He primarily wrote his poetry in Polish. Regarded as one of the great poets of the 20th century, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. When communist authorities threatened his safety, he defected to France and ultimately chose exile in the United States, where he became a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
As a translator, he introduced Western works to a Polish audience, and as a scholar and editor, he championed a greater awareness of Slavic literature in the West. Faith played a role in his work as he explored his Catholicism and personal experience. He wrote in Polish and English. On his mother's side, his grandfather was Zygmunt Kunat, a descendant of a Polish family that traced its lineage to the 13th century and owned an estate in Krasnogruda in present-day Poland.
In these works, he described the influence of his Catholic grandmother, Jozefa, his burgeoning love for literature, and his early awareness, as a member of the Polish gentry in Lithuania, of the role of class in society. When his father was hired to work on infrastructure projects in Siberia , he and his mother traveled to be with him. In , he visited Paris, where he first met his distant cousin, Oscar Milosz , a French-language poet of Lithuanian descent who had become a Swedenborgian.
Oscar became a mentor and inspiration. One student was killed when a rock was thrown at his head. In the same year, he publicly read his poetry at an anti-racist "Poetry of Protest" event in Wilno, occasioned by Hitler's rise to power in Germany.
In Paris, he frequently met with his cousin Oscar. By , he had returned to Wilno, where he worked on literary programs at Polish Radio Wilno.
