Tadeusz Różewicz issued from a white-collar worker's family in a provincial town and during the war was a soldier in a guerilla unit of the Home Army. His desperate tone of derision, critics like to explain, expressed the reaction of a whole generation "contaminated by death." His first volumes, Anxiety (Niepokój, 1947) and The Red Glove (Czerwona rękawiczka, 1948), received immediate notice. By contrasting the scenes of war he had witnessed, which asked for the brush of a new Goya, with the entire heritage of European culture, he arrived at a negation of literature because it seemed to be no more Tadeusz Różewicz 1921– Photograph by Layle Silbert; © copyright 1979than a lie covering up the horror of man's brutality to his fellow man. Thus, if poetry could be practiced at all, it should seek to destroy all literary conventions. Różewicz's opposition to metrics, rhyme, and even...