SOURCE: Cavanagh, Clare. “Poetry and Ideology: The Example of Wislawa Szymborska.” Literary Imagination: The Review of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics 1, no. 2 (fall 1999): 174-90.

In the following essay, Cavanagh analyzes the political and often apolitical themes in Szymborska's writing, exploring Szymborska's ironic portrayal of modern humanity's feelings of intellectual and moral superiority.

For a frequently conquered country speaking an obscure language in which every other letter seems to be z, Poland has established an enviable track record in poetry. To the unhappily marginalized poets of the West, Poland must epitomize what Seamus Heaney calls “the unacknowledged legislator's dream.” Since Romanticism, its poets have apparently wielded precisely the power that Percy Bysshe Shelley imagines in his “Defense of Poetry” (1821). In this fallen modern age, Shelley laments, poets function only as the world's “unacknowledged legislators” (hence Heaney's phrase). Though they stand unfailingly on the side of “great and...