Intra et extra muros – figura murów i (ze)wnętrza w twórczości Witolda Wirpszy
Intra et extra muros – the Figure of Walls and of the Inside and the Outside in the Poetry of Witold Wirpsza

Summary/Abstract: In this article, Dorota Kołodziej analyses the functioning of the figure of walls in Witold Wirpsza’s mature poetry. Although he used this theme in his early poetry, e.g., the 1953 poem List o Sumieniu, Wirpsza fully developed this figure in the 1960s and 1970s, in poems inspired by experiences from his life in West Berlin. Passages in Faeton (Phaeton), Traktat skłamany, and Wykorzenienie are significant contributions to serious reflection on the cultural image of the city and on the functioning of the border. The problem of space-sharing, however, found its fullest expression in the 1978 poem Walls, in which the best known barriers in history (the Great Wall of China, the Berlin Wall, ghetto walls, and the Wailing Wall) are the starting point for reflections on the anthropological sources of the need to erect barriers, on the functioning of memory in a city haunted by specters of the past, and – finally – on the relationship between the inside and the outside. By constructing images of moving walls, Wirpsza reveals the paradoxical nature of these notions and the absurdity of this hard opposition, but also stresses the fact that we cannot free ourselves from it.

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