Movements and schools
Polish Romanticism
The great poets of the stateless Polish nation, in the nineteenth century.
Poland vanished from the map in 1795, divided between three empires, and for more than a century the poets stood in for the state. Writing from Parisian exile after the crushed insurrection of 1830, Mickiewicz gave the nation its founding verse, Słowacki sought a spiritual history of the country, Krasiński staged a revolution that devours its children. Norwid, misunderstood in his lifetime, would be reread in the twentieth century. Polish romanticism lastingly installed the idea that the poet speaks for those who have no voice left.
works 5
- TheatreRevengeZemstaAleksander Fredro · 1834A comedy of the provincial lesser nobility: two neighbours set against each other by a shared wall, and thwarted love affairs.Literature
- PoetryPan TadeuszPan Tadeusz, czyli ostatni zajazd na LitwieAdam Mickiewicz · 1834An epic of the life of the Lithuanian nobility on the eve of the Russian campaign, written in exile.Literature
- TheatreThe Undivine ComedyNie-Boska komediaZygmunt Krasiński · 1835A romantic drama of an aristocratic poet caught up in an imaginary social revolution.LiteraturePublic domain
- TheatreKordianJuliusz Słowacki · 1899A Romantic drama written in exile after the failure of the November 1830 uprising, and conceived as a response to Mickiewicz's Les Aïeux.LiteraturePublic domain
- PoetryVade-mecumCyprian Norwid · 1953not translated into EnglishA cycle of a hundred poems composed in exile in Paris in the mid-1860s, to renew a Polish poetry judged to be a prisoner of Romanticism.LiteraturePublic domain