Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski’s Conceptist Poetics within the History of Ideas

Abstract

The theoretical writings of Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski have provided a constant focal point of scholarly interest, most often in the context of the study of problems relating to poetry’s concepts and aesthetics, the Christianization of antiquity, or the imitation of Horace. The multifaceted thought of this author, who belonged to a transitional intellectual formation in the history of European thought, can and should nonetheless likewise inspire studies in terms of the history of ideas, which place the object of knowledge at the intersection of artificially separated areas of knowledge. Sarbiewski’s treatise De acuto et arguto, devoted to his conceptist structure of the epigram, represents not only an enunciation of baroque literary theory, but also, read in dialogue with his other writings, reveals a consistent cosmological vision of reality.