SOURCE: Kryński, Magnus J., and Robert A. Maguire. “Sounds, Feelings, Thoughts: The Poetry of Wisława Szymborska.” Polish Review 24, no. 3 (1979): 3-4.

In the following excerpt, Kryński and Maguire acknowledge Szymborska's popularity in Poland and her significance to world literature despite being relatively unknown outside her homeland.

Wisława Szymborska is a contemporary of such important Polish poets as Tadeusz Różewicz, Zbigniew Herbert, and Miron Białoszewski. She was born in 1923 in Kórnik (the Poznań region), but moved to Cracow at the age of eight and has lived there to this day. Her first published poem dates from 1945. As with most Polish writers who made their debuts after World War II, much of her early work was infused with the ideology of socialist realism as then forcefully propagated by the Communist Party. These poems were collected in the volumes Dlatego żyjemy (That's What We Live...