SOURCE: Milosz, Czeslaw. “On Szymborska.” New York Review of Books 43, no. 18 (14 November 1996): 17.

Milosz is a Polish Nobel Prize-winning poet and essayist. In the following essay, Milosz analyzes the dominant thematic motifs in Polish poetry, commenting on Szymborska's place within the Polish literary community and how her poems focus on the mundane moments that are universal to the human experience.

I have been saying that Polish poetry is strong and distinguished upon the background of world poetry by certain traits. Those traits can be found in the poems of a few eminent Polish poets, including Wisława Szymborska. Her Nobel Prize is her personal triumph but at the same time it confirms the place of the “Polish school of poetry.” Perhaps it is not necessary to recall that the language of that poetry is the language of a country where the crime of genocide was perpetrated on a mass...