ABSTRACT
The aforementioned lines are much more than a mere epigraph introducing the theme of this essay. In fact, they form an integral part of the text because Rosa’s words reveal that she was an ardent poet and a genuine revolutionary in one breath. Though Rosa herself, perhaps, tried to raise a distinction between the two identities by placing ‘the party congresses’ and ‘meadows . . . humming with bees’ in mild opposition to each other, in her case, an indivisible source of humanism, as well as aspiration for beauty, welded the poet and lover of Goethe and Shakespeare, on the one hand, and the fi ery disputant and street fi ghter, on the other, into a single, inseparable being. We can take yet another step forward and claim that because Rosa herself was a poet, she could discover the poetry of Marxism in its revolutionary principle and in its inspired commitment to the Realm of the Possible (Utopia). While her faith in this principle prompted her to write the classic political text Reform or Revolution (1900) castigating the prosaic and calculating Eduard Bernstein, the poet in her, immersed in her garden, could write to Hans Diefenbach from Wronke (then a part of Germany, now in Poland) on 29 June 1917: ‘In the sky, which was a sparkling, glimmering blue, some dazzling, whitecloud formations stood towering; a very pale half-moon swam between them like a phantom, like
a dream’ (Luxemburg 1993: 218). This, without exaggeration, is prose poetry or poetry-in-prose of a high order attesting to the creative felicity of Rosa.
