It was in Paris, in 1935, that the Nobel prize-winning Polish poet and social commentator Czeslaw Milosz wrote, “the most beautiful bodies are like transparent glass. / The most powerful flames like water washing the tired feet of travelers. / The greenest trees like lead blooming in the thick of the night. / Love is sand swallowed by parched lips. / Hatred is a salty jug offered to the thirsty. / Roll on, rivers; raise your hands / cities! I, a faithful son of the black earth, shall return to the black earth. / as if my life had not been, / as if not my heart, not my blood, / not my duration / had created words and songs / but an unknown, impersonal voice, / only the flapping of waves, only the choir of winds / and the autumnal sway / of the tall trees.”

He was 24 when he wrote it, unaware of the renown that his pen would bring him. The poem shows that preoccupation with time and the march of history around which he was to turn not only a large amount of poetry but also volumes of criticism and historical studies. Notable among these was The Captive Mind, which, written in the early Fifties, was a study of human acquiesence in totalitarianism, something which he himself resisted, having left Poland and taken up residence in an America to which he was grateful but by no means subservient. His was a world view, one which drew repeatedly upon his own experience. As he recalled, “like many of my generation, I could wish that my life had been a more simple affair. But the time and place of his birth are matters in which a man has nothing to say”.

Czeslaw Milosz was born in 1911, in Szetejine, then part of Russia, and brought up by his Polish and Lithuanian parents in Wilno (Vilinus), of which he wrote in The Captive Mind: “There are certain places in Europe which are particularly troublesome to history and geography teachers: Trieste, the Saar Basin, Schleswig-Holstein. Just such a sore-spot is the city of Vilna. In the last half-century it belonged to various countries and saw various armies in its streets. With each change, painters were put to work repainting street and office signs into the new official language. With each change, the inhabitants were issued new passports and were obliged to conform to new laws.”

In Native Realm, he posited the notion that nowadays “there is a new organ, which we may call the telescopic eye, that perceives simultaneously not only different points of the globe but also different moments of time; the motion picture created it in all my contemporaries. And I, more often than my contemporaries, had to make use of it, tossed as I was by circumstances from one civilisation into another, from high-pressure areas into low, and vice versa. From the Russian Revolution of 1917 seen through the eyes of a child and a foreigner, to New Mexico and the coast of California, all the way to the old house on Lake Geneva, I have wandered through zones of storm and calm, heat and cold.”

Milosz, for all his travels, never left the places of his birth and upbringing. These recur in his writing, vividly evoked. In the 20th century it was to receive much buffeting, something impressed upon a boy who had been born a subject of the Tsar. “It is difficult for outsiders to understand the acute national hatreds in Eastern Europe. Wherever nationalism is late in appearing, passionate attempts are made to relate it to a half-legendary heroic past.” Milosz’s family was rooted in a diverse, spiritedly shifting collection of ancestors. Particularly significant among his relations was to be his cousin Oscar Milosz, who — having lost an inherited fortune in the Revolution — gained renown as a poet in France.

Czeslaw Milosz saw in himself what he called a “passive vitality”, by which he meant that, as a child — who was at first more concerned with naturalist matters than words to which these led him — he did not crave the microscopes which were beyond his means in shop windows: “I learnt, not how to save, but how to stifle temptation” and he later averred that his only extravagance in life was books.

Throughout his childhood, rivers, towns and landscapes followed one another at some speed, for his father was employed by the Russian Army to build roads and bridges. The family was often just behind battle zones. “Our home was often a covered wagon, sometimes an army railroad car with a samovar on the floor, which used to tip over when the train started up suddenly. Such a lack of stability, the unconscious feeling that everything is temporary, cannot but affect, it seems to me, our mature judgements, and it can be the reason for taking governments and political systems lightly. History becomes fluid because it is equated with ceaseless wandering.”

In due course, however, they settled in Wilno. Milosz described hauntingly this sloping place — “a city of clouds resembling Baroque architecture and of Baroque architecture like coagulated clouds”. If it was poor, it was a splendid backwater, and he felt set upon a career as a naturalist. Yet, Latin lessons awoke in him a relish for language. They could easily spend a lesson upon the intricacies of one line. “Most important was the ability I acquired, once and for all, to concentrate not only on the meaning but on the art of connecting words, the certainty I gained that what one says changes, depending upon how one says it.”

Life gained a new dimension with a visit to Paris in 1931. This was by way of Prague, which intoxicated him, with its laughter, music, taverns and crowds.The visit to Paris was to be by canoe, in the company of two friends. They sometimes had recourse to shifting the vessel by means of hired motor car and were once fished from the rapids by German police, who promptly asked for those papers which were, as they spoke, being carried downstream. Eventually reached, Paris was a revelation, and Milosz’s joy in it was to be lifelong. He met his cousin, the poet Oscar Milosz, a man of a suave disposition. Return to Poland brought him a job as an assistant at a local branch of Polish Radio.

Milosz came to see bureaucracy, however, as unappealing and dishonest. Already, suspicion was growing in the mind of authority that he was not the most loyal of servants, and, before long, he was eased out of the radio station, something which prompted him to travel again, in particular to Italy. Return to Warsaw led to another job with Polish Radio, where he was in the company of diveresly eminent literary figures.

As he put it, however, “I was not even allowed the ordinary pleasure of taking myself seriously. The fate of my own country and of all unhappy Europe weighed too heavily on me not to have known that each day I plunged into a complete fiction.” The war was to change all perspective, literally so, for, as he noted, visitors to Warsaw afterwards “cannot imagine that on the same space a completely different city once stood”. Nobody believed that Hitler would be the ultimate victor. For Milosz himself, death would have been his fate had he not been delayed by a few hours in setting off to meet a friend in Lublin, where bombardment killed him.

Milsoz was duly back in Wilno, ceded by Russia to Lithuania. The situation made it a lively place, suffused in alcohol, but, for Milosz, it boded far worse than that in Poland, for he saw that Nazism could not survive but that the communist ethic was deeper-grained. He began to work for the underground, and made an arduous journey back to Warsaw across dangerous territory with a group which often could not speak to one another in trains and elsewhere for fear of exposure. Here he produced a new volume of poetry, the copies sewn by his future wife Janka, and he was able to immerse himself in books rescued from the bombed-out university library. This literary unit, secretly funded from abroad, gained in strength.

The sense that time was precious was borne in upon him, and he made shifts to learn languages, partly by dint of reading with dictionaries alongside, as well as to write essays which explored the philosophical origins of the horror, and he translated Shakespeare. He did not make claims for great heroism, even admitting to fear and to fighting shy of becoming involved with the Home Army.