SOURCE: Hirsch, Edward. “Wisława Szymborska.” Wilson Quarterly 21, no. 2 (spring 1997): 110-11.

In the following essay, Hirsh encapsulates Szymborska's poetic work, considering its irony, skepticism, subjectivity, clarity, and wit.

The Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, who won the 1996 Nobel Prize in literature, is a canny ironist and rapturous skeptic. She writes a poetry of sardonic individualism, and comes at common experiences from her own angle, with her own perspective. “Four billion people on this earth, / but my imagination is still the same,” she confesses in her poem “A Large Number”; “It's bad with large numbers. / It's still taken by particularity.” Szymborska is all too aware of how the world keeps escaping our various formulations about it: “But even a Dante couldn't get it right,” she admits, “Let alone someone who is not. / Even with all the muses behind me.”

Despite her modesty, Szymborska has mounted in her work a witty...