Poet. Zbigniew Herbert was an influential 20th-century Polish poet, essayist, and moralist. He was a member of the Polish resistance movement during World War II. He was one of the most famous and translated Polish authors. His family came to Galicia from the United Kingdom. His grandfather was an English teacher and his father fought for Polish liberation in the Polish Legions. In 1938 Herbert started studies at the Casimir The Great Gymnasium in Lvow. During World War II, he joined the Armia Krajowa or the Home Army resistance and continued his studies in underground schools. In 1944 he moved from Lvow to Cracow and studied at the Fine Arts Academy, graduated from the Krakow University of Economics, then studied law and philosophy at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun. His poetry was first published in 1950 in the magazine "Dzis i jutro." His first poetry book "String of Light" was published in 1956. During the 1950s, he worked at many low-paying jobs because he refused to write according to official Communist guidelines. Between 1963 and 1968, he worked as an editor for "Poetry" magazine. Between 1955 and 1983, he was a member of Zwiazek Literatów Polskich. In 1968 his work was translated into English by Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott. The publication of his "Selected Poems" in the United States and England made Herbert one of the most popular contemporary poets in the English-speaking world. He traveled widely through the West and lived in Paris, Berlin and the United States, where he taught briefly at the University of California at Los Angeles. In his works, he presented the "reflection-intellectual" perspective, with stress on human beings and their dignity, to the background of history, where people are almost irrelevant cogs in the machine of fate. He often used elements of Mediterranean culture in his works. His lyrical tales contrast the moral sterility and disorientation of contemporary man to the ethical code of the heroes of Mediterranean culture, the "defenders of kingdoms without end and cities of ashes." Mr. Cogito, the fictious hero, who first appeared in a 1973 poem entitled "The Envoy of Mr. Cogito" and later in the 1974 book, "Mr. Cogito," personifies the disparity between the feeling of reality and the yearning for fame. The collection of poetry was first published in Paris in 1983 as Communist in Poland banned the publishing. The book was available in Poland in 1992. Among his many accolades are Nicholaus Lenau Prize in 1965 and Nagrada Vilenica in 1991. In 1991 he received the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society. His writings have been translated into 38 languages. He was posthumously awarded the Order of the White Eagle, Order Orła Białego, the highest civilian honor in Poland.