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Portrait of Wisława Szymborska

Literature · Poets

Wisława Szymborska

1923–2012 · Polish

Postwar Polish poetry

Wisława Szymborska won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996 for a body of work she described as small: fewer than four hundred published poems over sixty years. Written in plain, conversational Polish and built on irony and a shrug, they take huge subjects — history, extinction, terrorism, the Buddha of physics — and approach them sideways, from a cat's point of view or an onion's. She lived quietly in Kraków and called herself a poet of the phrase "I don't know".

How to spot them

  • ▸Nobel laureate 1996; nicknamed the "Mozart of poetry" for the lightness of the tone
  • ▸Kraków; a small output, plain diction, irony rather than grandeur
  • ▸Poems that adopt odd viewpoints: a cat, an onion, a grain of sand, a Vietnamese woman
  • ▸Her Nobel lecture built on the phrase "I don't know"
  • ▸She wrote books of unserious verse and made collages, which she sent as postcards

Key works

"Nothing Twice" (1957)

Nic dwa razy — nothing happens twice, and so we arrive here improvising; a much-set and much-quoted lyric

Calling Out to Yeti (1957)

The collection in which she broke with socialist realism; the Yeti poems address an absent, unreachable authority

Salt (1962)

The collection containing "Conversation with a Stone" and "The Museum"

"Love at First Sight" (1993)

The poem about two people who do not know they have brushed past each other for years; it prompted Kieślowski's Three Colours: Red

"Cat in an Empty Apartment" (1993)

A cat inspects the flat for the owner who has died and simply does not come back

"The End and the Beginning" (1993)

After every war, someone has to clear up; it opens the collection of the same name

View with a Grain of Sand (1995)

The English selection, translated by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh, that established her reputation in Britain and America

"Possibilities" (1986)

Możliwości — a list poem of preferences, from cats to Dickens over Dostoevsky, from the collection The People on the Bridge

Key ideas

  • "I don't know": the two words she called the most important a poet can say, the subject of her Nobel lecture
  • Contingency — the sheer improbability of any individual existing at all
  • Enormous subjects addressed obliquely, from a small or non-human vantage point

Quick-fire facts

  • •Born on 2 July 1923 at Prowent, near Kórnik; she lived in Kraków from 1931 for the rest of her life
  • •Her first collection, That's What We Live For (1952), conformed to socialist realism, and she later repudiated that work
  • •She was a member of the Polish United Workers' Party until 1966 and later supported the Solidarity opposition
  • •She worked for many years on the Kraków weekly Życie Literackie, writing a book-review column, Non-Required Reading
  • •Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996 "for poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality"
  • •Her Nobel lecture, "The Poet and the World", argues that inspiration comes from saying "I don't know"
  • •Her acknowledged published output is fewer than four hundred poems
  • •She wrote absurd light verse in invented forms for her friends, and made collage postcards by hand
  • •She died in Kraków on 1 February 2012; the collection Enough appeared posthumously

Drill it — 8 cards

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Sources