Polish · 1821–1883
Norwid left Poland at twenty-one, went deaf and half-blind in his twenties, sailed to New York in 1853 and worked as a graphic artist, came back to Paris, and died in a Polish charity home for the destitute in Ivry, having failed at everything. His manuscripts were dispersed. Publishers rejected Vade-mecum, the hundred-poem cycle he considered his life's work, and it was not printed complete until 1947. He wrote in a knotted, elliptical, heavily punctuated Polish full of neologisms and irony that his contemporaries found simply incompetent. Zenon Przesmycki began rediscovering him in 1897, fourteen years after his death, and by the mid-twentieth century Polish poets had decided he was the greatest of the Romantics — the one who wrote about labour, machinery, silence and the moral cost of style, and who sounds a hundred years ahead of everyone around him.