Vade-mecum vis-à-vis the English-language poetry cycles of the second half of the 19th century

The aim of the study is to initiate the reflection over the systemic ways of reading Vade-mecum that at the same time could be the new starting point to rearrange the comparative reflection on the cycle and its pioneering character. Similar possibilities seem to be provided by so-called synthetic comparatistics, and it is in that spirit that this article juxtaposes and compares Vade-mecum with Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass as well as Gerard Manley Hopkins’s Poems. The result of confronting of those perspectives has been expressed in specific conclusions, among others – the strong semanticising tendency of the cycle in Norwid’s, Tennyson’s, Whitman’s and Hopkins’s cases as well as the experiments in the area of maintaining and breaking the continuity of cycle’s diegesis – clearly outlined within the Norwid’s and Whitman’s cycles. Studying as well as comparing the structural aspects of the cycles by Norwid, Tennyson, Whitman and Hopkins may lead to the cautious determining the new starting point of research – literary comparatistics, which could be simultaneously referred to as conditional and analytical.