The poetry of Stanisław Barańczak, who himself was against historical avant-garde as a movement that abandoned ethical commitments, has quite a lot in common with avant-garde. Like other New Wave artists, his poetry can be read in the context of the neo-avant-garde and counterculture, e.g. in the context of Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle and Herbert Marcuse’s Onedimensional Man, with the propositions that overlap in many places with those of Baranczak’s “dialectic Romanticism”. When analysing the links of this poetry with the participant art of the 1960s and 1970s, it can be concluded that new-wave commitment has little in common with the typical attempts of the neo-avant-garde at regaining privacy, since the political character of Barańczak’s poetry is based on giving a position of privilege to the martyrdom code of Polish romanticism, which he frames in elitist modernist language.