Adam Zagajewski’s essays on poets and poetry are interpreted here in the context of scholarly debates about the specificities of mystical experience. From the four criteria the great American philosopher and psychologist William James developed in 1902, “transiency” and “passivity” can be brought together as indicators of what I call the inescapability of mystical experience, while the two other criteria, namely “ineffability” and “noetic quality”, can be treated as what I call the “paradox of articulation”. The essay demonstrates how profound the reflections of the Polish poet on these questions are, how they are related to his views about the possibilities of contemplation and art in view of the history of violence of the 20th century and what they mean for the future of religion. The highly influential narrative of a world-historical process of ongoing “disenchantment” (Max Weber) loses much of its persuasiveness if these reflections are true.

The text asks the question about Adam Zagajewski’s understanding of the interior space of one’s home. Guided by his post-memory, Zagajewski describes a coping mechanism based on withdrawal into one’s place and its interiority that was construed by the Poles resettled from former Polish territories in the East as an etui, a cover protecting the traumatized selves and their memorabilia from the new, unacceptable reality. Such a protective etui created by the four walls of one’s room was during communism a site of collecting and even hoarding broken things. Obsessive collecting lead to the destruction of even a modicum of comfort and the optic perspective in the over-crowded rooms. The consequence of these two processes of interiorization allows the author to refute the notion that Zagajewski was an aesthete.

In his poems and essays, Adam Zagajewski often described the work of poetry as discovering and giving expression to the “radiance” of the world. I argue that Zagajewski’s conception of poetry has much in common with Plato’s idea that philosophy begins in wondering. I further argue that in both cases, our confidence in the veridicality of wonder depends on our ability to share in wondering with another person, and I suggest that we can see this dynamic in several of Zagajewski’s poems about listening to music.

This essay considers Adam Zagajewski’s poem “Evening, Stary Sącz”and in particular, the line “Little abysses open between the stones.”This image invites us to reflect on the many startling gaps and voids in Zagajewski’s poems. At times, those abysses suggest historical and political dimensions particular to Polish (and European) experience in the 20th century; but more often, Zagajewski presents the abyss as moral and metaphysical. “Evening, Stary Sącz,”a poem that doesn’t on its surface appear very threatening, opens suddenly through its “little abysses”into sacrificial reality.

The article presents an interpretation of Adam Zagajewski’s poem “The Kingfisher” from the 2014 volume Asymmetry in the context of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s [“As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame”], whose initial words, cited in English, were used as the motto. The article reviews the motif of the kingfisher in poetry and culture. The possible readings of the poem also relate to the symbolism of colours and fire, through which its ontological and metapoetic senses are revealed.

The article shows Adam Zagajewski’s relationship with Charles Taylor’s thought. The author argues that the poet’s dialogue with the philosopher is not limited to quotations and direct references but is also revealed at a deeper level. Based on Zagajewski’s essays and interviews, the author concludes that the poet studied Sources of the Self and The Ethics of Authenticity, and probably also drew on later works dealing with the condition of religion in a disenchanted world (“A Catholic Modernity?” and A Secular Age). Zagajewski borrowed from Taylor’s historical argument about the genealogy of modern identity. He also alluded to the philosopher’s diagnoses of the Enlightenment-Romantic lineage of modern Europeans and his conviction that the struggle for more demanding forms of spiritual life is preserved. The most direct traces of the conversation with Taylor can be found in the essays from The Defense of Ardor. The author suggests that Zagajewski also alludes to Taylor’s diagnoses in poems (e.g., “Tierra del Fuego”, “Senza flash”, and “The Kingfisher”), in which the motifs of spiritual lobotomy and the epiphanic power of poetry appear.

The article summarizes the most important theses and interpretations contained in the book The Sound of Polish Modern Poetry: Performance and Recording after World War II by Aleksandra Kremer. First of all, it places the research achievements of the Polish-American literary scholar on the map of reflection related to sound studies and “philology of the ear”. Then, it points out what is particularly new and revealing in Kremer’s proposal for voice-oriented literary research and the audiosphere in Polish poetry of the second half of the 20th century. The following parts of the article are a recapitulation of individual chapters devoted to the author’s “vocal performance” (Kremer coined the term to describe an author’s reading of their own poetry) of works from the post-war period: Miron Białoszewski, Zbigniew Herbert, Czesław Miłosz, Tadeusz Różewicz, Julian Tuwim, Aleksander Wat, as well as poetesses: Anna Kamieńska, Krystyna Miłobędzka, Halina Poświatowska, Wisława Szymborska and Anna Świrszczyńska. Kremer uses excellent literary and linguistic skills, supplying traditional humanistic methods with conclusions from the calculations of the Praat program, which analyzes pronunciation parameters. The author of The Sound of Polish Modern Poetry: Performance and Recording after World War II reveals to the reader the hitherto unrecognized world of sounds of Polish poetry of the second half of the 20th century. The poet’s physical voice is treated here as an element revealing the poetic “I” and illustrating the attitude towards his own poetry in general.