SOURCE: Introduction to Polish Poetry of the Last Two Decades of Communist Rule: Spoiling Cannibal's Fun, Northwestern University Press, 1991, pp. 11-13.

In the following excerpt from an introduction to a collection of Polish poetry, Baranczak argues that Zagajewski's reconciles individualism and moralism and calls this achievement "a unifying feature of whatever is most valuable in recent Polish poetry. "

…The question of how to reconcile poetry's natural individualism with human solidarity and respect for supraindividual values is, in fact, the single most pressing issue that Polish poetry faced during the last decades of Communist rule. It was fascinating to observe how this dilemma was approached by various poets of the younger generation, such as Ryszard Krynicki, Adam Zagajewski, Ewa Lipska, Julian Kornhauser, Piotr Sommer, Jan Polkowski, or Bronislaw Maj. Born in the 1940s and 1950s, most of these poets entered literary life in the wake of the political protests...