Nature’s Double Name

The title of this chapter may appear to be as enigmatic and obscure as the poem from which it is drawn. Nevertheless, it gnomically indicates the cardinal features of the poetry of Bolesław Leśmian, the greatest of twentieth-century Polish poets, and one of the greatest of modern European ones. It encapsulates the Leitmotiv of his verse: the relationship between nature and mankind. For Leśmian, mankind, which constituted itself through secession from nature, is perpetually on the verge of being seduced back into it. The song of the 'demon of Green' weans man away from culture — though so long as he uses language, so long as he remains a poet, he refuses to abandon culture. Observed by Nature, man is self-consciously exhibitionist even when most apparently alone: in his moments of greatest solitude, moreover, he begins to make over parts of his being to Nature in the form of anthropomorphic projections. Nature employs these projections as fata morgana to draw humanity back into original chaos. Leśmian's poems acknowledge the charm of the spell and the ruinousness of succumbing to it: he is an Odysseus, roped tightly to the mast of poetry, driven to the verge of madness by the seductive cadences of Nature's incantations. The basic tension in his work is between nature and the name. Between nature and the double name: for his own name, Leśmian, contains the Polish words for 'forest' (las) and 'the name' (miano), so designating the point of departure of his work, and is in any case in part a pseudonym.KeywordsNegative SpaceForeign WordPolish WordSiamese TwinBody OftheThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Art · Literature · Poetry · Spell · Theology · Central European Literary Studies · History · Philosophy

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