A Strange Poet. A Commentary on Cyprian Norwid’s Verse
A Strange Poet. A Commentary on Cyprian Norwid’s Verse

Summary/Abstract: There lived in Paris. . . a Polish writer little known in his own country, an artist known even less, a strange poet, a hieroglyph-stylist, whose every poem has to be read syllable by syllable ten times over. . . His ideas, despite his profound learning and detailed familiarity with the achievements of contemporary knowledge, move in a diametrically opposite direction to that of modern philosophical current. But he was not a dilettante, and certainly not a visionary, a mystic, or a lunatic. . . He knew how to uncover in every thing such a relation of it to other things that it would become so original as to appear almost unrecognizable. He carried his soul around with him as if it were some kind of a numismatic rarity, unknown to anyone, unwanted, useless. . . . He resembled a stone salvaged from some marvelous edifice, which somewhere, sometime had burnt down completely Józef Tokarzewicz wrote these words about Cyprian Kamil Norwid in an obituary notice. Tokarzewicz described a strange poet: unknown, obscure, moving in an opposite direction to fashionable trends in art and philosophy. Such a description was appropriate because in the eyes of his contemporaries Norwid was indeed strange, obscure, ill-understood, and rejected.

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