The poet Adam Zagajewski, who has died aged 75, was one of the leading voices of Poland’s Nowa Fala (new wave), also known as the Generation of ’68 – a loose group of poets who opposed the corruption of language imposed by communism and promoted the simplicity and honesty of their native tongue. Like many of his generation, informed by the horrors of the second world war, Zagajewski became focused on poetry’s ethical obligations in understanding and presenting the world to the reader “after Auschwitz”.

In 1974, together with the poet and critic Julian Kornhauser, Zagajewski published a manifesto in the form of a collection of essays on Polish literature, The Unrepresented World, that demanded “non-naive realism” (Kornhauser’s term) in fiction: realism understood not as a literary movement but rather as an obligation to describe social reality in communist Poland, which put them in conflict with the authorities. Along with this mission to provide “the basic source of information about the world and its people”, Zagajewski also pondered on the concept of liberty, as in his poem Freedom, translated by Antony Graham:

But even when I am at a loss to define
the essence of freedom
I know full well the meaning
of captivity.

Emigrating to Paris, and teaching in the US before eventually settling back in Poland, Zagajewski was known and respected outside his home country (his first major international award was the Tucholsky prize, Stockholm, in 1985), but after the 9/11 attacks, when the New Yorker published his poem Try to Praise the Mutilated World, written before the tragedy, in its special issue on the attacks, his profile was raised considerably. In the poem, translated by Clare Cavanagh, he demands that we see both the tragedies of the world and its eternal beauty:

Praise the mutilated world
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.

Zagajewski saw the world through continuous dichotomies and the need to rebuild what was once mutilated or destroyed; never an exile, but “not settled either”. His essays, such as Two Cities: On Exile, History and the Imagination (1995), and A Defense of Ardor (2004), as well as his poetry, including Mysticism for Beginners (1997), Without End (2002) and Asymmetry (2018), also explore the paradoxes of modern civilisation, as he saw them.

He preferred to use traditional free verse (“Rhymes actually irritate me, a bit like the bell calling you to kneel in church”) and avoided poetic experimentations as his focus was on communication and understanding, yet still engaging in “a dialogue with the imagination”. He demanded that poetry tell the truth (“we write to understand the world,” he claimed), and once wryly concluded that “some French poets say Polish poetry is just journalism, because you can understand it”.

Born in Lwów, Adam was the son of Ludwika (nee Turska) and Tadeusz Zagajewski, an electronics professor; his family, including his elder sister, Ewa, were expelled when the city became part of Ukraine, and moved to the small town of Gliwice, in Silesia.

After studying for separate philosophy and psychology degrees at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, graduating in 1970, Zagajewski focused on his poetry; he had first published, in 1967, his poem Music, in a literary journal, Życie Literackie, and his first volume of poetry, Komunikat, was published in 1972. It was during this time that he, Kornhauser and other peers such as Wit Jaworski, Ewa Lipska, Ryszard Krynicki and Stanisław Barańczak forged Nowa Fala.

In 1975 he signed a letter, together with 58 other intellectuals, against the proposed political changes to the constitution that were to turn Poland into a vassal state of the Soviet Union, and his works were banned. The following year he co-created an independent underground magazine, Zapis, and later established a Society of Academic Courses to break up the state’s monopoly of higher education.

He moved in 1982 to Paris, following a fellow Jagiellonian graduate with whom he was in love, Maja Wodecka, an actor and translator. They married in 1990. In Paris he continued to publish, primarily in the Polish émigré monthly Culture, but he also began to spend more time in the US, where from 1988 he taught creative writing at the University of Houston and, from 2007, at the University of Chicago. Softly spoken, gentle and unassuming, he knew how to talk to his students about poetry, not just how to write it. He continued to write in Polish although he spoke several other languages fluently.

In 2002, Zagajewski returned to Kraków, which he had described as “the beautiful city under the grey cover of communism”, and taught poetry workshops back at the Jagiellonian, as well as reuniting with his friends, among them the Nobel prizewinners Czesław Miłosz and Wisława Szymborska.

In his later years he often wrote about love, but even more about dying, seeing his elegies as a “gesture against death” yet acknowledging the limitations of language to express the magnitude of loss, for example in About My Mother (2018), translated by Cavanagh:

… and how she forgave everything
and how I remember that, and how I flew from Houston
to her funeral and couldn’t say anything
and still can’t.

Zagajewski won many awards, including the 2004 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the 2010 European Poetry prize, and the 2013 Zhongkun International Poetry prize.

He is survived by Maja and Ewa.

• Adam Zagajewski, poet, born 21 June 1945; died 21 March 2021