from When Romanticism is no Longer the National Avant-Garde by Piotr Parlej

The situation is made more paradoxical if one recalls that the other option, in Poland at least, has coexisted (precariously marginalized) with the emerging powerhouse of parnassian poetry. Miron Bialoszewski's "Pamietnik z powstania" ("A Memoir of the Uprising"), an account of the Warsaw Uprising, suggests an alternative perspective on the same national trauma, from the point of view of a truth that does not allow itself to be extrapolated, generalized, sloganized, and reproduced into aesthetic manifestoes. Sadly an exception in Polish poetry, Bialoszewski continued an avant-garde tradition of considerable merit within a national aesthetic climate that spurned such experimentation, which it considered simply inadequate to the task of uplifting and perfecting the national soul.

Another measure of the situation, although an indirect one, is the following regularity: when the avant-garde did make an impact, and earned a place in the tissue of national existence, it was not in verse but in drama. In poetry, the nation was prepared to recognize itself only in a conservative (classicist/romantic) mirror; playwrights were the ones who were tolerated, or accepted, in their avant-garde robes.