Writing based upon his personal life experience, Milosz is a somber, political poet. He grew up in Czarist Russia which became Poland, survived the Nazi occupation, and moved to California, U.S.A. in the 1960s. The dichotomy of these places -- Poland and the United States -- causes more than a little culture shock for him. Having survived the horrors of the war and multiple social regimes, Milosz was an anxious man by the time he arrived in California. His writing career really takes off at this point because he's given time to reflect on events he's seen as well as the people he's met in his lifetime.
Milosz is a unique poet because of his peculiarly political bent. This is not to say that political poetry did not exist before him, but he brought a long-overlooked perspective. In addition to being a legend in Polish poetry, Milosz brings his heritage into the eyes of the American public. He was shocked after arriving in California by the people's blatant ignorance. Perhaps this is the inspiration for the poem "A Song for the End of the World" in which he accuses people of being so attached to their petty lives that they wouldn't believe the end fo the world if they saw it. Milosz takes it upon himself to point out the wrongness of this preference for ignorance. He talks about how important of a privilege knowledge is -- something he knows firsthand having lived in Soviet Russia where freedom of information was a joke -- and how it should not be rejected.
In addition to his poetry career, Milosz also wrote numerous essay collections and a couple of books which continue on this theme of political admonition. His poems, however, really find their voice in the 60s-70s. Reflecting on his career up to this point, he believes he's missed his potential by now and considers himself a bit of a failure ("The Magic Mountain"), but he can't help but continue to write. So many ideas had been trapped in his mind with no time to write them down because of survival in such unstable socio-political environments in Eastern Europe, but now those ideas find vent and parallel in the beauty of San Francisco Bay. By 1980 Milosz had written his way to a Nobel Prize.
