Wawrzyniec Engeström (altern. Lars Benzelstierna von Engeström) was a 19th-century Polish aristocrat with Swedish roots, a historian, writer and political activist who made it his life's mission to build bridges between Polish and Swedish culture. The rapprochement he sought was based on anti-German and anti-Russian sentiments. In his poems A Song about Our Stars (Pieśń o gwiazdach naszych, 1874, 1883) and The Vistula: A National Fantasy (Wisła – Fantazja narodowa, 1883) he drew on Wincenty Pol's Songs of Our Land (Pieśni o ziemi naszej). They all celebrated the idea of national unity based on historical memory, religion and custom. His inspiration came from Swedish Romantic literature, whose main works he translated into Polish.

In a number of passages in the Iliad and the Odyssey, Homer introduces theomachoi, i.e. “those who battle with the gods”, or hoi proteroi – “the earlier ones”. This generation of heroes precedes the generation of the heroes of the Trojan war and differs from them by, e.g., possessing certain supernatural capacities and by encountering fantastic monsters. This essay discusses the appearances and the function of the theomachoi in the Homeric poems. It is argued that Homer’s consistent use of such tales creates a net of parallelisms between the proteroi and the heroes of the Trojan war, which prompts the reader’s deeper reflection on the latter’s choices and actions.

This article examines the position of Cervantes' Don Quixote in the intertextual network of Juliusz Słowacki' digressive poems, closely bound up with Schlegel's conception of Romantic irony. The article analyzes in turn direct references to Don Quixote; the use by the Polish poet, often with an ironic twist, of Cervantes' narrative strategies; the influence of Cervantes on the creation of the world of the poems (not least their central characters) and on Słowacki's extensive use of parabasis in all its varieties – from authorial commentaries and addresses to the reader, through characters who step out of their role to speak to the reader, to the foregrounding of the problems involved in the act of reading – to highlight and disrupt the illusion of fictional truth. The analysis shows that the Spanish classic was in many ways Słowacki's literary model and an aesthetic inspiration.

This article examines the sources of literary invention in Philtron, a treatise in verse on the theme of Christian love by the Polish and neo-Latin Renaissance poet Sebastian Fabian Klonowic. To get a better appreciation of his work it is necessary to look at his sources, especially books of humanist erudition, learned compendia, dictionaries, handbooks of rhetoric, anthologies and commonplace books. An analysis of his use of those sources in Philtron and an examination of his notes indicate that Klonowic probably did not read all of his books through from beginning to end. Some of his readings were intentionally selective. In particular, while collecting material for his treatise, he would mine the grand 16th-century reference books like Ambrogius Calepinus's multilanguage Dictionarium, Dominico Nani's anthology Polyanthea, or Erasmus' Apophtegmata. The argument and topoi in at least some parts of Philtron are much indebted to the contemporary compendia and erudite research.