Leopold Staff, Polish poet and academic (born 1878)

Leopold Henryk Staff was a Polish poet; an artist of European modernism twice granted the Degree of Doctor honoris causa by universities in Warsaw and in Kraków. He was also nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature by Polish PEN Club. Representative of classicism and symbolism in the poetry of Young Poland, he was an author of many philosophical poems influenced by the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, the ideas of Franciscan order as well as paradoxes of Christianity.