YOUNG POLAND MOVEMENT

diverse group of early 20th-century neo-Romantic writers brought together in reaction against Naturalism and Positivism to revive the unfettered expression of feeling and imagination in Polish literature and to extend this reawakening to all the Polish arts. They looked back to the Polish Romantic writers and also to contemporary western European trends, such as Symbolism, for inspiration. Centred in Krakw, the movement was pioneered by the poet Antoni Lange and the editor and critic Zenon Przesmycki (Miriam). The most prominent figure of the Young Poland movement was the painter and dramatist Stanislaw Wyspianski, whose play Wesele (1901; The Wedding), a masterpiece of evocative allusion, is written in the stylized verse of the traditional puppet-theatre. Other writers included the peasant poet Jan Kasprowicz, who established a tonic poetic metre that became the characteristic rhythm of modern Polish poetry, and the novelists Stefan Zeromski, Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont, and Karol Irzykowski.