Kryzys liryzmu i narodziny poezji prozą. Przelotne chmury Szczęsnej

Abstract

In the mid-1880s, Józefa Cybulska, who wrote under the pseudonym Szczęsna, published a largely autobiographical novel entitled Karta z pamiętnika poety (A Page from a Poet’s Diary) in the weekly “Bluszcz” (“Ivy”). The protagonist of the novel, having published a volume of romantic poetry, experiences a deep creative crisis and becomes discouraged about the sense of his artistic path. He is suffering from the difficulty of integrating divergent, disharmonious feelings, impressions, and thoughts into a poetic form. Szczęsna’s collection of prose poems Przelotne chmury (Passing Clouds 1892) can be read as an attempt to find an appropriate, modern form for the changeable poetic sensibility of the turn of the century, and as a trace of the whole, which could not be expressed by existing forms.