The Baroque was particularly Baroque in Poland; expressionist and witty poetry flourished in an age of war and turmoil; soldiers wrote poetry; clergymen made war; contrast and paradox, two favorite figures of speech, reflected the social, religious, and political conflicts of the era which saw both the height of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth's territorial expansion and the beginning of its decline. 

An existentialist angst entered the literature of the time with a power comparable only to that of the late 19th-century decadents. No wonder, then, that the poetry of the three Morsztyns, Hieronim (ca. 1580-1623), Jan Andrzej (1621-1693), and Zbigniew (ca 1620-1689) often sounds  similar to the 'conceits' of the English Metaphysical poets. An even stronger European connection is manifest in Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski (1595-1640), whose works, often illustrated by Rubens, became European bestsellers in Latin, German, French, and English, and influenced such Western writers as the Englishmen Vaughan and Cowley. Waclaw Potocki (1621-1696) is best known - in Poland - for his epic poem on one of the century's armed conflicts, The Progress of the War of Chocim. His shorter works, however, are a representative of a quasi-Miltonian despair, much en vogue in 17^th-century Europe.