Jan Kochanowski's cycle crowning achievement is his…

Jan Kochanowski's cycle crowning achievement is his Treny (Laments), nineteen poems inspired by the death of his beloved daughter, Urszula, and written in 1580.

Modeling his poetry on the best classical traditions, he is able to transpose them into his native tongue with a pertinence and elegance that has not hitherto been achieved.

Besides his achievements in versification, he employs with great artistry a number of literary forms, such as hymns, lyrical songs, epigrams, satires, translations from the Bible, and others.

His role in developing Polish literary standards cannot be underestimated.

Kochanowski's place is also unique in Slavic literature generally, and he is considered to have had no equals until the nineteenth century.

A true humanist, he is the best representative of the Renaissance period in that region of Europe.

Born into the country nobility, Kochanowski  had studied at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków and later, from 1552, at the University of Padua in Italy.

He had served as a secretary at the royal court in Kraków on his return to Poland in 1559.

Having married about 1575, he has retired to his family estate at Czarnolas, in central Poland.

His first poems, mostly elegies, had been written in Latin, but he soon turned to the vernacular.

Since Polish is not fully developed at this time as a language of literary expression, Kochanowski devises his own poetic syntax and patterns of versification, setting high standards for the centuries to come.

Kochanowski authored the first Polish Renaissance tragedy, Odprawa poslów greckich (The Dismissal of the Grecian Envoys), in 1578.

With a plot from Homer's Iliad and written in blank verse, it was performed at the royal court in Ujazdów near Warsaw in 1578 and was regarded as a political commentary on the contemporary situation in the country, which is getting ready for a war with Russia's Ivan the Terrible.