Wers na pograniczach wersologii
Grey Areas of Versology

Summary/Abstract: The theories of free verse that Polish versologists have developed so far presuppose that a verse in a sense of an individual line in a poem is a fundamental and a tangible composition unit of a versed text, which means the reader must be able to identify when the verse begins and finishes. Yet, for the past few decades a clear tendency has been noticed in Polish poetry that blurs the clarity of versification or, what is worse, disposes of prosodic, metrical and graphic mechanisms of poetry delimitation that are well-grounded in literary tradition. It seems that the graphic layout of a poem is gaining in importance, yet many poems that follow this tendency do not comply with the criteria of the theory of free verse as an example of a graphic text.As a consequence, there are pieces of contemporary Polish poetry whose status is ambiguous as they belong neither to the category of free verse nor the prose and therefore, bearing in mind the current presupposition on verse, the free verse theories advocated by Polish scholars seem irrelevant in this particular case. This article aims at identifying the challenges these unclassifiable poems confront versologists with. Also, it attempts to point out semantic possibilities available exclusively in this grey area of versology.

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