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PARTISAN REVIEW
caught in this way. This is an old recipe from fine masters, but it seems
to have been almost entirely forgotten. The pure Romantic manner dis–
misses it: the speaker and the author are one and the same. Byron felt
obligated to announce what he thought of his heroes, inserting entire
digressions of personal lyrical flights, not distancing himself from him–
self for even a moment. Only when the Romantics aspired to drama did
they have to make allowances for the rules, without which drama is
impossible.
I have my own view of Mickiewicz's
Ballads and Romances
and his
Crimean Sonnets.
I think I have a right to. Every Pole has his private
accounting with Mickiewicz, just as an Englishman has his private
accounting with the Bible. I do not consider the
Ballads and Romances
to be as Romantic a work as, say, the verse of Lamartine.
If
I read
Bal–
lads and Romances
as they are read in school, I would have to come to
the conclusion that the author of "A City Winter" is at the very least
infantile, and I would not be able to explain their position in his work
as a whole. I love them for all the shades of the distance Mickiewicz
kept from the songs and fables of the Nowogr6dek region, a distance
filled with tender affirmation; I love them for his incarnations in the fig–
ures of hunters and maidens, for his skill at erasing the many difficulties
he faced, and for his use of simple language.
It
is a work of artistic irony
(not irony in the colloquial sense), and when one looks at it in this way,
it is easier to understand how he came to write
Pan Tadeusz.
Sometimes
I recite "Tukaj" to myself and think about what it is that produces the
exquisite beauty of Tukaj's speech before his death . Is it not that it is
persiflage?
The
Crimean Sonnets
are, in my opinion, less a collection of lyrical
effusions and more a song sung by a solo bass voice, where the per–
former is not at all identical with the total Mickiewicz, if I may put it
that way. Like Kochanowski's
Laments,
they are
extemporale
on the
theme of death, with a conscious selection of patterns which exist in lit–
erature, so that in the
Sonnets
the speaker is deliberately posed to resem–
ble a portrait by Wankowicz. Only this gives them their transparency
and their unity of themes, makes them, in a word, classical poems,
despite the attacks launched by pseudoclassicists.
As long as the poetic
metier
is reduced, as it is today, to assembling
words and overlooks the subtleties of the author's relationship to what
he supposedly is saying "from the depths of his soul," it will be difficult
to believe in the possibility of escaping from the chalk circle, and those
who do not like a journalistic tone will be absolutely right. Poetry is
divided into pure lyric and pure satire and obviously it cannot be
