It did not want to continue with the savage censorship of the past, but it did not know how far to go in liberalisation. So, Mrozek said, the central committee of the Polish Communist Party spent a whole afternoon in anguished debate over whether it should allow ten or 12 performances of his new play. It was after similar debate, no doubt, that Herbert was allowed to bring out a very small edition of his first book, Chord of Light.

Those early poems, terse, cutting and bitter, take up much of the book - and it was clear to everyone concerned with literature in Poland that a new poet, of a new kind, had arrived. There is also a poem in which he sadly says farewell to Apollo. From his early days, Herbert was soaked in the beauties of classical literature and art, and was never to forget them. Apollo, he says,

went in a rustle of stone robes
he cast a shadow a glow of laurels...
he raised a lyre to the height of silence.
but now
only an empty pedestal remains.

And in his next volume, Hermes, Dog and Star (1957), he has a poem about Apollo that really sets out the whole future of his life as a poet. It is about the moment after the music competition between Apollo and Marsyas, and Marsyas, the loser, is being flayed alive. It is now, says Herbert, that the real duel begins. Marsyas's howl of pain is composed of a single vowel,

A

The simple-looking "A" is Herbert's representation of Marsyas's scream - "aaarrrgh". But in it Herbert hears "the inexhaustible wealth of his body... sweet hillocks of muscle... the wintry wind of bone". And Apollo finds himself wondering if out of Marsyas's howling there will not arise a new art - and one that will turn his own music into a "petrified nightingale".

Herbert's mission became to create the art of "A" - an art that told the truth about pain. But to it he would bring, harnessed justly to its needs, the classical art of Apollo as well.