Polish Poetry - II. RENAISSANCE
Stanislaw Baranczak
0000-00-00II. RENAISSANCE
Western European humanism had its representatives in Poland as early as the second half of the 15th century, but only the 1560 ushered in the "Golden Age" of the Polish Renaissance. Meanwhile, a few transitional figures emerged. The first Polish-language poet whose identity is at least partly established is Biernat of Lublin (ca. 1465 - ca. 1529). His major poetic work is Zywot Ezopa (The Life of Aesop, ca. 1522), the first part of the legendary slave, while the second part presents the collection of fables. Another early humanist, this time much closer to the Renaissance mentality is Mikolaj Rej (1505-1569), traditionally called the father of Polish literature. A country squire with almost no formal education, he wrote in Polish, not in Latin. Rej's exlusive use of the vernacular was deliberate: it had much to do with the awakening of a sence of national identity in the beginnings of the Renaissance. His poetry is mostly didactic, descriptive, or satiric; it ranges from enormous versified treatises or dialogues to brief epigrams. As a poet, Rej undeniably lacks subtlety and artistic balance; his strengths are his passion for the particulars of life and his robust style.
Against the background of his predecessors, but also of his contemporaries, the work of Jan Kochanowski (1530-1584) appears as the culmination of the Polish Renaissance as well as one of the crowning achievements of all Slavic poetry before the 19th century. An educated humanist, Kochanowski was indebted to the classic heritage as well as to contemporary Itlian and French literature, but he gave his writing a national specificity and personal perspective. The bulk of his mature work is written in Polish, which he raised almost single-handedly to the rank of a literary language. His Polish output consists of the collections Fraszki (Trifles, 1584), Piesni (Songs, 1586), and Treny (Threnodies, 1580); a masterly poetic adaptation of the Psalms, Psalterz Dawidow (1578); several epic poems; and a classical tragedy in verse, Odprawa poslow grackich (The Dismissal of the Grecian Envoys, 1578). If the Anacreontic Fraszki and Horatian Piesni present Kochanowski as an orderly and well-balanced mind that enjoys the aurea mediocritas of everyday life, his Treny is marked by a radically different tone. This sequence of laments over the death of his little daughter encompasses a wide range of shifting feelings, from utter dispair and doubt to final reconciliation with God's decrees; the poet's usually lucid and tranquil style acquires a pre-baroque complexity and tension.
Kochanowski's influence on subsequent phases of Polish poetry was both enormous and varied. Perhaps his most durable legacy was his contribution to the development of Polish verse. The revolution he carried out consisted in replacing the remnants of the medieval system of relative syllabism with a strictly syllabic system, including exact rhyme, stabilized caesura, and paroxytonic cadence. This rigor allowed him the freedom to employ enjambment and thus create an interplay between syntax and verse structure. In addition, he was able to introduce a bewildering variety of meters and stanza patterns. Despite the 19th-century successs of the more songlike syllabotonic system, Kochanowski's syllabism remains one of the basic verse systems of Polish poetry; only since the beginnings of the 20th century Has it been rivaled seriously by tonic verse and vers libre.
As early as the second half of the 16th century - that is, at the zenith of the Renaissance - some literary innovations were already foreshadowing the arrival of the baroque. Mikolaj Sep Szarzynski (1550-1581), who died three years before Kochanowski, was a full-fledged baroque poet avant la lettre. His only collection, Rytmy albo wiersze polskie (Polish Rhythms or Verses; publicated posthumously in 1601), has been rediscovered only in recent decades, after centuries of oblivion. Szarzynski did not write much, but what he wrote reveals an extraordinary personality, a profoundly metaphysical poet. In particular, a handful of his religious sonnets, in which tortuous syntax, violent enjambment, and oxymoronic imagery portray a mind torn asunder by spiritual torment, bear comparison with the best of John Donne or George Herbert.
These two giants, Kochanowski and Szarzynski, dwarf the other poets of the Polish Renaissance, yet several are not without artistic merit. Sebastian Grabowiecki (ca. 1543-1607) was an author of refined devotional lyricism. Sebastian Fabian Klonowic (ca. 1545-1602) wrote descriptive and didactic poems that abound with picturesque details. Szymon Szymonowic (1558-1629) left behind a collection of half-bucolic, half-realistic Sielanki (Idylls, 1614), an important link in the evolution of the pastoral genre.
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