Polish literature is the literary tradition of Poland. Most Polish literature has been written in the Polish language, though other languages, used in Poland over the centuries, have also contributed to Polish literary traditions, including Yiddish, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, German and Esperanto. Until the early 18th century, a major language of Polish literature was Latin, widely popular across all of Western and Central Europe at the time.
For centuries – wrote Czesław Miłosz – Polish literature focused more on drama and poetic self-expression than on fiction (dominant in the English speaking world). The reasons were manifold, but mostly, rested on historical circumstances of the nation. Polish writers typically have had a more profound range of choices to motivate them to write including historical cataclysms of extraordinary violence that swept Poland, as the crossroads of Europe; but also, Polish own collective incongruities demanding adequate reaction from the writing communities of any given period.
Read more about Polish Literature: Middle Ages, Renaissance, Baroque, Enlightenment, Romanticism in The Wake of The Revolt, Positivism, Young Poland, Interbellum and The Return To Independence, World War II, 1945 To 1956, 1956 To 1989, Nobel Laureates
Famous quotes containing the words polish and/or literature:
“It has always been my practice to cast a long paragraph in a single mould, to try it by my ear, to deposit it in my memory, but to suspend the action of the pen till I had given the last polish to my work.”
—Edward Gibbon (1737–1794)
“Poe gives the sense for the first time in America, that literature is serious, not a matter of courtesy but of truth.”
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