This paper sets out to address issues relating to the reception of Zbigniew Herbert’s poetry and essays, and the scope here is bookended by his debut collection of poetry at one end and most recent commentaries and reviews by researchers and critics on the other. This overview of the scholarship which has come to be referred to as “Herbertian studies” extends its coverage to changing styles of reading, issues pertaining to aesthetics and beliefs, axiological dimensions, applied research methodologies, and interpretative angles. This outline of the history of the perception of Herbert’s legacy is organised chronologically, thematically and notionally. The analysis in hand focuses on key monographic papers, comprehensive studies, and reviews illustrating the order of the multiplicity of approaches and dimensions of analysis; furthermore, it sheds light on the variety of styles and methods of reading and chronicles the extended tradition of attempts at examining such works’ content and messages. The sheer number of such publications testifies to the popularity of Herbert’s output in this respect. The analysis of particular poems serves here as the point of departure for observations of a more general nature: existential and metaphysical interpretations are placed side by side with culturally referenced readings. Still, the catalogue of critical works on Herbert does not seem to be a definitive collection, as, for one, there is no sign of the pool of new interpretations drying up, and moreover, the search for “yet another Herbert” is given impetus by new concepts emerging in the expanding nomenclature in the field of the humanities.

This article is an attempt at a philosophical reconstruction of the idea of eternal life in the poetry of Zbigniew Herbert. The author sets out to discuss the difficulties connected with the ideas of both heavenly (transcendent) eternity, which posits a new mode of existence, and earthly (immanent) everlastingness, based on immortal  fame or instants of eternity intermittently available to humans (in other words, a momentary cessation of the awareness of the passage of time). An example of heavenly eternity is the immortality of the soul or the resurrection of the body; according to Herbert, both possibilities signify a radically novel (perfect and infinite) mode of existence, which is totally alien to human (imperfect and finite) nature. This is why man does not desire an eternity of this kind, as it would entail a transformation of his nature into a different, non-human (divine, angelic) being. A paradigmatic example of earthly eternity can be found in profound experiences (such as aesthetic contemplation of beauty), when the contemplating subject loses the consciousness of the destructive power of time, or even of his own eventual demise, deluding himself for a moment that his being is everlasting. Herbert seems to embrace a third way, which is the way of the sceptics, who do not believe in either kind of eternity,  consequently living in a state of permanent suspension between the two other ways.

The article subjects to analysis selected motifs from Zbigniew Herbert’s poem “Mr. Cogito and the Imagination” based on the draft copies of the work that are stored in the poet’s archive. An analysis of the manuscripts, which reveals a different, hidden aspect of the final text, allows for the investigation of what was omitted in the process of creation, such as the motif of Daedal and the reference to the Upanishads, and traces the development of the significant themes of the poem: a concept of identity and the notion of tautology.

This article chronicles the travails of Zbigniew Herbert during the process of writing his short prose piece depicting the image of the mythological Narcissus. An analysis of the extant versions of the manuscript serves as a telling illustration of how multivariate the reinterpretation of this myth can be. In the laboratory of his notebook, Herbert experimented with multifarious avenues of such conceptual reimagining. Those of Herbert’s texts about Narcissus which have actually been released in print are only narrowly reflective of the enormous scope of his protean creativity in the deconstruction and transformation of the canonical version of this Greek myth.

In Herbert’s essays and poems we find not only a wide range of economic problems, but also a real passion with which the author describes the economic fundaments of all civilizations. In the apocrypha The Portrait in Black Flames and poem “Hakeldama,” Herbert creates a great metaphor of the Final Judgment as the Great  Book of accounts. This is nothing unusual, as the poet held a master’s degree in economics from the School of Economics in Krakow, currently the Krakow University of Economics.

(Andrzej Franaszek, Herbert. Biografia, Vol. 1: Niepokój, Vol. 2: Pan Cogito, Wydawnictwo Znak, Kraków 2018, pp. 1920)