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| | Books | Longing for nobility |
 | | Since his early 30s, Bogdan Czaykowski writes in his introduction to this book, Norwid "tried for the rest of his life to convince readers that he had something important to say, and that his poems charted a new direction in Polish poetry, as he claimed in his Vade mecum... |
 | | "Laconic and elliptical" are the words Czaykowski chooses to describe Norwid when comparing him to Emily Dickinson, his contemporary and, like him, an autodidact and an anachronism. |
 | | And so was Norwid himself, a wholly idiosyncratic person, who cultivated idiosyncrasy not because he wanted to, but because it was thrust upon him by his marginalisation. |
| books.guardian.co.uk /print/0,3858,4938965-110738,00.html (974 words) |
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