An Empty Room

An Empty Room is a selection from the post-war poetry of Leopold Staff (1878-1957), one of the fathers of modern Polish literature. It is drawn from his last three collections, Still Weather (1946), Osier (1954) and The Nine Muses (1958). In these pared-down poems Staff achieved a powerful simplicity of form quite unlike the elegant traditional verse of his earlier books.

Tadeusz Rozewicz elegised Leopold Staff in his poem 'I knew the god of poetry'. He regards Staff as one of the few outstanding writers of our time because in these late poems he put truth above art. As the critic Ryszard Przybylski says: 'Staff abandoned Parnassian carving in order to express the simplest and most important knowledge about man.'

Czeslaw Milosz has described Staff's approach to poetry as a quest for wisdom - 'and wisdom resided in the joy of the quest' - and how in his thought Staff drew selectively from a diverse range of writers and philosophers, and in particular from Nietzsche, the Stoics and St Francis of Assisi. In his late work, wrote Milosz, Leopold Staff 'achieved a high degree of sophisticated simplicity, which made his poems sound at time like Chinese ideograms, especially in the slim volume Osier - perhaps his highest achievement.'