Adam Mickiewicz (1798 – 1855) was the greatest poet of Polish Romanticism and one of the great Romantic poets and intellectuals of the first half of the 19th century in Europe. Through his poetic works as well as through his academic, social and political activities he joined the culture of the Slavic nations of Central-Eastern Europe with that of Western Europe. This selection of 25 poems focuses on those of Mickiewicz’s poems which might be described as metaphysical poems. They are translated into English for the first time. The topics treated in them cover a range of religious, mystical, philosophical, and existential themes, expressed with incredible poetic ingenuity, which invites the reader to juxtapose Mickiewicz with such eminent figures of early European Romanticism as Coleridge, Wordsworth or Novalis and with the American transcendentalists. His poetry and thought, being Christian in the broadest sense, cannot be reduced to a particular religious denomination. The book presents a bilingual edition (Polish-English) with a scholarly introduction, presenting Mickiewicz as a writer in the context of his times, and a concise commentary on the poems. The co-editors of the volume are Jerzy Fiećko, one of the most eminent Mickiewicz scholars in the field, and Mateusz Stróżyński, a translator and an internationally recognized expert in the Platonic tradition and Western mysticism.weiterlesen