“No madness has eaten away his heart”? Julian Przyboś’s creative “I” of the Poet and the private “I” of the Person

Abstract

The starting point is Julian Przyboś’s split into the Poet (the creative “I”) and the Person (the private “I”). One could say about the Slavic wordsmith, that is, Poet and Person, that he fell victim to an expressive reading style, which, however, does not have to mean permission to thoughtlessly shrug off the slap in the face that Czesław Miłosz had twice given him. Julian Przyboś’s letters to his family 1921–1931 and his
letter to Jan Brzękowski dated 20 December 1960 prove that the wordsmith remained someone “sensitive” in a sense similar to that given by Olga Tokarczuk in her lecture “The Sensitive Narrator.”