SOURCE: “Tadeusz Różewicz and the Poetics of Pessimism,” in North Dakota Quarterly, Vol. 50, No. 3, Summer, 1982, pp. 77–82.

In the following essay, Hauptman discusses how Różewicz seeks to overcome his pessimism through his poetry.

“Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich … ?” 

Rainer Maria Rilke

Although many twentieth century poets such as Trakl, Celan, or Plath have manifested bitterness, despair, and pessimism in their verse, Tadeusz Różewicz, playwright, short story writer, poet, one of Poland's most important littérateurs, is perhaps unique: the frequently unrelieved negativism, especially of his early poetry, demands a new perspective on the part of the reader; the bleakness of his vision is such that it defamiliarizes¹ through hyperbole. The reader is traumatized into submission. And yet the vision that Różewicz depicts is unequivocally not hyperbolic: it is rather the most credible response to the Holocaust, the war, and the sufferings of the...