After being allowed to return home to the Duchy of Posen, he and his brother Jan Koźmian worked as joint editors of their pro-Catholic periodical Poznań Review (Przegląd Poznański [pl]).

Stanisław Egbert Koźmian was born in the Polish village of Wronów, near Lublin (then in the Duchy of Warsaw), on 21 April 1811, the eldest child of Tomasz Jan Adam Kożmian (b.

[1] After the death of his father in 1818, at the age of 38,[2] Stanisław and his the family were brought up in the household of an uncle, the poet, critic and journalist Kajetan Koźmian [pl], at Piotrowice, near Puławy.

From 1826 to 1828 he attended the Warsaw Lyceum,[5] where his classmates included the poet Zygmunt Krasiński and the writer and translator Konstanty Gaszyński [pl].

[6] From 1828 to 1830 he studied law and public administration at the University of Warsaw; whilst there he published a translation of the Irish poet Thomas Moore's Lalla Rookh.

[5] With his old school friend Leon Ulrich [pl], he edited the newspaper Dziennik Gwardii Honorowej, and translated Goethe's Clavigo and Schiller's William Tell.

During the uprising, Koźmian wrote patriotic poems; his War Song (Śpiew wojenny) was performed to the tune of God Save the King.

He left the city after it was recaptured and made his way to the Prussian border with the troops of Maciej Rybiński; his final rank in the Polish military was that of a podporucznik (second lieutenant).

[11] After his brother's father-in law, the political activist and military commander Dezydery Chłapowski, interceded on his behalf, he was able to stay in Poznań for 10 days.

He attempted to secure loans from Britain for the insurgent cause, and in London met the British prime minister Lord Palmerston, and called on him to come to the aid of Poland.

[8] In June 1848, Koźmian met Krasiński in Paris, and during the summer of that year he withdrew from the political scene, and travelled to the resorts of Duszniki-Zdrój and Lázně Jeseník.

[7][13] After living as an exile in England for 12 years, Koźmian was granted permission to return to Polish lands within the Greater Poland region, and settled within the Prussian Province of Posen in 1849.

At the same time, however, representing the conservative and Catholic factions, he successfully opposed efforts of the Society's Department of Natural History, which attempted to promote Darwin's theory of evolution, preventing it from holding lectures on the topic.

[3] From 1845 Koźmian published articles in the cultural magazine Poznań Review (Przegląd Poznański [pl]),[7][18] and in 1849 he and his brother Jan become joint editors.

[15] The periodical moved from being purely religious to discussing issues such as literature, art, science, and economics, although it maintained its strongly Catholic and conservative perspective.

[8][19] Koźmian's interests were wide; he published articles and essays on issues ranging from mathematical topics in Polish and English[3] as well as on Polish-British relations, and on Shakespeare.

[8] As a literary critic, his articles, also considered quite popular, were published, anonymously, in the columns of The Newspaper of the Grand Duchy of Poznań (Gazeta Wielkiego Księstwa Poznańskiego [pl]).

[26] The translations of Kozmian, Ulrich, and Józef Paszkowski [pl], which formed the basis of the first complete edition of Shakespeare's plays into Polish in 1875, surpassed in quality the work done in the 1830s.

The 12-volume publication, illustrated by the English artist Henry Courtney Selous and edited by Kraszewski, was produced in Warsaw in 1875 by different publishers, so as to reduce costs.

[8] Koźmian also translated poems by Lord Byron, John Moore, Robert Southey, Percy Shelley, William Cowper, and passages by the Scottish poet Thomas Campbell on Poland.

[20] In 1870–1872 he published Pism wierszem i prozą, two volumes of prose and poetry which included translations from poems by William Wordsworth, Walter Scott, Byron, Shelley, Southey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Burns.