Fugitives from Utopia: Polish Poets Across the Iron Curtain

Harvard FAS

Immigrants and travelers, dissidents and eccentrics—there were many ways Polish poets created spaces of personal freedom from the communist regime and the discourse of propaganda. In poetry, they contrasted utopian slogans with reality, but they also questioned more generally the idea of any human-made collective paradise, choosing instead irony, distrust, and singularity. In this course, we will study Polish poetry as embedded in the lived experiences of home meetings and experiments with…