Committed to Poetry. About Maria Kalota-Szymanska (1926-2011)

Abstract

Maria Kalota-Szymanska (1926-2011) was a poet, a publicist, an activist of literary associations (ZLP, Polish Writers Association, Pen-Club), she was born in Kuyavia and she lived in Wloclawek until her secondary school – leaving examination and in Torun until the end of her life. During her Polish Studies in the UMK she came into contact with the professor H. Elzenberg and Z. Herbert. She also made friends with W. Szymborska in later years. She published several volumes of poetry, stories, novels, but also articles and critical dissertation concerning literature, theatre and art. In her poems she expressed nature’s apotheosis and anti-urban accents, an opposition to growing reification and dehumanizing of space in which the human currently lived, the struggle to preserve the integrity of individual with more and more brutal uniformization, the drama of wounded love, the helplessness resulting from the impact of the indifference to suffering in the contemporary “military-field hospital” (the cruel gulf between soul and body), but also the joy of birth and the awareness of the need to pass away. Many interesting lyric poems were devoted to Torun. Her mountain poems are especially appreciated. They contain not only the great attachment to a beautiful landscape but also an attempt to search for significant values, on which you can permanently base your deeply understood humanity juxtaposed with passing and immutability, the majesty, the indestructibility and with the perfect indifference of the mountains. In a constantly changing world her poems are a rock, an important point of  reference and orientation, as well moral and existential. As the poet wished, after her death, the urn with her ashes was placed in her father’s (legionary) grave in the municipal cemetery in Wloclawek.