Zbigniew Herbert and Antiquity Poetry, oppression, and “the classic”

Zbigniew Herbert was a Polish poet and essayist. The relative success of Herbert with the Dutch reading public was confirmed by the publication, in 2000, of his Collected Poems, translated by Gerard Rasch, the most prominent Dutch translator of Polish literature at the time. The chapter focuses on peculiar Central and Eastern European way of representing antiquity, and also briefly comments on its significance for Herbert’s further artistic evolution, preparing the poetics of the persona. What Herbert says about Lucretius can easily be applied to his own poem about Marcus Aurelius. Henryk Elzenberg was probably the first person who read the poem, which formed part of a letter that Herbert sent him on December 16, 1951, during the worst period of Stalinist oppression in Poland. Herbert’s poems set in antiquity often appeal to the ideals of the “classic”.