Age Coordinates of the Personal Lifeworld in the Zbigniew Herbert’s Poetic Philosophy

Abstract

The article deals with the philosophical and poetic understanding of the age categories of childhood, maturity, old age in the lyrics of Z. Herbert. On the basis of a number of poetic works from different periods, age mods as the phenomena that make up the existential center of human existence have been analyzed. Herbert childhood appears mainly through the prism of concrete, real or personalized images based on his own memories that tend to universalisation. The phenomenon of maturity in the poetry of the Polish author is the most intense and ambivalent state of existence. The problem of old age as a problem of extinction is presented. The phenomenon of old age is perhaps most actualized, and often in opposite contexts (either because of the motives of ancient Stoicism, or because of the use of the poetics of paradox in order to portray the absurdity of the destruction of human consciousness in the death state).