His first collections of poetry, Communique (1972) and Meat Shops (1975), carried out his generation's program of speaking the truth about the public realities around him and exposing the falsity of the official language. His volume Letter: An Ode to Multiplicity (1982) included poems that reacted to the imposition of Martial Law, but also contained those themes that were to become a permanent feature of Zagajewski's work: meditative poems full of question marks and essays written by a "problematic person". Zagajewski's standard poetic themes include a constant questioning of the biographical-existential role of the protagonist of lyric poetry, and praise for life viewed in "its changeability, its pulsation, its ambiguity" (as he wrote in Solidarity and Solitude (1986). Other themes are immersion in European culture and the contemplation of its heritage, reaching into the depths of his own roots (the poem To Go to Lwow, 1985), and the exploration of variations on his own fate by trying on costumes and masks. A frequently recurring image in Zagajewski's poems is that of a pensive wanderer with a book in his hand, traveling through a world "borrowed from the great library" (The Canvas, 1986). Similar themes are found in his prose. The novel Warm and Cold (1975) recounts the passage into adult life and exposure to temptation of a young intellectual: he is tormented by doubts and by an inability to opt for a world of unambiguous principles. As a result, he begins to serve the police state. The subsequent novels The Thin Line (1983) and Absolute Pitch (published only in German translation) recount the spiritual conundrums of the contemporary artist. "I understood that the world is double, divided, splendid and trivial at once, ponderous and feathery, heroic and cowardly," a communist functionary finally admits in the short story "Treason" in the collection Two Cities, 1991. Zagajewski's essays present the world in a similar way. After the youthful literary manifesto The Unpresented World (1974), they become a series of chapters in the author's spiritual autobiography. Solidarity and Solitude (1986) highlights the pathologies and illusions of a culture too deeply involved in politics while weighing the dilemmas that face writers and artists today. The prose and mini-essays in Two Cities and In the Beauty of Others (1998) contain philosophical deliberations and reflections on reading and travelling through Europe. Zagajewski writes about Krakow and about Paris, about the cities of his childhood and the mythical cities of his "Central European" education, about Nietzsche, Junger, Bruno Schulz, Cioran, and Gottfried Benn, as well as about the dangers that our society presents to spiritual life and the paradoxes that arise when there are more and more informational media and less and less information worth conveying, as well as many other issues and figures who are crucial to our modern times.

I will never be someone who writes only about bird song, although I admire birdsong highly - but not enough to withdraw from the historical world, for the historical world is fascinating. What really interests me is the interweaving of the historical and cosmic world. The cosmic world is unmoving - or rather, it moves to a completely different rhythm. I shall never know how these worlds coexist. They are in conflict yet they complement each other - and that merits our reflection.