Imiona lęku: szkice o poetach i wierszach

Abstract

The book constitutes a proposal for a thematic reading. It consists o f seven dissertations devoted to poems by poets connected with the Interwar Period, writing about the experience of finiteness o f existence. The awareness of death inevitability, the feeling of endangering the integrity of a person by nothingness, and instinct experiences of fear constitute the themes o f this volume of drafts. The introduction preceding it, reflects on the presence of the experience of fear, in the light of the contemporary psychological and cultural image of the issue in question. The specificity of literature highligts its individual aspects, hidden in a unique style o f lyrics o f works, elements of poetics, peculiarity of picturing or thematic choices. A lyrical recording of the strategy of being for and against fear gains the significance of an unquestionable signature of a literary personality. In poems by Tytus Czyżewski, fear remains hidden and reveals itself totally unexpectedly from behind an exotic composition o f colours, an everyday- life image or a recording of a modern town noise in the shape o f an unremovable existential fear. In lyrics by Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska, it takes on the form of fear from commonness and evokes phantasmas o f love and death which, with their violent intensity, overcome all traditional borders. Władysław Sebyła, in his poetry, deals with the issue of man’s brave confrontation with cosmic emptiness and records a drama o f metaphysical torment from the experience of danger to mature acceptance o f one’s own insignificance in the light of time infiniteness and the empty sky. In poems by Józef Czechowicz, a metaphysical fear leads to the broadening o f the borders o f human experience in both ways, and the feeling of a dramatic trap by nothingness which is juxtaposed with just an individual desire o f duration and leaving a trace behind oneself. In lyrics by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz from Lato 1932, night experiences of charm and extasy are accompanied by an integral pavor nocturnus which increases the feeling o f danger in someone experiencing it by means of nothingness beyond it and alienation inside it. In a poem by Stanisław Baliński devoted to Jan Lechoń, the drama of alienation and losing oneself leads the main character to a suicidal jump into the eternity, it being the only way out from the space of terror. Man’s confrontation with his/her own finiteness recorded in the very poems of the volume shows different possibilities and shades o f a lyrical means of encoding fear which finally escapes any definitions and specifications.