This article is an attempt at a narrowly-focused application of a critical approach labelled ‘a history of the history of creativity’, formulated by Magdalena Popiel in her study The World of the Artist: Modernist Aesthetics of Creativity (2017). The article highlights the domain of autopoietic narratives – stories told by artists about their own creative performance, which involves projecting one’s own somatic identity and positioning one-self in a given socio-cultural context (community) – and examines the discursive dimen-sions of the creative process in the metanarrations of Tadeusz Peiper and Józef Czecho-wicz, two major poets of the Polish interwar avant-garde. The resulting model of the creative process is then set into the context of contemporary philosophical, anthropo-logical and psychological theories of creativity.

This article is an attempt to present a comprehensive view of the poetry of Józef Czechowicz in the context of Martin Heidegger's fundamental ontology. Czechowicz's poetic work, the article argues, is an exploration of mutual relations of the basic ontological categories of being and nothingness ( das Sein and das Nichts). They constitute the philosophical foundations of the purely literary tensions that can be detected in all comprehensive accounts of his work, such as the opposition of Arcadia and Catastrophy (Tadeusz Kłak) or the discussion of the ‘bright’ and the ‘dark’ strain in the poetry of the Second Avant-garde (Jerzy Kwiatkowski).