Abstract

The study is devoted to personological analysis of the one-hundred-poem collection entitled Vade-mecum by Cyprian Norwid in the light of advanced and, above all, multidimensional research on the personology of the subject of creative activities of Emily Dickinson’s poems. Based to a large extent on Robert Weisbuch’s complex terminology from the canonical volume Emily Dickinson’s Poetry, using his typology of lyrical personas, the researcher on Norwid gains important, additional comparative literature tool allowing, e.g. the juxtaposition alongside each other of the types of poetry written by Norwid, Dickinson and Baudelaire (Norwid’s and Dickinson’s lyrical persona is – it seems – a mixture of a “wounded dialectician” and “engaging sufferer”, Baudelaire’s persona is, in turn, the marriage of features of an “engaging sufferer” and “withdrawn bard”). This is how the premodernist “theatre of personas” is created, the stronger that – which I am trying to emphasize in this text – despite appearances, it is possible to find similarities in the poetic language between the works of Norwid and Dickinson. In the same way, Norwid and Dickinson – in order to build their lyric – use a poetic function in the Jakobsonian sense: on the one hand, they strengthen and intensify its impact, on the other hand, they use it to “cover up” the phenomenon of linguistic disintegration of the world for which Modernist lyric poetry served in a special way as a detector, a kind of litmus paper.