„Prozodia starożytna”, „wiersze miarowe” i Norwidowskie recitativa
‘Ancient Prosody,’ ‘Measured Poems,’ and Norwid’s Recitatives

Summary/Abstract: The study concerns historical theories on the prosody of a literary text, in particular theoretical and practical propositions submitted in the late Enlightenment and early Romanticism period by Polish writers – Józef Franciszek Królikowski and Stanisław Okraszewski, and the poet of mature Romanticism – Cyprian Norwid. Starting from the early disputes about syllabotonicism (accentual-syllabic versification), in the earlier formulations associated with the ‘musicality’ of poetry, the author shows two dominant approaches to this issue: the classicistic, and sentimental and romantic. The former puts ancient prosody forward as a model, refers to the ideals of melopoesis, and places lyric in the context of music and rhetoric; the latter, on the other hand, refers to the medieval tradition and native folklore which distance themselves from ‘the rhetorical’ in favour of a new concept of ‘the lyrical.’ The reverberation of this dispute echos in Norwid’s discourse, whereas in the prosodic layer of his poetry, provoking melodeclamation in a manner of voice realisation, one can see a continuation of the melopoesis tradition in which ‘the rhetorical’ of a poetical text does not contradict ‘the lyrical.’

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