Czesław Miłosz ; 30 June 1911 – 14 August 2004) was a Polish[1][poet, prose writer and translator of Lithuanian origin.His World War II-era sequence The World is a collection of 20 "naive" poems. After serving as a cultural attaché for the Republic of Poland (1945–1951), he defected to the West in 1951, and his nonfiction book The Captive Mind (1953) is a classic of anti-Stalinism.
From 1961 to 1998 he was a professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. Miłosz later became an American citizen[7] and was awarded the 1978 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Czesław Miłosz was born on June 30, 1911 in the village of Szetejnie (Lithuanian: Šeteniai), Kaunas Governorate, Russian Empire (now Kėdainiai district, Kaunas County, Lithuania) on the border between two Lithuanian historical regions of Samogitia and Aukštaitija in central Lithuania.

As the son of Aleksander Miłosz (d.1959), a civil engineer, and Weronika, née Kunat (d.1945), descendant of the Siručiai noble family,[citation needed] Miłosz was fluent in Polish, Lithuanian, Russian, English and French.

His brother, Andrzej Miłosz (1917–2002), a Polish journalist, translator of literature and of film subtitles into Polish, was a documentary-film producer who created Polish documentaries about his brother.

Miłosz was raised Catholic in rural Lithuania and emphasized his identity with the multi-ethnic Grand Duchy of Lithuania, a stance that led to ongoing controversies; he refused to categorically identify himself as either a Pole or a Lithuanian.[9] He said of himself: "I am a Lithuanian to whom it was not given to be a Lithuanian.",[10] and "My family in the sixteenth century already spoke Polish, just as many families in Finland spoke Swedish and in Ireland English, so I am a Polish not a Lithuanian poet. But the landscapes and perhaps the spirits of Lithuania have never abandoned me". Miłosz memorialised his Lithuanian childhood in a 1955 novel, The Issa Valley, and in the 1959 memoir Native Realm
In his youth, Miłosz came to adopt, as he put it, a "scientific, atheistic position mostly", though he was later to return to the Catholic faith.After graduating from Sigismund Augustus Gymnasium in Vilnius, he studied law at Stefan Batory University and in 1931 he travelled to Paris, where he was influenced by his distant cousin Oscar Milosz, a French poet of Lithuanian descent and a Swedenborgian. In 1931, he formed the poetic group Żagary together with the young poets Jerzy Zagórski, Teodor Bujnicki, Aleksander Rymkiewicz, Jerzy Putrament and Józef Maśliński.[14] Miłosz's first volume of poetry was published in 1934. After receiving his law degree that year, he again spent a year in Paris on a fellowship. Upon returning, he worked as a commentator at Radio Wilno, but was dismissed, an action described as stemming from either his leftist views or for views overly sympathetic to Lithuania.[10][15] Miłosz wrote all his poetry, fiction and essays in Polish and translated the Old Testament Psalms into Polish.
Miłosz spent World War II in Warsaw, under Nazi Germany's "General Government". Here he attended underground lectures by Polish philosopher and historian of philosophy and aesthetics, Władysław Tatarkiewicz. He did not participate in the Warsaw Uprising since he resided outside Warsaw proper.
After World War II, Miłosz served as cultural attaché of the communist People's Republic of Poland in Paris. He was also involved in unsuccessful attempts by the Polish communist regime for the return of Polish children (previously smuggled out of the Soviet Union to India and Mexico) back to the Communist Block. For his role in promoting the communist government he was heavily criticized in emigre circles most famously in the article "Former Fellow Traveller Milosz" by the writer and activist Sergiusz Piasecki in the Paris based Kultura. In 1951 he defected and obtained political asylum in France. In 1953 he received the Prix Littéraire Européen (European Literary Prize).

In 1960 Miłosz emigrated to the United States, and in 1970 he became a U.S. citizen. In 1961 he began a professorship in Polish literature in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1978 he received the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. He retired that same year, but continued teaching at Berkeley. Milosz' personal attitude about living in Berkeley is sensitively portrayed in his poem, "A Magic Mountain," contained in a collection of translated poems entitled Bells in Winter, published by Ecco Press (1985). Having grown up in the cold climates of Eastern Europe, Milosz was especially struck by the lack of seasonal weather in Berkeley and by some of the brilliant refugees from around the world who became his friends at the university.
In 1980 Miłosz received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Since his works had been banned in Poland by the communist government, this was the first time that many Poles became aware of him.[citation needed] When the Iron Curtain fell, Miłosz was able to return to Poland, at first to visit and later to live part-time in Kraków. He divided his time between his home in Berkeley and an apartment in Kraków. In 1989, he received the U.S. National Medal of Arts and an honorary doctorate from Harvard University. During this period in Poland, his work was silenced by government-censored media.
Miłosz's 1953 book The Captive Mind is a study about how intellectuals behave under a repressive regime, a work which he himself later translated into English. Miłosz observed that those who became dissidents were not necessarily those with the strongest minds, but rather those with the weakest stomachs; the mind can rationalize anything, he said, but the stomach can take only so much. Through the Cold War, the book was often cited by US conservative commentators such as William F. Buckley, Jr..
Miłosz spoke of the difficulty of writing religious poetry in a largely postreligious world. His compatriot Pope John Paul II, commenting upon some of his work, in particular "Six Lectures in Verse", said to him, "You make one step forward, one step back." Miłosz answered, "Holy Father, how in the twentieth century can one write religious poetry differently?" The Pope smiled.[17]

Miłosz died in 2004 at his Kraków home, aged 93 and was buried in Kraków's Skałka Roman Catholic Church, one of the last to be commemorated there. His first wife, Janina (née Dłuska), whom he had married in 1944, predeceased him in 1986. They had two sons, Anthony (b. 1947) and John Peter (b.1951 ). His second wife, Carol Thigpen, an American-born historian, died in 2002.
Miłosz is honoured at Israel's Yad Vashem memorial to the Holocaust, as one of the "Righteous among the Nations". A poem by Miłosz appears on a Gdańsk memorial to protesting shipyard workers who had been killed by government security forces in 1970. His books and poems have been translated by many hands, including Jane Zielonko, Peter Dale Scott, Robert Pinsky and Robert Hass..

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Czeslaw Milosz was born to Weronika and Aleksander Milosz on June 30, 1911, in Szetejnie, Lithuania (then under the domination of the Russian tsarist government). After the outbreak of World War I, Aleksander Milosz was drafted into the Tsar's army, and as a combat engineer he built bridges and fortifications in front-line areas. His wife and son accompanied him in his constant travels about Russia. The family did not return to Lithuania until 1918, whereupon they settled in Wilno (then a part of Poland; also called Vilnius or Vilna).
Milosz graduated from high school in 1929, and in 1930 his first poems were published in Alma Mater Vilnenis, a university magazine. In 1931 he co-founded the Polish avant-garde literary group "Zagary"; his first collection of verse appeared in 1933. That same year he co-edited an Anthology of Social Poetry. In 1934 he earned a degree as Master of Law and traveled to Paris on a fellowship from the National Culture Fund. In 1936 he began working as a literary programmer for Radio Wilno. He was dismissed for his leftist views the following year and, after a trip to Italy, took a job with Polish Radio in Warsaw. He spent most of World War II in Nazi-occupied Warsaw working for underground presses.
After the war, he came to the United States as a diplomat for the Polish communist government, working at the Polish consulate first in New York, then in Washington. In 1950 he was transferred to Paris, and the following year he requested and received political asylum.