Abstract

The essay examines the references of Orpheus and Eurydice by Czesław Miłosz to earlier literary incarnations of myth of Orpheus (from Virgil and Ovid to Rilke). It indicates the internal context of a memorial poem, which are not only senilia of the poet, but also reflections on suffering, death, responsibility of the artist for words and rebellion of poetry against nothingness, dispersed in many earlier works starting from the 1930s.