Polish literature comes of age in the Renaissance, when its writers, including Jan Kochanowski, recently translated into English by Seamus Heaney, Nobel Prize winner, become members of Europe's intellectual elite. Polish writing of the time is an interesting blend of the national and the cosmopolitan, feeding, as does vernacular literature all over the continent, on the newly rediscovered treasures of Antiquity.

Literature of the Polish Baroque is not unlike that of English Metaphysical poets. More importantly, this is the origin of the unique cultural formation of Sarmatism, a combination of both Antique and national mythology, Catholicism, and democracy. 

Enlightenment in Poland, which coincided with the destruction of its independence, was first of all a revolution in politics and society rather than literature. Nevertheless, Polish writing of the time reflected the age's belief in the classical and the rational. 

The traumatic national experience, combined with an understandable shift of interest from the private to the public, found its expression in the literature of Poland's unique Romanticism. In fact, Poland's three bards of the time, Mickiewicz, Slowacki, and Krasinski, is a phenomenon that seems to overshadow the literature of that country until today. Polish Romanticism was directly linked to the country's heroic but ill-starred efforts to regain its sovereignty. 

The national cause was continued in an entirely different vein by the Polish Positivists such as Boleslaw Prus, whose realistic novels reflected an attempt to restore national independence by economic, social and educational means rather than through direct political and military action. Not surprisingly, however, the same epoch gave rise to Poland's first literary Nobel Prize winner, Henryk Sienkiewicz, whose epic historical romances became international bestsellers and cult novels in Poland. It is not surprising that few poets of the time could compete with the powerful figures of the preceding era. One of the few exceptions, Adam Asnyk, combined an elegance of verse with a fervor of his great predecessors.

It is then quite logical that the emergence of the modernist Young Poland, with such figures as Przybyszewski, Przerwa-Tetmajer or Stanislaw Wyspianski, was of a Neo-Romantic and symbolist hue. The next generation of writers had to deal with an entirely new reality: the cataclysm of the first World War left in its wake a resurrected Poland. Literature responded by attempts to shed the 'Romantic cloak' of the poet-freedom fighter. Formal experiments followed the various European -isms. It seemed that the preoccupation with nation and independence can be overcome.

Not for long. Two totalitarian systems, the Nazi and the Stalinist, pushed Polish literature back into trenches. The old Romantic poetic paradigm was back until World War Two ended in Poland in, as it seems, 1989.