The article is a reappraisal of the work of Tymoteusz Karpowicz, one of the landmarks of the Polish poetic Neo-avant-garde, in terms of the quixotic model (principle). This approach brings into focus the following building blocks of Karpowicz’s autocreative poetics: the private library project, the idea of the book of books, the concept of holistic interconnectedness and the poet’s programmatic detachment (isolationism). In his verse they form sylleptic configurations in which language-games collide with the existential concrete and, in effect, transform the poetry into a performance acted out by the author both in his text and his highly mythicized geographic space. The superposing of his autothematic statements on his autocreative performative actions shows their remark-able congruence, and hence t the incontestable applicability of the quixotic model to describe the nature of Karpowicz’s creative project. In sum, he was a poet bent on finding his own place between the totalizing power of language and the harsh realities beyond the pale of literature.

This article is an attempt to confront the autothematic refl ection in Leopold Staff’s (Ars poetica and The Artist’s Sadness) with two poems, inspired by a somewhat similar approach, by Tymoteusz Karpowicz and Krystyna Miłobędzka. What they seem to have in common are textual signs of welcome with ‘open arms’ and ‘the outstretched hand’. These emblematic gestures invite the reader/the Other to a diffi cult dialogue and at the same time indicate the nature of the authors’ poetic ambition. The analysis of the two pairs of poems is set in the context of the 20th-century evolution of the idea of poetic genius and the poet’s self-awareness. Crucial to this comparative study of the poetic practice of Leopold Staff, Tymoteusz Karpowicz and Krystyna Miłobędzka is an appraisal of the authenticity of their vision and the language they used to express their maximalist ambitions.