Polish Poetry - IV. ENLIGHTENMENT
Stanislaw Baranczak
0000-00-00IV. ENLIGHTENMENT
In the mid 1760s, however, new tendencies began to occupy the center of the cultural stage. Under the reign of the last Polish king, Stanislaw August, the ideology of the Enlightenment rapidly gained ground along with a renewal of interest in Western (especially French) literary novelties. In poetry, the last decades of the 18th century marked a resurgence of neoclassicism. The purification of language went hand in hand with a return to discipline and clarity in writing. Classical genres, including descriptive poems, mock epics, odes, epistles, satires, fables, parables, and epigrams, were revived and cultivated.
Among the circle of poets close to the royal court, the most outstanding was Bishop Ignacy Krasicki (1735-1801). In 1778 he published anonymously his Monachomachia, a mock epic in ottava rima (q.v.) ridiculing the obscurantism and indulgence of monks. As a satiric poet, he reached his climax in Satyry (Satires, 1779-84), a series of penetrating ironic observations on contemporary morals which, thanks to brilliant dialogue and dramatic monologue, succeeded in being didactic without indulging in intrusive rhetoric. Another of his masterpieces is the collection Bajki i przypowiesci (Fables and Parables, 1779), in which the old genre of the animal fable acquires a new form close to the epigram and characterized by clarity and conciseness as well as a bitter and disillusioned, if humorous, vision of humanity.
Another great master of witty verse was Stanislaw Trembecki (1739?-1812). A libertine and courtier, he wrote political odes honoring the King and obsence erotic poems with equal ease. His highest achievements are his poetic fables, his rococo anacreontics, and his descriptive poem Sofiowka (Sophie's Garden, 1806).
By and large, though, poets of the Polish Enlightenment pursued the stylistic ideals of either strict neoclassicism or preromantic sentimentalism. A good example of the former is the work of Bishop Adam Naruszewicz (1733-1796); its belated extension can be seen in the conservative and rigid stance of the last generation of neoclassicists, including Kajetan Kozmian (1771-1856), Ludwik Osinski (1775-1838), and Alojzy Felinski (1771-1820). During the first decades of the 19th century, sentimentalism, on the other hand, surfaced in the works of Franciszek Dionizy Kniazin (1750-1807) and Franciszek Karpinski (1741-1825), who, in their songs and eclogues, offered many fine examples of simple and emotionally direct lyricism. Another link between the Enlightenment and romanticism can be discerned in the work of the versatile writer Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz (1758-1841), the first to popularize the ballad through both his translations and his original poetry.
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