Czesław Miłosz was born into a Polish-Speaking family in the small village of Szetejnie near the river Niewiaża in what is today Lithuania. His early years were spent in Wilno, after the city had been incorporated by Piłsudski into the newly founded Polish Republic during the short war with Lithuania in 1919. At first, somewhat uncertain about his career, Miłosz entered Wilno s Stefan Batory University in 1929 to study Law. It was during these years that his predilection for literature developed, and with friends he founded the literary magazine Żagary, which appeared from April 1931 to March 1934. Others involved in the group included the Catholic novelist Antoni Gołubiew, Jerzy Putrament (general secretary of the ZLP in the Stalinist period) and Jerzy Zagórski.

In 1933, Miłosz published his first volume of poetry, Poemat o czasie zastygłym (Poem on Frozen Time), and then co-operated on an anthology of contemporary poetry, Antologia poezji społecznej (Anthology of Social Poetry). After he received his Master's degree, he was awarded a one-year scholarship to Paris, where he began a close association with his relative, Oscar V. de Milosz, a Lithuanian diplomat and mystic who was also something of a poet. The older man s influence on Czesław found expression in a sense of foreboding regarding an impending apocalypse for mankind.

On his return to Poland, Miłosz found work in the recently opened offices of Polish Radio in Wilno. The social concerns of his programmes and of the group with which he still associated led the city s right-wing district governor to have him and other members of staff dismissed in 1937. Miłosz was immediately offered work in Polish Radio in Warsaw, which was anxious to resist the régime s pressure. In 1936, he published his second volume of poetry, Trzy zimy (Three Winters).

During World War II, Miłosz survived as an assistant in the University of Warsaw's Library, helping in the shifting of books from one library to another under German supervision. He was also active in the underground literary scene, publishing a conspiratorial edition of his own poetry, Wiersze (Poems), in 1940 under the pseudonym of Jan Syruć, and editing an anthology of poetry, Pieśń niepodległa (An Independent Song) in 1942. During this period, he spent much of his time translating from French (Maritain) and especially English (As You Like It, staged but not published in 1946, and TS Eliot's The Wasteland, printed in Twórczość in 1946). During the Warsaw Uprising, he lived on the outskirts of the city, and through his friendship with Jerzy Turowicz, later editor of the Catholic weekly Tygodnik Powszechny, he managed to move near to Kraków, where he remained until after the war.

In 1945, Miłosz helped to found the literary monthly Twórczość and also published his superb collection, written under the occupation, Ocalenie (Rescue). He then accepted an offer to work in the diplomatic service for the new régime. He became Vice Cultural Attaché in the Polish Consulate in New York and the Embassy in Washington from 1946 to 1949. After 1949 he was posted to Paris. As the situation in Poland worsened following the imposition of a one-party state in December 1948, and especially the adoption of socialist realism as a cultural orthodoxy, Miłosz felt increasingly uncomfortable as a representative of his country s cultural policies, and at his dependence on the régime for his livelihood. In the April 1948 issue of Twórczość, he published an expression of his growing dissatisfaction with the realities of post-war Polish politics and society: Traktat moralny (A Treatise on Morality), later included in the 1953 collection, Światło dzienne (Daylight), published abroad. In January 1951, he decided he would not return to his post at the embassy in Paris on his return from a Christmas holiday in Warsaw.

His financial situation was not easy at this time. The Paris-based Kultura group gave him accommodation, which led the régime immediately to brand him an enemy of the people. He subsequently became a non-person and a banned writer in Poland. Throughout 1951 he wrote Zniewolony umysł (The Captive Mind), an extraordinary sociological and psychological study of the mentality of those writers who managed to reach an accommodation with the rigours of diamat (dialectical materialism) and its aesthetic model, socialist realism. The book, which appeared at the same time in French, caused great debate among French intellectuals who were predominantly left-wing. It can be ranked with Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon as one of the most revelatory documents of the 1950s regarding the workings of Eastern European totalitarianism. His next collection of poetry, Daylight, consisted of poems written while still dependent on a tyrannical régime that he obviously detested. Not until the extraordinary Traktat poetycki (A Treatise on Poetry, 1957) was Miłosz able to write new poems, concentrating instead on the writing of another analysis of the totalitarian thirst for power, albeit this time a novel, published first in French as La Prise de Pouvoir (1953), then in Polish as Zdobycie wladzy (The Seizure of Power, aka The Usurpers), for which he received the Prix Littéraire Européen.

Miłosz exorcised the regrets he had about cutting himself off from Poland and his poetic impotence in his other novel, the quasi-magical Dolina Issy (The Issa Valley, 1955), which recounted the perceptions of a small boy in Lithuania of a whole series of different worlds of folk tales, history and reality which formed one magical unity. Miłosz's confidence rose when, after he had completed an account of his origins and his wholly different perspective on Europe and its history (as seen by a Lithuanian Pole) in Rodzinna Europe (Native Realm, 1959), the University of California in Berkeley, San Francisco, offered him the post of Lecturer in Polish Literature from 1961. From this secure and distant vantage point, Miłosz was able to return to his passion, poetry.

Miłosz s poetry grew in philosophical depth as his teaching an writing led him to synthesise his knowledge and views of Polish literature for the English-speaking world in his History of Polish Literature (1969). He also reassessed his poetic interests in many semi-philosophical essays indebted in their range and variety to Orwell and Eliot: Kontynenty (Continents, 1959), Widzenia nad zatoką San Francisco (Visions from San Francisco Bay, 1969), Prywatne obowiązki (Private Obligations, 1972), Ziemia Ulro (The Land of Ulro, 1977), Ogród Nauk (A Garden of Learning, 1979) and his only such volume in English, a selection of translated essays entitled Emperor of the Earth. Modes of Eccentric Vision (1977).

His poetry runs from cool philosophical and moral assessment of the eternal choice between the universal and the personal in the 1960s in the collections Król Popiel i inne wiersze (King Popiel and Other Verse, 1962), Gucio zaczarowany (Bobo's Metamorphosis, 1965), and Miasto bez imienia (The City Without Name, 1969), to the more religious tonality and considerations of human mortality to be found in the collection Gdzie wschodzi słońce i kędy zapada (From the Rising of the Sun, 1974). His interest in biblical translations grew steadily throughout the 1970s, and from 1977 he began to publish these translations in Poland: with the Catholic publisher Znak, based in Kraków, as well as Twórczość. These translations include St Mark's Gospel, Ecclesiastes, the Psalms, Lamentations, Proverbs, the Apocalypse and the Book of Job.

The obvious highpoint in Miłosz's life came with the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980. In 1981, he was permitted to return to Poland, where the younger generation in particular acknowledged him as their voice and teacher. The régime could no longer ignore him as it had done for years and many of his poetic works appeared for the first time in official circulation, whilst the underground published his 1950s analyses of totalitarianism.

E Czarnecka Conversations with Czesław Miłosz, San Diego, Harcourt Brace

A. Fiut Jovanovich, 1987

D. Davie The Insufficiency of Lyric, Cambridge, CUP, 1986.

A. Fiut The Eternal Moment: the Poetry of Czesław Miłosz, Berkeley/Oxford, University of California Press, 1990

K. Jastremski Biography, http://metalab.unc.edu/ipa/milosz/bio.html

Periphery, vols 4/5, 1998/99, 86-105