Czeslaw Milosz was a Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet. He was born in Lithuania in 1911, and lived in both Nazi and Stalinist Poland. During the Second World War, he wrote and edited resistance publications. After the war, he moved first to Paris, and then to the United States. At the time of his talk, he was teaching Slavic languages and literature at the University of California, Berkeley. A poet, essayist, novelist, critic, and translator, he was best known for a poetic sensibility rooted in the real, political world.
His lecture was November 7, 1985.