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Knowing One s Place in Contemporary
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Mahon Heaney Hartwig Magdalena Kay
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Knowing
One’s Place in
Contemporary
Irish and Polish
Poetry
ii
Knowing
One’s Place in
Contemporary
Irish and Polish
Poetry
Zagajewski, Mahon,
Heaney, Hartwig
Magdalena Kay
Continuum International Publishing Group
The Tower Building, 80 Maiden Lane,
11 York Road, Suite 704,
London New York,
SE1 7NX NY 10038
www.continuumbooks.com
© Magdalena Kay, 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording,
or otherwise, without the permission of the publishers.
e-ISBN: 978-1-4411-7843-5
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kay, Magdalena.
Knowing one’s place in contemporary Irish and Polish poetry: Zagajewski, Mahon, Heaney,
Hartwig/Magdalena Kay.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4411-1642-0 (hardcover: alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 1-4411-1642-7 (hardcover: alk. paper)
1. English poetry--Irish authors--History and criticism. 2. English poetry--20th
century--History and criticism. 3. Polish poetry--20th century--History and criticism.
4. Self in literature. I. Title.
PR8771.K34 2012
821’.91099415--dc23
2011037841
Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

For my parents
vi
Contents
Acknowledgments viii
Introduction: The margins of Europe—a new comparison 1

1 The dynamic ideal and the protean self:
Adam Zagajewski 29
2 Figuring otherness in the work of Adam
Zagajewski 57
3 Belonging on the edge: Derek Mahon’s
outsider poetics 81
4 Inhabiting the earth: Derek Mahon’s dissonances
and harmonies 103
5 Belonging as mastery in the poetry of Seamus
Heaney 135
6 Examining the structures of selfhood: Seamus
Heaney 161
7 Holding one’s self outside: Julia Hartwig 187
8 Learning to speak from inside: Julia Hartwig 211
Conclusion: Knowing one’s self 235
Bibliography 245
Index 255
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Charles Altieri for his support of this project in its
earliest stages and for his always constructive criticism. I am grateful to
David Frick for his guidance, tutelage, and warm encouragement. I wish
that I could thank Michael André Bernstein, recently departed yet still alive
in my memory for his good advice and kindness. Thanks are also due to
Robert Hass, Eric Naiman, and Chana Kronfeld.
Deep thanks are due to Matthew Kay, who patiently watched me work
through the original manuscript.
I have enjoyed conversations about this project with so many people that
I fear a list may diminish the unique importance of each. An interview with
Seamus Heaney in 1998 helped to set my mind on a track that meandered its
way to this project; his courtesy, patience, and good nature are exemplary.
My meetings with Adam Zagajewski heartened me and strengthened my
confidence in this project. The conversations I had with Bronisław Maj,
Stanisław Barańczak, Ryszard Krynicki, and Ryszard Nycz deeply informed
my thinking about Polish poetry while I was a student. Thank you to Clare
Cavanagh for conversations at various conferences. The “Miłosz and Miłosz”
international conference in Krakow allowed me to have some wonderful
discussions and to experience the hospitality of the Jagiellonian University.
To my colleagues at the University of Victoria who have given advice on any
and every stage of the writing and publication process, I am thankful.
I would like to extend special gratitude to Peter Fallon for his kind
permission to print portions of Derek Mahon’s poems.
I have benefitted from the thoughtful comments of the anonymous
reviewers of this manuscript. I am extremely grateful to Haaris Naqvi
at Continuum for contracting this project and communicating with me
throughout the editing process.
To Kim Blank, for everything.
My most intimate thanks are, of course, due to my parents; I have
benefitted enormously from their critical acumen and loving care. This book
is dedicated to them.
“Fire” and “The Self” come from Without End: New and Selected Poems
by Adam Zagajewski, translated by several translators. Copyright (c) 2002
by Adam Zagajewski. Translation copyright (c) 2002 by Farrar, Straus and
Acknowledgments ix
Giroux, LLC, and Faber and Faber. Reprinted by permission of Farrar,

Straus and Giroux, LLC and Faber and Faber.
Portions of this manuscript, in revised article form, have appeared in
New Hibernia Review (Spring 2010), An Sionnach: A Journal of Literature,
Culture, and the Arts (2006), The Polish Review (Winter 2009–2010), and
World Literature Today (2005).
x
Introduction: The
margins of Europe—a
new comparison
“Our poets replace politicians, teachers, and even economists.”
Bolesław Prus
History/Histories
Ireland and Poland are located at the margins of the culturally central continent
of Europe. At first glance, they are dissimilar. Their languages are located on
different branches of the Indo-European tree. Their societies are organized
differently. Yet, these margins share uncanny similarities that lead to comparable
cultural issues and questions, ranging from the dominance of a conservative
Catholic church (in the Republic of Ireland, matched by a conservative Northern
Irish Catholicism) to the pervasive sense within each country that it is indeed
marginal to the goings-on of mainland Europe. Both countries, also, historically
privilege the genre of poetry.1 These similarities may appear too incidental to
sustain a comparative literary study, yet the extraordinary, perhaps incredible,
fact is that, when we read the works of contemporary Irish and Polish poets,
we see that they react to similar pressures and problems, evince similar postures
toward certain cultural situations, and locate their concerns in similar ways. This
is a generalization, yet four of the most important poets writing today—Adam
Zagajewski, Derek Mahon, Seamus Heaney, and Julia Hartwig—call for such
comparison, and the quality of their work is reason enough to consider it. Poets,
after all, frequently stay a step ahead of their critics. In this case, the problems
motivating career-long explorations of belonging and identity bear comparison
and, indeed, such comparison helps bring these poets’ concerns into relief.
Despite the complexity of their thinking, the root cause of such exploration is
1
“But why should it be that Ireland has such a strong tradition of poetry? The other country
that springs to mind with a similar poetic slant is Poland, and there may be a clue in that. Po-
land has been, even more so than Ireland, a ‘most distressful country’, as the ballad “The Wear-
ing of the Green” has it, subject to the buffetings of history.” We may compare this comment
by Nick Laird (in The Guardian, 23 Oct. 2010) to that by Adolf Nowaczyński, quoted below,
claiming the same parallel but stressing the greater sufferings of Ireland.
2 Knowing One’s Place
simple: belonging can be a problem. Not everyone wishes to or can “know one’s
place.” Merely determining what one’s place is can be difficult, even painful. No
wonder it is so tempting to cast one’s mind out from the present moment to
imagine what one’s place should be or could be.
It is, perhaps, not so surprising to hear Seamus Heaney praising contemporary
Polish poetry, Derek Mahon admitting his interest in Adam Mickiewicz, Adam
Zagajewski claiming that Mahon is one of his favorite poets, or Julia Hartwig
showing keen interest in contemporary English-language poetry; their poems
evince startlingly similar concerns and take complementary paths in their
explorations of those concerns. The poems of Zagajewski, Heaney, Mahon,
and Hartwig form a shifting tableau of identifications rather than a unitary
representation of identity. They do not, of course, write in the same way.
Yet the fact that these poets all flee the confines of static identity, that they
write in praise of mutability, and that they glory in being hard to pin down
to a particular time and place, has a very deep basis. This basis has much to
do with their shared rebellion against the tradition of poetry as a nation-
building enterprise. This tradition views the individual poet’s belonging in a
collectivity as the primary feature that does and should influence that poet’s
work. These four poets, contrarily, want to protect the individuality of the
voice against coercive historical circumstances and generic expectations.
These generic expectations were formed in Romantic Ireland and Poland.
Poetry, in these countries, came to the fore as the genre best able to articulate
the historical crisis both countries felt themselves to inhabit. A bardic poetic
tradition, however, comes up against an ironic strain in the twentieth century,
and different forms of lyric voice are used to express different types of cultural
belonging or apartness. How to ground these poets’ comparative gestures,
however, is a difficult question, one that involves questions of method and
relations of fact, and necessitates some historical reconnaissance.
The most salient similarity between Ireland and Poland is also the
darkest: both have experienced a history of takeover and oppression; both
lost their sovereignty for over a century. Both had and have large émigré
populations, even while they cannot be called diasporic cultures; both have
developed a nomadic aesthetic, which is minoritarian, and a restorative
aesthetic centered on the home which is majoritarian. Both were ruled
by “outside” powers who sought to abolish the difference between inside
and outside, with the result that the shifts of Poland’s borders, the relative
Anglicization of various parts of Ireland, and the state of the Irish language
became critical subjects of study in the past two centuries. The simple facts
of the two countries’ histories make it indubitable that their cultural output
should bear the scars of approximately two hundred years of “unfreedom”
and foreign domination; at the same time, forcing a “captivity-narrative”
upon such national histories can be negative and limiting.2
The phrase is Rey Chow’s from The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York:
2
Columbia University Press, 2002).

The margins of Europe—a new comparison 3
The age of revolution proved to be the age of subjugation for Europe’s

margins, as the 1800 Act of Union swallowed the Kingdom of Ireland into
the United Kingdom and the Third Partition of 1795 divided the entirety of
Poland between Russia, Prussia, and Austria. Neither act was unforeseen:
the English king had served as the official head of Ireland since the 1542
Crown of Ireland Act, and Poland had suffered its initial partitions in 1772
and 1793, reeling from the disastrous War of the Confederation of Bar
(1768–72) against an already invasive Russian presence. Both countries
attempted unsuccessful Romantic revolutions. The effect was that the Polish-
Lithuanian Commonwealth was liquidated and Ireland ceased to exist as a
separate entity in all but name and geography. Both countries could look
back on centuries of sovereignty before their neighbors, gifted with well-
maintained armies and aggressive monarchs, took over their territory; both
developed a long, deep, cultural response to these conditions. The question
of the nation—how to win back its freedom, how to maintain a subjugated
culture—became central to art and scholarship.3
Romantic identity
These political conditions, in turn, engender a specifically literary pressure to
assume one particular identity, inflected by the Romantic paradigm common
to both countries.4 Herein lies another complication: although there are
important constitutive similarities between Irish and Polish Romanticisms,
there are key temporal and cultural differences (for example, the status of
Gaelic) that cannot be elided. Instead of claiming that the two countries
share a common literary and political history—an argument that would
eventually break down—the poetry of Zagajewski, Mahon, Heaney, and
Hartwig would most benefit from a brief consideration of literary-historical
conditions that produce similar kinds of pressure upon contemporary poets
within these countries.
Much of this pressure results from the continued legacy of Romanticism,
the single strongest literary current in Poland. Its inception dates somewhat
later than that of its British counterpart. Larry Wolff points to Rousseau’s
3
Gerry Smyth posits, “at least since the eighteenth century, the debate surrounding the ‘function
of criticism’ has always been a debate about the function of the nation and the relations
between colonizing and decolonizing subjects.” Irish (and Polish) criticism cannot help but
tackle political questions, which are also, we may note, questions about the individual as
seen within a collective. Decolonisation and Criticism: The Construction of Irish Literature
(London: Pluto Press, 1998) 52.
4
Maria Janion, the foremost scholar of Polish Romanticism, holds that “the loss of inde-
pendence [is] the most important event in the history of modern Polish consciousness”—see
“Romantyzm,” Literatura Polska; Przewodnik encyklopedyczny (Warsaw: Państwowy Instytut
Wydawniczy, 1985) 299. The statement could, of course, easily be rewritten with Ireland sub-
stituted for Poland.
1772 Considerations on the Government of Poland as a text propounding

ideas that would later be considered Romantic, such as the function of
patriotism as an ideological shield against one’s oppressors; given the
weakness of the local military and economy, Poles could not place their
confidence in material strength, but must form an ideal conception of Poland
to hold within their hearts.5 A political, as opposed to a textual, approach
to the Romantic period in Poland may establish its inception in 1794, the
date of the Kościuszko Uprising, a failed attempt to liberate Poland and
Lithuania from the repressive Russian and Prussian empires, which served
as a symbolic fight for cultural as well as political integrity. According
to Maria Janion and Maria Żmigrodzka, the third partition of Poland,
in 1795, marked the definitive end of Enlightenment notions of progress
and humanitarianism. A new strain of revolutionary poetry emerged (called
“poezja tyrtejska” after the Greek Tyrteus, whose stirring verse exhorted
the Spartans to victory in the Second Messenian War), motivated by the
twin desires for revenge and for universal freedom. This represents the most
militaristic aspect of Romantic poetry. Polish Romanticism is thus marked
by a view of the poet as a prototypical man of action6 and a spiritual leader
of the people, giving voice to their desire for nationhood and freedom. The
poet may be solitary but his work is linked to a collective. The most extreme
form of this thought is a nationalistic Messianism that exalts the martyr
and the mystic, situating final historical victory in the far future, prefaced
by a series of defeats and humiliations. Although the potential freedom of
the spirit opposes the captivity of the social body in this scheme, the spirit
in question is that of the nation (naród), a union of past, present, and future
generations guided by God. This belief had a Judeo-Christian foundation,
and notions of fall, redemption, and Messianism operate in a grand narrative
of the nation’s fate, spiritualizing the Enlightenment idea of progress to form
a myth of the suffering people, who must plumb the depth of wretchedness
in order to eventually undergo a glorious rebirth; the temporal scheme at
work is a Viconian spiral. Poland is, in this view, uniquely destined to be
the Christ of nations. By transforming the fact of national suffering into
the hope for an eventual triumph, this philosophy served the psychological
purpose of defending the people against collective despair.
This current developed from the later mystical works of Adam
Mickiewicz (1799–1855), the foremost exponent of Romanticism in Poland
and the most important influence upon twentieth-century Polish poetry.
Janion posits that his Forefathers’ Eve presents a powerful archetype in its
“private” protagonist’s transformation into a “social” man, “a Prometheus
5
See Wolff, Larry, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the En-
lightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).
6
Maria Janion and Maria Żmigrodzka, Romantyzm i historia (Warsaw: Państwowy Instytut
Wydawniczy, 1978) 7–8.
suffering for his nation, [which] became the basic moral and ideological
figure of Polish romanticism.”7 It heralds the second wave of Romanticism
after the November Uprising of 1830–31, of which Messianism was the
paramount sub-ideology. The salient political events demarcating the later
stages of the Romantic Movement were the 1848 Spring of Nations8 and the
January Insurrection of 1863. As both these revolutions resulted in greater
repression, the Romantic Movement responded with a greater emphasis
upon spirituality. The last wave of Romanticism is marked by Mickiewicz’s
lectures on Slavic literature, in which he postulated that God graces the
poet with vision in return for the poet’s spiritual effort for his people.
Poetry should be essentially visionary (indeed, one should not write poetry
before one performs a miracle),9 and come “à l’improviste,” unbidden; its
spontaneity and its prophetic power would take hold of the masses in a way
that intellectual reason could not. This belief must be borne in mind when
considering the influence of Romanticism upon contemporary writers, as
well as Mickiewicz’s correspondent belief that the true poet is created for
strife rather than for sweet songs. In other words, mysticism and prophecy
should not be associated with effeteness or aestheticism but with leadership,
mobilization of the masses, and a realization that spirituality must be used in
the world of politics, not just that of imagination. The notion that the past is
part of an unresolved historical process that engulfs the present is common
in colonized cultures. It connects past wrongs with a future-oriented quest,
thus reshaping an ancient Judeo-Christian motif. “Joy did not dwell in his
house, when his fatherland knew naught but sorrow,” writes Mickiewicz,
explaining his hero’s decision to leave home and fight for the freedom of
his country. Fighting, however, can be accomplished through art as well as
direct action: “O folk song! . . . an archangel’s sword is in thy hand.”10
Such lines remind us that “Romantic Ireland,” with its concomitant belief
that folk literature may serve the purpose of national resurgence, was also a
politicized formation. A crucial date for Irish Romanticism (four years after
the Kościuszko Uprising) is 1798, when the United Irishmen, a Republican
group, organized a revolt against the rule of George III. 1798 marks the
7
Janion 300. The relevant section of Forefathers’ Eve is Part III, composed when Mickiewicz
was in Dresden in 1832 (referred to as “Dziady drezdeńskie” in Polish). Mickiewicz’s most
Messianic work is Księgi narodu polskiego i pielgrzymstwa polskiego [Books of the Polish
People and of the Polish Pilgrimage], published in Paris in 1832.
8
In Poland, this revolutionary wave manifested itself as the Greater Poland Uprising, also called
the Poznań Uprising (“powstanie wielkopolskie” or “powstanie poznańskie”). Each of Poland’s
dramatic revolutions for independence resulted in tighter political control and, often, greater
cultural repression by the partitioning powers of Prussia (and by extension the German Con-
federation), Russia, and Austria.
9
See Wiktor Weintraub, Literature as Prophecy: Scholarship and Martinist Poetics in Mickie-
wicz’s Parisian Lectures (The Hague: Mouton, 1959) 12–13.
10
Adam Mickiewicz, Konrad Wallenrod, trans. Jewell Parish, Dorothea Prall Radin, and George
Rapall Noyes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1925) 46 (l. 1147), 36 (l. 905).
beginning of a period whose political life was dominated by the spread of

militant republicanism. Particularly important as a cultural figure whose
significance carried over into the twentieth century is (Theobald) Wolfe
Tone, a proponent of “frank and open war” against British rule and leader of
the Irish Rebellion. Upon being sentenced for his part in the Uprising, Tone
famously asked to be granted the death of a soldier by gunshot and was
denied his request; while awaiting death by hanging, he committed suicide.
Tone’s death contributes to a cult of martyrdom, one that is common to
both Ireland and Poland. It is in complex juxtaposition with the cultivation
of poetic uniqueness (Harold Bloom calls it “imaginative identity”11) of the
British Romantics and the displacement effect of “Romantic Ideology.”12 These
are differential Romanticisms, overlapping rather than discrete, though the
particularity of Ireland and Poland’s politicized, “fighting Romanticism” is
worth highlighting; so is the role of spirituality, which is not nearly as separate
from politics as it perhaps should be. Both Polish and Irish Romanticisms were
tied to a hypostatized belief in a Polish soul or Celtic spirit that reinforced
each country’s separateness from its colonizers. Mickiewicz’s archangel is
armed, and one of the constitutive features of these cultures is their ability to
weave together spiritual belief and political aspiration.
The Young Ireland movement gained ground in the mid-nineteenth
century and was responsible for the second great Irish Romantic rebellion.
The 1848 Young Irelander Rebellion arose from two imperatives: firstly, to
repeal the 1800 Act of Union, and secondly, even more pressingly, to seek
restitution for the devastating Great Famine. Beginning in 1845, this potato
blight resulted in massive disease, death, and emigration; the Irish population
was reduced by almost a quarter. The rebellion produced exiles as well as
martyrs, among them John Mitchel, who combined his political writing
(most famously Jail Journal) with editorship of poetry by other nationalist
figures (Thomas Davis and James Clarence Mangan). Such details reveal the
interpenetration of poetry and politics, the depth of which is hard to fathom
11
Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973) 71.
12
Jerome McGann’s The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1983) is the foundational text for understanding New Historicist “charges,” to
use Susan Wolfson’s term, against formalism and aestheticism. McGann provocatively writes
that Romantic poetry often “erases or sets aside its political and historical currencies” (137).
Such claims could initiate a whole new discussion, one taking us far away from this brief com-
parison of Polish and Irish Romantic legacies. Interestingly for our discussion, historicists such
as McGann or Marjorie Levinson make concerted and influential attempts to replace history
into a Romantic lyric tradition that has been accused of (occasional, not comprehensive) escap-
ism, thus showing, inversely, that the British Romantic lyric may be susceptible to such charges
in the first place. These are broad and contestable claims, but it is worth noting the centrality of
a scholarly tradition re-politicizing the English Romantic lyric at the same time as the inherent
politics of other (non-English) Romantic poetries render such efforts less necessary—it would,
indeed, be impossible to speak of Irish or Polish Romanticism without mentioning the revolu-
tionary aspirations of these subjugated countries during the Romantic period.
in contemporary North America. In nineteenth and early twentieth-century

Poland and Ireland, poets were very much acknowledged legislators of and
for their people.
Romantic nationalism flourished for many decades in Poland and
Ireland after the Romantic Movement had subsided in England: Thomas
Davis, often considered the founder of the Young Ireland group, lived from
1814 to 1845; Thomas Moore published his popular “Irish Melodies” in
the early nineteenth century (finally collected in 1852); James Clarence
Mangan composed until his death in 1849. This time was also fruitful in
Poland: Mickiewicz completed his masterwork Forefather’s Eve in 1823
and Pan Tadeusz (Master Thaddeus) in 1834; Juliusz Słowacki composed
his greatest poems in the 1830s and 1840s; Zygmunt Krasiński composed
his masterwork, The Un-Divine Comedy, in 1833. Crucially important is
the fact that all of the Three National Bards of Poland lived in emigration
or exile and wrote their most important works abroad. Poles emigrated in
large numbers after the failure of the 1831 November Uprising: this was the
so-called Great Emigration (“Wielka Emigracja”). The Irish had their own
great emigration after 1845, when depopulation began in earnest. The effect
is that exile became both a lived reality and, in time, a national myth.
These material specifics call up important differences between Romantic-
isms that cannot be elided in the interest of forming a unified view. Given
the differences between singular Romantic figures, their politics and poetics,
cultural generalizations will be approximate at best. There is, however,
a tenacious general distinction that may be made between British and
continental European (or Irish) Romanticism based on the extent to which
the former “erases or sets aside its political and historical currencies” in
order to focus upon “the ‘universal’ import of personal experience”;
Jerome McGann’s quotation marks signal the suspicion with which such
universality has come to be viewed, as he focuses upon Byron’s participation
in “a complex set of political, social, and world-historical meditations” that
aligns him with continental European Romanticisms, as opposed to “a
Wordsworthian line” prevailing in nineteenth-century Britain.13 Although
the socio-political groundedness of the “Wordsworthian line” has been
demonstrated by historicist scholars, the distinction remains a compelling
way of bringing together questions of identity and audience with large-scale
patterns. Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre gesture toward a way of bringing
together both “lines” in their argument that a sense of loss motivates “the
Romantic critique” of modernity. The general quality of this sense of
alienation and longing brings together internal and external manifestations
Jerome McGann, “Byron’s Lyric Poetry,” The Cambridge Companion to Byron, ed. Drum-
13
mond Bone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) 211, 209; see also his ground-
breaking critique of Romantic scholarship, which he believes to be problematically absorbed in
Romantic processes of self-representation, in The Romantic Ideology.
of loss with forward-looking desire. They note that an “active principle at

the heart of Romanticism has often been noted in various forms: anxiety,
a state of perpetual becoming, interrogation, quest, struggle,” even while
“a resigned Romanticism” also exists.14 In its prophetic incarnation, this
principle may signal “an anticipatory relation to time, a hastening of
futurity,” as Geoffrey Hartman observes, interestingly, of Wordsworth.15
This active principle often takes a political form in subjugated Ireland and
Poland, and marks the literature of both countries long past the end of the
so-called Romantic or revolutionary age.
Despite Yeats’s lament that Romantic Ireland was dead and gone in
“September 1913,” its legacy was long-lived, and bears comparison to its
Polish counterpart. John Merchant usefully points to the links between the
Young Ireland and Young Poland (“Młoda Polska”) movements at the turn
of the century, which, although motivated by political aspirations, are also
attempts to fuse native cultures with the ideas of European modernism (in
other words, to go past the nostalgia described by Löwy and Sayre).16 Both
movements, Merchant holds, grow out from a deep concern with identity, as
formed in opposition to England (D. P. Moran, Arthur Griffith) or as linked to
international cultural forces (Yeats, John Millington Synge, George Moore).
Poles recognized their own desires in those of Young Ireland, as based on
“‘parallels of predicament and similarities of reaction’” (Adam Zamoyski
in Merchant 4). The nostalgia for a grand Irish past permeating Thomas
Moore’s Lalla Rookh and Irish Melodies offered the Polish Romantics a
model for coping with their own sense of loss, which was compounded by
their position as exiles. Merchant connects Mickiewicz’s activist vision of
Poles as pilgrims with a mission to found “the Fatherland of the free” with a
conception of the national family held together by filial devotion.17 This will
14
Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre, Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, trans. Cather-
ine Porter (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001) 17–23.
15
“The Poetics of Prophecy,” High Romantic Argument: Essays for M. H. Abrams, ed. Lawrence
Lipking (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981) 15–40.
16
The Polish name for the period is itself ambivalent, dubbed “Modernism” by Ryszard Nycz
and “Neo-Romanticism” by Julian Krzyżanowski; this ambivalence maps onto the basic com-
petition between currents of “essentialism and cosmopolitanism” that Merchant sees as con-
stitutive of this period. Merchant quotes Adolf Nowaczyński’s 1907 and 1918 essays “The
Rebirth of Erin” and “Irish Theater,” establishing a comparison between Poland and Ireland:
“Imagine a nation over three times smaller than ours, but with our faults, comicality, sins, and
ugliness intensified three times over; recall that the Irish over 700 years have suffered under
torture and oppression, next to which our nineteenth century pales and shrinks in size like a
cloud disappearing over the horizon” (167). This is a stirring, albeit somewhat vague, com-
parison, though Nowaczyński’s nationalist fervor is historically specific and memorable: “the
rising emerald phoenix of Celtic Ireland from the ashes of denationalization” is inspirational
for a Polish audience (167). See John Merchant, The Impact of Irish-Ireland on Young Poland,
1890–1919 (Boulder: East European Monographs, 2008).
17
Ibid 2–4, 16, 60–67.
prove central for understanding the nationalized ideal of belonging against

which Adam Zagajewski and Julia Hartwig eventually rebel.
Maria Janion insists that Romanticism furnishes the most powerful
cultural paradigm in Poland, shaping modern social consciousness.18 She
views Romanticism as an ethically driven movement that champions
European “peripheries of culture” as against official, dogmatized centers,
and that which persists as a worldview rather than a temporally bounded
movement. The archetype of the nationalist poet-prophet, of a brief and
heroic life cut short by a martyr’s death, and of the visionary power of
folk culture, unite Polish and Irish Romanticisms. These archetypes are
also heavily present in the work of Yeats, who saw himself as the elegist
and celebrant of Romantic Ireland despite his effort to modernize his own
work. His hatred of “this filthy modern tide” impels him to look back at the
grandeur and spiritual vigor of Ireland in its most Romantic incarnations, the
Ireland of peasant folktales and of political martyrs. Twentieth-century Irish
poets struggle with his complex, even contradictory influence, while Polish
poets struggle with the late legacy of their own Romantics. Whereas Yeats
certainly cannot be generalized as a typically Romantic influence—neither
can Mickiewicz—the presence of these poets goads future generations into
reappraising their forms and their politics. The “active principle” manifested
for both in political struggle, and this facet of their legacies mediates the
reactions of contemporary poets to the claims of place.
The demands placed upon contemporary Irish and Polish poets reveal
the lasting strength of this legacy. Seamus Deane traces the concepts of
responsibility and commitment in a 1976 review essay: “it was difficult for
an Irish poet of the thirties and forties to see his function as anything less
than redemptive,” he writes, as each poet tried to be “major.” The troubles,
however, brought their own demands. Deane recognizes those placed upon
the poet during his own day, praising Heaney for writing poetry that responds
to (if not redeems) the “violent” and “public” world they inhabit. He makes
an important distinction in his assertion that “[r]elationship is unavoidable,
but commitment, relationship gone vulgar, is a limiting risk,” even while
“commitment is demanded during a crisis.” The poet “is called upon to assume
responsibility,” yet this may entail dissatisfaction and estrangement—which,
in fact, it sometimes does. In the very dilemma he sets before us, Deane
articulates the tensions between the aesthetic and the political, “vulgar” and
nuanced, unavoidably public yet psychologically estranging roles, in which
contemporary poets find themselves.19 These tensions are galvanized by
18
Maria Janion, Gorączka romantyczna (Krakow: Universitas, 2000) 39; also see “Roman-
ticism and the Beginning of the Modern World,” trans. Aleksandra Rodzińska-Chojnowska,
Dialogue and Universalism 10.9/10 (2000): 45.
19
Seamus Deane, “The Appetites of Gravity: Contemporary Irish Poetry,” The Sewanee Review
84.1 (Winter 1976): 200, 202–3.
dichotomized force-fields and yet they are not oxymoronic—herein lies their
tragedy (and also their interest). It is not impossible to dwell in two positions
simultaneously, to recognize the demand for commitment while upholding
more nuanced “relationship” and truly valuing flight from political alignment
altogether, as do most of the poets in this study. A similar difficulty underlies
Czesław Miłosz’s assertion that in “Central and Eastern Europe, . . . a poet
does not merely arrange words in beautiful order. Tradition demands that he
be a ‘bard,’ that his songs linger on many lips, that he speak in his poems of
subjects of interest to all the citizens.”20 This 1961 statement illustrates the
extent to which the need for “redemptive” poetry, which we may associate
with the Romantic paradigm, was strong as a generation of poets too young
to experience Romantic revolutions or fight in world wars came of age.
Now that Poland is independent and the two Irelands have a new level of
autonomy due to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, the Romantic model of
poetry appears outmoded. For two cultures at the margins of Europe, who
have experienced considerable instability and poverty, the nation-making
endeavor of literature has proven to be fruitful; yet in the contemporary era,
this tradition of writing has grown oppressive. Writers today face the task of
extricating themselves from a restrictive net of expectations without setting
themselves up for the criticism of “irresponsibility.” Viewing Polish and
Irish literature as private is still more radical than viewing it as communal.
Irish and Polish cultures are, in one sense, in exile from themselves—from
their long-lost heroic pasts (as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; as
the Isle of Saints and Scholars), from their central position in European
culture—and this collective exile sets an obvious agenda for the national
poet: to retrieve the country’s true character. As Deane points out, “Ireland
became a new cultural space when it was refigured as the place that had
to be retrieved and reintegrated with world culture through the mediation
of art.”21 The same may be said of Poland: the loss of place leads to a
quest to retrieve or, equally, to rebuild. A nation’s exile impels a nation’s
pilgrimage.
Contemporary poets inherit this tradition. They are forced to grapple with
it, if only to justify their refusal to fulfill its hopes. Seamus Heaney stresses
the “preoccupation” of language—the state of being occupied by English,
not Irish, interests—yet he can only write within this occupied territory. Of
Polish poetry, Clare Cavanagh writes, “woe to the poet who fails to fulfill his
or her obligations as the nation’s unofficial legislator in the face of foreign
oppression.”22 Joanna Niżyńska decries the “self-congratulatory patriotism”
20
Czesław Miłosz, The Captive Mind, trans. Jane Zielonko (New York: Random House, 1961)
168.
21
Seamus Deane, “The Production of Cultural Space in Irish Writing,” boundary 2 21.3 (Fall
1994): 140.
22
Clare Cavanagh, Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2009) 180.
and “public fetishization of martyrology” that persist with effects of the

Romantic paradigm.23 The lyric languages of Zagajewski, Mahon, Heaney,
and Hartwig are saturated with this history and weighted with these literary
models. They are, however, apt to place the pilgrim alongside a rather
opposite figure, that of the wanderer or nomad, as the quest for home no
longer involves a straight journey to a well-defined place.
Whereas a pilgrim has a spiritual destination, and a wanderer a home,
a nomad may be defined as one lacking a fixed home. The concept has
attracted those who dream of defying “the physical worlds that tie us to
territory,”24 or even of exploring a “subject who has relinquished all idea,
desire, or nostalgia for fixity,” expressing “the desire for an identity made
of transitions, . . . without and against an essential unity.” Whereas it would
be irresponsible to elide the harsh conditions of real nomadic lifestyles with
ideal conditions theorized by writers seeking to break free of rootedness
and defy administrative forces that would tie us to one fixed territorial
identity, the concept is fertile. Rosi Braidotti’s words cited above emphasize
the desire that fuels this conceptualization, and this is key for understanding
the motivations of Zagajewski and Hartwig in particular, who disclaim and
flee an “essential unity” at every turn. “Nostalgia[s] for fixity” are almost
programmatically relinquished at key junctures in their work, much as
the young Mahon rebels against the un-chosen territorial attachment that
comes with fixity and, in a surprising conceptual conjunction, Heaney’s
work develops into greater acceptance of unfixed, un-placed areas above or
beyond certain territories.
Nomadism furnishes a rich means of understanding the desire to subvert
territorial and, by extension, ‘identitarian’ conventions. Although the concept
involves some idealization, so does that of home when it is associated
with a “locus amoenus” whose conservation of traditional values (and the
underpinnings of those values), stability, and safety “is a sheer fantasy,”
writes Bożena Shallcross as she notes that Polish “topophilic feelings” tend
to “deny, resist, and hide homelessness and a mobile type of dwelling.”25
The notion of a strictly delimited home also corresponds to a strict notion
of outside, other space, holds Halina Filipowicz, and “[t]he fetishization of
those boundaries has produced certain blindnesses that leave Polish studies
23
Joanna Niżyńska, “The Impossibility of Shrugging One’s Shoulders: O’Harists, O’Hara, and
Post-1989 Polish Poetry,” Slavic Review 66.3 (Fall 2007): 466. Niżyńska points to the contem-
porary “O’Harist” movement as a very visible, though temporary, attempt to rebel against this
Romantic paradigm.
24
John K. Noyes, “Nomadism, Nomadology, Postcolonialism: By Way of Introduction,” In-
terventions 6.2 (2004): 159. Second quotation from Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects:
Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1994) 22.
25
Bożena Shallcross, “Toward a Definition of the Polish Home,” Framing the Polish Home:
Postwar Cultural Constructions of Hearth, Nation, and Self, ed. Bożena Shallcross (Athens,
OH: Ohio University Press, 2002) 2–3.
out of step with advances in theories of identity concurrently developing

in many different fields, including anthropology, geography, gender studies,
and postcolonial studies.”26 The relevance of this last category, especially,
seems indubitable to the work currently at hand.
The postcoloniality problem

From a historical, cut-and-dried perspective enumerating acts and battles,
Polish and Irish history can clearly be labeled colonial. Both countries,
however, imperfectly fit the rubrics of postcolonial studies, the perspectives
and terminology of which could, potentially, be useful for discussing the
cultural ramifications of these histories. Critical race theory does not help
(although the cultural colonization of Ireland did involve racialization);
“three-world” theory does not quite fit these northern European countries’
trajectories. Poland, meanwhile, has its own colonizing history as the center
of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.27 Both countries make the notion
of postcoloniality problematic as a “Manichean allegory,” particularly when
we consider the division of Ireland into “Unionist” and “Republican”.28 The
Irish language can no longer serve as an organ of resistance, as the Polish
language had for inhabitants of occupied Poland. The history of Polish,
meanwhile, prevents it from inhabiting the same rubric as the heavily
marginalized languages of other post-colonies.
Yet postcoloniality is a useful concept for clarifying the types of historical
circumstances that shape Irish and Polish culture and, more importantly
here, the socio-cultural pressures that poets must confront. Scholars such
as Chris Miller, Clare Cavanagh, Tamara Trojanowska, Hanna Gosk, and
Natasa Kovačević discuss the possibilities of viewing Poland as postcolonial;
Ewa Thompson makes the claim most stridently. There is a veritable cottage
industry of scholarship assessing Ireland’s postcoloniality, whose major
figures include Declan Kiberd, who embraces the term and applies Edward
Said’s work to Ireland; Luke Gibbons, who questions this enterprise; David
26
Halina Filipowicz, “Home as Desire: The Popular Pleasures of Gender in Polish Émigré Dra-
ma,” Framing the Polish Home 280.
27
These points are considered by Tomas Venclova and Hanna Gosk: see Venclova, “Vilnius/
Wilno/Vilna: The Myth of Division and the Myth of Connection,” trans. Tatyana Buzina, His-
tory of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th
and 20th Centuries, eds. Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer (Amsterdam; Philadelphia:
John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2004) 11–27, and Gosk, “Polskie opowieści w dyskurs
postkolonialny ujęte,” (Nie) obecność. Pominięcia i przemilczenia w narracjach XX wieku, eds.
Hanna Gosk and Bożena Karwowska (Warsaw: Dom Wydawniczy ELIPSA, 2008) 76–77.
28
I draw on the insights of Ali Behdad in “Global Disjunctures, Diasporic Differences, and the
New World (Dis-)Order,” A Companion to Postcolonial Studies, eds. Henry Schwarz and San-
geeta Ray (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2000) 396–409.
Lloyd, who fuses the language of post-structuralism with postcolonial

concerns; and Edna Longley, who refuses the postcolonial label altogether.
Although Ireland’s postcoloniality has been debated for many years,
Poland’s has not. German Ritz’s claim that there has been an “American
‘postcolonial’ discovery of Eastern Europe” rests upon merely two citations
of books by scholars of Eastern European provenance, though his fear
that we “uncritically return [Poland] to the well-known role of victim” is
comprehensible from a post-Romantic perspective.29 In nations that may or
may not be postcolonial, questions of terminological identity acquire special
poignancy.
The terms frequently deployed by postcolonial critics—colonization,
cultural nationalism, situatedness, hegemony and resistance, alterity and
identity, agency of all kinds—remain useful for discussing conditions that
are reflected in Polish and Irish literature, even while the self-referentiality
of some postcolonial theory renders it less useful than it could be.30 The
question of whether one or another country is postcolonial becomes
tiresome unless connected to larger questions of self-definition and cultural
consequence, and the desirability of this interdisciplinary perspective is
itself questioned: Zbigniew Lisowski decries the “chaos” that ensues when
other (non-literary) disciplines are “defrauded” of their terminology, and
perspectival multiplicity becomes a virtue in itself; he allies himself with
Edward Balcerzan, who, two decades earlier, lamented the changing state of
literary studies wherein attention to form became supplanted by attention to
extra-textual circumstances, so that “in speaking of literature [,] one speaks
of everything except it.”31 Włodzimierz Bolecki holds that the foreignness
(i.e., Americanness) of postcolonial studies impedes its potentially productive
application to countries such as Poland. These Polish critics decry what
they view as a tendency to scant the literary in favor of the political or,
more dangerously still, the ideological; in such discussions, methodology
and terminology become disputed. Such dispute is frequent to Irish Studies,
as certain words—even rather basic ones, such as land and soil—become
ideologically fraught, so that “soil is what land becomes when it is
ideologically constructed as a natal source, . . . a political notion” sacralized
29
German Ritz, “Kresy polskie w perspektywie postkolonialnej,” Gosk and Karwowska 116,
118, my translation. The two books he cites are Ewa Thompson’s Trubadurzy imperium: lit-
eratura rosyjska i kolonializm (Krakow: Universitas, 2000) and Myroslav Shkandrij’s Russia
and Ukraine: Literature and the Discourse of Empire from Napoleonic to Postcolonial Times
(Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001).
30
Bart Moore-Gilbert deplores the “beauty contest” model of scholarship seeking to affirm
postcolonial status as a badge of honor and attractiveness pinned upon individual countries,
who vie not for power but for status as victims in need of reparations. He makes this case in
Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics (London: Verso, 1997).
31
Zbigniew Lisowski, Poznawanie poezji: Interpretacje (Lublin: Norbertinum, 2008) 11–20.
Edward Balcerzan, “Zmiana stanu,” Teksty Drugie 2 (1990): 1–6. My translations and para-
phrases.
in the course of nineteenth-century struggles for greater land ownership and

political independence. The state, then, is “of the land,” while the nation is
“of the soil,” the materiality of which ensures its symbolic status as a reality
that “does not belong in the world of ideas.”32 These concepts show how
questions of postcoloniality are connected to intimate questions of physical
belonging, as expressed in terms that are variously charged.
Terminology is dangerous territory, even while it would be naïve to
construct a barrier between extra-textual circumstances and textual
forms in the interest of staying disinterested. Form, after all, is historically
inflected. The closest of textual analyses are inevitably informed by extra-
textual terms, even while their applicability can only be gauged by extended
engagement with texts themselves (as in the chapters to follow). Most
obviously, the adjective “Irish” effaces the difference between Northern
Ireland and the Republic, not to mention that between “native” and émigré
literatures, though this term is used by Heaney and Mahon, both Northern
Irishmen. Contemporary Polish scholars have sought to complicate such
national labels by encouraging a heterogeneous and multi-locational view of
literature, partly in response to the late-twentieth-century fascination with
Poland’s ethnically mixed borderlands (“kresy”).33
Irish revisionist scholars seek to correct what they see as a dominant
nationalist version of history, focused upon Irish anticolonial struggles, with
a view stressing cooperation, interdependence, and parallel development,
decrying essentialist conceptions of colonizer and colonized.34 Critics such
as Roy Foster and Edna Longley debate the cultural colonization and
subjection implied by the postcolonial moniker. At stake are the concrete
history of the nation, its cultural mythologies, and political aspirations.
At their best, such debates inspire us to pose new questions; their utility
shrinks if we are only prepared to accept certain answers. Hanna Gosk takes
up this issue in her call to apply postcolonial discourse to Eastern Europe,
bearing in mind that the “postcolonial paradigm” was first developed to
explicate British colonialism (and, we may add, French). Gosk asserts the
relevance of postcolonial studies forcibly and provocatively, deploring a
32
Seamus Deane, “Land & Soil: A Territorial Rhetoric,” History Ireland 2.1 (Spring 1994):
31–34.
33
The essays collected in Między Wschodem a Zachodem: Europa Mickiewicza i innych. O
relacjach literatury polskiej z kulturami ościennymi (2007) consider this very phenomenon.
34
The roots of this debate are historiographical, yet its branches reach into cultural space. At
question is the perspective with which one views the dominant power; terminology, mean-
while, reflects perspective. Kevin Whelan gives a useful introduction to these debates in “The
Revisionist Debate in Ireland,” boundary 2 31.1 (Spring 2004): 179–205; for a book-length
collection of essays on the topic, see Ciaran Brady, Interpreting Irish History: The Debate on
Historical Revisionism, 1938–1994 (Blackrock; Portland: Irish Academic Press, 1994). Also see
Rebecca Pelan, “Antagonisms: Revisionism, Postcolonialism and Feminism in Ireland,” Journal
of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies 7.1 (Spring, 2000): 127–47.
general lack of attention to colonial relations within Eastern Europe,35 and

even less to Poland, even if its fit into this paradigm is inevitably imperfect.
The issue raises important questions regarding the discursive patterns
that we discern within both popular and scholarly discourse. Whereas her
distinction between “post-partition” and “post-dependence” periods (the
latter referring to the post-Soviet era) is not elaborated fully enough to
warrant supplanting large-circulation terms, to which Gosk herself returns
(empire; colonialism; center and periphery), Gosk engages the postcolonial
question, as we may call it, with great perceptive energy. Her attention
to dominant and oppositional discourses adumbrates the contours of the
problem that Zagajewski and Hartwig face: because twentieth-century
Polish literature is characterized by an oppositional “counter-discourse”
(“kontr-dyskurs”), we must grapple with the dominance of a negatively
formed cultural identity. This constitutes its strength—identities cemented
by suffering are especially tenacious, she opines—and its weakness once
Poland actually gained national sovereignty. The Soviet empire differs from
the British, though, in its image in the eyes of the colonized: Soviet Russia,
Gosk holds, tended to be viewed as a pit of barbarism rather than a cultural
center. Anti-Soviet discourse “degrades the empire, revealing its scorn-
inducing primitivism. A wild barbarian may induce fear, but it is difficult
to see him as a civilizational or cultural model. His power does not awaken
respect.” Dariusz Skórczewski goes so far as to posit that the Soviet empire
lacked a cultural model to impose.36 The brutishness of the Communist
empire is opposed to an oppositional discourse idealizing autonomy and
creative freedom. Here, however, is the rub toward which Gosk gestures, but
which is most fully explored by scholars such as Janion and (in relation to
Ireland) Kiberd: the ubiquity and eventual triumph of this counter-discourse
actually establishes its own hegemony, and evinces its own blindnesses and
injustices.
One such blindness—or, rather, effacement—occurs when anti-colonial
discourse relativizes the differences between different types of oppression,
35
Gosk only singles out Ewa Thompson for brief comment, as well as a special issue of Europa
entitled “Said and the Polish Question” (28 June 2007). The terms used to describe Poland’s re-
gained independence are as various as the terms used to describe Eastern/East-Central/Central
Europe/Mitteleuropa. For example, Aleksandra Galasińska and Dariusz Galasiński describe
it as a “return to Europe” (The Post-Communist Condition: Public and Private Discourses of
Transformation. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2010, 2). See
also Cornis-Pope and Neubauer 1–13. Hanna Gosk, “Polskie opowieści w dyskurs postkolo-
nialny ujęte,” Gosk and Karwowska 75–88. See also Hanna Gosk, “Od europejskiej ekspan-
sji i kolonializmu po doświadczenie polskie,” Teksty Drugie 3 (2009): 121–29 and the book
to which this article responds, Jan Kieniewicz’s Ekspansja, kolonializm, cywilizacja (Warsaw:
Wydawnictwo DiG, 2008). Quotations from Gosk in Gosk and Karwowska 78, 83–85; my
translations throughout.
36
Dariusz Skórczewski, “Retoryka pominięcia i przemilczenia, a prawda literatury: o postkolo-
nialnych implikacjach pewnych praktyk dyskursywnych,” Gosk and Karwowska 102.
a constant danger attending any cross-cultural study. Kiberd notes certain

dangers inherent in nationalism itself: “[t]he colonialist crime was the
violation of the traditional community: the nationalist crime was often
a denial of the autonomy of the individual. Liberation would come only
with forms which stressed the interdependence of the community and
the individual.”37 In each “crime,” identity is not chosen freely. Kiberd’s
statement uncomfortably dichotomizes colonialism and nationalism in a
manner that assumes their necessary opposition and interdependence, yet
this is also key to understanding the sorts of pressures to which Polish
and Irish writers react. Collaboration and nationalism represent a rigid
and inevitable dichotomy within subjugated nations, while an equalization
of suffering represents a related heuristic danger for transnational
comparison.
Nationalism is the most obvious means of opposing a colonial
government, yet the term can be troubled: Luke Gibbons, for example,
insists upon the fragmented, subaltern character of Irish nationalism
against state formation.38 There is another, undeniable factor complicating
national(ist) striving, namely, the massive waves of emigration that mark
the long-term demographics of Poland and Ireland. Emigration is also a
form of anti-colonial resistance; it falls into its own patterns and pieties.
The mythos of a particular diaspora can be as potent as that prevailing
within the homeland, including the mythos of emigration itself. In Poland,
it has been challenged (if not dismantled) by great innovators such as
Witold Gombrowicz and Czesław Miłosz. Ryszard Nycz considers their
subversions of “the Romantic myth of the geographical and mystical
symbiosis of man with his place of origin, the Polish soul eternally rooted
in Polish soil,” as they typify two strategies for discussing estrangement.
Whereas Miłosz, Zagajewski’s avowed precursor, exemplifies a regionalist
approach of “settling in” to a lost home that is subjectified and relativized,
Zagajewski himself exemplifies Gombrowicz’s “alienation strategy” to
Nycz, focusing upon belonging within the self rather than between self
and place. Nycz mentions one such contemporary “alienation strategy”
in which the local community and even the self is viewed from an
anthropological and ethnographic position, which usefully forms a
possible linkage between Zagajewski and Heaney.39 In this way Nycz knits
together several critical terms forming a problematic nexus for this study:
home and self, rootedness and belonging, and their rather impoverished
antonym, alienation.
37
Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996) 292. Previous
citation from Gosk in Gosk and Karwowska 87.
38
See Luke Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996).
39
Ryszard Nycz, “‘Every One of Us Is a Stranger’: Patterns of Identity in Twentieth-Century
Polish Literature,” Shallcross, Framing the Polish Home 16–17, 20–22.
The problem of identity; identity as problem

Just as the terms structuring analyses of postcoloniality and spatial
belonging have been and should be continuously questioned, so should the
term subtending them all, “identity.” As we speak of place, so we inevitably
speak of its identity and the identity of groups resident upon it, two factors
intimately connected in the late-Romantic mythos. As we discuss postcolonial
terminology and its potential relevance to the four poets here under
consideration, we must bear in mind their remarkable suspicion of forms of
belonging dependent upon a too-easy understanding of cultural and spatial
identity. This is one of their broadest similarities. Identity cannot be too strictly
tied to belonging. Theoretical attention to hybrid identities, diasporic groups,
and cosmopolitanism should not obscure the fact that exclusionary, even
violent forms of identification are still very much present, and show no signs
of dissolving into a peaceful acknowledgment of multicultural hybridity.40
Theoretical interest in the concepts of diaspora and hybridity carries within
it an idealistic hope that these concepts can work against fundamentalism,
yet the urge to construct a fundamental identity is still strong.
The exclusivity of identity can be situated conceptually, too, in the still
regnant, albeit doubted and questioned, view of identity as the essence. It is
tenaciously present in the popular imagination, and mobilizes Zagajewski,
Mahon, Heaney, and Hartwig to rebel against the specific demands they feel
are made upon them. Yet the term is often used as a stimulus to assertions of
agency, as in so-called identity politics, wherein a group’s common ground
helps it fight for its rights. Despite her political assertions about the subject’s
lack of agency under debilitating conditions, Gayatri Spivak approvingly
quotes Jacques Derrida’s linkage of identity, selfhood, and agency within
her own discussion of identity politics. The passage usefully complicates the
etymological basis of a term that can be variously defined:
What is identity, this concept of which the transparent identity to itself is

always dogmatically presupposed by so many debates on monoculturalism
or multiculturalism, nationality, citizenship, and belonging, in general?
40
Rosemary Marangoly George defends “locational identity” as a term resisting specific claims
of rootedness but emphasizing spatial attachment, which she believes may still underlie the
concept; “locational,” to her, “suggests the variable nature of both ‘the home’ and ‘the self,’ for
both are negotiated stances” (2). Her stress on negotiation is useful for understanding the new-
ly contingent theorizations of identity that came to the fore in the 1990s, often in conjunction
with questions of postcoloniality and troubled belonging. See Rosemary Marangoly George,
The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth-Century Fiction (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996). Ella Shohat productively critiques “hybridity” itself, and
its inability to distinguish between “forced assimilation, internalized self-rejection, political co-
optation, social conformism, cultural mimicry, and creative transcendence.” Social Text 31–32
(1992): 110. These poets’ work reveals the frequent inability of our terms to do justice to the
kinds of attitudes they represent and perform in their poems.
And before the identity of the subject, what is ipseity? The latter is not
reducible to an abstract capacity to say “I,” which it will have always
preceded. Perhaps it signifies, in the first place, the power of an “I can,”
which is more originary than the “I”. . .41
The quotation succinctly sketches out an instability at the heart of identity,

namely, its supposed conceptual transparency (how can one not know
what identity means?) and the destabilizing division between an abstract,
philosophical understanding and a concrete, embodied, and potentially
dogmatic understanding of identity. This will be a major point of contention
and interest in the poetic analyses to follow. Derrida’s quick backward
glance at the root of identity opens up the same sort of questions that a non-
grammatological view—we may call it a cultural view or, simply, a popular
view—of identity makes manifest. The extent to which identity involves
expression, or a non-abstract “capacity to say ‘I,’” is contingent upon
the way “an abstract capacity” may itself be complicated by all manner
of contingent factors, including the subject’s view of its own capacity and
perceived limitations, which will be a major problematic in the work of
Zagajewski, Mahon, Heaney, and Hartwig.
The Latin “ipse,” or “self,” is the root of “ipseity,” an important term
to translate because selfhood and identity exist as two separate words in
English. The relative abstractness of the word is at issue and will remain so.
Even more problematically, the relative helpfulness of theory, whether more
or less abstract (as postcolonial theorists focused upon real-world struggles
sometimes clash with those focused upon the interplay of concepts), is at
stake. Conceptual discussions do occur in poems, but they tend to take place
through metaphorization. The performative dimension of selfhood, as opposed
to an abstract understanding of “ipseity,” will also demand reckoning. When
one “say[s] ‘I,’” one projects the concept into a public arena, toward others,
in an act of self-identification or self-description. The ability to make this
statement does seem to involve an originary “I can,” an assumption of agency.
Yet the very slight hesitancy of Derrida’s tone, his use of “perhaps” and his
interrogative manner, also testifies to the ambiguity at the center of this issue.
Nobody can stand outside identity to separate the “I can” from the “I am.”
Identity politics connote a divisive yet active type of agency claim: a
group that is united by one type of identity (racial, ethnic, or gendered) can
41
Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, or, The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick
Mensah (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996) 14. This work, originally published
in 1992, is used by Spivak in Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press,
2003) 83. Spivak actually puts forth an engaging argument against identity politics, in which
she uses this quotation. The Conclusion will take up this conceptual thread further, asking what
view of identity best suits the four authors studied here. For now, it is useful to bring the issues
that coalesce around the term to the forefront, with the understanding that they will inform,
and be informed by, the poets’ work.
achieve a political voice by banding together. Arjun Appadurai points out the
“paradox of ethnic politics”: the force of so-called “primordia” (language,
skin color, kinship, even neighborhood), which are sometimes globalized, is
to ignite intimacy into political sentiment, and to turn locality into a staging
ground for identity.42 The intimate details of one’s person can serve as the
basis for public demands. One’s “identity” may become a matter of political
selectivity and cultural sensibility (and/or sensitivity), as certain “primordia”
are more politicized than others. The decision to stress one aspect of identity
relies at least partially on the sorts of claims that one is allowed to make on
the basis of that aspectual solidarity; its corollary may be a decision not to
stress other equally primordial aspects. Primordially based identity claims
may be affected by the end benefit of such a claim as well as one’s originary
sense of self. Such choices are quite subjective, and can be hard to explain:
as we shall see, Julia Hartwig does not stress her sex or gender. Should this
be viewed as a telling lacuna, or a fact not much at issue in her poetry, which
does not seem particularly troubled by gender?
The difference between selfhood and identity is intangible, yet there is
no doubt that the former is far less politicized than the latter. Yet selfhood
is often defined using identity, as if the latter were an inescapable aspect
of the former. This chicken-and-egg dilemma is both further complicated
and partially clarified when one seeks the motivation behind a definition.
Kobena Mercer states that “identity only becomes an issue when it is in
crisis, when something assumed to be fixed, coherent and stable is displaced
by the experience of doubt and uncertainty.”43 A definition of identity will
be influenced by the movements associated with self-identification. The
original term is also rooted in the Latin identitas, derived from idem, “the
same,” itself abstracted from identidem or idem et idem, “over and over.” If
one does the same act over and over, then it becomes one’s identity. There is
no transparency to the term because it communicates a repeated action, not
a static kernel of truth at the base of the self. The association of identity with
physical primordia is, from an etymological viewpoint, perplexing.
Non-political conceptions of identity tend to stay closer to the word’s Latin
roots. Mathematical “identity” designates an equation expressing equality,
one that will stay the same if we solve it over and over. Here, the way we
determine whether identity exists is the hard part. Determining mathematical
identity involves working through a problem—identity is established
through repeated acts working through the possibility of non-identity. This
interestingly puts stress on the act of identifying instead of a static essence, in
42
Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” Theoriz-
ing Diaspora, eds. Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.,
2003) 25–48.
43
Kobena Mercer cited by Stuart Hall, “The Question of Cultural Identity,” in Modernity: An
Introduction to Modern Societies, eds. Stuart Hall, David Held, Don Hubert, and Kenneth
Thompson (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996) 577.
which we may query the terms used to put that act in motion. The problem
with identity is also the problem of using the right language with which
to engage it. Such an issue takes us back to the perennial question of an
individual’s ability to define herself against powerful social structures and
historical conditions. Who determines adequacy, who recognizes identity,
and what is deemed the correct basis of identity are connected questions.
None of the poets here unquestioningly accepts rootedness in society; nor do
they wish to be history’s fools. Instead of accepting a single form of identity,
and a single form of belonging, they tirelessly reconsider and rework these
issues throughout their oeuvres.
Although the desire to “place” Polish and Irish writing by assigning
it a geographical and historical identity is especially strong, it is equally
imperative to recognize the forceful manner in which belonging is questioned
by Polish and Irish writers. The urge to affirm one’s place, to celebrate home,
is counterbalanced by an equally strong urge to reject a single home, to
speak from a position in between the defined locations of culture. Heaney,
Mahon, Zagajewski, and Hartwig often reject their ostensible “homes”
but cannot find a better place to belong. The in-between state, though,
is not necessarily disabling—Zagajewski and Hartwig celebrate travel as
particularly empowering, even when it proves disorienting and impels self-
questioning. Wandering, travel, escape, and displacement can be attractive
temptations, not unfortunate necessities. The voices of these poets purposely,
sometimes perversely, complicate our conceptual terminology. They show
that there is danger in celebrating a literature’s cultural rootedness because
this project tends to be prescriptive and to underscore national, ethnic, or
religious affiliation. This is exactly what they find problematic. At the same
time, in order to fruitfully bring Irish and Polish cultures into dialogue, we
must perform what Michael Malouf calls an act of solidarity, in which a
cross-cultural reading practice driven by a perception of similarity (if not
identity) is aware of its own contingency and partiality at the same time as
it puts forward a transnational, translocal reading.44
In contradistinction to the claims of historical conjunction we may place
Seamus Heaney’s statement that “a poem floats adjacent to, parallel to, the
44
Malouf considers the theoretical and sociopolitical dimension of solidarity in a refreshingly
positive light, establishing “the strange cosmopolitanism of empire” (6) as the background for
his comparison of Irish and Caribbean cultures, while acknowledging that “solidarity has not
been part of the political or critical imagination at our present moment” (6). He brings together
Paul Gilroy (Postcolonial Melancholia), Jodi Dean, Chandra Mohanty, and Peter Waterman
in defense of a type of solidarity we may, perhaps, call “differential,” based on negotiation of
difference in the interest of forging alliance (Waterman calls it an “affinity” model, allowing
for linkages between people who are not in contact but act “in the same spirit”—Malouf 8);
the particular type of alliance that interests Malouf is “interperipheral.” Michael G. Malouf,
Transatlantic Solidarities: Irish Nationalism and Caribbean Poetics (Charlottesville: University
of Virginia Press, 2009) 6–15.
historical moment.”45 This image situates poetry in between the physical

earth and the stratosphere of ideas and troubles the concept of authenticity.
It begs us to reconsider the strict correlation of poetry with history that
the Romantics bequeathed to their successors. This notion that there is
something primordially continuous between past and present, something
that we can call the essence of a nation or a single literature, influences the
pressures which scholars bring to bear upon individual authors. Spivak has
eloquently, and fervently, spoken against the idea that a writer can speak
as an authentic ethnic representative of his or her culture.46 Essentializing
arguments do not allow for much change or variety, and in the Irish context,
the choice of an essential identity runs dangerously close to the choice of an
ideology. In the case of Poland, the desire to view a writer as authentically
Polish may deleteriously combine with the Polish tradition of writing for the
people so that a rigid notion of ethnic belonging “authenticates” a piece of
literature. Our valuation of a writer would be better served by accounting
for the heterogeneity within a single speaking voice. The self may be ironic
and contradictory; sometimes it cannot be pinned down to a single home,
a single place, or even a single voice. Furthermore, a poetic voice does not
always dutifully take its place in its dominant national literary tradition. The
readings that take up the bulk of this book will examine what happens when
a poet cannot belong, refuses the consolations of easy group identification
or restrictive “responsibility,” and tears the voice free from its surroundings
altogether. Each poet’s trajectory through this charged atmosphere will be
charted separately, in order that their juxtaposition may allow us to discern
the ways in which each poet’s work speaks to and answers the others’,
providing the richest and, indeed, most nuanced possible commentary upon
the central problem of knowing one’s place in contemporary societies upon
the margins of Europe.
Lives and narratives

An artist’s creative output cannot be explained by the events of the artist’s
life, yet art does not arise ex nihilo. It intersects with a number of stories that
take place around, through, and sometimes within it: the biography of the
artist, the story of her country and region or city, and the historical events
of her times. In the best case, a basic knowledge of the artist’s life enriches
the reader’s appreciation of the creative work; in the worst case, it leads to
the biographical fallacy, the belief that biography does indeed determine
artistic choices. These poets are especially wary of historical determinism, of
Seamus Heaney, The Government of the Tongue (London: Faber and Faber, 1988) 121.
45
Gayatri Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present
46
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).

which the biographical fallacy may be seen as a benign manifestation, and

often wrestle against the stories of their own lives. The biographical sketches
below are purposely brief, centering on one major circumstance of each
poet’s life that will prove significant for the chapters to come.
When Adam Zagajewski writes about his childhood, he emphasizes the
historicity of his family’s background. Part of the large migration of Poles
out of the Eastern city of Lvov (now Ukrainian L’viv) into Polish Silesia
directly after World War II, his family’s experience is part of a historical event
giving rise to an important collective nostalgia for Poland’s lost regions as
the country’s borders were moved westward. Zagajewski was born in Polish
Lwów in 1945 (he refers to it by its Polish moniker, translated as Lvov)
but, being four months old when he left, does not “know” his birthplace
firsthand, but relies upon a fund of secondhand memories suffused with his
family’s nostalgia. He internalizes these memories and this emotion. When
he moves to Krakow to attend the Jagiellonian University, he hopes to find
a sense of belonging in this new city of art and culture. The young poet’s
desire to bask in the “authentic antiquity” of a multi-generational city, as
opposed to a city of refugees, is also informed by his interest in the arts and
by a certain desire for high-cultural self-fashioning. These two cities focalize
his evolving sense of the sacred and the ideal.
With the imposition of martial law in December of 1981, Zagajewski
emigrated to Paris, though he insists that this decision was personal, not
political: his college sweetheart and future wife worked in Paris.47 For many
years, his unusual three-country lifestyle took him between the University of
Houston, where he taught Creative Writing, and several months of writing in
Paris, with extended visits to Krakow. More recently, he accepted a teaching
position at the University of Chicago while making Krakow his primary
home (since 2002). These details are worth considering in the context of his
work, which evinces a fascination with travel and wandering.
Chapter 1 begins by presenting Zagajewski’s dramatic identitarian
turnaround. He begins his writing life as an angry young man, a decision he
later regrets, together with a group of poets who consciously explore “the
unrepresented world” of life under totalitarian rule. Unlike the Northern
Irish generation of Heaney, Mahon, and Michael Longley (both groups may
be called “Sixties Generations,” coming of age in an atmosphere of civil
rights protests and anti-government rebellion), these poets—among them
Stanisław Barańczak, Ryszard Krynicki, and Julian Kornhauser—begin
Jarosław Klejnocki usefully complicates this issue, opining that despite his insistence on the
47
personal, positive quality of his decision to emigrate, Zagajewski takes on the role of emigre
or even exile, though Klejnocki holds that there was no other option at the time (i.e., the dark
days when martial law was imposed). Klejnocki gives a well-informed, sensitively nuanced dis-
cussion of this phenomenon in Bez utopii? Rzecz o poezji Adama Zagajewskiego (Wałbrzych:
Wydawnictwo Ruta, 2002) 64–67.
their careers by focusing upon politics. This chapter considers Zagajewski’s

rejection of this poetic mode, which has much to do with his changing
relation to his own cultural identity.48 His poems of the 1970s are self-
conscious dramatizations of changing poetic intent, as the rooted speaker
of his early poems, oppressed and suppressed by the powers-that-be, pulls
up his roots and establishes, over the course of works such as “To Go to
Lvov,” a sense of agency over his socio-cultural environment. Like Mahon,
he begins longing to escape history.
The second chapter on Zagajewski, “Figuring Otherness,” argues that his
growing dissatisfaction with the specter of a fixed identity is manifested by
the figurative work of the poems. Beneath the external and the conscious,
within the inner logic of Zagajewski’s poetic form, we find that expository
statements praising “wholeness” and unity are, in fact, largely contradicted
by the poems. Rather than serving the purpose of unification, Zagajewski’s
poetic figures often wrench apart tenor and vehicle, opening a space of
otherness and thereby rending the imagistic unity of the poem. The use of
such figures corresponds to a shift in Zagajewski’s work, an underground
tremor upsetting the poet’s relation to place and memory. His recent poetry
will not satisfy a desire for resolution, but mobilize the mind by presenting
highly unusual juxtapositions of feelings and qualities that, ultimately, refuse
the typical associations (of rootedness with belonging, of belonging with
happiness, of stability with rationality) that undergird our understanding of
place and self.
Derek Mahon, one of Zagajewski’s much-admired contemporaries,
does not write much about his childhood. His star rose early, as did that
of his friend Seamus Heaney, and the two represent very different modes of
troubling one’s place. Mahon was born in 1941 and grew up in a Protestant
family in North Belfast, “one of the most closed societies in Europe” in his
own words, in an urban yet provincial atmosphere that he calls “almost
barren of poetry.”49 Applying such claims, made by Mahon himself, is
problematic because of his strong concomitant assertions that nationality
and ethnicity are actually factors whose importance is overblown: “the time
is coming fast, if it isn’t already here, when the question ‘Is So-and-So really
an Irish writer?’ will clear a room in seconds . . . The question is semantic,
and not important except in so far as the writer himself makes it so.”50 At the
48
Zagajewski writes about this decision to reject the political mode of writing, and more gener-
ally about the interpenetration of poetry and politics in contemporary Poland, in Solidarność
i samotność (1986), published in English as Solidarity, Solitude: Essays, trans. Lillian Vallee
(New York: Ecco Press, 1990).
49
Mahon’s remarks cited in Hugh Haughton, The Poetry of Derek Mahon (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2004) 12, 14.
50
Derek Mahon, Journalism (Selected Prose 1970-1995) (Loughcrew: The Gallery Press,
1996) 21.
same time as he places himself, then, Mahon tells us to beware of assuming

that placement is relevant to interpretation.
Mahon has traveled and lived in Canada, the United States, France, and
settled for a time in England; he has worked as a journalist, editor, and
translator. In fact, all the poets in this study have worked as professors in the
United States. Mahon’s time in New York City brings to an end his decade
of silence between Antarctica (1985) and The Hudson Letter (1995). His
1990s poems are allusive, chatty, and loose-limbed, unlike his tightly crafted
early work. The 1990s volumes represent a distinct stage in his development,
which changes again in our current century, as his recent poems strive to
balance the salutary difficulty of balancing strict forms with a colloquial,
and increasingly autobiographical, idiom.
Chapter 3, “Belonging on the Edge: Derek Mahon’s Outsider Poetics,”
discusses Mahon’s refusal to fulfill a perceived socio-cultural obligation
in his early work. It is motivated by an idealistic view of language as a
mediator between the “perfect” and the “true,” between the identity of the
imagination and the external shapes that identity is forced to take. Mahon
criticizes the choices that his own poetry makes, and this chapter traces the
arc of his early engagement with perceived poetic obligations, from initial
rebellion through self-parody to insistence upon a necessary confrontation
of the ideal with the real, of imagined hermeticism with forced engagement.
Mahon wrenches the self out of its ideal constructions, and even, in his work
of the late 1970s and 1980s, flirts with a debilitating notion of art as falsity
and appropriation.
Chapter 4 conceptualizes the socio-cultural decisions discussed in
the prior chapter on Mahon, just as the second Zagajewski chapter
conceptualizes the ideational work of specific poetic figures. Mahon often
approaches schematization in his deployment of masterful images that have
the result of excluding the poetic consciousness from their own intellectual
drama (much like Heaney’s do, though in different metaphorical terms). His
tendency to dichotomize the lyric speaker’s surroundings connects to his
rebellion against belonging, and yet eventually his schemata break down.
The matter of social engagement becomes less vexing in his later work,
while the interesting question of how temporal displacement affects spatial
belonging comes to the fore.
Seamus Heaney’s work also oscillates between concreteness and symbolic
abstraction. Although he was born in 1939, his childhood on the family
farm of Mossbawn in County Derry, Northern Ireland, runs its course far
from the theater of war, and Heaney states that he always had the sense of
having a beautiful “first world” delivered to him wherein Arcadia was his
home. This world was left behind when Heaney went to boarding school
as an adolescent, from 1951–57. His first “emigration,” he states, was into
solitude from family life, and his later travels—into the Irish Republic, to the
United States, then back to the Irish Republic—constituted different types
of separation.51 Like Mahon, he honed his talent early and published in

journals while a university student (Mahon at Trinity, Heaney at Queen’s).
Unlike Mahon’s, Zagajewski’s, and Hartwig’s, his work is saturated with
autobiographical details, and readers must constantly negotiate the fine line
dividing the lyric speaker from the actual poet.
For many years Heaney, like Zagajewski, commuted between the United
States and Europe during the tenure of a teaching job at Harvard University;
both poets were teaching writing for several months, and writing full time
for several more. Heaney received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995,
an event that established him as the most celebrated Irish writer today.
Interestingly, this period, in the 1980s and 1990s, marks Heaney’s shift to
a more abstract type of poetry than he had written before, and his return
to Ireland corresponds to a renewal of the concrete, descriptive impulse
(in direct contrast to Julia Hartwig, who writes some of her most mimetic
and autobiographical verse while on extended travels in the United States).
The peregrinations, visits, and partial emigrations these poets experience are
striking material in themselves, and these changes of place often correspond
to changes of perspective.
Chapter 5, “Belonging as Mastery,” counters the benevolent image of
Heaney’s home by pointing to the young speaker’s fear of his land and struggle
to assert his own strength when faced by a threatening otherness. The poet’s
early volumes form a developmental narrative that coheres around this
problematic central node, this otherness, fear, and instability, which exists in
complex relation with the Arcadian characteristics of his home. Place, then,
is not always synonymous with home. Heaney’s work is not a narrative of re-
territorialization and unification with one’s culture, as often claimed by his
critics, but a sustained effort to forge an epistemological system that allows
him to belong. This effort is conscious, not instinctive. Whereas Heaney’s
early work is often read as a celebration of roots—and several poems lend
themselves readily to such reading—this chapter reads in it a narrative of
frustrated desire. The unexpected otherness of his natal land frustrates his
knowledge of it. Trust and knowledge are the key terms in Heaney’s early
work. The first is an ethical act and the second, a sensory one. His early
poems come to realize that these terms cannot always be harmonized.
The sixth chapter begins by positing Heaney’s Station Island as the inception
of a reactive movement against the poet’s previous project to fill space with
concrete, sensory entities. In the 1980s and 1990s, Heaney explores the
potential of absence in order to directly query whether trust can be located in
51
My source for many of Heaney’s remarks is a personal interview with the poet on 10/19/98
at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA, before this project was conceived. See also Heaney’s
remarks in Dennis O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008) 56. Heather Clark provides an excellent introduction to the
so-called Ulster (or Northern Irish) Renaissance in The Ulster Renaissance: Poetry in Belfast,
1962–1972 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
the not-seen, the not-known. This is a self-critical project. Although he states

that it is politically motivated, we must take this with a grain of salt: the urge is
ethical and psychological. Heaney cannot belong without trust, cannot affirm
identity without knowledge. His impulse is motivated by a metapoetic desire
to come to terms with a reality surpassing the verbal opulence of the well-
wrought poem, and one of the most surprising aspects of his development is
his revisitation of past poems and places. Such moments are not necessarily
integrative, but can reveal the contradictoriness or otherness of place, as well
as a sometimes-uneasy interrelation of body and land.
Julia Hartwig is the least verbally opulent poet of this group. She is also
the eldest, born in 1921 in Lublin, Poland. Her father, a photographer, went
to Moscow on business, fell in love with and married a Russian woman,
and eventually fled west, as did many other Poles who wished to escape the
aftermath of the 1917 Russian Revolution. Despite her dual heritage, Russia
is a foreign place to Hartwig, who does not speak Russian or know Russian
literature (by her own admission); her mother’s Russianness is the quality
that set her apart from others, both in Poland and within the family circle.
Her father reputedly kissed the earth, and made his children do the same,
after arriving from Russia; perhaps the contrast between this histrionic
display of patriotism and the loneliness of her mother deepened Hartwig’s
decision to avoid expressions of rootedness and belonging. She has remained
remarkably silent about her childhood, remembering her shameful “sense of
self-division” during the traumatic moment of her mother’s early death by
suicide.52 This combination of grief, uncertainty, and shame, which coheres
around the child’s sense of identity, is a telling biographical detail to bear in
mind while reading Hartwig’s poetry. It helps us to assess why, as Hartwig
writes, “many poets draw strength from childhood resources, but it seems
like I didn’t know how to make use of them.”53
By a great stroke of luck, all the Hartwigs survived the war. The future
poet returned to Lublin after working as a courier for the anti-Nazi
resistance, and found the city destroyed, its once-sizable Jewish population
murdered, and its historic center ruined: this was, in her words, “a crime
committed not just against its people but against the myth of Lublin, against
my own memories of childhood.”54 She moved to Warsaw and embarked
upon a series of travels to France and to the United States, where she and her
husband at the time, poet Artur Międzyrzecki, taught at various universities
from Iowa to New York, where her daughter eventually settled. Hartwig
lives and writes in Warsaw today.
52
This material is contained in Zawsze powroty: Dzienniki podróży (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo
Sic!, 2001). My translation.
53
Ibid 41.
54
Julia Hartwig, Zaułek Hartwigów (Lublin: Ośrodek “Brama Grodzka—Teatr NN,” 2006)
7. My translation. This unusual book was written when a Lublin street was named after the
Hartwig family.
Chapter 7, “Holding One’s Self Outside: Julia Hartwig,” brings a Polish

poet famous for her refusal to write poetry of roots into dialogue with
Heaney, Mahon, and Zagajewski. Whereas Heaney and Mahon both seek
to interrogate the tie between one’s geographical location and one’s personal
character, Hartwig wishes to escape the constraints of character altogether
by questioning the necessary coherence of identity, and striving to displace
the speaker from the space of the poem. She questions the intelligibility of
her own life’s narrative, focusing upon moments of self-abstraction. Instead
of corroborating the accepted view of Hartwig as a Classicist, this chapter
postulates that Hartwig may be seen as a Surrealist who revels in effacing the
distinction between figurative and mimetic language, leading to a strikingly
complicated, convoluted depiction of the speaker’s “place.”55
The eighth chapter, “Learning to Speak from Inside,” discusses the forced
confrontation, in Hartwig’s later work, between a speaker in permanent
flight from memory-based narrative and the dark, recalcitrant material
contained in that narrative. Just as Mahon finally queries how the self may
take its part in a material, historical reality, so Hartwig finally embodies
and historicizes the self by resisting her escapist tendency. Her poetry, which
has thoroughly suppressed autobiography, finally “tears down the curtain”
hiding the speaker’s life. The result is not reconciliation but a disabling sense
of entrapment. Hartwig’s most recent poems, since 2000, deeply examine
the speaker’s need to escape the spatio-temporal coordinates that trap her
in history. These poems reveal that personal identity is not always formed
through a natural sense of continuity with one’s past. Of the four poets
in this study, Hartwig most strenuously avoids embodying the poetic self
in a biographical, linear narrative, yet the idea of belonging in a state of
movement, or even of dis-placement, is taken up by all of their work.
The conclusion, “Knowing One’s Self,” discusses how we can conceptualize
the sort of identity that these poets seek in unique yet remarkably interrelated
ways. It does not appear to be a traditional rooted identity. Stuart Hall’s
seminal distinction between identification as a process and identity as a static
state helps to elucidate how we can deploy this term responsibly. The concept
of identity reveals new internal difficulties when we apply it to concrete
literary practices. The work of these poets dramatizes the way in which
identity is simultaneously a necessity and a trap, causing both happiness
and agony. If knowing one’s place necessitates knowing one’s self, then a
redefinition of identity can equally well lead us to ask whether the statement
is true vice versa, and whether one must grapple with the problems of one’s
place before one can begin to assess the contours of one’s identity.
55
Hartwig has translated French Surrealist poetry and has published an acclaimed monograph
on Guillaume Apollinaire (Apollinaire, Warsaw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1962;
reissued 1964, 1972).
28
1
The dynamic ideal and
the protean self: Adam
Zagajewski
Adam Zagajewski, one of the foremost Polish poets writing today, rejects
the traditional equation of belonging with rootedness. Instead, he depicts
an imaginative home that is dynamic, changing together with the protean
poet himself. The speaker of his poems is a traveler who views each new
locale as a potential home, even if his sense of belonging to it is momentary.
His focus is, therefore, on discovering moments of belonging, most often in
the present and the future, not in the past. In this way, Zagajewski’s poetry
upsets the common association of home with stability (one may leave one’s
home, yet it will remain as a stable point of return).1 His poetry explores
the idea of belonging as a temporary relationship of the self to a place that
can be found anywhere: any place has the potential to be a home. This fluid
notion is based on a constant recognition of otherness and concomitant
negotiation between the self and the other, harmony and disjunction,
unity and dissolution. The self, meanwhile, is itself unstable. It clings to its
surroundings and its perceptions, sometimes on the brink of dissolution.
The moment of choice, for Zagajewski, is valuable for its openness—its
freedom from the restriction of the already made choice—but this moment
cannot serve as a permanent dwelling. Zagajewski has dramatically changed
as a poet from the time of his first volumes in the 1970s, yet his early mode
of writing crucially influences his development: in particular, his focus on an
anonymous, mutable, traveling self may have its roots, paradoxically, in his
early political poetry, with its focus on the anonymous citizen.
In New Keywords, a book offering dense definitions of key terms in literary and cultural stud-
1
ies, Tony Bennett defines home as “a place of belonging” where one feels a sense of “family
intimacy.” Home is “surrounded by movement,” but, Bennett implies, it does not itself change.
See New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society, eds. Tony Bennett, Lawrence
Grossberg, and Meaghan Morris (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005) 162.
Zagajewski’s celebration of dynamism and mutability, however, can be

understood as a gesture of rebellion against his previous mode of writing.
Zagajewski made his debut in 1972 as a very different poet from the one
he is today. Like Julia Hartwig, he was associated with his politics before
he definitively came of age as a poet. In his youth, Zagajewski was one of
the four main members of the “Generation ’68” (together with Stanisław
Barańczak, Ryszard Krynicki, and Julian Kornhauser), a group of young
poets who wrote in opposition to the Communist régime. The massive
student protest against artistic censorship in 1968 served as a common
background for these poets, who were united politically and poetically in an
effort to unmask the brutal reality of life under Communism.2 At the time
in Polish literature, there were few plain statements about the political here
and now; this group sought to fill that gap. In Zagajewski’s words, literature
had been “abstract and elegant,” holding itself “above the state” and beyond
concrete details.3 This trend abruptly changed. The poetry of this group,
also called the “New Wave” (“Nowa Fala”), gave a bleak, yet emotionally
impassioned, portrait of life in a totalitarian state. It addressed itself to the
consciences of its readers. This poetry focused on the actual, as opposed to
Zagajewski’s later work, which frequently explores imaginative states.
Although this group shared an ideological program, its poetic output was
quite varied and becomes even more so with the passage of time. Krynicki’s
work grows increasingly metaphysical, his forms simpler, and his tone
quieter. Barańczak combines an almost baroque verbal dexterity with an
attack against Communist “new-speak” (“nowo-mowa”; Orwell’s term is
frequently used in Polish). Flashes of humor enliven the work of Barańczak
and Kornhauser. Each poet eventually chose his own path. Each poet of
this exceptional generation develops a recognizable individual style while
maintaining a tone of ethical watchfulness in his verse.4 The Generation ’68
The main protest in Warsaw was echoed in other cities, where police and military deliberately
2
attacked university communities. Eastern Europe experienced a wave of anti-Communist pro-

tests at this very time, including the famous “Prague Spring.” Students, intellectuals, and artists
were often active participants; the Warsaw protest occurred after Adam Mickiewicz’s prophetic
Romantic drama, Forefathers’ Eve [Dziady], was banned from a theater in March 1968 by a
Soviet ambassador. For a brief historical synopsis of this period, see Czesław Miłosz, The His-
tory of Polish Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). For a thought-pro-
voking statement on the ‘New Wave’ as a movement “Romantic in soul and body” see Tadeusz
Nyczek, Kos. O Adamie Zagajewskim (Krakow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2002) 36. Jarosław
Klejnocki opines that Zagajewski’s voice was already separate from the Generation ’68 at the
group’s very inception in his monograph Bez utopii? Rzecz o poezji Adama Zagajewskiego
(Wałbrzych: Wydawnictwo Ruta, 2002) 17–34.
For an in-depth discussion of this literary group, see Małgorzata Szulc Packaleń, Pokolenie
3
’68: Studium o poezji lat siedemdziesiątych (Warsaw: Instytut Badań Literackich, 1997).
Maciej Chrzanowski states that the group’s “minor artistic value” limited its influence and sur-
4
prisingly, Packaleń seems to agree with him. He predicts that the group will be remembered as
a short-lived, though powerful, phenomenon. Time has proved him wrong: each of the group’s
members has had a successful literary career on his own, while ’68 serves as a touchstone. See
Packaleń 315.
The dynamic ideal and the protean self 31
is, significantly, the last major literary movement that took Romanticism as
its foundation, and its belief in literature as a vehicle for collective expression,
even while it begins to seem anachronistic. Małgorzata Szulc Packaleń notes
that “the [single] poet writing in the name of the multitude is the basic
Romantic topos” (130–1). Zagajewski interprets this topos in a manner that
makes its oppressiveness evident: “Polish culture has a communal character
and it is at once splendid and painful . . . Every word belongs to everybody.
Every silence becomes public property.”5 His poetic father figure, Czesław
Miłosz, takes this sort of criticism further, noting with some rancor that
“Whoever writes in Polish must soberly tell himself that Polish readers only
pretend that they are interested in various human problems.” What really
interests them is what novelist Tadeusz Konwicki calls the “Polish Complex”:
the state of the victimized nation.6 The Generation ’68, however, initially
embraced this public function. The speakers of their poems are individuals,
but speak as members of the crowd. This is why the anti-Communist protests
of the Generation ’68 are popularly called Romantic, in keeping with the
fighting spirit of Polish Romanticism. It was, after all, arch-Romantic Adam
Mickiewicz’s visionary drama Forefathers’ Eve that ignited the initial protests
after being banned from the theater by Communist authorities in 1968. The
poet was a political rebel and a literary traditionalist.
The central change that these poets brought about was a change of speaker.
When the Generation ’68 poets announced that their protagonist would be an
average man (lit. “szary człowiek”—a grey man, colorless), they declined to
present him as a Romantic hero, though their average protagonist invariably
carries the potential for heroism. The imperative to serve a greater good is
a central component of Generation ‘68’s Romanticism. “Tell the truth that’s
what you serve,” writes Zagajewski in the early poem “Truth” (Prawda).7
Man has the tools to do good and to do evil; in “Truth,” he holds love in one
hand, hatred in the other. Zagajewski’s claim to eschew abstraction is not
entirely correct—love, hatred, truth, good, and evil are present in this poetry
as characters (in a direct contrast to Heaney and Mahon’s work, where the
abstraction must always be an image). Yet Zagajewski’s abstractions are
grounded in situations; the best poems of this time translate the urgency of
their appeal into an emotional correlative, a felt compulsion to act. They are
objectively based—communicating a situation and holding a reified “truth”—
Adam Zagajewski, Solidarity and Solitude, trans. Lillian Vallee (New York: Ecco Press, 1989) 69.
5
Miłosz quoted in Maria Janion, “Zmierzch paradygmatu,” in Czy będziesz wiedział, co

6
przeżyłeś (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Sic!, 1996) 6. My translation and paraphrase.

Contained in Zagajewski’s first volume, Komunikat (Krakow: Wydawnictwo Literackie,
7
1972) 58. Zagajewski’s third volume, List. Oda do wielości [Letter. Ode to Plurality] (1982)
was his turning point away from political poetry and, concomitantly, from an easily-defined
notion of belonging.
and differ fundamentally from Zagajewski’s subjectively based poetry, which

relies on the imaginative transmogrification of the objective world.8
When Zagajewski turned away from political poetry in the early 1980s,
readers accused him of losing his chance to give testimony to the fall of
Communism. One must not, however, exaggerate this rift in his oeuvre. Until
today, he defends the notion that truth may be stable, and spurns relativism,
holding that skepticism is a Western luxury that East Europeans cannot often
afford. Zagajewski’s early desire to awaken consciousness becomes aesthetic
and ontological in his later work, not moral and political, and the social
position of his speaker becomes less discernible—yet he is still frequently
anonymous, not a personality. In his transitional volume List. Oda do wielości,
the “I” is not yet biographical, as it becomes, increasingly, in his later work.
The “here and now” is predominantly a site of aesthetic epiphany, while
its unique, ambiguous, and changeable qualities are emphasized. In keeping
with this emphasis, Zagajewski’s primary persona wanders and searches; he
is no longer a citizen rooted to his sociopolitical situation.
This turning point is best exemplified by the forceful “Fire” (“Ogień”)
(1982).
Probably I am an ordinary middle-class

believer in individual rights, the word
“freedom” is simple to me, it doesn’t mean
the freedom of any class in particular.
Politically naïve, with an average
education (brief moments of clear vision
are its main nourishment), I remember
the blazing appeal of that fire which parches
the lips of the thirsty crowd and burns
books and chars the skin of cities. I used to sing
those songs and I know how great it is
to run with others; later, by myself,
with the taste of ashes in my mouth, I heard
the lie’s ironic voice and the choir screaming
and when I touched my head I could feel
the arched skull of my country, its hard edge.9
The poem begins on an equivocal note—“Probably I am”—with the effect

that, immediately, the reader is alerted to the possibility of reversal or
Klejnocki sees this as a difference between “descriptive truth” and “truth to the self” (“prawda
8
opisowa” and “prawda własna”) in Bez utopii 68.

Adam Zagajewski, Without End: New and Selected Poems, trans. Clare Cavanagh, Renata
9
Gorczyński, Benjamin Ivry, and C. K. Williams (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux 2002)
101. Original “Ogień” in List. Oda do wielości (Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1983) 12.
The dynamic ideal and the protean self 33
recognition. The speaker, however, insists upon his own mediocrity, which
makes the poem’s rising tide of emotion almost incredible, yet this is part
of its significance: even an “ordinary” and “naïve” man—especially a naïve
man—can be subsumed into collective emotion. Does it matter if the fire is
stoked by hatred or by a positive thirst for freedom (the poem was written in
the early ‘80s, while Poland suffered under martial law)?10 The focus here is
on the extremity of collective emotion, its destructive capacity, and its ability
to drown individual judgment.
The destabilization of the speaker’s position in its opening lines
(“Probably”), and the irony that turns into impassioned sincerity, make the
reader circle back. The first word, “Jestem” (“I am”) establishes the poem
as an act of self-definition, though the second word, “chyba” (“perhaps”),
renders it dubious. The first seven lines highlight the banal, even off-putting,
character of the very “average man” that the Generation ’68 addressed in
its work. The opening is dull, the verbs lack momentum, and adjectives are
almost aggressively deflated. “Freedom” is, literally, “without extraordinary
class limitations” in the original Polish, and this speaker’s refusal of
the extraordinary continues until the pivotal “I remember.” Its tone is
conciliatory—he is trying not to stand out of the crowd—and “clear vision”
(literally illumination, “jasność”) is tucked away in parentheses. The tinge
of self-confidence in this opening voice, of one who doesn’t hesitate to label
himself (“I am a --”) and to assure us of his transparency, suddenly gives
way to profound, impassioned self-reflection in the middle of the poem. We
leap from the banal to the remarkable: the tonal quiver of “clear vision”
heralds this change. The poem’s language thickens: dull words give way to
dense ones that are sensory and symbolic. The verbs burst into action, as
the fire’s momentum (“parches,” “burns,” “chars”) is transferred into the
self (“I used to sing . . .”), and its debris, ash, can be tasted physically. The
speaker evokes his personal trauma by moving from a description of large-
scale destruction into intimate sensual apprehension (ashes in his mouth).
“Fire” shows how the “szary człowiek,” the colorless man, can be
subsumed into a collective mania; how a song becomes a scream and brings
about a re-evaluation of the “I.” He comes to terms with his responsibility,
which is the price of collective belonging; at the same time, he recognizes
the penetrative power of the individual self (the crowd will never see itself
as such). The original poem has no periods, no semicolons, and no end-
stopped lines—it is a continuous utterance, its progression arduous; its tonal
A possible intertext for this poem is a comment made by Zbigniew Herbert (greatly admired
10
by Zagajewski) in an interview published in 1973 (hence, available well before the publica-
tion of “Fire”): “[d]uring the war I saw a library on fire. The same fire consumed books that
were wise and stupid, valuable and sordid. Then I understood that culture is most threatened
by nihilism. The nihilism of fire, stupidity, hatred” (18). See Herbert in Jadwiga Bandrowska-
Wróblewska at the beginning of Poezje wybrane (Warsaw: Ludowa Spółdzielnia Wydawnicza,
1973) 5–19.
shift is, consequently, even more surprising. The voice longs to recuperate
from the trauma that his words re-enact, yet his final word—“edge”
(“brzeg”)—strikes a dissonant note. It is ambiguous (edge of skull or of
country?) and its sound in Polish is hard. It is not echoed by any other line-
ending.11 The “edge” remains a problem that is unassimilated, thematically
and melodically, into the poem. The poem grapples with the boundary
between “freedom” as a slogan—freedom for a certain mass of people, or
universal freedom, as the speaker suggests—and freedom as an individual
condition—freedom from a mass of people, freedom from the state, and
from the imprisoning equivalence of skull and country. Recognition of the
“edge” or boundary between individual psyche and national psychology
would constitute freedom. It might protect the individual from the fire of
collective passions. This is a real transformation of the voice. Profundity is
reached through metaphor, through imagistic risk, not through confident
assertion; the poem uses abstract nouns, but its realizations happen through
metaphor. Socio-political categories (class, educational level, party) are
superficial, and the poem only gains depth when the phrase “I remember”
unlocks the door to a messy and difficult realm of realization, that within
the mind, and not in the outside world. Its dissonant conclusion signals
a problematic concept—the boundary line between individual and nation,
skull and country—that is unresolved.
In her essay on Zagajewski’s “lyrical ethics,” Clare Cavanagh asks, “Is a
system bent on the eradication of individual personality and vision perhaps
better combatted by a voice that embodies precisely those qualities most in
danger of liquidation?”12 A voice that insists upon its individuality embodies
the ethic that Zagajewski values; in the case of “Fire,” the speaker’s prior
participation in the collective earns him the ability to speak both for and
outside of it. The poem testifies to the process of reckoning with his singularity
and its limits. As Cavanagh states, the poet who purports to speak for the
collective may only address himself in multiplicate; when Zagajewski chooses
to “dissent from dissent,” he “[sets] his lyric ‘I’ against the defiant ‘we’ that
had shaped his poetic generation.”13 “Fire” may be read as Zagajewski’s
farewell to the collective voice. The volume in which it is contained (List.
Oda do wielości) is transitional. It contains political commentary and poems
that point in a new direction, beginning to question identity. The speaker
does not always speak as a Polish citizen. In fact, he often wishes to cast out
Zagajewski does not use rhyme, yet sometimes one can note a partial resemblance of line-
11
ending words based on a similar final vowel or consonant. One finds these small echoes in
“Fire,” but the last word breaks the melody.
Cavanagh, “Lyrical Ethics: The Poetry of Adam Zagajewski,” Slavic Review 59.1 (2000):
12
9–10.
Clare Cavanagh, Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics 4.
13
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"That devil might turn his beams on the Station itself, though," said
Walt.
"He wants to control communications."
"With the sub-electron beams we now have, he could do it on far less
Station for some time. Not perfectly, but he'd get along."
"Fine future," gritted Channing. "This is a good time to let this project
coast, Walt. We've got to start in from the beginning and walk down
another track."
"It's easy to say, chum."
"I know it. So far, all we've been able to do is to take energy from the
solar intake beams and spray it out into space. It goes like the arrow
that went—we know not where."
"So?"
"Forget these gadgets. Have Charley hook up the solar intake tubes
to the spotter and replace the cathodes with pure thorium. I've got
another idea."
"O.K., but it sounds foolish to me."
Channing laughed. "We'll stalemate him," he said bitterly, and
explained to Walt. "I wonder when Murdoch will come this way?"
"It's but a matter of time," said Walt. "My bet is as soon as he can get
here with that batch of fresh rats he's collected."
Walt's bet would have collected. Two days later, Hellion Murdoch
flashed a signal into Venus Equilateral and asked for Channing.
"Hello, Hellion," answered Channing. "Haven't you learned to keep
out of our way?"
"Not at all," answered Murdoch. "You won't try that betatron on me
again. This ship is coated with four tenths of an inch of lithium metal,
which according to the books will produce the maximum quantity of
electrons under secondary emission. If not the absolute maximum, it
is high enough to prevent your action."
"No," agreed Channing. "We won't try the betatron again. But,
Murdoch, there are other things."
"Can they withstand these?" asked Murdoch. The turret swiveled and
the triple-mount of tubes looked at Venus Equilateral.
"Might try," said Channing.
"Any particular place?" countered Murdoch.
"Hit the south end. We can best afford to lose that," answered
Channing.
"You're either guessing, or hoping I won't fire, or perhaps praying that
whatever you have for protection will work," said Murdoch flatly.
"Otherwise you wouldn't talk so smooth."
"You black-hearted baby-killing rotter," snarled Don Channing. "I'm
not chinning with you for the fun of it. You'll shoot anyway, and I want
to see how good you are. Get it over with, Murdoch."
"What I have here is plenty good," said Murdoch. "Good enough. Do
you know about it?"
"I can guess, but you tell me."
"Naturally," said Hellion. He explained in detail. "Can you best that?"
"We may not be able to outfire you," gritted Channing, "but we may
be able to nullify your beam."
"Nonsense!" roared Murdoch, "Look, Channing, you'd best
surrender."
"Never!"
"You'd rather die?"
"We'd rather fight it out. Come in and get us."
"Oh no. We'll just shoot your little Station full of holes. Like the
average spaceship, your Station will be quite capable of handling
communications even though the air is all gone. Filling us full of holes
wouldn't do a thing; you see, we're wearing spacesuits."
"I guessed that. No, Murdoch, we have nothing to shoot at you this
time. All we can do is to hold you off until you get hungry. You'll get
hungry first, since we're self-sufficient."
"And in the meantime?"
"In the meantime we're going to try a few things out on your hull. I
rather guess that you'll try out a few things on the Station, but at the
present, you can't harm us and we can't harm you. Stalemate,
Murdoch!'
"You're bluffing!" stormed Murdoch.
"Are you afraid to squirt that beam this way?" asked Channing
tauntingly. "Or do you know it will not work?"
"Why are you so anxious to get killed?"
"We're very practical, out here on Venus Equilateral," said Don.
"There's no use in working further if you have something that is really
good. We'd like to know our chances before we expend more effort
along another line."
"That's not all—?"
"No. Frankly, I'm almost certain that your beam won't do a thing to
Venus Equilateral."
"We'll see. Listen! Turretman! Are you ready?"
Faintly, the reply came, and Channing could hear it. "Ready!"
"Then fire all three. Pick your targets at will. One blast!"
The lights in Venus Equilateral brightened. The thousands of line-
voltage meters went from one hundred and twenty-five to one
hundred and forty volts, and the line-frequency struggled with the
crystal-control and succeeded in making a ragged increase from sixty
to sixty point one five cycles per second. The power-output meters on
the transmitting equipment went up briefly, and in the few remaining
battery-supply rooms, the overload and overcharge alarms clanged
until the automatic adjusters justified the input against the constant
load. One of the ten-kilowatt modulator tubes flashed over in the
audio-room and was immediately cut from the operating circuit; the
recording meters indicated that the tube had gone west forty-seven
hours prior to its expiration date due to filament overload. A series of
fluorescent lighting fixtures in a corridor of the Station that should
have been dark because of the working hours of that section,
flickered into life and woke several of the workers, and down in the
laboratory, Wes Farrell swore because the fluctuating line had
disrupted one of his experiments, giving him reason to doubt the
result. He tore the thing down and began once more; seventy days
work had been ruined.
"Well," said Channing cockily, "is that the best you can do?"
"You—!"
"You forgot," reminded Channing, "that we have been working with
solar power, too. In fact, we discovered the means to get it. Go ahead
and shoot at us, Murdoch. You're just giving us more power."
"Cease firing!" exploded Murdoch.
"Oh don't!" cheered Don. "You forgot that those tubes, if aligned
properly, will actually cause bending of the energy-beam. We've got
load-terminal tubes pointing at you, and your power-beam is bending
to enter them. You did well, though. You were running the whole
Station with plenty to spare. We had to squirt some excess into
space. Your beams aren't worth the glass that's in them!"
"Stalemate, then," snarled Murdoch. "Now you come and get us. We'll
leave. But we'll be back. Meanwhile, we can have our way with the
shipping. Pilot! Course for Mars! Start when ready!"
The Black Widow turned and streaked from Venus Equilateral as Don
Channing mopped his forehead. "Walt," he said, "that's once I was
scared to death."
"Me, too. Well, we got a respite. Now what?"
"We start thinking."
"Right. But of what?"
"Ways and—Hello, Wes. What's the matter?"
Farrell entered and said: "They broke up my job. I had to set it up
again, and I'm temporarily free. Anything I can do to help?"
"Can you dream up a space-gun?"
Farrell laughed. "That's problematical. Energy guns are something
strange. Their output can be trapped and used to good advantage.
What you need is some sort of projectile, I think."
"But what kind of projectile would do damage to a spaceship?"
"Obviously the normal kinds are useless. Fragmentation shells would
pelt the exterior of the ship with metallic rain—if and providing you
could get them that close. Armor-piercing would work, possibly, but
their damage would be negligible since hitting a spacecraft with a
shell is impossible if the ship is moving at anything like the usual
velocities. Detonation shells are a waste of energy, since there is no
atmosphere to expand and contract. They'd blossom like roses and
do as much damage as a tossed rose."
"No projectiles, then."
"If you could build a super-heavy fragmentation and detonation shell
and combine it with armor-piercing qualities, and could hit the ship,
you might be able to stop 'em. You'd have to pierce the ship, and
have the thing explode with a terrific blast. It would crack the ship
because of the atmosphere trapped in the hull—and should be fast
enough to exceed the compressibility of air. Also it should happen so
fast that the air leaving the hole made would not have a chance to
decrease the pressure. The detonation would crack the ship, and the
fragmentation would mess up the insides to boot, giving two
possibilities. But if both failed and the ship became airless, they
would fear no more detonation shells. Fragments would always be
dangerous, however."
"So now we must devise some sort of shell—?"
"More than that. The meteor-circuits would intercept the incoming
shell and it would never get there. What you'd need is a series of
shells—say a hundred, all emitting the meteor-alarm primary signals,
which would cause paralysis of the meteor-circuits. Then the big one,
coming in at terrific velocity."
"And speaking of velocity," said Walt Franks. "The projectile and the
rifle are out. We can get better velocity with a constant-acceleration
drive. I say torpedoes!"
"Naturally. But the aiming? Remember, even though we crank up the
drive to 50-G, it takes time to get to several thousand miles per
second. The integration of a course would be hard enough, but add to
it the desire of men to evade torpedoes—and the aiming job is
impossible."
"We may be able to aim them with a device similar to the one Charley
Thomas is working with. Murdoch said his hull was made of lithium?"
"Coated with," said Channing.
"Well. Set the alloy-selectivity disk to pure lithium, and use the output
to steer the torpedo right down to the bitter end."
"Fine. Now the armor-piercing qualities."
"Can we drill?"
"Nope. At those velocities, impact would cause detonation, the
combined velocities would look like a detonation wave to the
explosive. After all, darned few explosives can stand shock waves
that propagate through them at a few thousand miles per second."
"O.K. How do we drill?"
"We might drill electrically," suggested Farrell. "Put a beam in front?"
"Not a chance," grinned Channing. "The next time we meet up with
Hellion Murdoch, he'll have absorbers ready for use. We taught him
that one, and Murdoch is not slow to learn."
"So how do we drill?"
"Wes, is that non-arcing alloy of yours very conductive?"
"Slightly better than aluminum."
"Then I've got it! We mount two electrodes of the non-arcing alloy in
front. Make 'em heavy and of monstrous current-carrying capacity.
Then we connect them to a condenser made of Farrell's super-
dooper dielectric."
"You bet," said Walt, grinning. "We put a ten microfarad condenser in
front, only it'll be one hundred and thirty farads when we soak it in
Farrell's super-dielectric. We charge it to ten thousand volts, and let it
go."
"We've got a few experimental jobs," said Channing. "Those inerts.
The drones we were using for experimental purposes. They were
radio controlled, and can be easily converted to the aiming-circuits."
"Explosives?"
"We'll get the chemistry boys to brew a batch."
"Hm-m-m. Remind me to quit Saturday," said Walt. "I wonder how a
ten farad condenser would drive one of those miniatures."
"Pretty well, I should imagine. Why?"
"Why not mount one of the miniatures on a gunstock and put a ten
farad condenser in the handle? Make a nice side arm."
"Good for one shot, and not permanently charged. You'd have to cut
your leakage down plenty."
"Could be. Well, we'll work on that one afterwards. Let's get that
drone fixed."
"Let's fix up all the drones we have. And we'll have the boys wire up
as many as they can of the little message-canisters. The whole works
go at once at the same acceleration, with the little ones running
interference for the big boy."
"Murdoch invited us to 'come and get him,'" said Channing in a hard
voice. "That, I think we'll do!"
Four smoldering derelicts lay in absolute wreckage on or near the
four great spaceports of the solar system. Shipping was at an
unequaled standstill, and the communications beams were loaded
with argument and recriminations and pleas as needed material did
not arrive as per agreement. Three ships paid out one dollar each
gross ton in order to take vital merchandise to needy parties, but the
mine-run of shipping was unable to justify the terrific cost.
And then Don Channing had a long talk with Keg Johnson of
Interplanetary Transport.
One day later, one of Interplanetary's larger ships took off from
Canalopsis without having paid tribute to Murdoch. It went free—
completely automatic—into the Martian sky and right into Murdoch's
hands. The pirate gunned it into a molten mass and hurled his
demands at the system once more, and left for Venus since another
ship would be taking off from there.
In the Relay Girl, Don Channing smiled. "That finds Murdoch," he told
Walt. "He's on the standard course for Venus from Mars."
"Bright thinking," commented Walt. "Bait him on Mars and then offer
him a bite at Venus. When'll we catch him?"
"He's running, or will be, at about 3-G, I guess. We're roaring along at
five and will pass Mars at better than four thousand miles per second.
I think we'll catch and pass the Black Widow at the quarter-point, and
Murdoch will be going at about nine hundred miles per. We'll zoom
past, and set the finder on him, and then continue until we're safely
away. If he gets tough, we'll absorb his output, though he's stepped it
up to the point where a spacecraft can't take too much concentrated
input."
"That's how he's been able to blast those who went out with
absorbers?"
"Right. The stuff on the Station was adequate to protect, but an
ordinary ship couldn't handle it unless the ship were designed to
absorb and dissipate that energy. The beam-tubes would occupy the
entire ship, leaving no place for cargo. Result: A toss-up between
paying off and not carrying enough to make up the difference."
"This is Freddy," spoke the communicator. "The celestial globe has
just come up with a target at eight hundred thousand miles."
"O.K., Freddy. That must be the Black Widow. How'll we pass her?"
"About thirty thousand miles."
"Then get the finders set on that lithium-coated hull as we pass."
"Hold it," said Walt. "Our velocity with respect to his is about three
thousand. We can be certain of the ship by checking the finder-
response on the lithium coating. If so, she's the Black Widow. Right
from here, we can be assured. Jim! Check the finders in the
torpedoes on that target!"
"Did," said Jim. "They're on and it is."
"Launch 'em all!" yelled Franks.
"Are you nuts?" asked Channing.
"Why give him a chance to guess what's happening? Launch 'em!"
"Freddy, drop two of the torpedoes and half of the interferers. Send
'em out at 10-G. We'll not put all our eggs in one basket," Channing
said to Walt. "There might be a slip-up."
"It'll sort of spoil the effect," said Don, "But we're not here for effect."
"What effect?"
"That explosive will be as useless as a slab of soap," said Don.
"Explosive depends for its action upon velocity—brother, there ain't
no explosive built that will propagate at the velocity of our torpedo
against Murdoch."
"I know," said Franks, smiling.
"Shall I yell 'Bombs away' in a dramatic voice?" asked Freddy
Thomas.
"Are they?"
"Yup."
"Then yell," grinned Walt. "Look, Don, this should be pretty. Let's hike
to the star-camera above and watch. We can use the double-
telescope finder and take pix, too."
"It won't be long," said Channing grimly. "And we'll be safe since the
interferers will keep Murdoch's gadget so busy he won't have time to
worry us. Let's go."
The sky above became filled with a myriad of flashing spots as the
rapidly-working meteor spotters coupled to the big turret and began to
punch at the interferers.
The clangor of the alarm made Murdoch curse. He looked at the
celestial globe and his heart knew real fear for the first time. This was
no meteor shower, he knew from the random pattern. Something was
after him, and Murdoch knew who and what it was. He cursed
Channing and Venus Equilateral in a loud voice.
It did no good, that cursing. Above his head, the triply mounted turret
danced back and forth, freeing a triple-needle of Sol's energy. At each
pause another interferer went out in a blaze of fire and a shock-
excitation of radio energy that blocked, temporarily, the finder circuits.
And as the turret destroyed the little dancing motes, more came
speeding into range to replace them, ten to one.
And then it happened. The finder-circuit fell into mechanical
indecision as two interferers came at angles, each with the same
intensity. The integrators ground together, and the forces they loosed
struggled for control.
Beset by opposing impulses, the amplidyne in the turret stuttered,
smoked, and then went out in a pungent stream of yellowish smoke
that poured from its dust-cover in a high-velocity stream. The dancing
of the turret stopped, and the flashing motes in the sky stopped with
the turret's death.
One hundred and thirty farads, charged to ten thousand volts,
touched the lithium-coated, aluminum side of Murdoch's Black
Widow. Thirteen billion joules of electrical energy; thirty-six hundred
kilowatt hours went against two inches of aluminum. At the three
thousand miles per second relative velocity of the torpedo, contact
was immediate and perfect. The aluminum hull vaporized under the
million upon million of kilovolt-amperes of the discharge. The
vaporized hull tried to explode, but was hit by the unthinkable velocity
of the torpedo's warhead.
The torpedo itself crushed in front. It mushroomed under the millions
of degrees Kelvin developed by the energy-release caused by the
cessation of velocity. For the atmosphere within the Black Widow was
as immobile and as hard as tungsten steel at its best.
The very molecules themselves could not move fast enough. They
crushed together and in compressing brought incandescence.
The energy of the incoming torpedo raced through the Black Widow
in a velocity wave that blasted the ship itself into incandescence. In a
steep wave-front, the vaporized ship exploded in space like a
supernova.
It blinded the eyes of those who watched. It overexposed the camera
film and the expected pictures came out with one single frame a pure,
seared black. The piffling, comparatively ladylike detonation of the
System's best and most terrible explosive was completely covered in
the blast.
Seconds later, the Relay Girl hurtled through the sky three thousand
miles to one side of the blast. The driven gases caught the Girl and
stove in the upper observation dome like an eggshell. The Relay Girl
strained at her girders, and sprung leaks all through the rigid ship,
and after rescuing Don Channing and Walt Franks from the wreckage
of the observation dome, the men spent their time welding cracks
until the Relay Girl landed.
It was Walt who put his finger on the trouble. "That was period for
Murdoch," he said. "But Don, the stooge still runs loose. We're going
to be forced to take over Mark Kingman before we're a foot taller. He
includes Terran Electric, you know. That's where Murdoch got his
machine work done."
"Without Murdoch, Kingman is fairly harmless," said Don, objecting.
"We'll have no more trouble from him."
"You're a sucker, Don. Kingman will still be after your scalp. You mark
my words."
"Well, what are you going to do about it?"
"Nothing for the present. I've got some unfinished business to attend
to at Lincoln Head. Mind?"
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Knowing One S Place in Contemporary Irish and Polish Poetry Zagajewski Mahon Heaney Hartwig Magdalena Kay Online Ebook Texxtbook Full Chapter PDF

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Knowing One s Place in Contemporary

Irish and Polish Poetry Zagajewski

Haunted Heaney Spectres and the Poetry 1st Edition Ian

A Culture of Kinship and Place: the poetry of Sorley

Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Climate Crisis 1st

Spaces of Women s Cinema Space Place and Genre in

Visual Arts Practice and Affect Place Materiality and

Current Issues in Contemporary Sport Development 1st

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© Magdalena Kay, 2012

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

Introduction: The margins of Europe—a new comparison 1

8 Learning to speak from inside: Julia Hartwig 211

Conclusion: Knowing one’s self 235

Giroux, LLC, and Faber and Faber. Reprinted by permission of Farrar,

Columbia University Press, 2002).

The age of revolution proved to be the age of subjugation for Europe’s

1772 Considerations on the Government of Poland as a text propounding

beginning of a period whose political life was dominated by the spread of

in contemporary North America. In nineteenth and early twentieth-century

of loss with forward-looking desire. They note that an “active principle at

prove central for understanding the nationalized ideal of belonging against

and “public fetishization of martyrology” that persist with effects of the

out of step with advances in theories of identity concurrently developing

The postcoloniality problem

Lloyd, who fuses the language of post-structuralism with postcolonial

in the course of nineteenth-century struggles for greater land ownership and

general lack of attention to colonial relations within Eastern Europe,35 and

a constant danger attending any cross-cultural study. Kiberd notes certain

The problem of identity; identity as problem

What is identity, this concept of which the transparent identity to itself is

The quotation succinctly sketches out an instability at the heart of identity,

historical moment.”45 This image situates poetry in between the physical

Lives and narratives

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).

which the biographical fallacy may be seen as a benign manifestation, and

their careers by focusing upon politics. This chapter considers Zagajewski’s

same time as he places himself, then, Mahon tells us to beware of assuming

of separation.51 Like Mahon, he honed his talent early and published in

the not-seen, the not-known. This is a self-critical project. Although he states

Chapter 7, “Holding One’s Self Outside: Julia Hartwig,” brings a Polish

Zagajewski’s celebration of dynamism and mutability, however, can be

attacked university communities. Eastern Europe experienced a wave of anti-Communist pro-

Miłosz quoted in Maria Janion, “Zmierzch paradygmatu,” in Czy będziesz wiedział, co

przeżyłeś (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Sic!, 1996) 6. My translation and paraphrase.

and differ fundamentally from Zagajewski’s subjectively based poetry, which

Probably I am an ordinary middle-class

The poem begins on an equivocal note—“Probably I am”—with the effect

opisowa” and “prawda własna”) in Bez utopii 68.

Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S.

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