Although a number of literary phenomena surfaced during that time, it is impossible to chronologically set them apart from one another. Things simply happened too fast. The modernists of the early 20th century were overtaken by the Great War of 1914-1918; paradoxically, this cataclysm brought in its wake Poland's independence, with tremendous consequences for literary life in that country. The understandable attempt of poetry to liberate itself from the role of the national spokesman resulted in a wave of good and often experimental poetry. Various  groups of poets presented their own programs of dealing with new situation; the appearance of not one but two avant-garde movements could be an indication that the hydra of postmodernism was already showing its ever-regrowing heads.

And then an even Greater War and two totalitarian systems brought back the all-too-familiar situation of poetry in Poland: oppression, censorship, exile. V-day brought Poland a Soviet-sponsored communist regime, together with the Soviet model of socialist realism in art. When it died with Stalin, a slow process of liberation was somehow making its way through the ebbs and flows of the Party power; at the same time, a vigorous cultural life flourished in émigré circles on the better side of the Iron Curtain and in a developing alternative environment of the underground.