Rhetoric of revolution and avant-garde accessories in Edward Szymański’s poems

Abstract

In this article the author presents relationships between proletarian and avant-garde lyric poetry exemplified by the poetical works of Edward Szymański. The author indicates the existence of two models within the left-wing Polish poetry during the Interwar period: highly-artistic one and propagandistic one, mutually influencing each other in 1930s, what affected their further evolution and assimilation. The author thoroughly considers elements of revolutionary rhetoric (a. o. anti religiousness, promoting the socialistic world view, anti-state attitude and creation of the working class mythology). With great attention to detail he also analyses poetical features of Szymański’s work, their connections with the avant-garde poetics, i. e. references to particular formal and ideological solutions undertaken by the representatives of the New Art, such as prosodic irregularity, visualization of text, juxtaposition, narrative (epic-like) mode etc. The context of works by Tadeusz Peiper, Bruno Jasieński, Anatol Stern, Czesław Miłosz i Józef Czechowicz is also mentioned in this paper.