SOURCE: "Pole Wins Nobel Literature Prize," in Wall Street Journal, Vol. CCXXVII, No. 68, October 4, 1996, p. A5.

[In the following essay, Gamerman reviews the themes of Szymborska's poetry.]

In "Evaluation of an Unwritten Poem," Wislawa Szymborska, the Polish poet who won the Nobel Prize for Literature yesterday, writes of a poet who contemplates the cosmos—and comes up short:

     "In her depiction of the sky, one detects a certain helplessness,
     the authoress is lost in a terrifying expanse,
     she is startled by the planets' lifelessness,
     and within her mind (which can only be called imprecise)
     a question soon arises:
     whether we are, in the end, alone
     under the sun, all suns that ever shone."

The authoress's intentions, the narrator confesses, "might shine brighter beneath a less naive pen. / Not under this one, alas."

It seems fitting that in naming its new laureate, the Swedish Academy hailed the 73-year-old Ms...