Polish Romanticism is associated with a paradigm of the 'deed' that fundamentally shaped the struggle for freedom and the insurgent tradition of Poland in the 19th and 20th centuries. In debates about national identity and in political polemics, it still has an impact today. Recent Polish literary studies have repeatedly described this national dispositive of Romanticism as a risk to the intellectual and artistic independence of literature. This study of the period between 1848 and 1945 eludes both a (political) value judgment on activism and a reduction of literature to its mobilizing function. Instead, the poetic potential of activism itself is explored in three case histories: the poetics of the poet Cyprian Norwid (1821-1883), the critic, philosopher and novelist Stanisław Brzozowski (1878-1911) and the underground literary journal Sztuka i Naród (1942-1944 ) critically examine the utopian-activist designs of Romanticism and rediscover them as artistic 'room for manoeuvre'. The innovative interweaving of poetics and the history of ideas enables conceptual distinctions and refinements that are highly topical in view of contemporary activist cultures.