Czeslaw Milosz — Poet born on June 30, 1911, died on August 14, 2004

Czesław Miłosz was a Polishpoet, prose writer, translator and diplomat. His World War II-era sequence, The World, is a collection of twenty "naïve" poems. Following the war, he served as Polish cultural attaché in Paris and Washington, D.C., then in 1951 defected to the West. His nonfiction book, The Captive Mind, became a classic of anti-Stalinism. From 1961 to 1998 he was a professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. He became a U.S. citizen in 1970. In 1978 he was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and in 1980 the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 1999 he was named a Puterbaugh Fellow. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, he divided his time between Berkeley, California, and Kraków, Poland... (wikipedia)

At the entrance, my bare feet on the dirt floor, Here, gusts of heat; at my back, white clouds. I stare and stare. It seems I was called for this: To glorify things just because they are.
The voice of passion is better than the voice of reason. The passionless cannot change history.
It is impossible to communicate to people who have not experienced it the undefinable menace of total rationalism.
Grow your tree of falsehood from a small grain of truth. Do not follow those who lie in contempt of reality. Let your lie be even more logical than the truth itself, so the weary travelers may find repose.
What is poetry which does not save nations or people?