SOURCE: Carpenter, Bogdana. “The Prose Poetry of Zbigniew Herbert: Forging a New Genre.” The Slavic and East European Journal 28, no. 1 (spring 1984): 76-88.

In the following essay, Carpenter, a translator of Herbert's works, suggests that Herbert's prose poems emphasize his “critical dialogue with tradition” and enable him to use “new voices and personae, new forms, and a new, sharper tone on an increasingly broad scale.”

The prose poetry of the contemporary Polish poet, Zbigniew Herbert, is a distinct although integral part of his poetic output. It represents an attempt to enlarge the limits of poetry. But Herbert's prose poems do not abolish the distinction between literary genres; on the contrary, he constantly sharpens the distinction, and in this respect his practise is considerably different from that of his contemporaries.¹ In recent Polish criticism the relationship of the two genres has received special attention. Stanisław Barańczak has spoken...