Following the Cycle: The Ethnic Pattern of Polish-American Literature

Abstract

belles-lettres, how much emphasis should we put on aesthetic quality and on form? What makes an ethnic author ethnic? The whole subject bristles with questions that cannot yet be answered, but they must be asked if satisfactory answers are ever to become possible. This essay is thus no more than a tentative survey from a European point of view of how the first cycle of a pattern of ethnicity has developed in PolishAmerican literature from the 1870's to the present day. We might begin with the organic concept of literary history. Does the history of Polish-American literature fit Robert Spiller's model? Does it correlate with the evolution of Anglo-American writing, from paraliterary forms to sophisticated, avant-garde, experimental styles, from infancy to maturity? How far does it lead to symbolic illumination of the ethnic experience? It would be fatuous to expect a Polish-American Walt Whitman, a William Faulkner or a Thornton Wilder. No other than a Polish-American poet, MieczysAaw A. Niedzwiecki, warned not to look for masterpieces in Polonian writing. In a poem, Do przyjaci6o-poet6w i pisarz6w poAskoamerykanskich [To Polish-American fellow poets and writers], he laments their (and his own) creative impotence.' Niedzwiecki's lamentation seemed to have put some Polonian observers of the literary scene on critical alert against any claims to avant-gardism or highest poetic achievement. When such were attributed to Edmond Kowalewski's experiments with tone in his Deaf Walls, they earned him scorn.2 A historical survey of Polish-American poetry reveals that its evolution stopped at the rising genius level. Three generations of PolishAmerican poets defaulted on what some of us have been repeatedly told MELUS, Volume 12, No. 4 (Winter 1985.) 63