How exactly did Adam Zagajewski, the Cracovian exile from postwar Lvov, become the “Poet of 9/11”, as Newsweek hailed him on the tenth anniversary of the infamous terrorist attack? And why has the poem lingered on in the years that follow, comforting readers in the aftermath of all kinds of disasters, private and public, natural and manmade? This essay traces the history behind the poem’s debit in English translation on the final page of the New Yorker magazine’s first issue after the attack. It follows its subsequent afterlife as one of the best-known contemporary poems in the English language, as witnessed by its countless appearances in everything from anthologies to sermons, pop songs, and personal websites in the last eighteen years.

This article deals with the issues of the creative process explored by Adam Zagajewski in his writings, especially in his poems forming the cycle of Autoportraits. Indeed, he revisited the subject on numerous occasions, pointing to the importance of inspiration, which, he regretted, received too little attention in today’s world. Be it as it may, in the end it all comes down to the question about how he actually wrote his poems. This article is the first attempt to reconstruct the methods of Zagajewski’s creative work; it also retraces the process of writing a single poem from a poetic note to its final version.