Leopold Staff
(1878–1957)

Leopold Staff was an editor, a poet, a dramatist, and a translator. He was one of the best-known Polish poets of the first half of the twentieth century–the author of more than 30 volumes of poetry. Staff studied law and philosophy at the University of L'viv, which is now in Ukraine. There, he was a member of a student poetry group called the Planetarians, so called because they "all had their heads in the clouds." His first poetry collection, entitled Dreams of Power, was published in 1901.

Staff lived in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation. He took part in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, during which Polish civilians and soldiers fought for 63 days to expel the German army from Warsaw. The Poles lost. Many civilians were executed and the old city was destroyed. After the war, Staff continued to live and work in Warsaw. The Nine Muses, Staff's last poetry collection, was published in 1958, a year after his death.

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