The year 2022 has been designated the Year of Romanticism in Poland. An even two hundred years have passed since the first publication of Adam Mickiewicz’s Ballads and Romances — a collection of lyrics which has the same significance for Polish literature as Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads has for the English. Poems of love, the supernatural, and the exotic, Mickiewicz’s first volume of poetry achieved a level of sublimity that immediately set him at the head of all Polish ...

Because the poetry of Adam Mickiewicz is so closely identified with the history of the Polish nation, one often reads him as an institution, rather than a real person. In the Crimean and Erotic Sonnets of the national bard, we are presented with the fresh, real, and striking poetry of a living, breathing man of flesh and blood. Mickiewicz proved to be a master of Petrarchan form. His Erotic Sonnets chronicle the development of a love affair from its first stirrings to its disillusioning denou...

Forefathers' Eve [Dziady] is a four-part dramatic work begun circa 1820 and completed in 1832 - with Part I published only after the poet's death, in 1860. The drama's title refers to Dziady, an ancient Slavic and Lithuanian feast commemorating the dead. This is the grand work of Polish literature, and it is one that elevates Mickiewicz to a position among the "great Europeans" such as Dante and Goethe.With its Christian background of the Communion of the Saints, revenant spirits, and the int...