“A record of my feeling, that I live, that I breathe. My poems were that, and hence: hymns of gratitude. And at the same time, I was conscious of misfortune, of being injured. And nothing in me was spontaneous, but under control of the will.”
Taken from Selected and Last Poems 1931-2004 .
Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004) was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980. I was lucky enough to be introduced to the work of this amazing poet by Fiona Sampson, who taught the poetry part of one of my modules this semester.