Disillusioned with Stalinism, Mr. Milosz left Poland, finding political asylum in France, where he published "The Captive Mind" (1953), a widely influential attack on the manner in which the Polish Communist Party destroyed the independence of the intelligentsia.

His work was censored in Poland but circulated underground. It was not translated into English until 1973.

He took a job as a professor of literature at the University of California at Berkeley in 1960 and became a U.S. citizen in 1970.

Mr. Milosz cut an imposing figure, a barrel-chested and vigorous man whose most memorable characteristic was his wild, dark eyebrows.

A translator of Shakespeare, Milton, Baudelaire and T.S. Eliot into his native tongue, a scholar who commanded Russian, Polish, English, Latin, Greek and Hebrew, Mr. Milosz radiated a demanding intellectual style, colleagues said.

He became an extremely popular lecturer on campus, even before the 1980 Nobel Prize catapulted his popularity.

Mr. Milosz wrote his poems in Polish, then translated them.

He turned to Robert L. Hass, later the American poet laureate, and others to refine the English.

This co-translation resulted in a second translation of the beautifully accessible language, with deeply thought-out meanings.

His work was read not just by students and Polish partisans (his name, entered in the online Google search engine, returns 33,900 results), but fellow Pole Karol Józef Wojtyla, now known as Pope John Paul II.

Faggen said the pope and the poet began corresponding over Mr. Milosz's treatise on theology and its justifications of evil.

"One of the things the pope said to him was, 'In your poetry, you take two steps forward and one step back.' Czeslaw replied, 'Holy father, how in this century can I do otherwise?' " Faggen said.

He is survived by two sons. His first wife, Janina, died in 1986. His second wife, Carol, died in 2003.

Mr. Milosz would have been impatient with attempts to understand him through a recitation of biography.

"Biographies are like seashells; not much can be learned from them about the mollusk that once lived inside them," he wrote in "Milosz's ABCs" (2001).

Although he was ill, he was writing until recently.

He pursued meaning until the end of his life, asserting, in a poem called "Meaning" (1991):

When I die, I will see the
lining of the world
The other side, beyond bird,
mountain, sunset
The true meaning, ready to
be decoded.

And if there is no meaning, what remains, he said, is a word, a tireless messenger who "calls out, protests, screams."