 326–31. This excerpt is on page 328.

Gregory E. Reynolds is pastor emeritus of Amoskeag Presbyterian Church (OPC) in Manchester, New Hampshire, and is the editor of Ordained Servant. Ordained Servant Online, March, 2025.