[The traumatic experiences of World War II pervade all of Różewicz's writing], directly and indirectly. Of course, he is not the only Polish writer to explore this theme. But his treatment of it has seared itself on the minds of his contemporaries. As one of the most talented writers among them [Anna Kamieńska] has said:

We were all twenty-four then, and we all survived being led to the slaughter, but only Tadeusz Różewicz expressed this experience on behalf of the entire generation so graphically, so brutally, and so simply. His 'I' became the voice of his generation.

The "experience" created a profound problem of faith among Polish writers. It was not the problem of faith in God, which had tormented European intellectuals in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but rather of faith in man and all man's works. (p. 72)

This feeling lies at the heart of all Różewicz's art. He has always had a deep suspicion of general ideas, of theories, of philosophies. He regards the entire cultural heritage of the Western world as a construct of semblances and deceptions that hides a colossal lie. Spiritual values to him are illusions, or, at best, projections of idle yearnings. Especially emphatic is his rejection of art. (pp. 72-3)

Life, not civilization, is the pervasive motif of Różewicz's poetry of the 1940's and early 1950's. And it is as gruesome a picture of life as can be found in any post-war writer, for it is largely drawn in terms of death. In these early poems, Różewicz is obsessed with the body—but it is a body brutalized and mutilated by war. Man often seems to be nothing more than an animal, or a mere mechanism supplied with a tube that facilitates the ingestion and excretion of food. If he has survived the war, he is indifferent to the sufferings of those who perished ("Waiter, the Check"). Yet Różewicz is no nihilist like Gottfried Benn (despite certain similarities of imagery). Man is not invariably a beast. Frequently he yearns for moral and ethical guides, for clear distinctions between good and evil, much as Chekhov's characters do. While Różewicz does not believe that such guides and distinctions can be found, he seems to think that man must at the very least avoid cruelty and insensitivity in human relations, and strive for sincerity and directness. Różewicz has often been dubbed a moralist; perhaps "qualified humanist" would be the better term. A character who turns up often in his work is an old woman, who embodies those positive virtues. She is set in contrast to the male, who is ever ready to strike poses, pursue chimeras, and drench the world in blood. (p. 73)

From the mid-1950's onward, Różewicz's poetry no longer treated the war so starkly…. The body continued to fascinate him. But now, carnage yielded to carnality. There was a growing emphasis on the themes of sexual obsession, pleasure-seeking, money-grubbing and playing at culture; they were seen as frenzied activities which served merely to mask the terrible boredom of a society whose principal value was the acquisition of consumer goods. (p. 74)

Poland had not yet achieved the affluence of her neighbors to the west; but Różewicz seemed to foresee the same fate for a people just emerging from Stalinism and thirsting for material goods. The subtitle of the play Witnesses, or Our Little Stabilization has become a proverbial expression for the new Polish petty bourgeoisie, whose only aspirations center around material objects and money, whose only moral imperatives are an easy adjustment to any situation and a refusal to seek out challenges lest the comfortable "stabilization" be shaken.

At the same time, many of Różewicz's men yearn for something more, for a kind of Arcadia. This theme appears as early as 1947 ("Mask"), but it is especially insistent from the early 1960's onward. It may be the Arcadia of pre-war Poland, with the moral, national and religious values that in retrospect look like verities; the Arcadia of innocent childhood; the Arcadia of foreign lands (Italy in particular); even the Arcadia promised by socialist realism. But there are no Arcadias. Indeed, it is such pointless and frustrated yearnings that create the tensions which confer a unity on many of Różewicz's poems. Man thirsts for values, yet distrusts all values. He seeks a paradise lost, yet knows it is lost beyond recall. He hopes to flee to exotic foreign climes, yet he cherishes the familiar surroundings of his provincial town and his simple home. He is uncomplicated, almost morally radiant, yet capable of cruelty, even savagery.

There is nothing distinctive about Różewicz's characteristic hero except his lack of distinction. He most likely lives in society's lower strata, perhaps running a newspaper concession or serving out his time as a minor bureaucrat. He speaks in the "voice of an anonymous man," to use the title of one of Różewicz's volumes of poetry (Głos anonima, 1961). He is a man who finds it possible to be and not to be simultaneously ("Précis")—the very antithesis of the hero of nineteenth-century Romantic poetry, who played such an important part in defining the Polish national consciousness, especially in the poems of Mickiewicz and Słowacki.

Art is no more a solution to these problems in Różewicz's later works than in his earlier ones. If anything, his hostility toward "beauty" is even stronger. For instance, "Et in Arcadia Ego" (1960–61), a kind of gloss on Goethe's Italian Journey, attempts to destroy the myth of Italy as the epitome of beauty, serenity and spiritual equilibrium. Różewicz has nothing but scorn for writers who seek to practice "pure" art. The hero of "A Voice from Croisset" is Flaubert, whose entire life consists of a search for stylistic perfection and the mot juste; as far as Różewicz is concerned, it is a blighted, wasted existence. He is equally contemptuous of the trappings of "literary society" that are so dear to most of his fellow-writers ("Lyrical Classified Ads")…. (pp. 75-6)

The poet-figure who is prominent in Różewicz's poetry is himself an Everyman, an ordinary citizen who disclaims any special powers and even revels in his own limitations ("Stone Imagination"). He speaks, yet suspects that his voice is not heard, that he can work no real change in society, that he is really little more than a tape-recorder registering the babble of life ("It is Possible," "Way Out"). Shakespeare figures prominently in the elaboration of this problem. In "Conversation with the Prince," the poet contrasts himself unfavorably with Hamlet, who, though indecisive, at least is capable of imposing his concerns upon the world. In "Nothing in Prospero's Magic Garment," the modern Caliban is represented by the masses, who presumably thirst for an inspiring word from the humanist poet (a modern Prospero), but instead hear only the empty verbiage of press, radio and television. Różewicz obviously stands in awe of the complexity, energy, and efficacy of Shakespeare's heroes; but he is also fascinated by the less admirable personages. For example, he identifies Polonius with the man of today and even with the poet of today, seeing him as a petty, calculating rationalist who is incapable of posing the great existential questions, who can go no further than Eliot's J. Alfred Prufrock, whose "overwhelming question"—"Do I dare?"—is addressed not to matters of life and death, but to the satisfaction of carnal lust.

Why, then, should the poet speak at all? It is not easy to say: Różewicz's attitude embraces yet another of the tensions that are so characteristic of his art. The poet ought to be at the same time a poet and a non-poet; he should speak in his own voice, yet involve himself in mundane life so as to be indistinguishable from the ordinary citizen. (p. 76)

The predominantly gloomy tone of much of Różewicz's art stands in marked contrast to the two most important schools of Polish poetry in the two decades preceding World War II: Skamander, and the Cracow Vanguard (also known as the First Vanguard). The poetry of Skamander, whose most outstanding representative was Julian Tuwim, is suffused with optimism and vitalism (which owes much to the then-fashionable Henri Bergson). The Cracow Vanguard—Skamander's younger contemporaries—were led by the theoretician Tadeusz Peiper and the poet Julian Przyboś. They too cultivated optimism, although in their case this attitude stemmed from a vague faith in socialism and from a belief, shared with the Futurists, in the salutary powers of technology and urban civilization. However, they rejected the poetic techniques of Skamander, which relied heavily on rhyme, meter, traditional stanzaic patterns, euphony, a lyrical, even sentimental strain, and a perceptible story-line in most poems. Instead, they cultivated a concise, often elliptical manner. For them, the poem was built on the metaphor, which was likened to the deployment of form in abstract painting: it was not designed to describe the world, but rather, was a means of creating an autonomous poetic reality through skillful arrangements of beautiful sentences.

At first, critics tended to regard Różewicz as a follower of the practices of the Cracow Vanguard. There are some points of similarity. For one thing, Różewicz rejects the sort of poetic techniques cultivated by Skamander (although this is generally true of almost all post-war Polish poets). Like Przyboś, he scorns any suggestion of logical development, relies heavily on visual imagery, and works for understatement, not bombast. But here the similarities end. Różewicz is opposed to any poetry which—like that of the Cracow Vanguard as well as Skamander—is interested primarily in the niceties of form and in "beautiful" effects. As he sees it, the Vanguard's work is far too esoteric for most readers and is therefore deficient in the quality that any true poetry must possess: the ability to speak immediately and unambiguously to its audience. If we look for affinities with other poets, a more fruitful area would be the work of such French avantgardists as Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, and Blaise Cendrars, as well as their Polish counterpart Adam Ważyk (born 1905). The emphasis on physiology and the disgust with man's moral pretensions link Różewicz with the German expressionist Gottfried Benn. Unlike the surrealists, however, he is profoundly humanistic; unlike Benn, he is fundamentally a moralist.

The principles of Różewicz's own poetic work are contained in a statement he made in 1965: "I consciously gave up the privileges that accrue to poetry … and I turned to the banal truth, to common sense … I returned to my rubbish-heap." By privileges he means virtually all the "traditional" resources of the poetic art as employed by Skamander in particular. In their place, he puts a deliberately "unpoetic" diction, with a garden-variety lexicon and the rhythms of ordinary speech, which often seem to stutter. His aim is to create "not verses but facts." The result is what critics have called a "naked poem." He makes scant use of metaphor or hidden meanings: this is a deliberately anti-"symbolic" poetry, a poetry very much, as he put it, of the "here and now." It abounds in clichés from politics, journalism and literature (cf. the "cultivate your garden" of "A Voice from Croisset"), and it advances a "common-sense" outlook which sometimes resembles the homespun style of the copy-book, and frequently passes into banality.

At first glance, Różewicz seems to have achieved what some have called the "prosaization" of poetry. Often, in fact, he has been accused of eradicating the boundaries between poetry and the newspaper article. That is certainly the case with many of his imitators. But it is not true of Różewicz himself. His poems are carefully crafted. For him, the word (rather than the sentence) is the basic unit; this is pointed up by his heavy reliance on enumeration (e.g., "Following the Guide"). Unlike Mayakovsky's, his poetry is not intended primarily for declamation, even though it is built on the rhythms of ordinary speech. Rather, it is a visual poetry, which seems to reflect the roaming eye or the camera lens. There are no necessary connections between images, as the absence of punctuation emphasizes; yet the poems are held together by carefully created contrasts, particularly between a highly emotional (though seemingly restrained) tone and the "objective" presentation of seemingly factual data. The use of clichés and banalities is, of course, a conscious poetic device: it reinforces Różewicz's basic themes, particularly his anti-estheticism, while, ironically, renewing familiar material by setting it in unfamiliar contexts. Particularly in his later poems, he makes heavy use of a collage-technique (cf. "Continuous Performances"), which enables him to bring together advertising slogans, news items, headlines, quotations from prose fiction and poetry, and the like. This serves his idea that the world is a "rubbish heap," in which the "trivial" and the "lofty" may coexist because traditional hierarchies of value have been destroyed. Critics speak of "the Różewicz poem" as a special genre, or of the "fourth system" of versification in Polish poetry (the others being syllabic, syllabo-tonic, and tonic), and they have made Różewicz virtually a classic in his own time by devoting intensive study to his techniques. (pp. 77-9)