Rafał Milan

The text is an attempt to indicate the common places in the works published by Kasprowicz as volume VI of his Dzieła poetyckie [Poetic Works]. In the field of research interest, the basic human experiences are – according to Kasprowicz – pain, associated fear and literary strategies for taming them. The cycles Ginącemu światu [To the Dying World] and Salve Regina, as well as the poems from the volume O bohaterskim koniu i walącym się domu [Of the Heroic Horse and the Wrecking House] are read in the perspective of a modern allegory. Detailed interpretations use the concepts of classical psychoanalysis (such as fetish, symptoms, denial). The source of inspiration also comes from Walter Benjamin’s proposed description of the disappearance of experience and the disintegration of significant structures – which can be recognised as phenomena characteristic of modernity.

The text is an attempt to widen the study field dealing with the senses in the world implied by the poetry of Bolesław Leśmian by including the so far neglected aspect of the essential role of touch in creating this world. The metapoetic reflection, inscribed in poems coming mainly from Leśmian’s first volume and being often the source and part of their plot, suggests the integral relation between the process of metaphorization (or, process of realizing a metaphor) and acting through touch in the presented reality. Thus understood, touch does not, however, constitute a simple metaphor of a creative act; rather, it problematizes the very (im)possibility of going beyond the “tangible” materiality of the text.
The interpretations carried out make it possible to visualize a specific – poetic – modality of touch, which is close to caress – as defined by Lévinas. In the face of the literary “reflexiveness” of that sense, the poem touches upon the non-literary reality like a shadow portending that which is not yet present.
 

This text attempts to highlight those elements of the presented world in Bolesław Leśmian’s poetry (as well as the metapoetic and anthropological reconsiderations that they imply), which turn the poetic theology of the Polish writer into a kind of theology of poetry. Leśmian is not immune to the fear of making God seem all-too-human, which was characteristic of the Young Poland movement. Nonetheless, he does not succumb to idolatry of an unknown, infinitely remote deity, as for example Kazimierz Przerwa-Tetmajer did. Interpretation of Leśmian’s early poetry (primarily poems from the cycle Oddaleńcy), lead me to the conclusion that the future  author of Napój cienisty sees the death of God as a source event, which is responsible both for the constitution of modern subjectiveness and its crisis.
The awareness of the death of God manifests in Leśmian’s poetic world as suspension of the creative act, which cannot be entirely incorporated into the constructed reality. Although poetry is incapable of soothing the ontological uprooting of the human being that parallels the death of God, it nevertheless connects the poet with  hat which is different (the substantially non-human), thus allowing to experience the unembodied remnants of God, which preclude the reconciliation of lyrical autoreferentiality with subjective emancipation. Therefore, Leśmian’s path to God unwinds from inside of the poem and corresponds with the experience of emptiness that is  idden beyond the veil of poetic reflections and repetitions.