Poetry
Mr. Cogito
Pan Cogito
Zbigniew Herbert · 1974
Synopsis
Forty poems gathered around one character, Mr. Cogito, an ordinary man who reads the newspaper and takes a walk in the morning, and through whom the author meditates, with irony and tenderness, on the body and thought, the pearl, pure thought, suffering, hell, the temptation of Spinoza or redemption. His efforts to improve himself always end in a smiling failure. The collection closes with poems on ethics, including a call to stand upright and remain faithful.
Context
The character was born from a note taken at Kazimierz, on the Vistula, probably in the last days of September 1962, and the collection was written between 1962 and 1973. In January 1973, the weekly Tygodnik Powszechny published the Message of Mr. Cogito, which was received with fervour; the manuscript, submitted the same year to Czytelnik, spent several months with the censors, and the book appeared in January 1974, in a print run of ten thousand copies. The character returns in the author's later collections, up to the last.
Who it is for
Short poems in a sober, ironic language; the character gives the collection its unity.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as the turning point of his work; its last poem became, at the end of the seventies, a kind of secular decalogue of the opposition.
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