MLECZKO Stanislaw - Serce a hexameter, or the gieneza of poetic metrics in connection with the aesthetic education of languages, especially Polish (1901)

A precocious work on the borderline of biology, pedagogy and literary studies. The author analyzes literary works from antiquity, the Iliad and the Odyssey, comparing to them Polish translations and the way of pronouncing sounds in different languages, tempo, pauses for breath during recitation, etc. He uses musical notations, mathematical and physical formulas or graphs showing the contractions of the heart chambers during recitation or movements. His research leads him to posit a theory about the existence of a kind of 'poetry pulse' inherent in every nation, with the heart acting as a hexameter.

AN ITEM RARELY FOUND ON THE ANTIQUARIAN MARKET.

"A skillful study of the principles of Greek prosody today could still become a refining factor in the development of any poetic language.

But what? - We are forced to learn these things in this period of our youth, when they are still utterly incommensurable with our minds, when even a substantially humane exposition of them would be untimely, unpedagogical - that is why they rightly remain distasteful to us later on for life.

And yet Hellenic art and literature is proof that man civilizationally can rise high without modern degeneration of himself, without sophistication and morbid over-sensitivity of his sensibility, and for this reason we Europeans could still learn a lot from the ancient Greeks today.

But what? - Behold, as a result of a strange confusion of concepts, the school of today, in an incomprehensible blindness of routine, makes the influence of so-called classicism on the education of man almost exclusively negative: just degenerating us, head-darkening us. May this work of mine, therefore, be a ray of light, dispelling this darkness, while illuminating humanity in the souls of men.

And I stipulate that in the end I am not concerned with Greek literature, but with my own literature first and foremost. While the title: "The Heart vs. Hexameter" is a synthesis, so to speak, a mathematical formula, summarizing in itself all the deductions contained in this work and being at the same time its synthetic germ. (...)"

General Store at E. Wende and S-ka Bookstore, Warsaw 1901.

Format: 230 x 160 mm, 305 pages.

Hardcover, bookbinding.

Book in very good condition, with minimal rubbing of corners, inside without any loss, after restoration.