Poezja jako doświadczenie wewnętrzne. Aleksander Wat o „epifanii naturalnego” (na marginesie „Mojego wieku”)
Poetry as Internal Experience. Aleksander Wat on the “Epiphany of the Natural.” (On the Margin of “My Century [Mój wiek]”)

Summary/Abstract: The article is devoted to one of the most important threads of the theory of poetry formulated by Aleksander Wat in the time of his evolving creative biography: from his futurist debut, through the period of leftist involvement and the poet’s lyrical silence until developing a new diction which he himself referred to as the “epiphany of the natural.” Remarks on the necessity of preserving this par excellence poetic way of “a man’s fulfilment” recorded in "My Century: The odyssey of a Polish intellectual" arrange into a story about the lyric as about internal experience preserving the deep, dark, exposed to decadent “decay” mental source of a free subject. In his conversations with Miłosz, Wat reconstructs the birth of this poetological conception as parallel to the trauma of Soviet prisons and concurrent to “disenchantment” with the communism. The theory of the “epiphany of the natural” presented by Wat as a radical shift of accent from the aesthetic and the social to the anthropological gains its complete fulfilment no later than when the poet succeedes in rejecting the late immensely strong antinomies of social and subjective reality: futurist freedom of word being a thing and hidden intimist depth of song which is existence. Due to that in Wat’s optic lyric allows not only for sheltering from history but also, in return, becomes a space of contemplative and active being.

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