Wokół Mikołąja Sępa Szarzyńskiego i jego Sonetu III DO Naświętszej Panny

Most of what we know about Mikołaj Sęp Szarzyński (? – c. 1580) and his work is plausible conjecture that cannot be fully verified. The small volume published twenty years after his death, Rytmy – a single extant copy was found accidentally in the early 1800s – represents his uncertain legacy. Yet not only is Sęp Szarzyński the second greatest pre-modern Polish poet after Kochanowski, but, owing to his sonnets and other compositions of his early maturity, he can be considered the creator of a new style that, under the influence of late Italian Petrarchism, brings Polish poetry closer to mannerism and, for some commentators, to the Baroque. This article will focus in particular on Sonnet III (‘To the Holy Virgin’). While drawing on Dante and Petrarca, the sonnet resonates with the themes and styles of contemporary Spanish Marian literature. Sonnet III is the cornerstone of Sęp Szarzyński’s sonnet cycle (the first in Polish literature) that marks the artistic culmination of a ‘passage’ to modernity, in which an attitude of doubt and the attendant “grammar of uncertainty” (cf. Jan Błoński) constitutes the writer’s main stylistic and existential signature.