SOURCE: Milosz, Czeslaw. “Romanticism.” In The History of Polish Literature, pp. 208-33. London: Macmillan Company, 1969.

In the following excerpt, Milosz describes the nature of Mickiewicz's poetry, the events of his life, and his importance to Polish literature.

Adam Mickiewicz was born on Christmas Eve in Nowogródek (or perhaps in Zaosie, a village near that town), in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. His father was a small-town lawyer, a very typical representative of the petty gentry. The poet's mother, belonging to the same class, had been a servant girl at a neighboring manor before her marriage. The region, which had once been ethnically Lithuanian, now had a peasant population speaking Byelorussian, and the folklore that was to mark Mickiewicz so strongly was predominantly Byelorussian. The childhood and early adolescence of the future poet was permeated with the cordial, warm atmosphere of local Roman Catholic and Greek Catholic traditions...