A Lifetime of Struggle Puts Polish Poet in Demand

“It all seems now to have been a dream.”

The dying words of Czeslaw Milosz’s mother worked their way into a poem he read recently at Claremont McKenna College.

They stand as an apt commentary on his life:

History has followed him across the continents, from his childhood in Czarist Russia, to Warsaw during World War II, to Berkeley in the 1960s. As a writer, he emerged from relative obscurity to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980. He has lived to see his verse, once banned in Poland, now treated as a national treasure.

And today, with heightened world interest in Eastern Europe, the man who describes himself as a “hermitic poet” is once again much in demand.

His hands deep in his pockets, his bushy gray-white eyebrows arched above thin black-framed glasses, Milosz stared out at the audience of about 100 who gathered last Wednesday in Claremont to hear him read from his works.

“I’ve basically been just a poet,” Milosz said. “But in life I have written many other things, in spite of myself.”

Those things, including essays and prose, have been framed by the impact of history on moral issues, Milosz said.

“It’s good for students who are studying literature to see a poet who has taken on not simply literary matters but the range of moral and spiritual problems which confront human beings,” said Robert Faggen, a literature professor at the college, who invited Milosz to speak.

“He’s a poet with a large vision of fundamental hopes and aspirations of human beings, who has provided a powerful alternative to pessimistic and dehumanizing views of men,” Faggen said.

The 78-year-old poet said his work, which for decades was circulated underground by the dissident Polish press, has played an important role in bringing change to Poland. “The movement to tie intellectuals and workers together was influenced by my work,” he said. “The artist always has a role.”

In fact, Milosz’s name now is frequently mentioned in the same breath as that of two of the world’s most renowned Poles, Pope John Paul II and Solidarity leader Lech Walesa.

At one point Wednesday, a bemused Milosz reached into his pocket and pulled out a tiny cloverleaf-shaped pin. Given to him by an admirer when he was in Poland last October, it is engraved with designs: two crossed swords, a worker’s tools, a book.

“The Pope,” he said, pointing to the swords. “Walesa,” he said, pointing to the tools. “Milosz,” he said, slapping his chest and then pointing to the picture of the book. Smiling, he returned the keepsake to his pocket.

Then, Milosz told a story about his first encounter with Walesa. “I told him that I considered him the true leader of the country, my leader,” Milosz said. “And he said that he had gone to jail because of my poetry.”

No longer teaching, Milosz spends his time writing, lecturing and giving readings at universities around the world.

“I felt so fortunate to hear him speak,” said Leslie Bailey, 19, a third-year philosophy major at Claremont McKenna. She spent a semester in Poland last fall, but was unable to attend a reading by Milosz in Krakow. “I couldn’t get a pass to get in because I was an American,” she said. “There were thousands of people there and they gave priority to Polish students.”

Last Wednesday, though, she finally had her turn. And instead of being in an audience of thousands, she was among just a handful of students who met with Milosz in an informal seminar. The students asked the poet about nature, religion, art and, of course, politics.

“I am following the changes in Eastern Europe closely,” Milosz said. “I think the changes will have an impact on art, but I wonder in what way. It’s still to soon to tell.”

As for his personal life, one student asked: “Do you have any hobbies?” Milosz laughed and responded: “Drinking, drinking vodka.”

Born in Lithuania in 1911 and raised in Poland, Milosz grew up under two totalitarian systems: national socialism and communism. After World War I, his family left the Soviet Union and returned to what was the new Polish state. When World War II began, Poland was invaded by Nazi Germany and Milosz worked with the Resistance movement.

After witnessing the subsequent Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe, he became a member of the new communist government’s diplomatic service at the Polish embassies in New York, Washington and Paris. Milosz worked for the government until 1951, when, disenchanted, he quit and defected to the West. He remained in Paris and worked as a free-lance writer until 1960, when he became a professor of Slavic languages and literature at UC Berkeley.

He spent the next 20 years there writing in Polish for a people living in a country where his books were banned. “From my room at Berkeley I see the Golden Gate Bridge, and there I write in Polish,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. After Milosz won the Nobel Prize in 1980, the Polish government relented and lifted its freeze on his work, and the poet made his first trip home in 30 years.

Today he is so popular that a monument to slain Polish workers in Gdansk is inscribed with two quotations, one from the Bible, the other from a Milosz poem.