Czeslaw Milosz
in conversation with Helen Vendler
March 29, 2000. Johnson Chapel, 8:00 p.m.

Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz will read from his poetry and discuss his work in an onstage conversation with noted poetry critic Helen Vendler of Harvard University. The event is free and open to the public.

Joseph Brodsky wrote: "I have no hesitations whatsoever in stating that Czeslaw Milosz is one of the greatest poets of our time, perhaps the greatest."

Czeslaw Milosz was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980, recognizing him as one of the greatest writers living today. Born in Lithuania in 1911, Milosz witnessed the turmoil of early twentieth-century Europe. In the thirties he was a leader of the Polish avant-garde poetry movement and during World War II he was a member of the resistance.

The weight of Milosz's poetry arises from his remembering that man is inextricably linked to his history. Milosz deftly fuses historical and individual elements, making his poetry "a kind of higher politics, an unpolitical politics."

In the forties, Milosz served as a diplomat for Poland's communist regime in Washington, D.C. In 1951 he defected to Paris where he spent the next decade as a freelance writer. He continued to write--in Polish--about lost homelands, the search for identity, and political repression.

Through his poetry, Milosz struggles to understand human nature in its entirety, and he teaches that "we must lift ourselves over new thresholds of consciousness; that to aim at higher and higher thresholds is our only happiness."

Links:

http://metalab.unc.edu/ipa/index.html. The Internet Poetry Archive has a page on Czeslaw Milosz where one can read and hear several of Milosz's poems, including "Conversation With Jeanne" and "A Poem for the End of the Century," along with a short introduction by Milosz discussing the contradictions between these two poems. The site also has a bibliography of Milosz's work.

The Internet Poetry Archive has pages for Seamus Heaney, Philip Levine, Yusef Komunyakaa, Robert Pinsky and Margaret Walker.

http://www.barclayagency.com/milosz.html. Czeslaw Milosz's speaking agent, The Barclay Agency, has a site on Milosz which includes a biography and several links. One leads back to the Internet Poetry Archive. Another is a description of Milosz's appearance at the Library of Congress in 1997.

http://www.poets.org/LIT/listen.htm. The Academy of American Poets has a page where you can hear Milosz read his poem, "And the City Stood in its Brightness."

http://www.nobel.se/laureates/literature-1980.html The Nobel Foundation site has the text of Milosz's Nobel acceptance speech, among other links.

http://www.almaz.com/nobel/literature/1980a.html The Nobel Prize Internet Archive has several good links for more information about Milosz.