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SOURCE: Krauss, Nicole. “Herbert's Microscope.” PNR: Poetry Nation Review 25, no. 3 (January-February 1999): 13-16.
In the following essay, Krauss reads several of Herbert's poems against his prose study of the Dutch masters, Still Life with a Bridle, as a study on clarity, precision and accuracy of representation across disciplines.
A poet's sphere of activity is not the time in which he lives but reality, which is a much broader notion.
- Zbigniew Herbert
Zbigniew Herbert was a poet who felt most comfortable among tautologies, equations where nothing is lost or gained on either side, barring all possibilities of injustice: ‘a bird is a bird / slavery means slavery / a knife is a knife / death remains death’. Only at the risk of superfluousness - perhaps the excess Herbert found most distasteful - can one attempt to describe a poet who so exquisitely dissected his own psyche in the many poems about Mr...
This section contains 3,317 words (approx. 12 pages at 300 words per page) |
![]() |