BOLESŁAW LEŚMIAN’S STRÓJ: BEYOND INTERPRETATION

Abstract

olesław Leśmian is considered to be one of the greatest philosophical poets of the Polish language. In his own view, however, it was not the meaning, but the rhythm that played the fundamental role in poetry. My paper attempts to follow the poet’s intuition and to establish a mode of reading that both takes into account Leśmian’s aesthetic standpoint and is consistent with his literary praxis. In this attempt, I follow the ideas expressed by Hans Urlich Gumbrecht in his book Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey and in his more recent essay How to Approach „Poetry as a Mode of Attention”?. Gumbrecht emphasises the importance of the dimension other than meaning in the process of reading poetic works. Presence, as he calls it, manifests itself through contact with the material aspect of a poem and its rhythmical organisation. I would like to examine Gumbrecht’s theoretical proposal by analysing one of Leśmian’s ballads from the collection The Meadow (1920).