GROWING TOWARDS PERFECTION: DYNAMICS OF DEVELOPMENT OF LEOPOLD STAFFS POETRY

This article is an attempt at re-reading Leopold Staff's poetry as a process of growing towards perfection. It includes three elements (phases): 1. The analysis of the Nietzschean ideas of will to power and self-creation in Staff's poetic work (the first perfection); 2. The annulment of the injuction to project one's will to power as a consequence of a lost confrontation with the law of transience embodied in a symbolic ruins, and a revaluation of Norwid's interpretation of ruins (the second perfection); 3. The adoption of the spiritual and aesthetic ideals of claritas and the Franciscan Caritas - a symbolic manifestation of the process of growth towards perfection in the context of the European religious tradition (the third perfection).