Baroque
The literature in the period of Polish Baroque, between 1620 and 1764, was significantly influenced by the great popularization of Jesuit high school, which offered education based on Latin classics as part of preparation for a political carrier. The studies of poetry required the practical knowledge of writing both Latin and Polish poems, which radically increased the number of poets and versifiers countrywide. On the soil of humanistic education some exceptional writers grew as well. Piotr Kochanowski (1566–1620) gave his translation of Torquato Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered, Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski, a poet laureate, become known among European nations as Horatius christianus (Christian Horace) for his Latin writings. Jan Andrzej Morsztyn (1621–1693), an epicurean courtier and diplomat, extolled in his sophisticated poems the valors of earthly delights. Wacław Potocki (1621–1696), the most productive writer of the Polish Baroque unified the typical opinions of Polish szlachta with some deeper reflections and existential experiences. Notable Polish writers and poets active in this period include:
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Famous quotes containing the word baroque:
“Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“It is the Late city that first defies the land, contradicts Nature in the lines of its silhouette, denies all Nature. It wants to be something different from and higher than Nature. These high-pitched gables, these Baroque cupolas, spires, and pinnacles, neither are, nor desire to be, related with anything in Nature. And then begins the gigantic megalopolis, the city-as-world, which suffers nothing beside itself and sets about annihilating the country picture.”
—Oswald Spengler (1880–1936)
“The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, and Balanchine ballets don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)