Oskaras Milašius

Oscar Vladislas de Lubicz Milosz ( lt, Oskaras Milašius; ) (28 May 1877 – 2 March 1939) was a French language poet, playwright, novelist, essayist and representative of Lithuania at the League of Nations.Czesław Miłosz, Cynthia L. Haven. Czesław Miłosz. 2006p.203 His literary career began at the end of the nineteenth century during '' la Belle Époque'' and reached its high point in the mid-1920s with the books ''Ars Magna'' and '' Les Arcanes'', in which he developed a highly personal and dense Christian cosmogony comparable to that of Dante in '' The Divine Comedy'' and John Milton in ''Paradise Lost''. A solitary and unique twentieth-century metaphysician, his poems are visionary and often tormented. He was a distant cousin of Polish writer Czesław Miłosz, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1980.

Life

Oscar Milosz was born in Čareja (Chereya), then Minsk Governorate, Russian Empire, now in modern-day Belarus, where he also spent his childhood. Between 1316 and 1795, this region was part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Oscar Milosz's father, Vladislas de Lubicz Milosz, was ethnically Lithuanian, nominally Catholic, and for a time an officer in the imperial Russian army. His mother, Marie Rosalie Rosenthal, was Jewish, the daughter of a Hebrew professor at the University of Warsaw. The family spoke Polish at home. Oscar was baptized a Catholic on 2 July 1886, at St. Alexander's Church in Warsaw. In 1889, when he was 12, his parents placed him at the Lycée Janson de Sailly in Paris. He began writing poems in 1894 and started to frequent artistic circles, meeting Oscar Wilde and Jean Moréas. After finishing at the Lycée, he enrolled at the École des langues orientales, where he studied Syriac and Hebrew.

His first book of verse, ''Le Poème des Décadences'', appeared in 1899. In the first years of the twentieth century, Milosz travelled widely in Europe and North Africa and explored many foreign literatures. A European poet of the French language, Milosz was an excellent linguist and was fluent in French, Polish, Russian, English, German, Italian, and Spanish as well as being able to read Latin and Hebrew. Later in life, he would master written and spoken Lithuanian and studied Basque.

Milosz published his second poetry collection, the more accomplished ''Les Sept Solitudes'', in 1906. He then entered into a phase of literary experimentation during which he tried his hand at a novel, ''L'Amoureuse Initiation,'' published in 1910, and three "mystery dramas," the most popular of these plays being ' (1913), a reworking of the Don Juan myth. During this time he also composed his third poetry collection, ''Les'' ''Éléments'' (1911).

On 14 December 1914, while saying his prayers at the end of an evening of intensive reading of the Bible and Emanuel Swedenborg, Milosz experienced an illumination that led him to proclaim the next day to a friend: "I have seen the spiritual sun." Influenced by this vision, his poetry became more profound. He began to study the Kabbalah, Renaissance and Baroque alchemists, and thinkers like Paracelsus and Jacob Boehme. After 1916, the development of his metaphysics became his major poetic preoccupation. He began to develop a literary cosmogonic system in the tradition of Lucretius, Dante, John Milton, William Blake, and Edgar Allan Poe and exposed it for the first time in the essay ''Épitre à Storge,'' published in ''La Revue de Hollande'' in 1917. In the early 1920s, Milosz convinced himself that his poetic cosmogony was supported by Einstein's theory of relativity, still a subject of debate. During this period, after a flirtation with "occult" reading and friends, like the numerologist René Schwaller de Lubicz, Milosz turned his back on these currents of thought and began to study medieval science and thinkers like the English scholastic Robert Grosseteste. Finally, in 1927 he took a Father Confessor

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