He was born on 12th December 1860 into a peasant family in Szymbórz, near Inowrocław. He spent his childhood in extreme poverty – he was one of 14 children in Piotr Kasprowicz and Józefa née Kloft’s family. As a small child, Kasprowicz unexpectedly recovered from an illness believed to be fatal. This event was perceived as a miracle, which was attributed to the grace that was supposed to flow from the image of St. Valentine, but also to the deep religious beliefs of the poet's mother. It was to influence his entire later spiritual and artistic development.
Kasprowicz, endowed with deep sensitivity, described his first encounter with music as formative for his future poetic imagination: the sound of a church organ left him deeply impressed. His most famous collection, Hymns, included a recollection of the sound of a simple country pipe resounding over a pond near his home village.
Kasprowicz's education began at a school in Szymbórz. It was then that he probably wrote his first poem, Bądź Polką [Be a Polish Woman] (ca. 1877), dedicated to his teacher’s daughter.
His experiences in secondary school were typical of young people growing up in the Prussian partition. At the age of ten, he started learning at the secondary school in Inowrocław (at that time he belonged to the Tomasz Zan Society), and later moved on to schools in Opole, Racibórz and Poznań, at the latter of which (St. Mary Magdalene Secondary School) he passed the matura exam in 1884. He studied philosophy and literature at the University of Wrocław and Leipzig University.
He debuted as a poet with the volume Poezje [Poems] in 1889. Initially, his works were strongly influenced by positivism, which was already in its declining phase, and often featured the motif of peasant misery (as in the famous series of sonnets Z Chałupy [From the Cottage]) and the desire for social reform – portrayed by an extremely vivid image of the poverty of the Polish countryside, something the poet was well acquainted with from his childhood. During this period, he was associated with the socialist movement, which even led to Kasprowicz being arrested twice by the Prussian authorities.
In 1887, after his release and a short marriage ending in divorce, Kasprowicz moved to Lviv, where he remained for the next 35 years. There he started work as a journalist, publishing critical literary and theatrical texts in Kurier Polski and Słowo Polskie (1902-1906). He quickly became one of the important figures of the Lviv bohemia, which was probably helped by his impressive manners, impeccable dress and dandy style. This was undoubtedly an attempt to remedy the misery of his childhood and early youth.
At that time, Kasprowicz started to move away from the poetics of positivism, succumbing to the power of new literary currents of the approaching modernity. The focus on social themes became weaker (however, they were never completely abandoned by the poet), the motif of man's disconnection between good and evil appeared more and more often, as well as the fatalistic conviction of suffering as a state inextricably linked with human existence, which was most fully expressed in the poem Miłość [Love] (1895). This poem was an attempt to synthesise the spirit of Christianity with Eastern pantheism, and, in terms of form, showed a loosening in the rigour of poetic syntax, replaced with free verse. His next collection of poems – the famous Krzak Dzikiej Róży [Wild Rose Bush] (1898) is, in turn, a sign of Kasprowicz's turn towards symbolism. The volume also echoes many artists’ deep fascination with the nature of the Tatra region during that era.
The turn of the 20th century was an extremely dramatic time in Kasprowicz's life. His beloved wife left him. The tragic experience caused a deep mental breakdown in the poet, which was reflected in the spirit and content of his works. Two volumes of hymns published at that time, Ginącemu Światu [To the Vanishing World] (1901) and Salve Regina (1902), were testimony to this deep emotional trauma, but also to a crisis of faith and a struggle with God. This particular attitude towards God, the split between adoration and negation, bordering on blasphemy, is, in fact, the leitmotif of almost all the poet's work. The first signs of expressionist tendencies also appear in these poems.
Kasprowicz embarked upon his third – this time happy – marriage in 1911 with Maria Bunin, 19 years his junior. It brought the poet inner peace and a change in the tone of his work. Księga Ubogich [The Book of the Poor] from this time is a sign of the poet's reconciliation with God and the world. This apotheosis of home and simple human happiness was the polar opposite of Kasprowicz’s past rebellious work; some had previously considered him the next Polish bard prior to this new chapter of literary output.
Kasprowicz devoted the last years of his life mainly to pedagogical work. In the academic year 1921/22, he was the rector of the Jan Kazimierz University in Lviv. At that time, he often visited Zakopane. In 1923, he settled permanently in Zakopane’s Harenda villa where he spent the last three years of his life. He died on 1st August 1926. He was buried in the old Zakopane cemetery, from which his remains were transferred in 1933 to the mausoleum in Harenda.
Kasprowicz's poetic oeuvre is stretched between two literary eras: the 19th century with its positivist ideals and the rebellious beginning of the 20th century, modernism, which was to give birth to contemporary literature – from strict formal rigour to free verse and poetic prose. Kasprowicz's poetic work is not only his own poetry. His knowledge of foreign languages – modern ones as well as classical Greek – gave him the opportunity to translate. He translated Aeschylus and Euripides, Shakespeare and Marlowe, Byron and Yeats, Goethe and Schiller, Rimbaud and Maeterlinck, D'Annunzio, Heijemrmans and Ibsen.
Originally written in Polish by Tomasz Mościcki, February 2017, translated into English by P. Grabowski, January 2021
