Synopsis
Though best known as poets, Zbigniew Herbert (1924-1998), Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996) and Adam Zagajewski (b.1945) also wrote some of the most original prose of the 20th century. It is this prose that concerns Bozena Shallcross in "Through the Poet's Eye". The travels undertaken by these East European poets, who journeyed to the West under different circumstances, give Shallcross her point of departure as she explores the connections between the sensory experience of travel and the perception of the visual arts found in their writings. As Zagajewski, Herbert and Brodsky blend observations of their surroundings with their impressions of the culture's art and architecture, their travels become "epiphanic journeys", dynamic and intensive moments of insight produced by the interdependence of movement and works of art. Whether encountering visual masterpieces in the formal environment of a museum or strolling through Venice - considered by Brodsky "the greatest masterpiece our species produced" - these poets transformed the reality of their travels into a sublime journey of the eye.
Shallcross guides us through their testimony as it goes beyond practical goals or purely aesthetic considerations into metaphysical peregrinations. She shows how this epiphanic perception of the visual arts follows the dynamic movement of travel, transforming the traditional view of an epiphany as a frozen instant into one of a creative moment that forms a passage from one state to another. Demonstrating the link between works of art, the epiphanic responses they produce, and the reality of travel, these writers' journeys attest to the creative primacy of vision, the core of which is moulded by still life and abstract painting; in doing so, they create a testimony that connects each of them in his own way to the stream of West European culture.
