„Bo jest w tym realizm”? Baudelaire i Norwid o reprezentacji

This article is a comparative study of the aesthetics of Cyprian Kamil Norwid and Charles Baudelaire. The analysis focuses on their use of realistic techniques and metaphors of representation in the context of critical statements about realism (especially the paintings of Gustave Courbet), in which both poets repudiate the notion of pure art as a direct imitation of reality. While they declare that this doctrine is reductive and unworkable, they do, as the article points out, make use of some of its techniques and practical suggestions (i.e. to foreground ordinary, trivial, and arguably ugly objects). Seen from this perspective, the poetry of both Norwid and Baudelaire, the harbingers of modernity, can be situated at an interface of faits divers (shocking tabloid stories) and the moral fable