Ballads and Romances

The year 2022 has been designated the Year of Romanticism in Poland. An even two hundred years have passed since the first publication of Adam Mickiewicz's Ballads and Romances - a collection of lyrics which has the same significance for Polish literature as Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads has for the English. Poems of love, the supernatural, and the exotic, Mickiewicz's first volume of poetry achieved a level of sublimity that immediately set him at the head of all Polish writers - a