#6 Et in Arcadia Ego by Tadeusz Różewicz
In this episode, I'm joined by Stefan Głowacki to discuss Tadeusz Różewicz's long poem 'Et in Arcadia Ego' (1961). Over the course of the episode, we consider how the poem might be thought of as Różewicz's idiosyncratic "Italian Journey", written in response not only to Goethe's text, but as an attempt to confront the ghosts of classicism, a journey undertaken to see if the ideals of Western art can still be found among the wreckage of postwar Europe.
We also look at Rózewicz's attempts to construct new poetic forms to reflect the postwar experience, his exstensive use of ekphrasis, as well as aspects of his work that seem to be in dialogue with the anglophone poets T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens.