Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855; Polish)
Journal: Cambridge University Press eBooks
Year: 2021

Honored since his own lifetime as the great national poet of Poland, Mickiewicz was born near Wilno (Vilna) in the Duchy of Lithuania, which since 1795 had been made a province of the Russian empire. He never visited Warsaw or Krakow, but he wrote in Polish. While attending the university at Wilno he became a poet: his first serious poem, “Ode to Youth” (1820), called on the young to soar on imaginative wings above the petty tyrannies of the age (the poem was censored by the Russian authorities)