chĕsˈwäf mēˈwŏsh, 1911–, poet, essayist, and novelist, b. Szetejnie, Lithuania (then in Russia). Widely considered the greatest contemporary Polish poet, Milosz was born into an ethnically Polish family, studied in Vilna, lived in Warsaw during World War II, emigrated from Communist Poland after the war, and has lived in the United States since 1960, when he began teaching at the Univ. of California, Berkeley. He began writing verse in 1931, developing his own distinctive poetic voice some five years later. The main source of his early poetry was the Lithuanian countryside of his youth, which also figures prominently in his autobiographical novel The Issa Valley (tr. 1973). His poetry was profoundly affected by World War II and, later, by the Communist dictatorship in Poland. Much of his mature poetry and essays are modest yet profound meditations on the fate of humanity and culture.

His best-known prose work, The Captive Mind (1953), is an essay collection that studies the spiritual condition of society under Communist totalitarianism. He is also well known for the novel The Seizure of Power (1955) and the long poem A Treatise on Poetry (1957). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980. Among his many works are the classically styled verse of Bells in Winter (1978), Collected Poems, 1931–1987 (1988), Provinces (1991), and New and Collected Poems, 1931–2001 (2001). His work also includes History of Polish Literature (1969); and the essay collections Emperor of the Earth (1977), Visions from San Francisco Bay (1982), The Witness of Poetry (1983), and Beginning with My Streets (1991).

See his Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition (1968), A Year of the Hunter (1994), and the partially autobiographical Milosz's ABC's (2001); E. Czarnecka and A. Fiut, ed., Conversations with Czeslaw Milosz (1987); studies by D. Davie (1986), E. Mozejko (1988), and L. Nathan and A. Quinn (1991).

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