This article is to attempt to explain the concept of subtlety, recommended by Karol Irzykowski, one of Poland’s great minds of the early 20th century, to his fellow literary critics as a supreme guide in their work, including the sorting out of a work's historical and cultural contexts. Irzykowskis ‘subtlety’ is a highly complex concept as it reaches out to the cognitive mechanisms of the brain to throw light on and account for the dynamic relationship of consciousness and unconsciousness in the creative process. Conse-quently, subtlety in that sense is not just another analytical tool of literary criticism. It is more like a sophisticated sensor tracing the interfaces of psychology and aesthetics (the ‘chiaroscuro of criticism’). In criticism, when used to its fullest capacity, subtlety would not only take into account the recipient but also the impact (creative impulse) of the critical text.