Three Bards

The Three Bards (Polish: trzej wieszcze, IPA: [ˈtʂɛj ˈvjɛʂt͡ʂɛ]) are the national poets of Polish Romantic literature. They lived and worked in exile during the partitions of Poland which ended the existence of the Polish sovereign state. Their tragic poetical plays and epic poetry written in the aftermath of the 1830 Uprising against the Russian rulership, revolved around the Polish struggle for independence from foreign powers.

Wieszcz means prophet or soothsayer in the Polish language. Therefore, the Three Bards were thought to not only voice Polish national sentiments but also to foresee the nation's future. Originally, the term Three Bards was used almost exclusively to denote Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855), Juliusz Słowacki (1809–1849) and Zygmunt Krasiński (1812–1859).

In a rough classification of the members of this brilliant triad, Mickiewicz, the master of the epic and lyric, may be called the poet of the present; Krasiński, the prophet and seer, the poet through whom the future spoke; while Słowacki, the dramatist, was the panegyrist of the past.

The concept of a bard was a Polish approximation of the Ancient Latin term poeta vates, denoting a poet to whom the gods granted the ability to foresee the future. Imported to Poland in the 16th century along with many other Sarmatist ideas, initially the term wieszcz was used to denote various poets. However, with the advent of Romanticism in the 19th century, the term started to be applied almost exclusively to denote Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Słowacki and Zygmunt Krasiński. Though the poets did not form a particular poetic group or movement, all of them started to be seen as moral leaders of a nation deprived of political freedom. They also often used the local folklore, which somehow linked the term wieszcz with folk wisemen, often found in legends and folk tales.

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