ABSTRACT
In 1951, in a Polish journal named, in the spirit of the Stalinist period, The New Culture, the critic Andrzej Braun singled out a promising young poet called Tadeusz Różewicz for censure, finding in his poetry “unfortunate” similarities with the atmosphere of early Eliot and even obvious quotations from the latter’s work. Braun took these as evidence that Różewicz had “thoroughly mastered the rat-hopeless poetry of the English decadent”. This chapter examines the subtle dialogue with Eliot in the work of the poet who changed the face of Polish poetry, attempting to present the relationship in a quite different light. Różewicz discovered in Eliot a “prophetic genius”, a diagnosis of the ills of modernity and a drive to “challenge the world from which his work arose” that was deeply in tune with his own. Różewicz knew Eliot only in translation, and the context in which he wrote was quite different. Yet he found in the Anglo-American poet one of the very few “distinguished shamans” in an “insane century” who, as another Polish poet of Różewicz’s generation puts it, “knew the secret/of conjuring a form with words that resists the action of time” (Zbigniew Herbert, “To Ryszard Krynicki – a Letter”, translated by John and Bogdana Carpenter).
