This article takes stock of the prose and poetry of ‘the Warsaw bohemians’ – or ‘literary gypsies’ (‘cyganeria’), as they are called by historians of Polish literature – a non-conformist literary milieu of the early 1840s. For the contemporary radical activist and literary critic Edward Dembowski they represented ‘the young generation of Warsaw writers’. That description chimed in with their own programmatic statements extolling the virtues of youth. However, as our analyses show, in the overwhelming majority of their poems youth is addressed in unmistakably elegiac tones. Its energies are spent on pursuing morally dubious projects that are impossible to accomplish. If its glories are praised to the skies, the next moment it is pushed aside or negated. The enchanted worlds cannot but give way to the real world, i.e. the realities of social and political life.