Self-Portrait | Historical Context

Self-Portrait Historical Context

Polish New Wave Poets

In the early 1970s, Polish writers who were influenced by the political events in their country in the late 1960s formed a movement called the New Wave. This group was made up of several diverse literary groups, among them, the Poznań group Attempts, which included Stanisław Barańczak and Ryszard Krynicki; the Cracow group Now, which included Zagajewski, Julian Kornhauser, Jerzy Kronhold, and Stanisław Stabro; and the Warsaw and Lódź group Hybrids, which included Krzysztof Karasek, Jarosław Markiewicz, Jacek Bierezin, Zdzisław Jaskuła, and Witold Sulkowski.

The disparate groups came together in a spirit of rebellion against artistic tradition. Tadeusz Witkowski, in the Slavic and East European Journal, notes that these poets, who also became known as the Generation of 1968, “rejected the concept of universal poetry, devoid of the concrete 'here and now,' poetry speaking in a highly literary language, exclusively utilizing allusion, metaphors, and abstract symbols.” They discarded,...
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