Przemysław Michalski

This essay sets out to examine Miłosz's attitude towards confessional poetry, or rather, to examine his stance on confessionalism as a seemingly inseparable element of any poetic utterance. By means of such terms as decorum, referentiality of poetic language and its usefulness, I try to show why Miłosz preferred to stay away from overtly confessional modes of poetic utterance, which draw too heavily on the poet's own experiences and may result in blurring the distinction between biography and literature. One reason why the poet so intensely disliked excessive confessionalism is that its main purpose is to describe the emotions of the speaker, whereas he felt that the main task of poetry is to celebrate the dazzling beauty of the outside world, whose existence transcends and surpasses the insignifi cantly small inner world of a troubled psyche. Last but not least, the notion of the usefulness of poetry, in his understanding of the term, is that it makes it possible for poems written in diverse countries and epochs to intensify the contemporary reader's sense of belonging to the great family of the human race. The question we have posed can be understood as prompting a reconsideration of the inadequacy and insuffi ciency of language. The previous century saw a number of philosophical treatises grappling with this issue. The issue also emerges quite often in modern poetry, either in the form of metapoetic refl ection on the substance of poetry itself or as a hidden source of tension within the text. Miłosz's views on the matter were ambivalent and often fl uctuated, instead of evolving into a homogeneous position. On the one hand, he believes in a certain soteriological potential of language, as evidenced by the famous lines from the poem " Reading the Japanese Poet Issa " : " What is pronounced strengthens itself./ What is not pronounced

This article deals with the question of the so-called Bovarism in The Awakening, the famous novel written by Kate Chopin. When it was first published in 1899, it was universally condemned for its alleged obscenity, just like its French predecessor. It is true, however, that unlike Flaubert’s book, The Awakening did not find itself in the dock, faced with charges of immorality, but the hostile reviews condemned the novel to many decades of obscurity. In this article, I try to return to the question of parallels between the two novels, which can be seen on many levels. Some similarities concern both male and female characters, while others are to do with specific narrative decisions and solutions. The most conspicuous example of the latter is the suicidal death of both heroines

This essay sets out to examine Miłosz's attitude towards confessional poetry, or rather, to examine his stance on confessionalism as a seemingly inseparable element of any poetic utterance. By means of such terms as decorum, referentiality of poetic language and its usefulness, I try to show why Miłosz preferred to stay away from overtly confessional modes of poetic utterance, which draw too heavily on the poet's own experiences and may result in blurring the distinction between biography and literature. One reason why the poet so intensely disliked excessive confessionalism is that its main purpose is to describe the emotions of the speaker, whereas he felt that the main task of poetry is to celebrate the dazzling beauty of the outside world, whose existence transcends and surpasses the insignifi cantly small inner world of a troubled psyche. Last but not least, the notion of the usefulness of poetry, in his understanding of the term, is that it makes it possible for poems written in diverse countries and epochs to intensify the contemporary reader's sense of belonging to the great family of the human race. The question we have posed can be understood as prompting a reconsideration of the inadequacy and insuffi ciency of language. The previous century saw a number of philosophical treatises grappling with this issue. The issue also emerges quite often in modern poetry, either in the form of metapoetic refl ection on the substance of poetry itself or as a hidden source of tension within the text. Miłosz's views on the matter were ambivalent and often fl uctuated, instead of evolving into a homogeneous position. On the one hand, he believes in a certain soteriological potential of language, as evidenced by the famous lines from the poem " Reading the Japanese Poet Issa " : " What is pronounced strengthens itself./ What is not pronounced

The following essay attempts to shed some light on Michael Longley’s poems about birds, which form a fairly complicated network of mutual enhancements and cross-references. Some of them are purely descriptive lyrics. Such poems are likely to have the name of a given species or a specific individual representative of that species in the title. Others make references to birds or use them for their own agenda, which often transcends the parameters of pure description. Sometimes birds perform an evocative function (“Snow Geese”), prompt the poet to explore the murky mysteries of iniquity (“The Goose”), judge human affairs from the avian vantage (“Aftermath”), or raise ecological problems (“Kestrel”). Most of the time, however, Longley is careful not to intrude upon their baffling otherness. Many of his bird poems are suffused with an aura of subtle yet suggestive eroticism, a conflation of the avian and the amorous.

"The Airy Tomb" is the longest poem from R. S. Thomas's first collection of verse The Stones of the Field (1946). It is a story of a lonely life of Twm, one of the many Welsh farmers who appear in Thomas's early work. The poem describes two very different approaches to the mystery of death. The first relates to death as it displays itself in nature. Since Twm is instinctively well attuned to its rhythms, he finds this kind of death normal, a natural conclusion to every individual existence. The other kind of death which he saw both his parents succumb to is death and interment as they occur within the context of a given culture, which dismays Twm by its unlikeness to the first type of death. The rite of burial in the ground is particularly disturbing for him. The main focus of this article is to compare and contrast these two stances and tease out their philosophical ramifications.

As Slavoj Žižek claims, Shakespeare's play "Richard II" clearly shows that the Bard was well familiar with the work of the French philosopher, Jacques Lacan. In my paper I will try to demonstrate that he was also well acquainted with the poetry of Philip Larkin, which is best seen in one of Shakespeare's 'problem plays' "Measure for Measure", where he not only returns to the familiar themes of the brevity and wretchedness of this life and the uncertainty of the life to come, but also wrestles with other issues frequently found in Larkin's poetry, such as self-knowledge and self-deception, sex and death, appearance vs. reality, and a few others. As I hope to show in my paper, Act III in particular reads like a dramatised version of Larkin's last great poem "Aubade" and is teeming with images and problems which the Bard "lifted" from the work of Philip Larkin. Such deliberately anachronistic reading of the play should prove that great writers, both past and present, return to the same questions time and again, which in turn shows that "self-interpreting animals" that we are, we cannot help probing questions which matter most to us.

On the notion of (un)faithfulness in Ronald Stuart Thomas's selected ekphrases This article hopes to contribute to the ongoing debate about ekphrasis from the vantage of (un)faithfulness of the text to the visual material which spurred it into being. First of all, the author gives a brief outline of the recent developments in the discussion of ekphrastic literature. Then he goes on to define the idea of textual (un)faithfulness as understood in this article, where it represents a rhetorical strategy without any ethical implications. At the same time, the author is convinced that the imperative of absolute ekphrastic faithfulness is impossible to achieve. Consequently, he enumerates five different techniques which the ekphrastic poem may employ in order to accentuate its different character from the painting. All of these are illustrated by entire poems or excerpts taken from the work of the Welsh priest-poet Ronald Stuart Thomas (1913-2000). Studiowanie niezwykle obszernej i w szybkim tempie przyrastającej literatury na temat ekfrazy prowadzi do melancholijnego wniosku, że chyba już wszystko na ten temat zostało powiedziane 1. Dotyczy to przede wszystkim ustaleń teoretycznych i rozważań literacko-filozoficznych o tym, czym właściwie jest ekfraza, czy można uściślić jej genealogiczną pozycję, jaki jest stosunek ekfrazy do opisu, czy możliwy jest dialog intersemiotyczny między obrazem i tekstem, i tym podobne 2. Wrażenie to nie oznacza bynajmniej, że znaleziono ostateczne odpowiedzi na wyżej wymienione pytania, ale raczej, że pytania te postawiono już zbyt wiele razy. Poczucie wyczerpania dyskusją nie oznacza wcale, iż problematyka ekfrazy przestała być zajmująca. Wydaje się jednak, że bardziej obiecującym sposobem ujęcia jest analiza konkretnych tekstów niż podejmowanie po raz kolejny dywagacji o charakterze czysto teoretycznym 3 .

In this article I employ the Kierkegaardian categories of three distinct stages of existence (aesthetic, ethical, religious) to show that J. Alfred Prufrock, the famously elusive protagonist of T. S. Eliot's first great poem, possesses many features characteristic of what the Danish philosopher described as the aesthetic mode of living. The article begins with a concise outline of the aesthetic existence, and then goes on to describe the ways in which Prufrock's character corresponds to Kierkegaard's analyses. Prufrock's opacity to himself and others, his inability to relate meaningfully to anything lying outside of himself, his futile self-introspections, ultimately leading to a solipsistic insulation from the world, spectral musings on situations which never occurred, and which are unlikely to happen in the future, all make him an embodiment of the melancholy-stricken aesthete. Prufrock's self-involvement is further underscored by the textual organisation of the text. His predicament is made visible through the use of recurrent lines and images, incantatory passages which are deliberately hazy, as well as tentative advances and retreats of the vaguely intimated narrative arch of the poem. All of these features serve to create an aura of solipsistic unreality of Prufrock's universe. Finally, I come to the conclusion that the drowning of the main character described in the final lines of the poem demonstrates the futility of the aesthetic life.

The article is a close reading of Ronald Stuart Thomas's little discussed poem " Darlington ". It was first published in an short-lived Irish magazine Rann in 1953, only to re-emerge years later in his Uncollected Poems. What makes it uncharacteristic of Thomas is not its subject matter, but its single-minded focus on a barren life and lonely death of an Englishman – " a pale Saxon " in the vernacular of the text – among the unfriendly Welsh, who continue to ostracise him even after his death. The poem does not provide much detail regarding the actual manner of this alienation, so the question is left open whether this is a speculation concerning the posthumous fate of the dead man's spirit in the hereafter, or a flatly factual report of the topographic isolation of his grave. At the same time, by means of a conspicuous employment of alliteration, Thomas creates in the poem a prosodic milieu in which the estranged Englishman must have felt at home. The unclear politics of the text leaves one wondering whether it is a coldly objective account, a sample of humane commiseration with another man's loneliness, or an instance of unseemly gloating over the ultimate failure of an unwelcome stranger.

In this paper I would like to examine some interesting similarities between Kierkegaard's and Hopkins's respective visions of hell. Although both the English Jesuit and the Danish philosopher were born and died in the 19 th century, they most certainly did not know of each other's existence. Both lived and created in relative obscurity, and were often misunderstood and underestimated by their contemporaries. Even Hopkins's closest friends and fellow poets (Robert Bridges and Coventry Patmore) were often baffled and sometimes outraged by the revolutionary verse of the Jesuit poet, which took audacious liberties with the conventional poetic model prevalent in Victorian England. This is partly the reason why only a handful of his poems were published during his lifetime, while the bulk of his work, including his greatest poems, was published almost thirty years after his death. The Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, whose eccentric habits were a frequent butt of jokes and satirical sketches, was posthumously hailed as the founding father of existentialism, who influenced many important philosophers, e.g. Karl Jaspers, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus. There are also significant differences between the two. Hopkins became a Jesuit at twenty-four and for the rest of his life remained a staunch Catholic and a devout soldier of Christ. Kierkegaard was a loner and despite his theological studies he was always at loggerheads with institutionalised Christianity in general, and the Danish Protestant church in particular.

Kilka uwag o stanie teorii Ponieważ mówi się, że obrazek wart jest tysiąc słów, zacznijmy od obrazka: sytuacja towarzyska, jeden mężczyzna najwyraźniej został właśnie przedstawiony drugiemu przez kobietę o imieniu Meg. Następnie padają słowa: " Terrorystyczną? Dzięki Bogu. Źle zrozumiałem Meg. Myślałem, że prowadzi pan działalność teoretyczną ". Ten dowcipny rysunek (anegdota?) wiele mówi o ogólnym stosunku do teorii, czyli o jednoznacznej niechęci, jeśli nie wrogości, z jaką do teorii odnoszą się niektórzy przedstawiciele innych dziedzin 1. Ta niechęć nie ogranicza się do przedstawicieli nauk ścisłych, ale obejmuje również humanistów; wydaje się nawet, że jest wśród nich bardziej powszechna i wyraźna, gdyż ma bezpośredni wpływ na ich naukową i dydaktyczną praxis. Nawet dzisiaj, kiedy teoria już okrzepła, jednocześnie tracąc sporo dawnego impetu, nadal postrzega się ją czasem jako zagrożenie dla tradycyjnie rozumianej humanistyki. Z drugiej strony nie można nie dostrzegać tego, że minął już okres, kiedy na wielu wydziałach filologicznych widziano w teorii biblijną bestię, której pojawienie się zwiastuje nadejście czasów ostatecznych. Obecnie sytuacja jest mniej dynamiczna i trudno sobie wyobrazić, aby w najbliższym czasie powrócił ferwor i ekscytacja nowością, jakie opanowały świat humanistyki kilka dekad temu, kiedy dzieła czołowych teoretyków radykalnie zmieniły sposób, w jaki patrzymy na literaturę, tekst oraz relacje między dziełem literackim i językiem. To nagłe wtargnięcie rozważań teoretycznych miało zresztą tyluż zwolenników, ilu przeciwników – wielu uważało wręcz, że teorii należy dać zdecydowany odpór, co zaowocowało ogromną liczbą pozycji polemicznych, a zbiór rozważań teoretycznych i antyteoretycznych przybrał ogromne rozmiary. Dzisiaj wszystkim chyba udziela się poczucie lekkiego znużenia teorią, która straciła dawny impet biorący się głównie z obrazoburczej nieraz odwagi stawiania niewygodnych pytań. Nastąpiła nieunikniona petryfikacja wielu nurtów teoretycznych, które przybrały postać nowej ortodoksji, a hasła wczoraj wypisane na rewolucyjnych sztandarach trafiły na karty dzisiejszych podręczników. Celem niniejszych rozważań jest zastanowienie się nad obecnym miejscem teorii w świecie humanistyki. Teoria jawi się jako niesłychanie zróżnicowana, w jej obrębie można wyróżnić ogromną liczbę prądów i szkół. Właśnie ta migotliwość świata teorii powoduje, że trudno o postawienie twardej diagnozy jej obecnej kondycji, gdyż każde uogólnienie wymagałoby licznych doprecyzowań i dopowiedzeń. Dlatego też niniejsze uwagi starają się uniknąć

This essay sets out to examine Miłosz's attitude towards confessional poetry, or rather, to examine his stance on confessionalism as a seemingly inseparable element of any poetic utterance. By means of such terms as decorum, referentiality of poetic language and its usefulness, I try to show why Miłosz preferred to stay away from overtly confessional modes of poetic utterance, which draw too heavily on the poet's own experiences and may result in blurring the distinction between biography and literature. One reason why the poet so intensely disliked excessive confessionalism is that its main purpose is to describe the emotions of the speaker, whereas he felt that the main task of poetry is to celebrate the dazzling beauty of the outside world, whose existence transcends and surpasses the insignifi cantly small inner world of a troubled psyche. Last but not least, the notion of the usefulness of poetry, in his understanding of the term, is that it makes it possible for poems written in diverse countries and epochs to intensify the contemporary reader's sense of belonging to the great family of the human race. The question we have posed can be understood as prompting a reconsideration of the inadequacy and insuffi ciency of language. The previous century saw a number of philosophical treatises grappling with this issue. The issue also emerges quite often in modern poetry, either in the form of metapoetic refl ection on the substance of poetry itself or as a hidden source of tension within the text. Miłosz's views on the matter were ambivalent and often fl uctuated, instead of evolving into a homogeneous position. On the one hand, he believes in a certain soteriological potential of language, as evidenced by the famous lines from the poem " Reading the Japanese Poet Issa " : " What is pronounced strengthens itself./ What is not pronounced

Introduction This essay sets out to examine the problem of intertextuality in two poems written by the Welsh priest-poet Ronald Stuart Thomas (1913-2000). Since it harbours no ambitions of redefining the very notion of intertextuality or engaging with a critical polemic with its various postulates and problems, intertextuality is here defined simply as an interrelationship between one text and other texts. Although the following investigations (as almost any invoking the notion of intertextuality) are obviously greatly indebted to the work of founders of the discourse on intertextuality (most notably Bakhtin and Kristeva), this essay will leave aside their claim that all literature is inescapably intertextual. While recognizing the disputed validity of this claim itself, and acknowledging solid arguments which bolster it, it is clearly beyond the scope of a single article to address such enormously complicated questions of theory. Neither will I argue with the postmodern view that our understanding of the world is mediated through language to such an extent that our engagement with the