| dc.description.abstract | The fact that the authors of a romantie elegy employ a relatively limited and
unchangeable set of themes, auxiliary images for certain moods, and stylistie eonventions
—in short —a specific elegiac pattern, is one of the most characteristic features
of the poetics of a romantic elegy.
Monotony of ornamentation with which the authors of an elegy have tied their
hero, the tendency of using always the same images, repetability, triteness of their
meanings, striking resemblance of lyrical composition among very many texts. all
this cannot be explained by the mere fact of imitation. It is neither the problem of
faint inventiveness nor poverty of imagination of the authors but the problem of
social timeliness and meaning of the ideas which have found their reflexion in the
elements of style of contemporary poeta. Elegiae pattern seryed special purposes:
thanks to it a reader decoded an elegy not as a tale about the misery of an individual,
but as sorrow over the ruthless misery of all mankind, over inevitable and nover
ending injustice of fate —and this was a correct reception. Thus, to quote'after Hegel,
it helped a romantic poet „to look at individual sensations and tremblings of the
heart from a more general point of view.”
Irrespective of the fact how important a role in a romantic elegy a given element
of its stylistie structure played, such an element should not be considered separately
but systematically, as a component part of a whole, in close relationship with other
components of style. In the course of analysis —for instance —of P. A. Pletnev's elegy
The Night one can notice that ita idea has been expressed mainly with the help of
elegiac patterns, however these patterna were treated not as something to be slavishly
followed but as something to be handled with subtle aesthetie intuition and mastery;
the poet perfectly realized the necessity of using these means, and clearly established
the proportion of their adequacy to his own creative purposes.
The scholar decided that his purpose would not only be to list and elassify individual
elementa of style: images, linguistic constructions, poetieal figures or particular
features of lyrical composition of a romantie elegy, but to understand their aesthetic
funetions. He not only wanted to explain how a given poem is bnilt but to answer
why it is constructed in such a way, how it realizes its basie functions, how the real
meaning shows through its mieroclements. Such an analysis finally leads to a deeper
understanding of artistie synthesis, to a correct explanation of the nature of a literary
work. | pl_PL |
