Ocean State Libraries

Legends of Modernity, now available in English for the first time, brings together some of Czesław Miłosz's early essays and letters, composed in German-occupied Warsaw during the winter of 1942-43. "Why did the European spirit succumb to such a devastating fiasco?" the young Miłosz asks. Half a century later, when Legends of Modernity saw its first publication in Poland, Miłosz said: "If everything inside you is agitation, hatred, and despair,...

In his first collection of new poems since receiving the Nobel Prize in 1980, Milosz has changed the very idea of what a book of poetry can be. He combines verse, prose poems, prose jottings, pensees, quotations, translations, and even fragments from personal letters into the shape of a writer's notebook. Under the surface of these multiple forms, a deeper unity appears. Whether Milosz meditates on sexuality, language, the problems of belief, urban...

Like Native Realm, Czeslaw Milosz's autobiography written thirty years earlier, A Year of the Hunter is a "search for self-definition." A diary of one year in the Nobel laureate's life, 1987-88, it concerns itself as much with his experience of remembering - his youth in Wilno and the writers' groups of Warsaw and Paris; his life in Berkeley in the sixties; his time spent with poets and poetry - as with the actual events that shape his days. Throughout,...