„TALENT (NIE)WYŻSZY NAD MIERNOŚĆ”. KILKA UWAG O ZJAWISKU WIERSZOMANII NA LITWIE W LATACH 1815–1830
“TALENT (NIE)WYŻSZY NAD MIERNOŚĆ” (“TALENT (NOT) ABOVE MEDIOCRITY”). SOME REMARKS ON THE PHENOMENON OF POETRY WRITING MANIA IN LITHUANIA 1815–1830

Summary/Abstract: An overview — even cursory — of literary culture in Lithuania in the first decades of the nineteenth century indicates there were many people who pursued poetry writing. According to Piotr Chmielowski, such a phenomenon did not exist then to this extent and with such intensity in any other part of Poland’s territory. As proof, in one of his works, he lists more than seventy names of poets who in the years 1815––1822 had their poetry printed on the pages of journals published at the time. This number, certainly, does not fully reflect the scale of the said phenomenon. It should be noted that young people strove for a place on local poetry Parnassus, for example, also through parlor readings or through entries in memory books. Those young poets were often satisfied with minor, fleeting poems, handed from one person to another, without hope of the fruits of their poetic labor appearing on the pages of periodical press. Unfortunately, few of these poets possessed “talent above the mediocrity”, hence few manged to impress their audience. The paper aims to present selected views of contemporary audience concerning the poetry as its members also made an attempt at evaluation of the poems and aesthetic valorisation of the authors’ talent.

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