Short answers, pulled from the story.
Jan Kochanowski was a Polish Renaissance poet who lived from 1530 to 1584 and wrote in both Latin and Polish. He established poetic patterns that became integral to the Polish literary language and is regarded as the greatest Polish poet before Adam Mickiewicz.
Jan Kochanowski was born on the 23rd of June 1530 at Sycyna, near Radom, in the Kingdom of Poland. He died suddenly in Lublin on the 22nd of August 1584, probably of a heart attack, at the age of 54.
Treny, known in English as the Laments, is a cycle of nineteen elegies Kochanowski wrote mourning the death of his daughter Ursula, who died at two and a half years old. The poems were published in three volumes in 1584.
Odprawa posłów greckich is a blank-verse tragedy Kochanowski wrote around 1565 to 1566, modeled on Homer and recounting an episode leading to the Trojan War. It is considered the first tragedy ever written in Polish and was first performed on the 12th of January 1578 at Ujazdów Castle in Warsaw.
In 1791 a nobleman named Tadeusz Czacki removed a skull from Kochanowski's tomb, and it was later held at the Czartoryski Museum. Anthropological studies in 2010 showed the skull actually belonged to a woman, possibly Kochanowski's wife.
Kochanowski served as secretary to King Sigismund II Augustus from around 1563 and was made provost of Poznań Cathedral on the 7th of February 1564. He was present in 1569 at the assembly that enacted the Union of Lublin, which formally established the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.