When the exiled Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855) closed his epic poem Pan Tadeusz (‘Master Thaddeus’, 1834) with a vivid description of a polonaise, he was not only evoking the romantic image of Poland and Lithuania in 1811 but also investing the dance with Polish history, with its continuing patterns of partition and insurrection. In Book 12 of Pan Tadeusz, the inn-keeper Jankiel – renowned for the power and brilliance of his dulcimer playing – sparks off the wedding celebrations for Tadeusz and Zosia with the Polonez Trzetiego Maja (Polonaise of the Third of May), written to celebrate the enlightened but shortlived Constitution of 1791. Mickiewicz – through his description of Jankiel's performance – darkens the mood with reference to the renegade Confederation of Targowica in 1792 and to the horrific slaughter by the Russians of the citizens of the Warsaw district of Praga during the Polish insurrection of 1794. Jankiel then pays homage to General Dąbrowski, who commanded the exiled Polish Legions in Italy in 1797, by strumming the famous Mazurka Dąhrowskiego (since 1926, the Polish national anthem), and a second polonaise concludes the festivities.

Mickiewicz wrote Pan Tadeusz in Paris, where he and many other Poles, including Chopin, had settled in the aftermath of the Polish uprising of November 1830. By then, polonaises, mazurkas and other indigenous folk dances were very much part of Polish art culture. But they had not always been so: their history lay principally outside Poland, and, in finding exotic colour in their rhythms and melodies, Mickiewicz was following a well-trodden European path (the tapping of overtly patriotic sentiments, however, was a relatively recent phenomenon).