The aim of this article is to show how Kazimierz Przerwa-Tetmajer depicts the creative process in his autothematic poems. The readings draw on the interpretative strategies of the theory of affect (primarily the work Ernst van Alphen, Teresa Brennan and Brian Massumi) and somatic criticism (e.g. Anna Łebkowska’s somatopoetics, Marta Smo-lińska’s ‘augmented haptics’). In the great majority of Przerwa-Tetmajer’s poems dealing with the process of poetic creation, we are told that it is triggered by an explosion of the affects or an overpowering divine inspiration, bordering on madness. The article ana-lyzes in turn the affective nature of the creative process and the affective perception of a work of art; the image of the artist as craftsman; and, finally, the image of the phantas-matic woman, a product of the act of creation.

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.

This article deals with the issues of the creative process explored by Adam Zagajewski in his writings, especially in his poems forming the cycle of Autoportraits. Indeed, he revisited the subject on numerous occasions, pointing to the importance of inspiration, which, he regretted, received too little attention in today’s world. Be it as it may, in the end it all comes down to the question about how he actually wrote his poems. This article is the first attempt to reconstruct the methods of Zagajewski’s creative work; it also retraces the process of writing a single poem from a poetic note to its final version.

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.