Abstract
Summary This article tries to assess the influence of Czesław Miłosz on Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz, whose poetic career - since his very debut - has developed in the shadow of his great predecessor. The complex bond and dialogically changeable relationship between the two poets are examined here with help of conceptual tools supplied by antithetical criticism, especially Harold Bloom’s ‘anxiety of influence’ theory. The article maps successive phases of Rymkiewicz’s poetic biography by matching them against a string of Miłosz’s poems. Already the poems in Rymkiewicz’s debut volume Konwencje (1957) (which includes a poem entitled ‘Czesław Miłosz’) show that his attitude towards his mentor is no means uniform. His responses range from a fascination which spurs creative effort, borrowings and imitation, to ironic dialogue, polemics, and gestures of rejection. Yet even in Rymkiewicz’s antithetical reactions one may detect traces of his youthful fascination with Czesław Miłosz’s Rescue (1945).
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