‘The First and the Last World...’ Around the Collections of Poems One Life and Seeing the World by Jan Czykwin

Abstract

The article provides a synthetic analysis of two poetry collections by Jan Czykwin, One Life (2009) and the posthumous volume Seeing the World (2025), edited by Halina Twaranowicz – approached as a coherent diptych documenting the evolution of the poet’s artistic consciousness. Adopting a survey-oriented perspective, the author focuses on identifying dominant themes and poetic strategies, renouncing the ambition to provide an exhaustive account. Both collections reveal the process of transition from individual experience to universal and metaphysical reflection, accompanied by a deepening of self-referentiality. Poetry here emerges as a space of tension between craft and revelation, in which the creative act remains indelibly marked by an ineffable element that resists rationalization. In this way, the poet’s work is presented as a dynamic cognitive process, constituted at the intersection of experience and transcendence.