Czeslaw Milosz
Czeslaw Milosz
Czesław Miłosz; 30 June 1911 – 14 August 2004) was a Polish poet, prose writer, translator and diplomat. His World War II-era sequence The World is a collection of twenty "naïve" poems. Following the war, he served as Polish cultural attaché in Paris and Washington, D.C., then in 1951 defected to the West. His nonfiction book The Captive Mindbecame a classic of anti-Stalinism. From 1961 to 1998 he was a professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of...
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth30 June 1911
CitySeteniai, Lithuania
We have become indifferent to content, and react, not even to form, but to technique, to technical efficiency itself.
What is poetry which does not save nations or people?
What has no shadow has no strength to live.
Two attributes of a poet, avidity of the eye and the desire to describe that which he sees.
The revolt against one's environment is usually 'shame' of one's environment.
I think that I am here, on this earth, To present a report on it, but to whom I don't know. As if I were sent so that whatever takes place Has meaning because it changes into memory.
The partition separating life from death is so tenuous. The unbelievable fragility of our organism suggests a vision on a screen: a kind of mist condenses itself into a human shape, lasts a moment and scatters.
I am composed of contradictions, which is why poetry is a better form for me than philosophy
Be young forever, seasons of the earth.
When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.
Human material seems to have one major defect: it does not like to be considered merely as human material. It finds it hard to endure the feeling that it must resign itself to passive acceptance of changes introduced from above.
A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death.
Consolation Calm down. Both your sins and your good deeds will be lost in oblivion.
Do not feel safe. The poet remembers. You can kill one, but another is born. The words are written down, the deed, the date.