Venezia nella poesia di Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz

The article explores the problem of the representation of Venice in Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz’s poetry, starting from the short series “Tram Tickets,” from the mid-1920s, to the masterful “Ode on the Destruction of Venice,” a true farewell and poetic testament of the writer. This study seeks to define the characteristics of the city’s genius loci, tracing the relationships between romantic historicism, perceptual poetics, and the decadent aestheticism of Iwaszkiewicz. For the poet, Venice constituted a complex palimpsest where every added word necessarily had to be negotiated with a complex and cumbersome tradition of texts and images; every attempt to define the nature of the city implied a Sisyphean effort to find a pure and non-conditioned look. For this reason, he was convinced that Venice could be described only indirectly, through the rhetorical tools—similes, synaesthesia, metaphors —offered by poetic language. Iwaszkiewicz’s representation of Venice appears to be rooted in particular in the modernist tradition and in its complex network of cultural and symbolic references. The essay highlights the influence of John Keats and Aleksandr Blok, as well as the specific interpretation of the figures of Endymion and Salome, symbols of eternal youth and beauty, the myths on which the poetics of the Polish writer was based. Among all the cities that are reflected in Iwaszkiewicz’s works, Venice is the one that best expresses his conception of the crisis of European civilisation, awareness of the end of a historical period, and hope of a future palingenesis.