Barbarians Come and Go: Kopyt, Góra and the New Anarchism

This essay aims to describe the difference between ‘barbarism’ and ‘anarchism’ in contemporary Polish poetry. Analysing the critical voices in the wake of a well-known essay by Karol Maliszewski, in which he coined the term ‘barbarism’ to refer to certain contemporary Polish poets, we come to the conclusion that the distinction between ‘civilised’ and ‘barbaric’ poetry after 1989 has been based solely on the literary personae of the various authors. Thus we claim that the generational shift between the poets of brulion and the younger ‘anarchist’ poets may be seen as leading to a certain new kind of persona, which is, at the same time, more coherent (due partly to their clear political statements) and more independent of the poem (due to their non-literary sociopolitical activities).