Abstract

Cyprian Norwid was considered by many researchers a poet of Polish Romanticism. The author of Vade-mecum was ahead of the times in which he lived, announcing and contesting the upcoming modernité at the same time. The aim of the article is not, however, to sum up research conducted so far on the modernity of Norwid’s work, but to show why late Romanticism is such an important category of description of the phenomenon of the author of Vade-mecum and what links his works created in the 1860s and 1880s with the manifestos of the birth of new poetry at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.