Ecstatic Pessimist

Ecstatic Pessimist address several topics and strands in the literary production and life of Czesław Miłosz, the Nobel Prize Polish-language poet and American citizen. It is also a personal history of the relations between Miłosz and the author of the book, himself a poet who worked on translations with the Polish poet in 1960s.

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Ecstatic Pessimist is a timely book about the Central and Eastern European experience of the mid 20th century, as told through the poetry and experiences of Czeslaw Milosz, Nobel Laureate for literature, who wrote on the horrors of war and the human experience. Written by a colleague and friend of the poet, it is part literary criticism and part memoir.

This biography/memoir of Czesław Miłosz is a first hand account of the poet’s life and his relationship to the author, beginning in the 1960s. Milosz was a Polish-American poet, prose writer, translator, and diplomat. Regarded as one of the great poets of the 20th century, he won the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature. In its citation, the Swedish Academy called Miłosz a writer who "voices man's exposed condition in a world of severe conflicts".