Polish · 1809–1849
Słowacki was the son of a literature professor, left Warsaw in 1831 as an emissary of the November Uprising's government and never came back, and spent eighteen years in Paris, Geneva and Italy writing plays and poems that almost nobody read in his lifetime. His rivalry with Mickiewicz was one-sided and consuming: he wrote Kordian partly as an answer to Forefathers' Eve, and when Mickiewicz once praised him in public he treated it as the great event of his life. He travelled to Egypt and Palestine, wrote a poem about a hymn at sunset on the sea that Polish children still learn, fell under the same mystic Towiański's influence, and died of tuberculosis in Paris at thirty-nine. His verse is more musical and stranger than Mickiewicz's, and Polish poets from Norwid to Miłosz have preferred him.