'There are certain places in Europe which are particularly troublesome to history and geography teachers."

So wrote the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, not of Cracow, the city where he spent much of his final decade and where he was buried 10 days ago, but of Vilnius, where he went to school and university many decades earlier.

Vilnius, since the early 1990s the capital of the independent state of Lithuania, was in Milosz's youth the university city of Wilno, a vibrant and culturally thriving place whose population was chiefly Polish and Jewish, its streets "a blend of Italian architecture and the Near East". It was also on one of the fault lines of the violent struggles of the Great Powers that were to lay waste to the continent and lead to the deaths of so many millions in the 20th century. Writing in the 1950s, Milosz recalled that his city had been ruled in his lifetime by "Russians, Germans, Lithuanians, Poles, again the Lithuanians, again the Germans, and again the Russians".

Wilno, or Vilna as the Jews called it, was also "the Jerusalem of the north", a great centre of Hebrew and Yiddish literature and learning, both sacred and secular. Milosz's early observation of and respect for his Jewish fellow citizens "formed a complex" in him, he said, which meant that even as a very young man he was lost for the exclusive and often anti-Semitic nationalism that was the dominant ideology of many of his Polish Catholic contemporaries. "My allergy to everything that smacks of the 'national' and an almost physical disgust for people who transmit such signals have weighed heavily upon my destiny," he wrote decades later.

This allergy first drove him to the political left but in a context and at a time when independent Poland, and independent politics, had a very short time yet to live. Since the Yalta Agreement had awarded his country to the Russian "sphere of influence" in the post-war settlement, he regarded the continuing struggle for national independence of the patriotic right to be doomed. He was also out of sympathy with its social politics, believing a wholesale programme of reforms in favour of the working class and peasantry to be long overdue.

His service to "People's Poland", through its diplomatic service, was to be relatively short lived, however, and in 1951 he defected from his posting in Paris. But his opposition to communism, or, as he preferred to call it, Leninism-Stalinism, was too complex to win him easy approval in the West. He found the US brand of anti-communism hysterical, and when he moved to work in the US in the 1960s he was "sufficiently intelligent . . . to make myself aware of the violent struggle for existence, the urban poverty, the loneliness of the individual, the fundamental anti-intellectualism of the system".

In an attack on Camus in the early 1950s Jean-Paul Sartre had written: "If you like neither communism nor capitalism, then I see only one place for you - the Galapagos Islands." In his refusal to abdicate the right to criticise and judge independently, to rally body and soul to the good cause, Milosz always remained, like his friend Camus, something of a Galapagan.

As a poet, Milosz was aware that his exile had cut him off from his audience and much of his inspiration. (He returned to live in Poland only in his final decade.) But he could still remain true to his language, and it to him. In the poem 'My Faithful Mother Tongue' he wrote: "You were my native land; I lacked any other / I believed that you would also be a messenger / between me and some good people / even if they were few, twenty, ten / or not born, as yet."

He also arguably remained all through his life a Catholic of some kind, though scarcely an orthodox one in spite of his later firm friendship with Pope John Paul II. From the Christian tradition he took not just faith but also a stubborn adherence to the notion of individual morality in the face of the catastrophic 20th-century idolatry of Nation and History. In New York he was delighted to find English translations of the writings of the Hasidic wise men of Wilno, the place where he had first learned to love cultural complexity and difference.

His last public act, in June this year, was to defend the right of gays and lesbians to hold a march in holy Cracow. An angry woman, caught on television, advised him to "go back to Lithuania and leave Cracow alone". We must assume that, as a local patriot to the end, this amused him greatly.