SOURCE: Fabre, Jean. “Adam Mickiewicz and European romanticism.” In Adam Mickiewicz, 1798-1855: In Commemoration of the Centenary of His Death, pp. 37-59. Zurich: UNESCO, 1955.

In the following essay, Fabre stresses that Mickiewicz was the quintessential romantic poet.

‘How’, said Valéry, ‘can people discuss the subject of “romanticism” rationally?’ Is not the very word one of those ‘abstract’ and ‘conventional’ terms, the purpose of which seems to be ‘to provide a pretext for an infinite series of disagreements’? Some of these ‘disagreements’ occur to the mind at once. Every critic in every country will be tempted to define romanticism in a different way according to the period and the atmosphere, the environment and the moment—according, above all, to his own fancy. There are such things as romantic art and the romantic soul: they do not always coincide. In characterizing the former, the books on the subject, particularly...