“Low” Romanticism for the Folk Cause: Peasant Revolts in Selected Poems by Lucjan Siemieński

Abstract

Romantic literature, dominated by the great artistic personalities (of Mickiewicz, Słowacki, and Krasiński), was founded on the category of “folksiness” and “folk culture”, understood as a mythical and spiritual foundation of the Polish identity. However, the dominating trend of “high” Romantic literature was accompanied by the lyrical work of the inland poets, who created another social project, based on the desire to be “the voice of the common people”.

“Narzeczony”, “Napierski” and “Czerniawa” are three original poems by Lucjan Siemieński, stylized after rustic dumkas and focused on peasant revolts. The perspective of Siemieński’s poetry enables us to see the “Mickiewicz’s era” as a heterogeneous structure, leaving space for the inland poetry that lets the “folk histories” resound and that treats the issues of peasants as vital societal problems even if they were marginalized within the dominating discourse. The case of Siemieński opens up a perspective of reading the Romantic inland poetry as a space within which there could be produced a revolutionary language of a new social order.