Lyric and Public: The Case of Adam Zagajewski

Abstract

as Poetry and History/' Czestaw Mifosz proclaims in an essay entitled, tellingly enough, A Poet Between East and West. Certainly statement itself speaks to divide that separates Eastern and Western readers and writers of poetry. Mifosz's assertion betrays his origins in a part of world where, as he writes elsewhere, the word 'poet' has a somewhat different meaning from what it has in West: In Central and Eastern Europe ... a poet does not merely arrange words in beautiful order. Tradition demands that he be a 'bard/ that his songs linger on many lips, that he speak in his poems of subjects of interest to all citizens (The Captive Mind, 1953). Such claims may seem exaggerated, to say least, to American readers reared in a culture that places poetry firmly on margins of modern life. They have been real enough, though, to nearly two centuries of Polish poets, forced willy-nilly by their country's turbulent history to serve as their nation's second government, in Alexander Solzhenitsyn's famous phrase.* If you live in world's center / You must account for everything / The living and dead are watching you, Zagajewski writes in his early poem World. His lines speak to seriousness with which poets of so-called Generation of '68, or New Wave, adopted their inherited role as conscience of an oppressed nation. The place of lyric poetry in modern society has thus been at heart of Zagajewski's writing from start. The dialectic that gives its name to his famous collection of essays, Solidarnosc i samotnosc (1986; Eng. Solidarity, Solitude, 1990), has shaped his poetry and prose in striking ways since his first beginnings as a writer until present day. He has tested limits and possibilities of lyric poetry in a way few Western writers can claim. Twice, in fact, his writings have placed him right in eye of storm. What is poet's role in world at large and in this particular world, world of postwar Polish People's Republic, Zagajewski asks in his two most controversial books Swiat nie przedstawiony (1974; The unrepresented world), coauthored with Julian Kornhauser, and Solidarity, Solitude. And answers he gives in both his poetry and prose take us to heart of some of most pressing Polish cultural controversies of recent decades. They speak to place of lyric poetry, not just in Polish or Eastern European society, but more surprisingly in our own recent history as well. (jover of Mysticism tor Beginners (1997) I The historical avant-garde was essentially a collective phenomenon; it thrived on generati g groups, factions, manifestoes, credos, causes. Hence abundance of -isms that