The Renaissance is the true naissance of Poland's Golden Age in literature as well as in politics. The stability and the prosperity of the Polish-Lithuanian Union was certainly an element in the development of learning and the arts. These, as those in the rest of Western and Central Europe, were going classical, humanist, vernacular. This new education was now open but not limited to the country's nobility, whose studies at the Krakow University were often completed by a grand tour of Europe and/or more studies at the illustrious academies of Koenigsberg, Padova, Bologna, Wittenberg (Hamlet's old school), or Paris. 

Such was the background of Jan Kochanowski (1530-1584), a nobleman of quite average means, who returned from the West a member of Europe's intellectual elite and went on to become Poland's first major poet and playwright successful in Latin as well as in Polish. His elevated language and diction, his classicist themes and form, the serenity and harmony of his poetical worldview established Poland's literature on the European scene.

Yet the Renaissance was not all stoicism and hedonism. Examples of a more somber tone in poetry can be found in Kochanowski's later poems such as Laments, in which he tries to come to terms with personal tragedy. A premonition of the dark mysticism of the approaching Baroque is evident in the sonnets of Mikolaj Sep-Szarzynski (1550-1581).